The dark soul of English cricket lies exposed

by Maxie Allen in The Full Toss • February 6, 2014

We are not going to take this lying down. Now is not the moment to supinely accept the latest act of cruelty our ECB overlords determine to perpetrate against us.

On Tuesday night, at the height of my anger, I wrote on Facebook that Pietersen’s dismissal constituted the greatest act of betrayal in the history of British sport.

If anyone bothered to read my outburst, they may have deemed me insane. But even in the cold light of day, I stand by every word.

We, the followers of the England cricket team, have been treated with an arrogance and contempt to a degree which is grotesque even by the standards of the English game’s hierarchy.

The ECB has taken a long, slow look at us, and then – quite deliberately – thrown a bucket of cold piss in our face.

They have sacked our best player – a cricketer whom some of us disliked, but many of us adored, and the vast majority valued. In so doing, they have ruined any chance of our short- or medium-term revival in Test cricket.

Pietersen’s sacking was not only a vindictive and cowardly way to treat one of English cricket’s finest servants. It was also a self-inflicted and catastrophic act of vandalism against the very fabric of our team.

Our team. Not their team. Our team.

We – the supporters, the spectators, the TV viewers – are the people who make English cricket what it is. Without us, it has no meaning or purpose – and becomes merely the private enterprise of two hundred professional sportsmen and administrators.

Our passion and our participation are the essence of the entire game. And our money pays for it. The salaries of the ECB executives and the England players are funded directly by the – very expensive – match tickets and Sky Sports subscriptions we buy.

The ECB have always taken us for granted – never doubting that we poor saps will obediently fork out whatever it costs to follow the team, even when they sold the game to Rupert Murdoch to line their pockets and then sent us the bill.

Depending on how you look at it, we are either the taxpayer or the customer. But when Downton, Whitaker and Giles conspired to make their fateful decision, do you think that for one nanosecond they thought about us?

Did they ask themselves – is the removal of Pietersen in the best interests of England supporters? Is it what they’d want? Is it a fair way to treat them?

I think not. But once that call had been made – with all its huge significance for the future health and performance of the test side – Paul Downton couldn’t even be bothered to explain to us the reasons why.

The ECB’s failure to tell us why – and exactly why – they sacked KP is breathtaking in its arrogance. We need to know the precise reasoning behind a decision which has caused such pain and which has such immense significance for our future.

We are stakeholders – and as such we have an unquestionable right to know the truth. And yet they are hiding still behind that wretchedly bland and evasive press release. Did Downton really think we’d accept those weasel words?

There is no justification for the ECB’s secrecy. If Pietersen’s behaviour genuinely made it impossible for him to continue in the side, then we must be told the specific facts, in detail: what happened, when, where, and involving whom. The excuse of employer confidentiality is nonsense; in no other walk of life would this happen – if a public sector employee was dismissed for gross misconduct, the facts would be placed in the public domain.

The other excuse offered is the sanctity of the dressing room: the notion whatever happens there, stays there. Usually, that’s fair enough. But in this affair, the England players have forfeited any such rights to confidentiality. The anti-KP faction have got what they wanted – their enemy has been liquidated – and in return they are obliged to reveal the facts which cost a man his career and the team its best player. If indeed Pietersen was fired as a result of conflicts and other incidents which occurred in private, they can no longer be kept private.

Piers Morgan was absolutely right to make the claims about Matt Prior on Twitter yesterday. The CNN and Life Stories host may not be to everyone’s taste, but at the moment he is the only journalist with the balls to challenge the establishment head-on, and shine a light into the incestuous and insular culture of the England squad. There may be no reason to single out Prior (although he did not deny Morgan’s allegation), but that’s not the point – in this climate of secrecy and obfuscation, the only answer is guerilla warfare and nuclear tactics.

Many people say – why is Morgan sticking his nose in, when he’s not a cricket journalist? It’s precisely because he’s outside the cricket world that his intervention is so valuable. Morgan is a total pain in the arse for the cricket establishment, and right now that’s exactly what we need – someone who’s not afraid to upset the ECB. That’s in contrast to the leading media cricket correspondents, who have been so disappointingly supine and reverent, especially Jonathan Agnew and – uncharacteristically – Mike Atherton.

The truth is that cricket hacks live in the same cosy bubble as the players and administrators, and they all have far more in common with each other than any of them do with the public. The Fleet Street press pack need good relationships with the ECB and plentiful access to the talent – which makes them too cowardly to speak very far out of turn. Thank the heavens that Michael Vaughan, at least, has had the guts and intelligence to see through the bullshit and tell us the truth.

But to return to the subject of openness – it might be, of course, that the ECB have not revealed the reasons for KP’s execution for the very simple reason that they don’t have any. They can’t tell us the detail of Pietersen’s offences because he never actually committed any. Even Derek Pringle, the arch-KP hater, and a journalist close to both Alastair Cook and Graham Gooch, can’t come up with much beyond a possible row with Andy Flower in Sydney. The BBC today report that no row took place between Cook and KP, and Graeme Swann told The Sun that ”I saw or heard no issues with [KP] in Australia this winter. His approach was exceptional”.

If this is true – that nothing much really happened – it means that Pietersen was dismissed purely because a few people didn’t like him.

Neither Downton or Whitaker have deigned to give a press conference to explain themselves. No ECB representative has yet given an interview. The most plausible explanation for the silence is this: it’s never occurred to anyone at Lord’s that we, the public, deserve a proper account of the facts. It would be beneath Paul Downton to actually have to address the great unwashed.

As far as the ECB are concerned, our purpose in cricketing life is merely to buy tickets and subscribe to Sky. Beyond that we are at best an irrelevance, but mainly an inconvenience.

The Guardian report that James Whitaker is due to give two broadcast interviews today, on the T20 squad selection. These were already scheduled before KP-gate arose. It remains to be seen what he will, or won’t say.

Downton, meanwhile, has given no interviews at all since he took charge, not even to discuss the abrupt and surprise departure of Andy Flower – who himself did not speak publicly either. The entire landscape of Team England has been bulldozered, without a word of explanation.

The ECB have turned the clock back to the Middle Ages, to the days when the MCC, a private club, ran the game as a personal fiefdom – aloof, patrician, and self-appointed.

And the wrecking balls have been wielded by a dismal triumvirate who remain steadfastly in the shadows, and whose credibility – to put it mildly – is open to question.

Paul Downton, the new England managing director, has been out of the game for more than twenty years. How did he get the job? Did Giles Clarke get chatting to him at a cocktail party?

James Whitaker, the new chair of selectors, is best described with this summary from Darren Gough on Talksport: “Lovely man – he always looks smart, nice hair, nice suits. Chairman of selectors – one Test match for England”. 

Presumably, the ECB didn’t have the phone number for any Englishman who’d had a proper test career.

Ashley Giles also had one hand on the dagger’s handle, and goodness knows why he was given the right to decide who the next coach will be able to pick. Unless he has already been told that the job is his. And if so, god help us.

You might think that I’m exaggerating, that I’m hysterical, that I’m paranoid and mad. What a fuss I’m making, you may say, about dropping a player who was a git anyway.

OK then, fair enough. Let’s just put up with it and carry on. I mean, everything’s fine like this, isn’t it?

Sonia Gandhi - A Blot on the Nation

(Editor's Note: This article was received by email and unable to verify journal of publication. But the points raised are important.)
by Mark Tully

Sir William "Mark" Tully, OBE. He worked for BBC for a period of 30
years before resigning in July 1994. He held the position of Chief of
Bureau, BBC, Delhi for 20 years Padma Shree, KBE, Padma Bhushan, one
of the most respected journalists in the world, writes on Indian
Politics: An eye opener account, not known to most of the Indians.

"I can say without the shadow of a doubt that when history will be
written, the period over which she (Sonia Gandhi) presided, both over
the Congress and India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense
corruption and of a democracy verging towards autocracy, if not
disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single person, a non-Indian
 and a Christian like me. Truth will also come out about her being the
main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G, which she uses to buy
votes."

The sun has already set; darkness is just about to start. Do you blame
it on bankruptcy/blindness of Congress or country's misfortune. It is
both. Now read the complete analysis, which follows. THE TRUTH & THE
HIDDEN FACTS. I was surprised when the Congress party gave me a Padma
Shri – I am the   only foreign journalist to ever get it. For, in my
forty years of political reporting in India, I have always been a
vocal critic of the Nehru dynasty. Someone even called me recently: “a
vitriolic British journalist, who in his old age chose to live back in
the land he never approved”.

It started with Operation Blue Star. I was one of the few western
correspondents who criticized Indira. As I have said since then
numerous times, the attack on the Golden Temple and the atrocities
that followed the army operations, produced in all sections of the
Sikhs a sense of outrage that is hard today to alleviate. I believed
then that the large majority of Hindu India, even if politically
hostile to Indira Gandhi, openly identified with – and exulted in –
her will to overwhelmingly humble a recalcitrant minority.

As everybody knows, Indira Gandhi helped my fame grow even more, by
wanting to imprison me during the Emergency she clamped and finally
throwing me out of India for a short while. But the result was that
the whole of India tuned in, then and thereafter, to my radio’s
broadcasts, ‘The Voice of India’, to hear what they thought was
‘accurate’ coverage of events.

When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, I first believed that he was
sincerely trying to change the political system, but he quickly
gave-up when the old guard would not budge. I criticized him for his
foolish adventure in Sri Lanka, although I felt sorry for him when he
was blown to pieces by Dhanu, the Tamil Tiger.

It is in Kashmir, though that I fought most viciously against his Govt
and subsequent Congress ones for its human right abuses on theKashmiri Muslims of the Valley. The Congress Governments tried indeed
several times to censor me and the army even took prisoner my Kashmiri
stringer, whom I had to rescue by the skin of his teeth. I am also
proud that I was the first one to point out then, that the Indian
Government had at that time no proof of the Pakistani involvement in
the freedom movement in Kashmir.

Thus I always made it a point to start my broadcasts by proclaiming
that the Indian Government accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorism»,
or that “elections are being held in Indian-controlled Kashmir”…As I
was so popular, all the other foreign journalists used the same
parlance to cover Kashmir and they always spoke of the plight of the
Muslims, never of the 400.000 Hindus, who after all were chased out of
their ancestral land by sheer terror (I also kept mum about it).

As for Sonia Gandhi, I did not mind her, when she was Rajiv Gandhi’s
wife, but after his death, I watched with dismay as she started
stamping her authority on the Congress, which made me say in a series
of broadcasts on the Nehru Dynasty: “It’s sad that the Indian National
Congress should be completely dependent on one family; the total
surrender of a national party to one person is deplorable. You have to
ask the question: what claims does Sonia Gandhi have to justify her
candidature for prime-ministership? Running a country is far more
complicated than running a company. Apprenticeship is required in any
profession — more so in politics”.

I heard that Sonia Gandhi was unhappy about this broadcast. Then,
after President APJ Abdul Kalam called her to the Raj Bhavan and told
her what some of us already knew, namely that for a long time, she had
kept both her Italian and Indian passports, which disqualified her to
become the Prime Minister of India, she nevertheless became the
Supreme leader of India behind the scenes. It is then that I
exclaimed: “the moribund and leaderless Congress party has latched
onto Sonia Gandhi, who is Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by
baptism”.

She never forgave me for that. Yet, today I can say without the shadow
of a doubt that when history will be written, the period over which
she presided, both over the Congress and India, will be seen as an era
of darkness, of immense corruption and of a democracy verging towards
autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single
person, a non Indian and a Christian like me.Truth will also come out
about her being the main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G,
which she uses to buy votes, as the Wikileaks have just shown.

Finally, I am sometimes flabbergasted at the fact that Indians –
Hindus, sorry, as most of this country’s intelligentsia is Hindu –
seem to love me so much, considering the fact that in my heydays, I
considerably ran down the 850 million Hindus of this country, one
billion worldwide. I have repented today: I do profoundly believe that
India needs to be able to say with pride, “Yes, our civilization has a
Hindu base to it.” The genius of Hinduism, the very reason it has
survived so long, is that it does not stand up and fight. It changes
and adapts and modernizes and absorbs – that is the scientific and
proper way of going about it.

I believe that Hinduism may actually prove to be the religion of this
millennium, because it can adapt itself to change. Hindus are still
slaves to MUSLIMS and CHRISTIANS On the name of secularism, lots of
facilities and cash incentives are given to Muslims and Christians.
Haj subsidy is given to Muslims for Haj yatra, wages of Muslim
teachers and Imams are given to Muslims are given by looting the Hindu
temples. No such subsidy is given to Hindus for going to Hindu
religious places or any wages to Hindu religious priests or Hindu
teachers. In fact congress secular government creates many obstacles
for Hindus for going to Amarnath Yatra.

Even after 65 years of independence reservation is given on religious
grounds while it should have been abolished by this time. If at all
reservation or subsidy is needed, then it should be purely on economic
grounds rather on the grounds of minorities. Such reservations affect
the quality of work. Congress party giving various kinds of
allurements to minorities to buy their votes with Hindu money. In the
government, many people are with Hindu names but in fact many are
Muslims and Christians with Hindu names  to fool Hindus and to
show in the government, majority   people are Hindus.

 

My Weltanschhaung - 16/02/2012

The EU troika, after shifting the 'austerity' goal posts for Greece are now willing to let Greece quit the Euro. So let's hope that Greece will not have to implement the austerity measures if it quits the Euro. 

Israel and its allies will only be happy after a war with Iran.

What has the world come to - Sun journalists who had hitherto never left an opportunity to criticise the EU, now plan to use the EU human rights law to challenge their benevolent employer Murdoch. With facts like that who needs fiction. What about allowing markets to function freely - you Sunny folks?

I think Arsenal are finished as a team and Wenger will leave at the end of the season. They were not in the reckoning in the game against AC Milan last night. What a shame!

British policemen have a 70 % chance of escaping prosecution on serious charges of misconduct if the investigation is carried out by the IPCC. Shocking but not surprising indeed.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-escape-charges-in-70-per-cent-of-ipcc-cases-6953024.html

London Olympic officials refuse to divulge information about how many tickets were sold and at what prices. A scam?

NGOs, Kiran Bedi, The Media: Who’s The ‘Farest Of Them All?

By Farzana Versey

27 October, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Kiran Bedi is indeed wrong, but when media persons sit to judge her it is a bit of a laugh. Clearly, they do not look in the mirror.

Instead of seeing this as an opportunity to question all sorts of voluntary agencies and their modus operandi, we have a situation where a person is pinned down for wrongdoing without a backward glance at how the whole NGO business works, often with the media’s involvement.

Kiran Bedi has been fudging her bills, where she charged inflated amounts from her hosts. The main source was airline tickets. She would travel by economy class, that too at a discount because of her gallantry award, and charge business class fares. We now have these sanctimonious NGOs tell us that they took it at “face value”. Most NGOs send the tickets themselves. So, why did they let her use her travel agent? And what sort of auditing departments do they run? The reason for keeping quiet is not that they were afraid of Ms. Bedi’s wrath – they obviously did not mind shelling out Business Class fares – but because their finances will lead to many question marks.

This is my point. The media and certain activists have taken a convenient yo-yo stand on the Jan Lokpal Bill campaign. They propped him up and were completely besotted by Team Anna. After they were done with the photo-ops of the caps and the fasting and dancing, they realised that there were chinks in the armour. No one was interested in the deeper questions – it came down to superficial put-downs.

Let us get this fudging business clear. Kiran Bedi has admitted to it and says she will return the excess money that she wanted to use for her own NGO. Where do the NGOs get this kind of money that they can afford to invite people from different cities for seminars? I have often posed this query when we rubbish other institutions. Do you know that most of the activists themselves travel Business Class, stay at fancy hotels, and order the best food – for what? To gupshup about the state of the nation, the homeless, female foeticide, dowry, terrorism, communalism?

Check out the number of people who have left their high-paying corporate and bureaucratic jobs to “serve the nation” or “become useful members of society” or, “fight communalism”. They could do all of these by continuing to work. The reason is that activism has become a paying proposition. Have you seen the huge ads put up in newspapers inviting you to attend some conclave or the other? Is it affordable or even appropriate to shell out this kind of money on overheads? Besides government grants, there is a good deal of foreign sponsorship and donations from industrial houses. While the international ‘intervention’ often comes with some amount of side-effects (pushing of substandard products and services clubbed with the do-good, feel-good stuff), some of the Indian business black money that is not stashed away in banks abroad is routed to charitable organisation, with income tax exemption.

Why does the media not raise a voice about this? Has the media ever questioned journalists who attend these same seminars? Oh yes, the same journalists who give inflated bills to their accounts departments for their travels and hotel stays and “related expenses”. Journalists who sit at the desk and make phone calls but charge taxi fare for the quotes. Journalists who try to get tickets and freebies because they think they are in a position to ‘arrange something’. Journalists who do not have to spend a paisa at restaurants and spas because they just might mention it, in passing, in their next column. Journalists who give us scoops that are fed to them by interested parties or who conduct sting operations that are again paid for by interested parties.

Of course, it is not only the media at fault, but also those who host such talks. Corporate India’s ladies who lunch get a big high when they invite a person who can indeed talk and add to their resume. They flash such people as trophies to display their own worth as ‘aware citizens’. That some media people are doing their evening show with this group should be an eye-opener rather than a can-opener.

If, as some commentators wish to know, why people from public office enter the fray late in the day to become part of NGOs, then one might wish to ask them why they have timed their queries now and not for all these years. Do they ponder about it when they go on government-sponsored junkets?

The problem is that this whole Anna Hazare campaign has been a sham, and revealed more shams both on the inside as well as on the outside. It showed us how the ruling party and the opposition got to pay politics; the arrests also reveal a lot about those who got away without a scratch to their reputations. It is rather disingenuous of Digvijay Singh to say that if Kiran Bedi can offer to return the money, then every bribery case can be closed by saying the bribe-taker will return the money, including, A. Raja.

This is some gumption. A minister in the government of India is caught in a scam of frightening proportions and another government person uses this as an analogy. He is also quite gung-ho about such a thing happening at the highest level. The 2G Spectrum scam is not just about bribes, but also about how the nation was taken for a ride with the government, big industrialists and lobbies involved. It is about how the government functions and not merely who took how much. This case has come under scrutiny; many others do not.

If political agencies get a chance, they try to co-opt the activist groups. Most are willing to go along because it is the easy option. In some cases where they need the government to act, it does become a crucial mutual involvement. Therefore, if a political party invites activists, and they fudge figures about travel expenses, then what will the political parties do? Why not question the complete lack of balance by media groups? One can understand individual commentators taking a particular position, but why do they blatantly follow the newspaper/TV channel line? Where is their independence? Those who talk about objectivity should really look in their own backyards. There is favouritism everywhere and the media indulges in it as much as politicians, and the ‘activist’ role of the media should also come under scrutiny.

Tavleen Singh, Indian Express columnist, while raising some important points, makes a rather shocking comment: “My own observation is that many NGOs working in India appear to be funded by organisations bent on ensuring that India never becomes a developed country… In order for India to become a halfway developed country, we need new roads, airports, ports, modern railways and masses more electricity. In addition, according to experts, we need 500 more cities by 2050. The odd thing is that the NGOs who oppose steel plants, nuclear power stations, dams and aluminum refineries in India never object to the same things in China.”

Is this the definition of development, and the only model? As I have already said, many NGOs do have an agenda, but not only if they are funded by organisations that do not wish to see a developed India. By this logic, Gujarat should have no NGOs. And why must Indian NGOs object to what happens in China? Has the Indian government opposed the self-immolation of Tibetan monks and nuns in support of the Dalai Lama’s return? Has the BJP done so? Has the media done so?

Forget the NGOs for a while. Think about how these plants were to come up, who was to be uprooted and how it would affect the environment. If this development is only for those setting up factories and making India technologically advanced, then why are we still the hub of western-powered outsourcing? Are the NGOs involved here?

Why absolve the fat cats of business only to hit out at the NGOs unless they are specifically playing dirty? How many media people have taken free jet rides, attended fancy wedding functions abroad and written glowing accounts of them? Will they be sanctified as the facilitators of development? Or do they need to get closer to the seats of such power or perhaps such development? These are trick or treat queries. Ask them we must, for there is much beyond Kiran Bedi, whose banshee persona was in fact given a boost by the media when they needed her sound bytes. They were birds of a feather, until she was grounded.

The still-feathered ones have taken wing and are giving us a bird’s eye-view.

Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based writer.

We can all learn from Gwyneth Paltrow

Terence Blacker in The Independent Friday, 9 September 2011





The scavengers who live off the scraps of celebrity scandal will be paying particular attention to the marriage of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin over the next few weeks. Not only are the couple blessed with talent, looks and success – provocation in itself – but she has just made a statement which has caused considerable outrage in some quarters.





Prepare to be shocked. "The more I live my life, the more I learn not to judge people for what they do," Gwyneth has said, quite openly and without apology. "I think we're all trying to do our best but life is complicated." As if that were not controversial enough, she added: "I know people I respect and admire and look up to who have had extra-marital affairs."



The response to these dangerous and reckless remarks has been predictable. There has been clammy speculation about the state of Paltrow's marriage. Seven years of married life, and suddenly she's relaxed about infidelity. What could be going on there? Then, naturally, there have been gusts of moral disapproval from the media. Famous people who express sane, reasonable views are instinctively mistrusted – we expect our celebrities to be out of touch and entertaining – and sneering reference has been made to Paltrow's "latest flirtation with controversy", not to mention her "superhuman compassion".



Paltrow is, though, making a worthwhile point. It is a very contemporary habit, the need to stand in judgment over every little muddle in which a public figure finds herself or himself and draw sorrowful conclusions from them, as a vicar does in a sermon. Scandal and misadventure have always been part of the media, but the busy drawing of moral lessons, the pious scolding from the sidelines, is something new. Disapproval is to the 21st century what primness was to the Victorians.



Both, to a large extent, are propelled by sexual frustration. Prurience, today as over a century ago, tends to disguise itself as moral concern – we need to know every excitingly shocking little detail, in order to condemn it. When a photograph was published recently of a uniformed American cop having sex with a woman on the hood of her car, it was published around the world – it was funny and played to some well-worn erotic fantasies. The story accompanying the picture, though, was the scandal, the abuse of power, the controversy. The randy cop was quickly fired.



It is worth remembering who is doing the judging on these occasions. Unlike the Victorians, today's wet-lipped moralists are not eminent politicians or churchmen. They are journalists.



Such is the hypocrisy when it comes to public misbehaviour that it is now taken for granted. When MPs were being pilloried for taking liberties with their allowances, the moral outrage was orchestrated by those who belonged to a profession in which, over the previous decades, the large-scale fiddling of expenses was a matter of competitive pride. Nor, for all their shrill moralising when a celebrity is caught in the wrong bed, are those who work in the media famous for their high standards of sobriety or sexual fidelity.



Here, perhaps, is the truth behind the new need to judge. Commentators scold, and readers allow themselves to be whipped into a state of excited disapproval, for reasons of guilt about their own less-than-perfect lives.



As Gwyneth Paltrow says, life can indeed be complicated. Taking the high moral ground is only worthwhile when something truly bad has been done. It is fine to be interested and excited by scandal, but why do we have to condemn quite so much? Since when have we all become so sanctimonious?



Few lives would bear the closest scrutiny day by day. Indeed, in a world more full of temptation and dodgy role-models than ever before, a bit of complication along the way may simply be a sign that you are living it to the full.

So you thought Britain wasn't corrupt?

Mary Dejevsky:

Two of the most deep-rooted maladies of British society are freebies among friends and jobs for the boys

Friday, 22 July 2011 The Independent

Anyone who had expected to drowse through the Home Secretary's Commons statement on the Metropolitan Police might have awoken with a start when she began with "allegations about police corruption". It was the flat, almost casual, way in which Theresa May appeared to accept at least the possibility, that surprised and the use of the actual words "police corruption". She went on to announce a review of "instances of undue influence, inappropriate contractual arrangements and other abuses of power in police relationships..."

The reason this bald catalogue shocks is that Britain has long projected an image of itself as a paragon of good governance and the rule of law, to the point where experts on such matters earn a good living advising other countries how to emulate our standards. It also happens to be an image that the vast majority of its citizens share. We regard ourselves as mercifully free of the sort of corruption that blights the lives of, say, Nigerians, Egyptians or Russians, and a cut above most southern Europeans.

That may be how we see ourselves, but it is not quite how others see us. Transparency International, an independent organisation which monitors this sort of thing, places the UK 20th in its latest (2010) corruption perception index. Overall, this may not look so bad – 178 countries are listed. Look closer, though, and you will see that the UK comes well below all the Nordic countries, below Luxembourg, Ireland and Germany, and just below the small Gulf state of Qatar. It is only marginally ahead of the United States, France and Spain. Is this where Britain should be – in 20th place, and falling?

Corruption, of course, takes many forms. In some countries, bribery is so prevalent as to be tantamount to a tax. Indeed, a theory has recently been advanced that this is how it should be regarded and that it is perhaps not so reprehensible after all. In others, an unofficial tariff – ranging from a box of chocolates to a luxury holiday – dictates access to the best educational establishments, the best hospitals, the best flats. In yet other countries which would not generally be regarded as particularly corrupt, contributions to political parties constitute a perennially murky area in which even otherwise distinguished politicians have come to grief, such as the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl. You might argue that the US system of lobbying is a form of legalised corruption.

Generally, these are not ills that afflict the UK. If you live here, you can probably be fairly confident that you will not have to offer teachers a backhander for admitting your child or ensuring a decent grade. (Although I have heard tell of quite lavish gifts offered.) You will not have to pay a doctor for decent NHS treatment or a fast track up the transplant waiting list. (Although, again, there is apocrypha that hints at exceptions, and it was once intimated to me that a consideration might keep my husband classified as a UK resident when we were living abroad, so that he would still qualify for expensive drugs on the NHS.)

And you probably won't find a speed cop or parking warden suggesting that a small transaction "between us" would "fix it" before he writes out the ticket, or a frontline immigration officer nodding through someone with some crisp banknotes, but no visa, in his passport. Or election officers stuffing ballot-boxes after the polls have closed.

But you will find ways in which Britain falls very far short of Scandinavian-level probity; areas where complacency has meant a blind eye is turned to abuses, and grey zones where transactions take place that are not actually illegal, but which would – and should – embarrass one or both parties if they became public.
Several such instances emerged earlier this week when the Commons Home Affairs Committee questioned the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the Assistant Commissioner, John Yates – both of whom had just resigned – as well as the head of public affairs, Dick Fedorcio. The most blatant was Sir Paul's acceptance of hospitality from Champney's health farm.

The commissioner may have been recovering from very serious illness (as he was), he may have declared the gift in the register as required (which he said he did on his return to work), and the owner of Champney's may have been a family friend (though it is unclear how close). But the value of this gift – around half the average Briton's annual pre-tax salary – and Sir Paul's apparent inability to understand that accepting it sat uneasily with his position as the country's most senior police officer on a salary of more than £250,000, suggests a blind spot. It left the impression that there was one law, and one set of subsidised living standards, for the well connected, and another for everyone else.

Something similar applied when it came to the hiring of Neil Wallis, former deputy editor of the News of the World, as a media consultant. Despite some close questioning – notably from two sparky new female Tory MPs, Nicola Blackwood and Louise Mensch – there was precious little clarity about how Wallis actually got the job. Between the lines, however, it could be deduced that there was no open advertisement, no standard recruitment procedure, no formal interview and no public disclosure of the appointment. This was a public-sector, tax-payer funded position, yet contacts and networks appear to have been all.

What we have here are two of the most deep-rooted maladies of British society: freebies among friends and jobs for the boys. And there will be many who shrug and say that this is just how the country works. Yet these ingrained ways of doing things are part of the reason why the UK comes below Finland, Australia and Canada in TI's corruption perception index. They are also a reason, along with our segregated schools, why social mobility in Britain is so relatively poor. Advantage compounds advantage.

At root, much of the disparities come down to information and the way so much is still kept from "prying" eyes. The UK-based American journalist Heather Brooke, who has made opening up what she calls Britain's "information cartel" something of a personal crusade and whose work led to the publication of MPs' expenses, notes that records available to US journalists as a matter of course are "off-limits" here, where access to information "depends on one's wealth, power or privilege". She is right – yet the responses, when she argues this, are not all approving. Some accept that it was ever thus; others accuse her of poking her nose into places it does not belong.

Nor has the Freedom of Information Act so far brought the transformation it should have done. Quite basic information still has to be applied for. This government's efforts to open up details of department and local council spending are laudable, but there has hardly been a rush to comply. Until our patronage system is tackled, British boasts of incorruptibility will remain boasts – discredited by our 20th place on the global corruption index and our continuing fall, as those below us move to clean up their act.
m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk

The great Murdoch conspiracy

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph on 15 July 2011

When I went to work in the House of Commons as a lobby correspondent nearly 20 years ago, I assumed that the British constitution worked along the lines we had been taught in textbooks at school and university. Which is to say: Britain was a representative democracy; the police were reasonably honest; and the country was governed under the rule of law. I naively expected MPs to be honest and driven by a sense of duty, and ministers to be public-spirited.

During my first few years at Westminster, I came to appreciate that most of my assumptions were hardly true. In particular, it became clear that power had seeped away from the Commons, which had lost many of its traditional functions. It rarely held ministers to account, and ministers no longer made their announcements to the House, as Erskine May, the rulebook of Parliament, insisted they should; instead they were leaked out through journalists.

For a number of years I was a part of this alternative system of government. We would be fed information confidentially and behind the scenes, and treated as if we were more important than elected MPs. All this was very flattering – and professionally very useful – but I couldn’t help sensing that something was wrong. It wasn’t just that the media had taken over the function of Parliament, it also meant that the traditional checks and balances no longer operated. Above all, information could be put into the public domain privately and therefore unaccountably.

All newspapers were guilty of being part of this new system, but it was exploited in particular by the Murdoch press. I believe that when Rupert Murdoch arrived on the British scene in the 1960s, he was, on balance, a force for good. The deference that still defined a great deal of political culture was challenged by Mr Murdoch, and better still he took on and defeated the print unions, which had all but destroyed the British newspaper industry in the 1970s. But by the 1990s, Murdoch’s newspapers were starting to abuse their power. The best way of demonstrating this is perhaps by examining the career of Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International who is in such trouble this week. Her professional career is, in a number of ways, a parable for the times we have lived through.

One of the greatest adventuresses of her era, she emerged on the scene when New Labour under Tony Blair was on the verge of power. During this time she was married to Ross Kemp, the EastEnders actor who was one of the most powerful defenders of New Labour. They lived in south London, emphasising the faux-proletarian credentials that were such an important, if misleading, part of the New Labour message.

As New Labour’s star waned, Rebekah Brooks changed course. She ceased to be the cool, metropolitan figure favoured by New Labour. She moved to Oxfordshire, took up riding and became the central figure in the now notorious Chipping Norton set. Meanwhile, her titles changed their allegiance. The political editor of the Sun might have been deemed to lack the impeccable social credentials demanded by an incoming Tory government. He was replaced by an Old Marlburian.
The identical transfiguration took place at The Times, where Phil Webster, one of the few remaining journalists in Fleet Street who has come up the hard way, was removed. Webster, who had been a favourite of the Blair government, found himself replaced as political editor by Roly Watson, who had been a member of Pop, the exclusive club at Eton, at the same time as David Cameron. A pattern was clear. Rebekah Brooks (like all the News International insiders) attached herself like glue to whichever political party held the ascendancy.
During the Blair years, News International executives, Mrs Brooks among them, would attend the annual Labour Party conference, but they were scarcely treated as journalists. When Tony Blair gave his leadership speech, they would be awarded seats just behind the cabinet, as if they had been co-opted into the Government. Arguably they had. The first telephone call that Blair made after he had escaped from the conference hall was routinely to Rupert Murdoch himself. And when ministers who had been favoured by the Murdoch press left office, they would be rewarded. David Blunkett and Alastair Campbell were both given columns on News International publications.
A version of this process repeated itself when Gordon Brown became prime minister, with Rebekah Brooks attending Sarah Brown’s cringe-making “pyjama party” at Chequers. It may not suit Mr Brown, who made such a passionate speech in the Commons yesterday, to remember it but he, too, was part of the Murdoch system of government. And so was David Cameron, who last October threw a party for his closest friends to celebrate his 44th birthday. Reportedly everyone present had known the Prime Minister all his adult life – with the exception of Mrs Brooks.
There was a very sinister element to these relationships. At exactly the same time that Mrs Brooks was getting on so famously with the most powerful men and women in Britain, the employees of her newspapers (as we now know) were listening in to their voicemails and illicitly gaining access to deeply personal information.
One News of the World journalist once told me how this information would be gathered into dossiers; sometimes these dossiers were published, sometimes not. The knowledge that News International held such destructive power must have been at the back of everyone’s minds at the apparently cheerful social events where the company’s executives mingled with their client politicians.
Let’s take the case of Tessa Jowell. When she was Culture Secretary five years ago, News International hacked into her phone and spied on her in other ways. What was going on amounted to industrial espionage, since Ms Jowell was then charged with the regulation and supervision of News International, and the media group can scarcely have avoided discovering commercially sensitive information, even though its primary purpose was to discover details about Ms Jowell’s private life.
Yet consider this: Ms Jowell was informed of this intrusion at the time and said nothing. More curious still, she retained her friendship with Rebekah Brooks and other News International figures. Indeed, Ms Jowell appears to have been present at the Cotswolds party thrown by Matthew Freud, son-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, only 10 days ago.
James Murdoch, heir apparent to the Murdoch empire, was also present. These parties were, in effect, a conspiracy between the British media and the political class against the country as a whole. They were the men and women who governed Britain and decided who was up and who was out. Government policy was influenced and sometimes created. I doubt very much whether Britain would have invaded Iraq but for the foolhardy support of the Murdoch press.
The effect on government policy was wretched. Decisions were determined by consideration of the following day’s headlines rather than sound analysis. Furthermore, private favours were dispensed; Blair when prime minister spoke to his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi about one of Murdoch’s business deals in Italy. Of course it was all kept secret, though details did sometimes leak out. All recent prime ministers have insisted that their meetings with Murdoch were confidential and did not need to be disclosed, as if they were somehow private affairs. Mercifully, Cameron – who has partially emerged from the sewer thanks to his Commons statement – has put an end to this concealment.
It has taken the horror of the revelations concerning the targeting by the Murdoch empire of the family of Milly Dowler, terrorist victims and even relatives of British war dead to bring this corrupt, complicit, and conspiratorial system of government to light.
The process of exposure has taken far too long, but there is at last hope. Two years ago, Rebekah Brooks contemptuously turned down an invitation to give evidence to MPs about how she operated. Next week, Rupert Murdoch, his son James and the reluctant Brooks will all be dragged before them.
The system of collaboration between an over-mighty press and timorous politicians is being exposed. There is hope that we can return to a more decent system of government; that Parliament can reassert its rights, and that ministers will make their decisions for the right reasons and not simply to ingratiate themselves with Murdoch and his newspaper editors. Perhaps the sickness that has demeaned and distorted British politics for the last two decades is at last being challenged and confronted.

This media is corrupt – we need a Hippocratic oath for journalists

Our job is to hold power to account. Instead, most of the profession simply ventriloquises the concerns of the elite

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011 21.30 BST
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Is Murdoch now finished in the UK? As the pursuit of Gordon Brown by the Sunday Times and the Sun blows the hacking scandal into new corners of the old man's empire, this story begins to feel like the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. The naked attempt to destroy Brown by any means, including hacking the medical files of his sick baby son, means that there is no obvious limit to the story's ramifications. Illustration by Daniel Pudles The scandal radically changes public perceptions of how politics works, the danger corporate power presents to democracy, and the extent to which it has compromised and corrupted the Metropolitan police, who have now been dragged in so deep they are beginning to look like Murdoch's private army. It has electrified a dozy parliament and subjected the least accountable and most corrupt profession in Britain – journalism – to belated public scrutiny. The cracks are appearing in the most unexpected places. Look at the remarkable admission by the rightwing columnist Janet Daley in this week's Sunday Telegraph. "British political journalism is basically a club to which politicians and journalists both belong," she wrote. "It is this familiarity, this intimacy, this set of shared assumptions … which is the real corruptor of political life. The self-limiting spectrum of what can and cannot be said … the self-reinforcing cowardice which takes for granted that certain vested interests are too powerful to be worth confronting. All of these things are constant dangers in the political life of any democracy." Most national journalists are embedded, immersed in the society, beliefs and culture of the people they are meant to hold to account. They are fascinated by power struggles among the elite but have little interest in the conflict between the elite and those they dominate. They celebrate those with agency and ignore those without. But this is just part of the problem. Daley stopped short of naming the most persuasive force: the interests of the owner and the corporate class to which he belongs. The proprietor appoints editors in his own image – who impress their views on their staff. Murdoch's editors, like those who work for the other proprietors, insist that they think and act independently. It's a lie exposed by the concurrence of their views (did all 247 News Corp editors just happen to support the invasion of Iraq?), and blown out of the water by Andrew Neil's explosive testimony in 2008 before the Lords select committee on communications. The papers cannot announce that their purpose is to ventriloquise the concerns of multimillionaires; they must present themselves as the voice of the people. The Sun, the Mail and the Express claim to represent the interests of the working man and woman. These interests turn out to be identical to those of the men who own the papers. So the rightwing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the trade unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambast the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values – the worship of power, money, image and fame – which advertisers love but which make this a shallower, more selfish country. Most of them deceive their readers about the causes of climate change. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the multimillionaires who own these papers. The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests. In this respect the media companies resemble the Tea Party movement, which claims to be a spontaneous rising of blue-collar Americans against the elite but was founded with the help of the billionaire Koch brothers and promoted by Murdoch's Fox News. Journalism's primary purpose is to hold power to account. This purpose has been perfectly inverted. Columnists and bloggers are employed as the enforcers of corporate power, denouncing people who criticise its interests, stamping on new ideas, bullying the powerless. The press barons allowed governments occasionally to promote the interests of the poor, but never to hamper the interests of the rich. They also sought to discipline the rest of the media. The BBC, over the last 30 years, became a shadow of the gutsy broadcaster it was, and now treats big business with cringing deference. Every morning at 6.15, the Today programme's business report grants executives the kind of unchallenged access otherwise reserved for God on Thought for the Day. The rest of the programme seeks out controversy and sets up discussions between opponents, but these people are not confronted by their critics. So what can be done? Because of the peculiar threat they present to democracy there's a case to be made for breaking up all majority interests in media companies, and for a board of governors, appointed perhaps by Commons committee, to act as a counterweight to the shareholders' business interests. But even if that's a workable idea, it's a long way off. For now, the best hope might be to mobilise readers to demand that journalists answer to them, not just their proprietors. One means of doing this is to lobby journalists to commit themselves to a kind of Hippocratic oath. Here's a rough stab at a first draft. I hope others can improve it. Ideally, I'd like to see the National Union of Journalists building on it and encouraging its members to sign. 'Our primary task is to hold power to account. We will prioritise those stories and issues which expose the interests of power. We will be wary of the relationships we form with the rich and powerful, and ensure that we don't become embedded in their society. We will not curry favour with politicians, businesses or other dominant groups by withholding scrutiny of their affairs, or twisting a story to suit their interests. "We will stand up to the interests of the businesses we work for, and the advertisers which fund them. We will never take money for promulgating a particular opinion, and we will resist attempts to oblige us to adopt one. "We will recognise and understand the power we wield and how it originates. We will challenge ourselves and our perception of the world as much as we challenge other people. When we turn out to be wrong, we will say so." I accept that this doesn't directly address the power relations that govern the papers. But it might help journalists to assert a measure of independence, and readers to hold them to it. Just as voters should lobby their MPs to represent them and not just the whips, readers should seek to drag journalists away from the demands of their editors. The oath is one possible tool that could enhance reader power. If you don't like it, suggest a better idea. Something has to change: never again should a half a dozen oligarchs be allowed to dominate and corrupt the life of this country.