R K Misra in Outlook India
Gujarat and its 'model' have been the toast of the Indian season ever since its Chief Minister, Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014.This includes its liquor prohibition policy which has adherents like Bihar now where Nitish Kumar came to power after knocking the wind out of Modi's sails!
Billowing in the political clouds ever since, are propounded perceptions of a 'dry' India. Kumar could do with a closer look at adversary Modi's 'model' state before giving wings to his national vision.
Proud and boastful of the fact that it has been the only state in the country which was born 'dry' and continues to remain so till date, Gujarat's much hyped liquor 'totalitarianism' took a humpty-dumpty like fall last week when over 20 people died after consuming hooch near Surat. What has now become a standard drill after decades of practice, is in place. Newly anointed Chief Minister Vijay Rupani is making all the right noises. Top cops and district heads-transferred, smaller fry suspended. The anti-terrorist squad (ATS) chief took charge of investigations. A three-man top cop panel headed by additional director general of police (ADGP), looked into the matter and submitted its report to the state home department head. Within 24 hours over a thousand country liquor cases registered. Carton loads are being seized at entry checkpoints into the state. A full blooded search for the culprit methanol is under way. Blah, blah, blah and the farce goes on.
Consumption or possession of liquor without a valid permit is a non-bailable offence in the state. A person arrested on either count has to be produced in court to be bailed out. And yet it oozes Bacchus brew from every nook and cranny of its ample frame.
Booze, as the upwardly mobile call it, is lucrative business and according to conservative estimates, a Rs 30,000 crore annual turnover, pure black money spewing industry. While Prime Minister Modi may have pulled out all the stops to unearth Indian black money stashed abroad, his decade and a quarter year stint as chief minister of the state, failed to dent the business. In fact, to be fair to him, no chief minister who held office in the state was ever able to stem the flow.
The business has three components. At the bottom of the pyramid is the poor man's drink--hooch, lattha or moonshine. Then follows the desi or country liquor which is the preferred drink of rural Gujarat followed by brewery liquor at the apex (rum, whisky, gin, vodka etc). Hooch is the preferred drink of the urban labour class while 'desi' distilled, largely for captive consumption in villages, ranks safer and a notch higher. The fruit liquor 'mahua' ranks in this category. With a consumer base of the middle and affluent class in cities and towns, Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL) as brewery made liquor is called in official parlance, holds sway. Country liquor is a cottage industry but brewery liquor flows into the state from MP, Rajasthan, Maharashtra even Punjab and Haryana.
Let's take the case of Gujarat's biggest city Ahmedabad. A network of about 1000 bootleggers sell anywhere between 1.5 to2 lakh litres of moonshine per day. Women outnumber men in this business. This is besides the IMFL business where the brand of your choice is home delivered to you. The trade is tech-savvy and 'whats app' and other suchn mobile applications come in handy. Surat is reported to guzzle 50,000 litres per day and almost 70 per cent of the 18,000 villages in the state brew their own country liquor. All major cities report high consumption and rural areas are no exception. There are 61,000 health permit holders in the state and worth of the average daily consumption of alcohol to permit holders is put at around Rs 75 lakhs.
No bootlegger can operate in Gujarat without police connivance. At every 'point' of the operation, negotiations have to be done with the cop for a certain amount of money and this goes right up to the top and from there to the political top brass. The cops may be sloppy in policing but would be the envy of management experts in planning and distribution of ill-gotten spoils.
Thus it is the huge amount of unadulterated black money greasing the administrative-political system in Gujarat that ensures a high decibel sound and light show only for the benefit of the masses with little or no follow-up action. Take the case of the 2009 hooch tragedy in Ahmedabad where 150 people lost their lives. Modi, then the chief minister, made all the appropriate noises. A Commission of Inquiry was instituted with former High Court judge K M Mehta as the chairman. The panel submitted its report in 2011 and there has been pin drop silence thereafter. The Gujarat Vidhan Sabha was quick to amend the pertinent act provisioning for even death penalty for those convicted in spurious liquor cases. The Bill was cleared by the then Governor Dr Kamala Beniwal. Not a single person has got life imprisonment thereafter, let alone terminal punishment.
The whole business of prohibition in Gujarat is a big charade in which everyone is happy and the only ones who stand to lose out are the people. Gujarat is soggy wet so those who want to drink, get enough of it but for a price. The cop is happy, he gets his cut and the politician in power more so because he gets a fair share as well besides the rip off from transfers and postings by playing favourites. Right from the sub-inspector to the DGP, the transfers are all at the behest of the Home department and the politicians who preside over it. The bootlegger is happy because he still manages to make money for himself despite all the pricks and cuts. It is only the honest tax payer who gets fobbed because the state loses a huge amount of money in excise and allied duties. Never mind this common man, he was in any case, born to bear the burden of the cross. Moonshine for the earthy, sunshine for the dirty.
Showing posts with label hypocrisy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hypocrisy. Show all posts
Saturday 24 September 2016
Sunday 6 December 2015
The India that says no
Tunku Varadarajan in the Indian Express
Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing during the International Solar Alliance in Paris on Monday. (PTI Photo)
As foreign pundits took aim at India, the director of the Indian cricket team was quick to shoot back. “Which rule tells me the ball can’t turn on Day One?” said a mouthy Ravi Shastri. “Where does it tell me in the rulebook it can only swing and seam?” India has to sink or swim when playing abroad, so touring teams should expect no different in India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing during the International Solar Alliance in Paris on Monday. (PTI Photo)
These last days have seen a fascinating demonstration of righteous assertiveness by Indians. In Paris, Narendra Modi was at the world climate conference defending India’s right to burn coal, it being the cheapest and most profuse of the country’s present sources of energy, entirely mined at home (unlike oil, imported from the world’s volatile hell-holes, and over whose price India has little positive control).
Back in smoggy India, another leader, India’s Test cricket captain Virat Kohli, was defending the country’s repeated resort to slow, turning pitches in the series against South Africa, this type of pitch being the most reliable source of victory at home for the spin-focused Indian cricket team.
In both cases, what we were seeing was a species of indignant, nationalist pushback against standards set by the West, and Western expectations of “fair play” that work to India’s apparent disadvantage.
Modi was blunt and eloquent. Having “powered their way to prosperity on fossil fuel when humanity was unaware of its impact”, he wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times, it was “morally wrong” of the industrialised West to deny India the right to use the same sources of energy today to pull its people out of poverty. “Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn, developing countries are allowed to grow.”
The message embedded here was that the West is guilty of double-standards in seeking to deny India access to the very fuels that had served the occident so well for centuries — and for doing so just as India is primed for a Great Leap Forward. In response to his assertion of India’s transitional developmental rights, Modi earned patronising lectures from the usual suspects, including the tirelessly sanctimonious The New York Times.
Double-standards were also the theme of the Indian cricket complaint. Responding to the barrage of English and Australian criticisms of the Nagpur pitch — where South Africa were spin-dried in just three days — the captain, manager and players of the Indian team took a leaf out of Modi’s book. Why are your standards the norm, they said to Western critics, and our standards — Indian standards — the aberration?
At issue is the belief, rife in English and Australian cricket circles, that green pitches that seam and bounce are fair and manly, the proper surfaces on which to play a game of cricket. These are the pitches one encounters in England and Australia because they are the natural products of local conditions. They also suit the style of play of teams from these countries, while cramping the style of visiting Indian players.
In contrast, Indian pitches are bereft of grass and turn early in a Test match. They are described by foreign cricket writers — often the loudest promoters of the too-much-spin-is-immoral school of thought — as Dust Bowls, conjuring images of famine, and of hardscrabble conditions unsuited to civilised cricket.
As foreign pundits took aim at India, the director of the Indian cricket team was quick to shoot back. “Which rule tells me the ball can’t turn on Day One?” said a mouthy Ravi Shastri. “Where does it tell me in the rulebook it can only swing and seam?” India has to sink or swim when playing abroad, so touring teams should expect no different in India.
As with cricket, so with carbon. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out the opportunities for many,” said Modi in Paris. Hands off our coal. And hands off our pitches. This is the India that can say No.
Wednesday 18 November 2015
We accept that Russian bombs can provoke a terror backlash. Ours can too
Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian
‘Isn’t it odd that in the case of Russia, western governments have been keen to link Vladimir Putin’s – and only Vladimir Putin’s – foreign policy to terrorist violence?’ Illustration: Sébastien Thibault
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see,” wrote Ayn Rand in her novel The Fountainhead. That there is a link, a connection, between the west’s military interventions in the Middle East and terrorist attacks against the west, that violence begets violence, is “glaringly evident” to anyone with open eyes, if not open minds.
Yet over the past 14 years, too many of us have “decided not to see”. From New York to Madrid to London, any public utterance of the words “foreign” and “policy” in the aftermath of a terrorist attack has evoked paroxysms of outrage from politicians and pundits alike.
The response to the atrocities in Paris has followed the same pattern. Derided by a former Labour minister as “west-hating fury chimps”, the UK’s Stop the War coalition removed from its website a piece that blamed the rise of Islamic State (Isis) and the Paris attacks on “deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies”. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, scrapped a speech in which he was due to say that Britain’s “disastrous wars” have “increased, not diminished, the threats to our own national security”. Such arguments are verboten in our public discourse.
Isn’t it odd, then, that in the case of Russia, western governments have been keen to link Vladimir Putin’s – and only Vladimir Putin’s – foreign policy to terrorist violence? On 1 October the US government and its allies issued a joint statement declaring that the Russian president’s decision to intervene in Syria would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”. Yes, you heard them: it’ll “fuel” it.
Moscow’s bombing campaign will “lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism”, claimed David Cameron on 4 October. Note the words “lead to”. Speaking at a Nato summit on 8 October the US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, warned of the “consequences for Russia itself, which is rightly fearful of attacks”. Got that? “Rightly fearful”.
And, in the days since the crash of the Russian Metrojet airliner in Egypt on 31 October, which killed 224 civilians, commentators have queued up to join the dots between Russia’s actions in Syria and this alleged terrorist attack by Isis. On a BBC panel discussion the Telegraph’s Janet Daley referred to the crash as “a direct consequence of [Russia’s] involvement in Syria”, adding: “[Putin] has perhaps incited this terrorist incident on Russian civilians.”
Compare and contrast Daley’s remarks on the downing of Flight 9268 with her reaction to the Paris attacks. Rather than accusing President Hollande of “inciting” terrorism against the people of France, or calling the carnage a “direct consequence” of French involvement in Syria, she took aim at anyone who might dare draw attention to the country’s military interventions in Muslim-majority countries such as Libya, Mali and, yes, Syria.
“If there is any need to argue about these matters, it should come at some other time,” she wrote, because “the French people did not deserve this”, and “it is wicked and irresponsible to suggest otherwise”. (To quote one of the leading foreign policy sages of our time, Phoebe Buffay of Friends: “Hello, kettle? This is pot. You’re black.”)
If Isis did bring down the Russian airliner, then of course it would be madness to pretend it wasn’t linked to Putin’s military campaign on behalf of the dictator of Damascus. Yet it would be equally insane to pretend that the horror in Paris had nothing at all to do with France’s recent military interventions in the Middle East and west Africa.
Yes, the attackers in the Bataclan concert hall chanted Allahu Akbar as they opened fire on the crowd, but they were also heard saying: “What you are doing in Syria? You are going to pay for it now.” Yes, Isis’s official statement of responsibility referred to Paris as “the capital of prostitution and obscenity”, but it also singled out the French government for leading a “Crusader campaign” and “striking the Muslims … with their planes”.
To understand political violence requires an understanding of political grievances; to blame terrorism only on religious ideology or medieval mindsets is short-sighted and self-serving. The inconvenient truth is that geopolitics is governed as much as is physics by Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The CIA, back in the 1950s, even coined a term – “blowback” – to describe the unintended negative consequences, for US civilians, of US military operations abroad.
Today, when it comes to Russia, an “official enemy”, we understand and embrace the concept of blowback. When it comes to our own countries, to the west, we become the child in the playground, sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “La la la, I can’t hear you.”
You can argue that French – or for that matter UK or US – military action in the Middle East is a legitimate and unavoidable response to the rise of a terrorist mini-state; but you can’t argue that actions don’t have consequences.
The former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, told me in 2011 that “people are going to ... bomb us because they don’t like what we’ve done”. In an interview for al-Jazeera in July, the retired US general Michael Flynn, who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2013-15, admitted to me that “the more bombs we drop, that just … fuels the conflict”.
It is a view backed by the Pentagon’s Defence Science Board, which observed as long as ago as 1997: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”
Let me be clear: to explain is not to excuse; explication is not justification. There is no grievance on earth that can justify the wanton slaughter of innocent men, women and children, in France or anywhere else.
The savagery of Isis is perhaps without parallel in the modern era. But the point is that it did not emerge from nowhere: as the US president himself has conceded,Isis “grew out of our invasion” of Iraq.
Yet we avert our gaze from the “glaringly evident” and pretend that “they” – the Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese – are attacked for their policies while “we” –Europe, the west, the liberal democracies – are attacked only for our principles. This is the simplistic fantasy, the geopolitical fairytale, that we tell ourselves. It gives us solace and strength in the wake of terrorist atrocities. But it does nothing to stop the next attack.
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see,” wrote Ayn Rand in her novel The Fountainhead. That there is a link, a connection, between the west’s military interventions in the Middle East and terrorist attacks against the west, that violence begets violence, is “glaringly evident” to anyone with open eyes, if not open minds.
Yet over the past 14 years, too many of us have “decided not to see”. From New York to Madrid to London, any public utterance of the words “foreign” and “policy” in the aftermath of a terrorist attack has evoked paroxysms of outrage from politicians and pundits alike.
The response to the atrocities in Paris has followed the same pattern. Derided by a former Labour minister as “west-hating fury chimps”, the UK’s Stop the War coalition removed from its website a piece that blamed the rise of Islamic State (Isis) and the Paris attacks on “deliberate policies and actions undertaken by the United States and its allies”. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, scrapped a speech in which he was due to say that Britain’s “disastrous wars” have “increased, not diminished, the threats to our own national security”. Such arguments are verboten in our public discourse.
Isn’t it odd, then, that in the case of Russia, western governments have been keen to link Vladimir Putin’s – and only Vladimir Putin’s – foreign policy to terrorist violence? On 1 October the US government and its allies issued a joint statement declaring that the Russian president’s decision to intervene in Syria would “only fuel more extremism and radicalisation”. Yes, you heard them: it’ll “fuel” it.
Moscow’s bombing campaign will “lead to further radicalisation and increased terrorism”, claimed David Cameron on 4 October. Note the words “lead to”. Speaking at a Nato summit on 8 October the US defence secretary, Ashton Carter, warned of the “consequences for Russia itself, which is rightly fearful of attacks”. Got that? “Rightly fearful”.
And, in the days since the crash of the Russian Metrojet airliner in Egypt on 31 October, which killed 224 civilians, commentators have queued up to join the dots between Russia’s actions in Syria and this alleged terrorist attack by Isis. On a BBC panel discussion the Telegraph’s Janet Daley referred to the crash as “a direct consequence of [Russia’s] involvement in Syria”, adding: “[Putin] has perhaps incited this terrorist incident on Russian civilians.”
Compare and contrast Daley’s remarks on the downing of Flight 9268 with her reaction to the Paris attacks. Rather than accusing President Hollande of “inciting” terrorism against the people of France, or calling the carnage a “direct consequence” of French involvement in Syria, she took aim at anyone who might dare draw attention to the country’s military interventions in Muslim-majority countries such as Libya, Mali and, yes, Syria.
“If there is any need to argue about these matters, it should come at some other time,” she wrote, because “the French people did not deserve this”, and “it is wicked and irresponsible to suggest otherwise”. (To quote one of the leading foreign policy sages of our time, Phoebe Buffay of Friends: “Hello, kettle? This is pot. You’re black.”)
If Isis did bring down the Russian airliner, then of course it would be madness to pretend it wasn’t linked to Putin’s military campaign on behalf of the dictator of Damascus. Yet it would be equally insane to pretend that the horror in Paris had nothing at all to do with France’s recent military interventions in the Middle East and west Africa.
Yes, the attackers in the Bataclan concert hall chanted Allahu Akbar as they opened fire on the crowd, but they were also heard saying: “What you are doing in Syria? You are going to pay for it now.” Yes, Isis’s official statement of responsibility referred to Paris as “the capital of prostitution and obscenity”, but it also singled out the French government for leading a “Crusader campaign” and “striking the Muslims … with their planes”.
To understand political violence requires an understanding of political grievances; to blame terrorism only on religious ideology or medieval mindsets is short-sighted and self-serving. The inconvenient truth is that geopolitics is governed as much as is physics by Newton’s third law of motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The CIA, back in the 1950s, even coined a term – “blowback” – to describe the unintended negative consequences, for US civilians, of US military operations abroad.
Today, when it comes to Russia, an “official enemy”, we understand and embrace the concept of blowback. When it comes to our own countries, to the west, we become the child in the playground, sticking our fingers in our ears and singing “La la la, I can’t hear you.”
You can argue that French – or for that matter UK or US – military action in the Middle East is a legitimate and unavoidable response to the rise of a terrorist mini-state; but you can’t argue that actions don’t have consequences.
The former chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit, Michael Scheuer, told me in 2011 that “people are going to ... bomb us because they don’t like what we’ve done”. In an interview for al-Jazeera in July, the retired US general Michael Flynn, who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2013-15, admitted to me that “the more bombs we drop, that just … fuels the conflict”.
It is a view backed by the Pentagon’s Defence Science Board, which observed as long as ago as 1997: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.”
Let me be clear: to explain is not to excuse; explication is not justification. There is no grievance on earth that can justify the wanton slaughter of innocent men, women and children, in France or anywhere else.
The savagery of Isis is perhaps without parallel in the modern era. But the point is that it did not emerge from nowhere: as the US president himself has conceded,Isis “grew out of our invasion” of Iraq.
Yet we avert our gaze from the “glaringly evident” and pretend that “they” – the Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese – are attacked for their policies while “we” –Europe, the west, the liberal democracies – are attacked only for our principles. This is the simplistic fantasy, the geopolitical fairytale, that we tell ourselves. It gives us solace and strength in the wake of terrorist atrocities. But it does nothing to stop the next attack.
Tuesday 12 August 2014
Iraq exposes the west’s hypocrisy in the Middle East
It’s right to take military action to protect Yazidi people. But the west’s record on who gets saved and who doesn’t is shameful
A friend from Pristina once told me that the happiest day of his life was when he heard Nato cruise missiles over his home town. This was in 1999 when Nato intervened from the air to stop the Serb campaign to drive Albanians from Kosovo. Often military intervention is wrong, but sometimes it is right. It was right in Kosovo, and Libya in 2011, and it is right today in northern Iraq.
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Also read
Muslim double standards abound
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I resigned from the British foreign office because my government lied about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. My scepticism about western motives runs deep. But the evident suffering of the Yazidis and others, and the imminent threat to the hitherto stable region of Kurdistan, overcomes these doubts. The views of the Yazidis and the Kurdistan regional government are clear. Their views matter most.
But the intervention in northern Iraq highlights the hypocrisy that characterises western policies in the Middle East. Who gets saved and who doesn’t? In Egypt, the west supports an authoritarian dictatorship where thousands, from Muslim Brothers to secular democrats like Alaa Abd El Fattah, are incarcerated in appalling, torturous jails. In Palestine, the US resupplied bombs to Israel during its callous bombardment of Gaza. And in Iraq itself, the US chose currently embattledNouri al-Maliki as prime minister, and continued to support him even after his militias had scythed down Sunnis and imprisoned thousands for their ethnicity. The UK government gives its tacit support to all of this, with a calculated display of rhetorical hand-wringing.
The west has worked itself into a grotesque muddle in the Middle East, supporting dictatorships in some places, calling for others to end; condemning the killings of civilians in one place, in another condoning them. These are the double standards that will be exploited by extremists across the world; a fount of terrorism that will continue to haunt us.
For too long, western policy has been guided by abstract and invented notions of “interests” and “security”, arbitrary guidelines that long ago degraded into “our friends” and “their enemies”. A new doctrine is needed, based on clear principles: protection of civilians, promoting local solutions, consistent rewards and punishments, all included in a comprehensive approach.
As everywhere, the welfare of civilians should come first and guide all policy. This offers a clear signpost in Kurdistan but also Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. In cases of violent repression, this means giving populations the means for self-defence. In extremis, it might mean military intervention.
Since Sykes and Picot carved up the Middle East a century ago, the west has imposed its own simplistic designs on the complexities of the region. Instead, it must always facilitate local discussion, without assumptions such as that Iraq should remain as one state. If the Kurds want their own state, we should not be the ones to stop them. Our role should be to aim for a negotiated solution, with clear protections for minorities.
When John Kerry visits Cairo bringing attack helicopters for President Sisi, it cannot be a surprise that the regime pays no attention when he calls for the release of political prisoners. Rhetoric counts for very little. Criticism over the shelling of UN schools in Gaza doesn’t matter when in private officials reassure Israel that support continues. If a government abuses its population or fails to engage in inclusive political dialogue, it should be criticised, then condemned, then shunned and, if it continues, sanctioned. This applies in Saudi Arabia; it should apply in Iraq, but also in Israel.
Western policy does not connect the dots between the interconnected crises of the Middle East. Protecting civilians in Syria means giving the means of self-defence, such as anti-aircraft missiles, to the moderate opposition (which my organisation advises). This would have limited the rise of Isis in Syria, preventing the threat in Iraq and thus the necessity of military intervention. Pounding Isis in Iraq won’t stop the danger re-emerging from Syria. Condoning repression in Egypt will sustain the terrorist threat worldwide.
These principles highlight the mess of western policy. Following them would, in the longer term, help put it right.
Thursday 12 December 2013
Reclassifying ketamine is more fiddling while the crack pipe burns
Why can't we talk about our history of intoxication? Photograph: guardian.co.uk
Tis the season to be off your head, legally and in a ladylike manner. At the moment there is a lot of focus on the harm that us people (ie, women) do to ourselves with our: "Yay, it's wine o'clock." Or, as the Sun explains: "So many mums open the wine once the kids are in bed. The cork rarely goes back in the bottle."
One might ask why women's lives are so stressful that self-medication is needed, and why alcohol is such an astonishingly cheap way to get wasted. Legally.
I stress legal because the news that government advisers want ketamine reclassified from a class C to B drug is more fiddling while the crack pipe burns. The drug wasn't banned until 2006, but someone who gets caught with it will now face up to five years in prison instead of two. A heavy price, one feels, for the person who wants to anaesthetise themselves of an evening. Send them to prison where drugs are the currency? It's almost as if government advisers don't live in the real world.
Sure, the long-term effects of ketamine (bladder damage) are not nice and I have never doubted that it is dangerous. When I was 16, two boys I knew broke into a veterinary surgery and injected it. The dose was for horses, not humans. They both died stupid, stupid deaths.
Reclassifying it might mean a few students may now think twice. But those who will be thinking really hard are the manufacturers who will design a legal substance that guarantees the effects of ketamine and can be sold online. For this is how prohibition works hand in hand with capitalism and organised crime. Recently, we have all experienced contact highs – cooking up meth (Breaking Bad), cheering on Nigella (coke), Paul Flowers (a vile cocktail of everything and ill- considered banking). We watch Russell Brand's abstinence monologues that do indeed break the barriers of space and time.
There is no joined-up drugs policy. It is rare that I say a good word about George Osborne but, as I have said in the past, I don't care if he took cocaine. Because I don't. And to be fair to Nick Clegg – maybe I really am out of my mind – he admits that in the war on drugs, drugs won, acknowledging that many senior police officers want decriminalisation. Addiction, Clegg declared recently, is a health issue, not a criminal justice one.
Facts remain a dangerous substance in this debate, as Professor David Nutt knows. In 2009, he said that illegal drugs should be classified according to the harm, both social and individual, they cause. Alcohol would certainly have a high classification. Booze and tobacco, he said, were more harmful than LSD, cannabis and ecstasy. So he had to be got rid of, as few politicians ever seem to be able to expand their minds enough to consider actual evidenced-based policy-making.
Decriminalising certain drugs would inevitably mean misuse. But the unsayable thing is that many of us use drugs, legal and illegal, at certain stages in our lives. And enjoy them.
Instead, however, we hand over the trade to organised crime, which is why Mexico is in the state it is now, upping its poppy production massively. We have spent 10 years trying to bomb or bribe away the only cash crop the Afghans can grow (the opium poppy). What do we want them to sell? Cabbages? This year is a record one for the crop, produced mainly in Helmand, so that has really worked.
You may be the sort of person who does not want to drink or take drugs. You may not wish to expand your mind, or lose it. You may not want to connect the handing-out of mood-altering SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) with kids smoking skunk and mums' little wine clubs. You may think it's no longer cool to neck any pills other than statins. You may want to move to Uruguay, which has just legalised marijuana, though I can't think of anything worse than being in Montevideo with a load of gap yahs. It's not my drug of choice, as I like things that make you want to talk.
I would like the real drug conversation, not the gurning, coked-up, aren't-we-amazing one. Not the one where Tulisa is a threat to civilisation. Why can't we talk about our history of intoxication, personal and political? Those who make the laws that would make me a criminal are not coherent in their logic. They are cowards, afraid of a media that is neither clean nor sober. Drugs, legal and illegal, are a fact of life. Even life-enhancing. There will be casualties of drugs but there are casualties of not facing reality. Both need to be managed. Honestly, I really cannot snort another line of this hypocrisy.
Sunday 28 October 2012
Doosra: Is it really a question of integrity?
Posted by Michael Jeh 1 day, 5 hours ago in Michael Jeh
John Inverarity has bowled me a doosra today with his comments about the doosra and integrity. I’m genuinely not sure which way to play this one.
That he is a gentleman and a scholar there can be no doubt. His reputation as man of decency and integrity allows him the privilege of making a comment such as this with some immunity from anyone looking to take cheap shots at him. From that perspective, reading his words carefully, I can draw no hint of mischief or hypocrisy in his brave statement. Perhaps a long bow could be drawn to infer that he is pointing fingers at some bowlers but I genuinely think that to do so would be to do the gentleman an injustice. Clearly he believes that the doosra has the potential to corrupt bowling actions and he would prefer to see the Australian bowling contingent shy away from that technique. Fair enough too if that is his genuine belief.
On the other hand, I also believe that it may be a bit naïve on the part of Australian cricket, if Inverarity is speaking on behalf of the institution rather than as an individual, to encourage a policy that is clearly going to disadvantage Australia to this extent. Put simply, the doosra is arguably the most potent bowling weapon in modern cricket. Especially in limited overs cricket, it is probably the single most influential factor in giving bowling teams a sniff of hope. The fast bowlers have proved woefully inadequate in coming up with anything new to stem the flow of boundaries. In fact, their skill level has actually dropped some considerable level, evidenced by the steady diet of full tosses that are served up at least once an over when under pressure. So the doosra and the variations that followed (carrom ball) can lay claim to being the most influential game-changer. When a bowler with a good doosra comes on to bowl, I immediately sit up and take notice because there is always the chance that a game can be turned on its head. Since Shane Warne led the new spin revolution, nothing has excited me more in the bowling stakes than the perfection of the various types of doosra.
That is why I am slightly flummoxed by Inverarity’s stance on it. Whilst not necessarily agreeing with his inference that it may lead to illegal actions, I respect his integrity enough to accept his point in the spirit it was intended. However, to encourage Australian spinners to not learn the art form is possibly putting principle before pragmatism. That in itself is admirable if it were applied universally but no country, least of all Australia, has ever applied this morality on a ‘whole of cricket’ basis so what makes the doosra so special? Is Inverarity suggesting that Australian cricket should now make decisions on the basis of integrity or is the doosra singled out as the one issue where we apply the Integrity Test? If so, is it any coincidence that we don’t really have anyone who can bowl the doosra with any great proficiency and will that change on the day we discover our own Doosra Doctor?
All countries have their own inconsistencies to be ashamed of so I’m not suggesting that Australia is alone in this regard. Far from it. Living in Australia, I just get to see a lot more of the local cricketing news so I’m better qualified to make comment on Australian examples. A few examples spring to mind….let’s think back to the times when we prepared turning tracks in the 1980s to beat the West Indies. A fair enough tactic too so long as there’s no complaints if other teams prepare pitches to suit their strengths. Similarly, I recall a period during the late 1990s when Australian teams insisted on having their fielder’s word accepted when a low catch had been taken. That theory worked OK until Andy Bichel claimed a caught and bowled off Michael Vaughan in the 2002/03 Ashes series when replays showed it had clearly bounced in front of him. I know Bich quite well and he is as honest as they come so it was genuinely a case of him thinking it had carried when in fact it hadn’t. Around that same period, Justin Langer refused to walk when caught by Brian Lara at slip, despite the Australian mantra that a fielder’s word was his bond. They come no more honourable than Lara in this regard so what happened to the principle? Like all matters of convenience, it is admirable but rarely works when it becomes an inconvenient truth.
And that is the source of my confusion with linking the doosra to the question of integrity. I’m not convinced that the integrity issue will stand the test of time if Australia accidentally discovers a home-grown exponent of this delivery. Likewise the issue of the switch-hit. Now that Dave Warner plays it as well as anyone, are we opposed to this too on integrity grounds? If Warner hadn’t mastered the shot, would that too be something that we would not encourage because it perhaps bent the spirit of cricket?
Only time will tell whether Inverarity’s wisdom and guidance will be mirrored by those in the organisation with perhaps less integrity and more pragmatism in their veins. I suspect it will take more than one decent man to stop an irresistible force. His motives may be pure indeed but I suspect that this is one issue that will turn the other way!
John Inverarity has bowled me a doosra today with his comments about the doosra and integrity. I’m genuinely not sure which way to play this one.
That he is a gentleman and a scholar there can be no doubt. His reputation as man of decency and integrity allows him the privilege of making a comment such as this with some immunity from anyone looking to take cheap shots at him. From that perspective, reading his words carefully, I can draw no hint of mischief or hypocrisy in his brave statement. Perhaps a long bow could be drawn to infer that he is pointing fingers at some bowlers but I genuinely think that to do so would be to do the gentleman an injustice. Clearly he believes that the doosra has the potential to corrupt bowling actions and he would prefer to see the Australian bowling contingent shy away from that technique. Fair enough too if that is his genuine belief.
On the other hand, I also believe that it may be a bit naïve on the part of Australian cricket, if Inverarity is speaking on behalf of the institution rather than as an individual, to encourage a policy that is clearly going to disadvantage Australia to this extent. Put simply, the doosra is arguably the most potent bowling weapon in modern cricket. Especially in limited overs cricket, it is probably the single most influential factor in giving bowling teams a sniff of hope. The fast bowlers have proved woefully inadequate in coming up with anything new to stem the flow of boundaries. In fact, their skill level has actually dropped some considerable level, evidenced by the steady diet of full tosses that are served up at least once an over when under pressure. So the doosra and the variations that followed (carrom ball) can lay claim to being the most influential game-changer. When a bowler with a good doosra comes on to bowl, I immediately sit up and take notice because there is always the chance that a game can be turned on its head. Since Shane Warne led the new spin revolution, nothing has excited me more in the bowling stakes than the perfection of the various types of doosra.
That is why I am slightly flummoxed by Inverarity’s stance on it. Whilst not necessarily agreeing with his inference that it may lead to illegal actions, I respect his integrity enough to accept his point in the spirit it was intended. However, to encourage Australian spinners to not learn the art form is possibly putting principle before pragmatism. That in itself is admirable if it were applied universally but no country, least of all Australia, has ever applied this morality on a ‘whole of cricket’ basis so what makes the doosra so special? Is Inverarity suggesting that Australian cricket should now make decisions on the basis of integrity or is the doosra singled out as the one issue where we apply the Integrity Test? If so, is it any coincidence that we don’t really have anyone who can bowl the doosra with any great proficiency and will that change on the day we discover our own Doosra Doctor?
All countries have their own inconsistencies to be ashamed of so I’m not suggesting that Australia is alone in this regard. Far from it. Living in Australia, I just get to see a lot more of the local cricketing news so I’m better qualified to make comment on Australian examples. A few examples spring to mind….let’s think back to the times when we prepared turning tracks in the 1980s to beat the West Indies. A fair enough tactic too so long as there’s no complaints if other teams prepare pitches to suit their strengths. Similarly, I recall a period during the late 1990s when Australian teams insisted on having their fielder’s word accepted when a low catch had been taken. That theory worked OK until Andy Bichel claimed a caught and bowled off Michael Vaughan in the 2002/03 Ashes series when replays showed it had clearly bounced in front of him. I know Bich quite well and he is as honest as they come so it was genuinely a case of him thinking it had carried when in fact it hadn’t. Around that same period, Justin Langer refused to walk when caught by Brian Lara at slip, despite the Australian mantra that a fielder’s word was his bond. They come no more honourable than Lara in this regard so what happened to the principle? Like all matters of convenience, it is admirable but rarely works when it becomes an inconvenient truth.
And that is the source of my confusion with linking the doosra to the question of integrity. I’m not convinced that the integrity issue will stand the test of time if Australia accidentally discovers a home-grown exponent of this delivery. Likewise the issue of the switch-hit. Now that Dave Warner plays it as well as anyone, are we opposed to this too on integrity grounds? If Warner hadn’t mastered the shot, would that too be something that we would not encourage because it perhaps bent the spirit of cricket?
Only time will tell whether Inverarity’s wisdom and guidance will be mirrored by those in the organisation with perhaps less integrity and more pragmatism in their veins. I suspect it will take more than one decent man to stop an irresistible force. His motives may be pure indeed but I suspect that this is one issue that will turn the other way!
Monday 21 November 2011
It's not about sex
20 November 2011, 03:02 PM IST
The truth is: People today have illicit sex all the time, and many among us have it among our own gender. No one quite knows how this promiscuity came about. Some blame popular culture. Others say, our popular culture merely mirrors the way we actually are. It's stupid to expect that our politicians will be any different from us. If they were, it will only make them worse. If you ask me, it's their sexual pursuits that make them human. Take that out and all you are left with is just greed: An obsessive greed for money and power. Grabbed, not earned.
So what bothers me is not sex. Not even sleaze. For one man's sleaze is another's pleasure. What bothers me is where many of these sexual encounters eventually lead. They seldom remain just encounters between consenting adults, as all sex ought to be, licit or illicit. They spiral down into a dark hell of depravity, violence and crime. Crime so brutal that the sexual part of it seems like just a minor distraction.
The abduction and possible murder of Bhanwri Devi, a small town nurse who was having an affair with a minister, recently caused so much upheaval that the Rajasthan Chief Minister had to dump his entire cabinet. The Gehlot ministry was never much known for its rectitude and efficiency. But what dropped it wasn't its corruption or its ineptitude. What dropped it was a horrible story of deceit, extortion, abduction, and (in all likelihood) murder. For Bhanwri Devi, who was in the eye of the storm, is now missing and was last seen abducted by hired goons with a contract to kill.
It's not just Bhanwri Devi. Every day you read about many such cases. The starting point may be sex. Or sexual attraction. But where it leads to is unspeakable hell. Acid attacks. Slashing. Abductions. Brutal violence. Khap incited murders. It is one endless spiral of horror with each story worse than the other. At the heart of it all is just one obsession: Sexual dominance. Power.
What disturbs me is the fact that sex, one of the most wonderful things India taught the world to celebrate, is now just another instrument of power men keep using to harass, intimidate, dominate, and commit violence on women. So girls wearing jeans are attacked outside their colleges. So are girls drinking in bars. Or out on dates. When the men accompanying them try to resist, they are stabbed, murdered. Mumbai is still reeling under the impact of the ghastly killing of two young men, Keenan and Reuben, who tried to protect their girlfriends from being molested by a bunch of local hoods. There is that horrible case of a policeman who picked up a college girl on Marine Drive where she was sitting with one of her classmates and raped her in the police chowky right there, in broad daylight.
No, it has nothing to do with sex. This is about power. Sex is only a pretext. The obsession with power leads to such disgusting, violent crime. It shows how perverse our notion of manhood is, how emasculated we are as men that we seek to prove our manhood by attacking helpless women. Or try to disempower them by idiotic laws that seek to prevent them from working in bars beyond 9 pm. As the demand for greater representation in politics from women's groups grows, so does the violence. You see it even in the virtual world these days. Women are constantly harassed, intimidated, stalked on the net.
But don't discredit sex for this. Discredit the genes that make us men believe every woman is easy game. And when she says no, she must be taught a lesson. No, it's never about sex. It's only about power. And the abuse of power is what politics is all about.
Saturday 9 July 2011
The great age of Britain's popular press is drawing squalidly to its close
by Ian Jack in The Guardian
Who will mourn the passing of the News of the World? The staff will, especially those not recruited by the Sun on Sunday. A pure-minded lover of Pakistani cricket might, thanking "the fake sheikh" for exposing the national team's easy corruption. This week everyone hates the News of the World, and yet only last Sunday around 2.6 million people liked it enough to buy a copy. They didn't mind what they were reading, so long as they didn't know how some of it came to be written. And they didn't mind that too much, either – if they knew about phone hacking, they overlooked it – until it came to the case of the abducted and then murdered girl, Milly Dowler.
We own what the Victorians knew as our baser selves. When the News of the World first appeared in 1843, Britain was embarking on a long age of public respectability in which salacious accounts of sex and violence were hard to find. The News of the World made this a specialism, mainly by reporting court cases no other paper would touch. The education acts of 1870 and 1880 spread literacy through every social class and hugely expanded the reading public. By 1914, the paper was selling a couple of million copies a week, all of them deliciously published on a day nominally devoted to worship and quiet reflection. In its peak year, 1949, the circulation averaged close to 8.5m and required not a parcels van or two but a whole train to take Scottish copies north from the presses in Manchester.
It was, by then, the world's biggest-selling newspaper – a publishing triumph owned by an English family, the Carrs, that exploited an otherwise unsatisfied appetite for sexual voyeurism and scandal. At 11 o'clock in church: remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Behind one's lavatory door at 12: Vicar Denies Weekend in Caravan. "As British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding," was how its then editor described his paper during the takeover battle of 1969 (and everyone knew that the loser, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech).
Whether hypocrisy is a peculiarly British vice is debatable; other societies may be just as two-faced in different ways. But understanding the difference between how people were supposed to be and how they actually were became a key weapon for the pioneers of British popular newspaper journalism when universal primary education delivered new audiences in the late 19th century. Social reformers and educationalists thought of reading in terms of self-improvement and a more skilled workforce – a moral and economic good. A new breed of newspaper publishers, of which Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) was by far the most inventive, saw a less worthy side. He spread the message to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial.
"Crime exclusives are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news," Northcliffe told his news editor at the Daily Mail, Tom Clarke, in 1921. "They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sort of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read. Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
Northcliffe first put his "only human" principle to work as the 22-year-old editor-publisher of a little weekly, Answers to Correspondents, which told its readers how many MPs had glass eyes (three) or cork legs (one), and how tall Gladstone was (5ft 9ins!), and adjudicated debates over whether women lived longer than men and if snakes could kill pigs. Later he would say that his fortune had been founded on useless information, but by then he could afford to make jokes about his youth, having in the meantime launched the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), and bought the Observer (1905) and the Times (1908). No one did more to shape the future of British journalism. Northcliffe divided news into two main divisions – reports of happenings and what he called "talking points", where his reporters would develop the topics people were discussing, or stimulate new ones. "What a great talking point," he told Clarke when he read that Paris had decided skirts should be long. "Every woman in the country will be excited about it. We must start an illustrated discussion on 'THE BATTLE OF THE SKIRTS: LONG v SHORT.' Get different people's views. Cable to New York and Paris, get plenty of sketches by well-known artists … print as many as you can … plenty of legs."
Such enterprising devotion to the frivolous – and to women – had never before been heard in a newspaper office. In this, he prefigured the modern British editor; similarly, his close relationships with politicians made him the model for the modern British proprietor. During the first world war he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, and adopted him as a kind of editorial pupil. Promoted to an editorship in Melbourne, Murdoch emulated the maestro's techniques and forged his own political alliances, so much so he got the nickname Lord Southcliffe. His only son, Rupert, learned the trade at his knee.
Northcliffe had an unhappy end. He became paranoid and issued bewildering instructions that his staff, trained to oblige his imperiousness, never knew how to disobey. He appointed a Daily Mail concierge as the censor of advertisements, he saw two moons in the sky at Biarritz, at Boulogne he tried to push a railway porter into the sea. Perrier water became an obsession, and on the train from Dover to London he drank 13 bottles of it. (In the spirit of Answers, I can't resist the information that his brother, St John Harmsworth, bought the French spring that was then in the custody of a Dr Perrier. St John bottled the water in bottles shaped like Indian clubs and gave a few to Sir Thomas Lipton, which the grocery magnate pressed on King Edward VII, who gave Perrier a royal warrant. Bingo.)
He died under the supervision of two nurses in a hut on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens. Neurosyphilis has always been strongly rumoured, but never proved. It was an organic psychosis of some sort, in a mind that had been unsteadied by power. In his last days, he ordered hundreds of sackings, but he had always been a brisk sacker: "My dear Tom Clarke, Fire [name deleted]. Chief" is a memo reproduced by Clarke in his fascinating memoir. An editor who said she wasn't to blame for her paper's criminal behaviour because she'd been on holiday at the time? Her feet (I like to think) would never have touched the ground.
For the moment Rebekah Brooks stays, but all around her the great age of Britain's popular press is tumbling squalidly to its close.
Who will mourn the passing of the News of the World? The staff will, especially those not recruited by the Sun on Sunday. A pure-minded lover of Pakistani cricket might, thanking "the fake sheikh" for exposing the national team's easy corruption. This week everyone hates the News of the World, and yet only last Sunday around 2.6 million people liked it enough to buy a copy. They didn't mind what they were reading, so long as they didn't know how some of it came to be written. And they didn't mind that too much, either – if they knew about phone hacking, they overlooked it – until it came to the case of the abducted and then murdered girl, Milly Dowler.
We own what the Victorians knew as our baser selves. When the News of the World first appeared in 1843, Britain was embarking on a long age of public respectability in which salacious accounts of sex and violence were hard to find. The News of the World made this a specialism, mainly by reporting court cases no other paper would touch. The education acts of 1870 and 1880 spread literacy through every social class and hugely expanded the reading public. By 1914, the paper was selling a couple of million copies a week, all of them deliciously published on a day nominally devoted to worship and quiet reflection. In its peak year, 1949, the circulation averaged close to 8.5m and required not a parcels van or two but a whole train to take Scottish copies north from the presses in Manchester.
It was, by then, the world's biggest-selling newspaper – a publishing triumph owned by an English family, the Carrs, that exploited an otherwise unsatisfied appetite for sexual voyeurism and scandal. At 11 o'clock in church: remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Behind one's lavatory door at 12: Vicar Denies Weekend in Caravan. "As British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding," was how its then editor described his paper during the takeover battle of 1969 (and everyone knew that the loser, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech).
Whether hypocrisy is a peculiarly British vice is debatable; other societies may be just as two-faced in different ways. But understanding the difference between how people were supposed to be and how they actually were became a key weapon for the pioneers of British popular newspaper journalism when universal primary education delivered new audiences in the late 19th century. Social reformers and educationalists thought of reading in terms of self-improvement and a more skilled workforce – a moral and economic good. A new breed of newspaper publishers, of which Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) was by far the most inventive, saw a less worthy side. He spread the message to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial.
"Crime exclusives are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news," Northcliffe told his news editor at the Daily Mail, Tom Clarke, in 1921. "They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sort of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read. Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."
Northcliffe first put his "only human" principle to work as the 22-year-old editor-publisher of a little weekly, Answers to Correspondents, which told its readers how many MPs had glass eyes (three) or cork legs (one), and how tall Gladstone was (5ft 9ins!), and adjudicated debates over whether women lived longer than men and if snakes could kill pigs. Later he would say that his fortune had been founded on useless information, but by then he could afford to make jokes about his youth, having in the meantime launched the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), and bought the Observer (1905) and the Times (1908). No one did more to shape the future of British journalism. Northcliffe divided news into two main divisions – reports of happenings and what he called "talking points", where his reporters would develop the topics people were discussing, or stimulate new ones. "What a great talking point," he told Clarke when he read that Paris had decided skirts should be long. "Every woman in the country will be excited about it. We must start an illustrated discussion on 'THE BATTLE OF THE SKIRTS: LONG v SHORT.' Get different people's views. Cable to New York and Paris, get plenty of sketches by well-known artists … print as many as you can … plenty of legs."
Such enterprising devotion to the frivolous – and to women – had never before been heard in a newspaper office. In this, he prefigured the modern British editor; similarly, his close relationships with politicians made him the model for the modern British proprietor. During the first world war he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, and adopted him as a kind of editorial pupil. Promoted to an editorship in Melbourne, Murdoch emulated the maestro's techniques and forged his own political alliances, so much so he got the nickname Lord Southcliffe. His only son, Rupert, learned the trade at his knee.
Northcliffe had an unhappy end. He became paranoid and issued bewildering instructions that his staff, trained to oblige his imperiousness, never knew how to disobey. He appointed a Daily Mail concierge as the censor of advertisements, he saw two moons in the sky at Biarritz, at Boulogne he tried to push a railway porter into the sea. Perrier water became an obsession, and on the train from Dover to London he drank 13 bottles of it. (In the spirit of Answers, I can't resist the information that his brother, St John Harmsworth, bought the French spring that was then in the custody of a Dr Perrier. St John bottled the water in bottles shaped like Indian clubs and gave a few to Sir Thomas Lipton, which the grocery magnate pressed on King Edward VII, who gave Perrier a royal warrant. Bingo.)
He died under the supervision of two nurses in a hut on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens. Neurosyphilis has always been strongly rumoured, but never proved. It was an organic psychosis of some sort, in a mind that had been unsteadied by power. In his last days, he ordered hundreds of sackings, but he had always been a brisk sacker: "My dear Tom Clarke, Fire [name deleted]. Chief" is a memo reproduced by Clarke in his fascinating memoir. An editor who said she wasn't to blame for her paper's criminal behaviour because she'd been on holiday at the time? Her feet (I like to think) would never have touched the ground.
For the moment Rebekah Brooks stays, but all around her the great age of Britain's popular press is tumbling squalidly to its close.
Sunday 26 June 2011
Ideals go overboard when it comes to choosing a school
Janet Street-Porter
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Sunday, 26 June 2011
Don't you love the way alleged socialists and the community-minded middle classes justify their biggest act of hypocrisy – claiming that they want better education for all, while paying through the nose to send their offspring to private schools? Marcus Brigstocke, a pleasant enough comedian, has been doing a bit of hand wringing, telling this paper last week, "I have ethical problems with it [my choice] but... I think this is the best environment for them". Rich people always use the feeblest excuses to justify paying to segregate their children from the rest.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, has decided to send his kids, Luke and Liberty, to swanky Norland Place in west London, and says "we made a decision we feel is best for them". Since when did "best" mean "fee- paying"? Even lefty musicians undergo a radical change of heart when they start to breed. New Statesman columnist Alex James, whose band Blur trashed public schools in their song "Charmless Man", is opting for private, protesting "you want your kids to have the best education". The MP Diane Abbott shunned local schools in Hackney and spent thousands sending her son James to a top school, claiming she did not want him to "get in with the wrong crowd". A great message to send to constituents who have no other choice. She claimed that other West Indian mums sympathised with her – shameless.
Private schools account for only 7 per cent of students, but 45 per cent of the Oxbridge intake – and that's the reason middle-class parents, even in a recession, will remortgage their homes, give up holidays, and beg grandparents for cash to meet the fees. As parents struggle to pay this self-imposed tithe, independent schools are getting into debt – they're owed £120,000 on average – and many are raising fees. Surely the time is right for parents to come to their senses, save their lolly and give state education a chance?
I never thought I'd feel sympathy for Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, but I do. Tasked with trying to drag all state schools up to a decent level of achievement, he's besieged on all fronts. He's highly committed, but what about his fellow politicians? Not only does his own party prefer private education for their children, the Prime Minister says he's "terrified"of finding a good state secondary school for his family. The left is no better – many choose faith schools and selective secondaries in the belief that it will give their kids a better start in life. David Miliband is an atheist, yet sends his eldest son to a faith school over a mile away, when there is a secular primary close by. In short, few people in power or in the public eye are willing to endorse state schools.
It's as if Michael Gove is trying to sell us cars that no one in government, the professions or the City would be seen dead driving. He's got plenty of other problems on his plate – Ofqual, the body that monitors exam standards, recently failed to spot that 10 GCSE and A-level papers contained mistakes, affecting up to 250,000 students. They can hold an investigation and castigate exam boards, but surely the buck stops with them. Of course no one will get the sack or resign, and many young people will be denied the university of their choice.
This week, 300,000 teachers plan to strike over changes to their pension arrangements, and Gove has said schools have a "moral duty" to stay open. On top of all that, a review into testing primary school leavers wants to change the creative writing paper and replace it with "right" or "wrong" tick boxes. Doesn't sound very challenging to me. Teachers have moaned and moaned about these test, but the number of kids leaving primary school who are illiterate is shocking.
Gove needs more money for teachers to reduce class sizes – the only way that standards will improve. He needs to introduce quality vocational training for less academic kids at 14, so they will be ready to take up lucrative jobs as plumbers, engineers, and builders. Labour introduced worthless diplomas instead of A-levels, which have left hundreds of thousands of teenagers unemployed and unskilled. I am the product of a state education – and it couldn't have been better. Gove needs cash and moral support from his colleagues and prominent citizens. Sadly it looks as if neither will be forthcoming.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, has decided to send his kids, Luke and Liberty, to swanky Norland Place in west London, and says "we made a decision we feel is best for them". Since when did "best" mean "fee- paying"? Even lefty musicians undergo a radical change of heart when they start to breed. New Statesman columnist Alex James, whose band Blur trashed public schools in their song "Charmless Man", is opting for private, protesting "you want your kids to have the best education". The MP Diane Abbott shunned local schools in Hackney and spent thousands sending her son James to a top school, claiming she did not want him to "get in with the wrong crowd". A great message to send to constituents who have no other choice. She claimed that other West Indian mums sympathised with her – shameless.
Private schools account for only 7 per cent of students, but 45 per cent of the Oxbridge intake – and that's the reason middle-class parents, even in a recession, will remortgage their homes, give up holidays, and beg grandparents for cash to meet the fees. As parents struggle to pay this self-imposed tithe, independent schools are getting into debt – they're owed £120,000 on average – and many are raising fees. Surely the time is right for parents to come to their senses, save their lolly and give state education a chance?
I never thought I'd feel sympathy for Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, but I do. Tasked with trying to drag all state schools up to a decent level of achievement, he's besieged on all fronts. He's highly committed, but what about his fellow politicians? Not only does his own party prefer private education for their children, the Prime Minister says he's "terrified"of finding a good state secondary school for his family. The left is no better – many choose faith schools and selective secondaries in the belief that it will give their kids a better start in life. David Miliband is an atheist, yet sends his eldest son to a faith school over a mile away, when there is a secular primary close by. In short, few people in power or in the public eye are willing to endorse state schools.
It's as if Michael Gove is trying to sell us cars that no one in government, the professions or the City would be seen dead driving. He's got plenty of other problems on his plate – Ofqual, the body that monitors exam standards, recently failed to spot that 10 GCSE and A-level papers contained mistakes, affecting up to 250,000 students. They can hold an investigation and castigate exam boards, but surely the buck stops with them. Of course no one will get the sack or resign, and many young people will be denied the university of their choice.
This week, 300,000 teachers plan to strike over changes to their pension arrangements, and Gove has said schools have a "moral duty" to stay open. On top of all that, a review into testing primary school leavers wants to change the creative writing paper and replace it with "right" or "wrong" tick boxes. Doesn't sound very challenging to me. Teachers have moaned and moaned about these test, but the number of kids leaving primary school who are illiterate is shocking.
Gove needs more money for teachers to reduce class sizes – the only way that standards will improve. He needs to introduce quality vocational training for less academic kids at 14, so they will be ready to take up lucrative jobs as plumbers, engineers, and builders. Labour introduced worthless diplomas instead of A-levels, which have left hundreds of thousands of teenagers unemployed and unskilled. I am the product of a state education – and it couldn't have been better. Gove needs cash and moral support from his colleagues and prominent citizens. Sadly it looks as if neither will be forthcoming.
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