English cricket’s reign of shame exposed with devastating admission of guilt

Damning report must act as a brutal wake-up call and a line cannot be drawn under this with prejudice rife within the sport writes Jonathan Liew in The Guardian 



You may want to sit down for this part. Turns out – no, seriously – that a sport created and codified for the purpose of allowing rich white landowners to bet against each other, and then exported around the world at gunpoint with the promise that it would civilise savage peoples, may not actually be that progressive.

How can this possibly have happened? Who do we see about this? And who’s asking, anyway?

The publication of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report into systemic discrimination in the English game will doubtless be described as many things. A wake‑up call. A line in the sand. A humiliation. What it represents to those who have been arguing the point for many years is, rather, a kind of historical artefact: documentary proof that English cricket’s in-built prejudice against women, people of colour and people from poorer backgrounds is not some fey liberal invention or a jaundiced troublemaker’s charter, but a lived reality for many people for many years, perhaps even generations. 

It is above all a devastatingly frank document, both in its analysis of the problem and its proposed solutions. The England and Wales Cricket Board’s first‑look response, a wide-ranging apology for the injustices that have occurred on its watch, may feel instinctively like so much corporate whitewash. But even a few years ago the very idea that the national governing body would admit its complicity in a racist, sexist system would have felt fanciful. In this case, diagnosis really can be the first step of the treatment.

And here the ICEC helpfully provides the hard data to back up decades of hunches and anecdotes. A staggering 87% of respondents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, 82% with Indian heritage and 75% of all black respondents reported encountering discrimination in the game. The real kicker, though, is the deficit of trust that the vast majority felt with a game that was supposed to protect them: a feeling that cricket’s authorities, the white male captains and coaches and chief executives and board chairs who hold all the power in the game, would instinctively lean towards the status quo.

South Asians make up 28% of the game’s recreational pool, but just 2.8% of the sport’s executive-level positions. Black participation was measured by a Sport England survey to be so low as to be statistically irrelevant. The percentage of England male cricketers who were privately educated was 58% in 2021, compared to 7% in the population at large. For years anybody pointing this out has met a wall of complacency and silence, a modern version of the classic Henry Newbolt poem: “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” This is, after all, England. We don’t talk about these things.

The debate sparked by Black Lives Matter has been steered away from meaningful change. Photograph: Reuters


The first thing to note is that there are certain people – many people – for whom all this is evidence that the world is simply working as it should. Your one black friend makes you an ally. Your one female cricket writer makes your publication diverse. Your one British Asian prime minister makes your country progressive. And your one working-class men’s Test captain makes your team representative. For these people there has long been a kind of selective blindness at work here: an image of English cricket as a kind of idyllic safe space, a world of village greens and good chaps, one of whom is called Khan, actually, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

It is a malaise almost as old as England itself, and perhaps the most devastating parts of the report are those that deal with cricket’s historical baggage, the legacy of Victorian Britain and the slave trade, the inequities that were built into the game from its very foundation.
Nobody gets to draw a line under this. Nobody gets to move on until everybody gets to move on

“Cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that [its] history is replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression,” the report states. For some this will be nothing more than a statement of the obvious. But it is also perhaps the first time anybody remotely near a position of power has dared to utter it.

And of course you do not need to go back centuries to glimpse how cricket’s original sin continues to inflect it into the present day. It was in 1995 that the Independent lauded the fact that England’s (all‑white) pace attack “did not for once look like a United Nations strike force”. The same year, Surrey’s chief executive Glyn Woodman trumpeted the measures he had taken to deter British West Indies fans from attending the Oval Test.

“Twenty years ago parts of the ground were almost no-go areas,” he said. “They could sit wherever they liked, and they can’t do that now because of pre-selling of tickets.” And lest you regard even this as ancient history, then consider that one of the most bitter debates in the game at the moment is whether Eton and Harrow should be the only two schools who get to play at Lord’s.

West Indies fans celebrate during the fifth Test between England and the West Indies at the Oval in August 1976. Photograph: Fresco/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images


Similarly, the debate catalysed in 2020 by Black Lives Matter and Azeem Rafiq has been maliciously steered away from a conversation about meaningful change towards the more headline-friendly territory of witch hunts, who said what to whom, and who is a racist, whatever that means. One of the report’s more understandable blind spots is the role of the media and political class in actively seeking to derail the cause of diversity in an attempt to validate and provoke the prejudices of its older white male constituency (or “Type K individuals”, as the report so deliciously categorises them). But you get a flavour in the commission’s decision to anonymise all evidence to ward against “the impact of media reporting on those discussing discrimination in cricket, [which] was often alarming and profound”. The merciless hounding of Rafiq by the right-wing press springs to mind here.

Doubtless many of the same people will now call for a line to be drawn under English cricket’s reign of shame. Sorry. Nobody gets to draw a line under this. Nobody gets to move on until everybody gets to move on. Nobody gets to plead “stick to cricket”. This stuff is cricket. Are international ticket prices too high? Should we call them “batters” or “batsmen”? Is your county’s membership really representative of the area at large? How do we prevent age-group selections from being defined by whose parents can afford a set of pads and gloves? When your fast bowler with a history of racist tweets verbally abuses a Muslim opponent in an Ashes Test, do you start asking questions, or do you simply assume you already know the answers?

The hounding of Azeem Rafiq by the right-wing press is one of the report’s blind spots. Photograph: House of Commons/PA

And of course the backlash to this report will be severe and merciless. Those who wish to remain blind will do everything to avoid seeing. But the time for squeamishness has long passed. From its very earliest days English cricket was conceived as a Type K pastime: a game run by well‑off white men, for the benefit of well-off white men, defined and written about by well-off white men. Unsurprisingly, those well-off white men quite like things the way they are. But in many ways, English cricket brought this fight on itself. The very least it can do by way of recompense is to win it.

Facts do not matter

Amit Varma in The Hindu

The most surprising thing about these Gujarat elections is that people are so surprised at the Prime Minister’s rhetoric. Narendra Modi has eschewed all talk of development, and has played to the worst impulses of the Gujarati people. His main tool is Hindu-Muslim polarisation, which is reflected in the language he uses for his opponents. The Congress has a “Mughlai” mentality, they are ushering in an “Aurangzeb Raj”, and their top leaders are conspiring with Pakistan to make sure Mr. Modi loses. A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson has also launched a scathing attack on Congress president-elect Rahul Gandhi. None of this is new.

Mr. Modi’s rhetoric in the heat of campaigning has always come from below. From his references to “Mian Musharraf” over a decade ago to the “kabristan-shamshaan” comments of the recent elections in Uttar Pradesh, it has been clear that the otherness of Muslims is central to the BJP playbook. Hate drives more people to the polling booth than warm, fuzzy feelings of pluralism. But, the question is, are the Congress leaders really conspiring with Pakistan to make sure the BJP lose?

Answer: It doesn’t matter.

No care for truth

In 1986, the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote an essay named “On Bullshit”, which was published as a book in 2005 and became a surprise bestseller. The book attempts to arrive at “a theoretical understanding of bullshit”. The key difference between a liar and a , ‘bullshitter’, Frankfurt tells us, is that the liar knows the truth and aims to deceive. The ‘bullshitter’, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the truth. He is “neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false,” in Frankfurt’s words. “His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.”

The ‘bullshitter’ is wise, for he has cottoned on to an important truth that has become more and more glaring in these modern times: that facts don’t matter. And to understand why, I ask you to go back with me in time to another seminal book, this one published in 1922.

The first chapter of “Public Opinion”, by the American journalist, Walter Lippmann, is titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”. In it, Lippmann makes the point that all of us have a version of the world inside our heads that resembles, but is not identical to, the world as it is. “The real environment,” he writes, “is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.”

We construct a version of the world in our heads, and feed that version, for modifying it too much will require too much effort. If facts conflict with it, we ignore those facts, and accept only those that conform to our worldview. (Cognitive psychologists call this the “Confirmation Bias”.)

Lippmann sees this as a challenge for democracy, for how are we to elect our leaders if we cannot comprehend the impact they will have on the world?

Fragmented media

I would argue that this is a far greater problem today than it was in Lippmann’s time. Back then, and until a couple of decades ago, there was a broad consensus on the truth. There were gatekeepers to information and knowledge. Even accounting for biases, the mainstream media agreed on some basic facts. That has changed. The media is fragmented, there are no barriers to entry, and the mainstream media no longer has a monopoly of the dissemination of information. This is a good thing, with one worrying side effect: whatever beliefs or impulses we might have — the earth is flat, the Jews carried out 9/11, India is a Hindu nation — we can find plenty of “evidence” for it online, and connect with like-minded people. Finding others who share our beliefs makes us more strident, and soon we form multiple echo chambers that become more and more extreme. Polarisation increases. The space in the middle disappears. And the world inside our heads, shared by so many other, becomes impervious to facts.

This also means that impulses we would otherwise not express in polite society find validation, and a voice. Here’s another book you should read: in 1997, the sociologist, Timur Kuran, wrote “Private Truths, Public Lies” in which he coined the term “Preference Falsification”. There are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social approbation. But as soon as we realise that others share our views, we are emboldened to express ourselves. This leads to a “Preference Cascade”: Kuran gives the example of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but an equally apt modern illustration is the rise of right-wing populists everywhere. I believe — and I apologise if this is too depressing to contemplate — that the majority of us are bigots, misogynists, racists, and tribal in our thinking. We have always been this way, but because liberal elites ran the media, and a liberal consensus seemed to prevail, we did not express these feelings. Social media showed us that we were not alone, and gave us the courage to express ourselves.

That’s where Donald Trump comes from. That’s where Mr. Modi comes from. Our masses vote for these fine gentlemen not in spite of their bigotry and misogyny, but because of it. Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi provide them a narrative that feeds the world inside their heads. Mexicans are rapists, foreigners are bad, Muslims are stealing our girls, gaumutra cures cancer — and so on. The truth is irrelevant. Facts. Don’t. Matter.

Think about the implication of this. This means that the men and women who wrote the Constitution were an out-of-touch elite, and the values they embedded in it were not shared by most of the nation. (As a libertarian, I think the Constitution was deeply flawed because it did not do enough to protect individual rights, but our society’s consensus would probably be that it did too much.) The “Idea of India” that these elites spoke of was never India’s Idea of India. These “liberal” values were imposed on an unwilling nation — and is such imposition, ironically, not deeply illiberal itself? This is what I call The Liberal Paradox.

All the ugliness in our politics today is the ugliness of the human condition. This is how we are. This is not a perversion of democracy but an expression of it. Those of us who are saddened by it — the liberal elites, libertarians like me — have to stop feeling entitled, and get down to work. The alt-right guru Andrew Breitbart once said something I never get tired of quoting: “Politics is downstream from Culture.” A political victory will now not come until there is a social revolution. Where will it begin?

We’re doomed by the identity trap, damned when we try to escape

Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

 

Illustration by Andrzej Krauze




Diane Abbott wrote a powerful article in these pages last week about the hatred she receives. Whatever one thinks of her politics, the veteran Labour MP has for decades been a fireball of public service. But her star has always been followed by a comet tail of toxic vapour. This personal abuse is at times snide and implied, at other times explicit, vicious and unprintable. But it is a constant in her political life, following her round, undermining her, consistently framing her in terms of her gender and her race.

Abbott’s article came just days after she received an exceptional and sustained amount of personal abuse over the article 50 vote, culminating in a leaked text sent by Brexit secretary David Davis, in which he made derogatory comments on her appearance. Her article was necessary and timely, but something about her speaking out made my heart sink. It felt like defeat; the ultimate feeding of the trolls. It is important to look beyond the headlines and understand the significance of what happened.

The fact is that her tormentors had hounded this most resilient of characters to a point where she finally cracked and, breaking a longstanding habit in a 30-year career of not commenting on personal insults, she laid it all out. She was forced to sound an alert, warning that something must be done before we get to the point in our democracy where women and minority candidates, already low in number, are bullied out of the political arena altogether.

Diane Abbott: misogyny and abuse are putting women off politics



Since then, she has been forced to go further, revealing this weekend that she does not walk or drive around her constituency as freely as she used to because, in the wake of Jo Cox’s murder, the death threats she receives can’t be shrugged off any more. It was a piece in which she used the word “I” for the first time in respect of her identity – it wasn’t about her profession or her political views. It is this forced “coming out” by Abbott as a black woman in public life that was disheartening.

Contrary to the view so widely held on the right, of this country being in the grip of a constantly aggrieved professional-victim class, few people actually like to talk about their experience of receiving abuse. It is uncomfortable and excruciating and diminishing, and above all a distraction when one just wants to get on with one’s business.

It is also, as many who are on the receiving end of such onslaughts (including myself) can testify, boring and predictable to have to keep running the gauntlet between attack and defence. There is another, silencing fear, as the bile swirls and rises around you: that you come across as attention-seeking or fragile. Above all, you want to show that the blows have not landed.

But when somebody occupies a public position, not speaking out becomes an abdication. It is a decision that is never taken lightly because it plays into the hands of the racists and misogynists whose ultimate motivating animus is to disabuse you of the notion that you can ever be anything but a woman who does not know her place or a member of an inferior race.

Oh but now you wince at the N-word. Come on now, you might say, let’s not get carried away and blow it all out of proportion. And besides, Abbott is hardly a flawless political figure who doesn’t deserve criticism. OK, she gets compared to a monkey and is the butt of her male colleague’s jokes about being too unattractive to hug, but what about sending her child to private school?

This is the line of argument that enables the masking of abuse behind legitimate criticism of an individual or their views. As if calling for a tree strong enough to carry her weight so she can be hanged, as was said, is a logical follow-on from any of her failings or political hypocrisies.

And then there are the accusations of playing the race card or the gender card – both denying that the abuse is real, and blaming the victim for using their minority status as a shield of deflection. It is a closed loop, a circular firing squad. You either accept the abuse with grace, turn the other cheek, or invite more abuse and derision for speaking out against it. The logical conclusion is that the only winning move is not to play.

It is ultimately this potential chilling effect that forces people to break their silence. Abbott said she had never complained until now. And she will have known of the potential cost to her stature, not to mention the possibility that her perceived vulnerability might encourage trolls further.

But ultimately, she said, she went into politics “to create space for women and other groups who have historically been treated unfairly”. It is only by creating this space that the abuse will subside, and that an individual like Diane Abbott will no longer be an offending novelty who is seen to only represent her own narrow racial or gender interests, rather than the people who elected her.

Diane Abbott on abuse of MPs: 'My staff try not to let me go out alone'



She and others like her are obliged to confront one of the most persistent political myths: that identity politics is a divisive phenomenon that actively seeks to separate minorities or women from the mainstream, conferring on them dispensation to act with impunity because any criticism is automatically bigotry. It is a notion that fails to recognise what is obvious, which is that identity is dictated from above. Abbott’s defining character as a black woman is imposed and kept alive by others, not by her. She has spent decades integrating into the mainstream.

Women or minorities aren’t droning on about discrimination and abuse because they’re snowflakes demanding special treatment. They do so because they keep being limited, circumscribed, told that they cannot have roles in public life that extend beyond their identity. But then they are condemned when they respond in terms of what is being attacked. But what else can one do? Hannah Arendt said: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.”

Playing identity politics, as critics describe it, seems less an offensive ploy than a defensive posture, akin to raising your arms to cover your face when it is repeatedly being punched.
The whole affair exemplifies the precariousness of how to deal with what is now an epidemic. Silence is not an option. Even those not personally distressed have a duty towards others – those younger, more vulnerable or just made of different stuff – to clear the way for them to claim their rightful positions in public life. But there is also a risk that by doing so, any progress minorities or women have made to break out of their pen is undermined. It is a quiet stranglehold. Diane Abbott is trying to break free of it, but at what price?

It was the rise of the Davos class that sealed America’s fate

Naomi Klein in The Guardian

They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.

But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.

For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.

Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.

Trump’s message was: “All is hell.” Clinton answered: “All is well.” But it’s not well – far from it.

Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump’s support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.

It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.

People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.

Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people’s agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.

Bernie Sanders’ amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.

That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are “leaderful”, as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.

So let’s get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let’s set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.

'No women, no rape': The warped logic of Harvard's students should disturb us all

Radhika Sanghani in The Telegraph


An all-male elite Harvard club has chosen 2016 as the year that it breaks a historic silence. In the 225 years of its existence, it has barely ever released a public statement. But as pressure mounted on the group to ditch its sexist ‘no women’ policy, the Porcellian went public.

Charles M. Storey, its president, defended the club’s single-gender status in an email to student paper The Crimson:

“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organisations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Storey’s defence of the club’s boys’ only rule is that it keeps women safe. According to his logic, inviting women into the group would increase sexual misconduct. For their own safety, they’re better off not trying to join. Got it?

This is clearly an appalling defence on many levels. But what’s worse is the fact that a large number of students agree.

Though Storey himself issued an apology shortly after a backlash, (“Unfortunately, I chose my words poorly and it came out all wrong. This failure has led to extreme and unfortunate misinterpretations, which were not my intentions at all”) other students have taken to the paper’s website to defend him.

“Porcellian has no female members and no guests. Ergo no risk of the ladies getting assaulted. If the risk today is zero percent, it can only get worse is the club goes coed,” justified one commenter.

Another spelled out that “statistically speaking, any change in membership cannot decrease sexual assaults as Harvard claims. As a matter of fact, they could only stay zero or potentially increase, which is exactly what the club stated.”


A third echoed their views, agreeing that what Storey had said was 'obvious' - "no sexual assault of women can occur when no women are present."

It's hard to believe just how literally people are taking Storey's words. To them, it's perfectly logical that if a woman is present there's a higher chance of sexual assault - 'ergo' women should steer clear of male-only clubs.

In other words: no women, no rape.

Their logic is chilling. It might all add up ‘statistically’ but is that really how we should be looking at rape? If we followed that argument through to its logical conclusion, we'd be living in a world where men and women are segregated simply because it’s 'safer’.

Women-only public transport would be the norm, and the possibility of gender-neutral loos wouldn't even exist. Non-binary people would be ostracised from society and everything from socialising to education would become boys vs girls.

This dystopian future could ‘statistically’ lead to lower sexual assault and rape rates, but how is that feasible in a modern society? We need to be moving forward not backwards. The answer does not and never will lie in segregation.

If we want to stop sexual assault from happening, we need to tackle rape culture. On university campuses, male-only clubs are a good place to start. They are generally known to be rife with misogyny. And when women are not present, it's harder for men to see them as equals who deserve respect. Little wonder they often end up as the butt of crude jokes. The same can go the other way - and neither attitude is healthy.

Men and women need to be equal - and that means integration.

In 2016, this should be an accepted truth. The fact that a group of Harvard students - supposedly the brightest minds in America - clearly don’t understand that is incredibly worrying. They're so busy looking at rape culture ‘statistically’ they’re missing the obvious: men and women should be able to spend time together without the assumption of sexual misconduct.

That their time at Harvard hasn't yet taught them that, is deeply worrying indeed.