Imran Khan's Naya Pakistan and a soothsaying beau

Irfan Husain in The Dawn

WHATEVER people might think about Imran Khan’s words and antics, nobody can deny that he brings a lot of colour and macho swagger to politics.

By making bizarre accusations against rivals, he succeeds in putting them on the defensive while deflecting any criticism of his own course of action. And, like Trump, he shrugs off attacks from the tiny minority of liberal, secular critics who quaintly seek the truth in our political discourse.

And so the PTI circus rolls on from one triumph to the next, lights ablaze and trumpets blaring. In fact, it’s the only show in town, with other parties and politicians providing the chief showman with a series of easy targets. Nawaz Sharif is hit with the charge that he handed over state secrets to the Americans. Proof? That’s a 20th century concept with no relevance to contemporary Pakistani politics.

With just a few months to go until the general elections, you would think Imran Khan would be burnishing his party manifesto, and highlighting the achievements of his party in KP province. Far from it: judging from media coverage, the whole country is fixated on the Great Khan’s marriage proposal to his ‘spiritual guide’.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about who Imran Khan marries: what happens between two consenting adults should be strictly their business. However, the fact that a national leader, and a serious contender for the country’s most powerful civilian job, should need the crutch of a resident soothsayer is disturbing.

According to breathless media coverage, it was the lady in question who advised Khan to go to the mountain resort of Nathiagali while the Panamagate trial was going on. But do we really want a prime minister who is so gullible? However, Khan is not alone in his superstitions: according to reports doing the rounds at the time, Nawaz Sharif sought guidance from a pir known as Dewana Baba in Mansehra.

We are informed through a report in Dawn from a couple of years ago that Asif Zardari probably managed to complete his term in office thanks to the powers of Pir Ejaz. Apart from this major triumph, he also claims that he was instrumental in enabling Zardari to access the $60 million sitting in Switzerland, and frozen by the authorities pending an investigation.

And let’s not forget the goats: apparently, one animal was slaughtered every day for the duration of the Zardari presidency. The same gent had advised the PPP head honcho to stay near the sea to ward off the evil eye, as well as other supernatural attacks launched by his enemies.

During her second stint as prime minister, Benazir Bhutto was reported to seek guidance from Dewana Baba, Nawaz Sharif’s seer. You’d think that after Sharif’s unceremonious departure, BB would have seen the light. No chance: once bitten by the oracle bug, the victim seeks to guard his spiritual flanks against attacks from the dark side.

It is often insecure leaders who seek the advice of oracles and seers. Lacking confidence in their own decision-making powers, they look to higher powers to guide them. And once you start believing in jinns, you need to counter hostile spirits with your own unseen troops.

But as we know all too well, soothsayers often get it terribly wrong. Just look at what happened to Rajapakse, the Sri Lankan ex-president: there he was, solidly entrenched with well over a year to go in his term of office, when he suddenly called for an early election. Overnight — and much to everyone’s surprise — a fractious opposition coalesced into an effective election machine, and defeated Rajapakse.

It later emerged that he had been advised by his resident oracle that the alignment of his stars predicted victory if he were to call the election a year earlier than they were due. Big mistake. When asked to explain what went wrong, the soothsayer replied that he had guided Rajapakse to victory twice before, and “two out of three” wasn’t a bad record.

In fact, while we pretend to be impervious to such superstitious rubbish, we surreptitiously glance at the horoscope columns in the newspapers to see what the stars say. Many supposedly rational leaders have sought spiritual help in gaining an edge over their rivals. Ronald Reagan’s wife regularly consulted a Californian syndicated horoscope columnist.

Mankind has always looked for help to ward off the terrors of the night when spirits stalk the land, and ghouls and zombies await the unwary. Most belief systems make mention of them in one form or another.

 

So in this wider context, does it matter that the man who would be prime minister believes in this mumbo-jumbo? Actually, yes. Many years ago, Imran Khan rubbished Darwin’s theory of evolution, overlooking the mass of accumulated evidence that supports it. Is this the man who will give us a ‘naya Pakistan’?

From climate change to robots: what politicians aren’t telling us

Simon Kuper in The Financial Times

On US television news this autumn, wildfires and hurricanes have replaced terrorism and — mostly — even mass shootings as primetime content. Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent, and more Americans now live in at-risk areas. But meanwhile, Donald Trump argues on Twitter about what he supposedly said to a soldier’s widow. So far, Trump is dangerous less because of what he says (hot air) or does (little) than because of the issues he ignores. 

He’s not alone: politics in many western countries has become a displacement activity. Most politicians bang on about identity while ignoring automation, climate change and the imminent revolution in medicine. They talk more about the 1950s than the 2020s. This is partly because they want to distract voters from real problems, and partly because today’s politicians tend to be lawyers, entertainers and ex-journalists who know less about tech than the average 14-year-old. (Trump said in a sworn deposition in 2007 that he didn’t own a computer; his secretary sent his emails.) But the new forces are already transforming politics. 

Ironically, given the volume of American climate denial, the US looks like becoming the first western country to be hit by climate change. Each new natural disaster will prompt political squabbles over whether Washington should bail out the stricken region. At-risk cities such as Miami and New Orleans will gradually lose appeal as the risks become uninsurable. If you buy an apartment on Miami Beach now, are you confident it will survive another 30 years undamaged? And who will want to buy it from you in 2047? Miami could fade as Detroit did. 

American climate denial may fade too, as tech companies displace Big Oil as the country’s chief lobbyists. Already in the first half of this year, Amazon outspent Exxon and Walmart on lobbying. Facebook, now taking a kicking over fake news, will lobby its way back. Meanwhile, northern Europe, for some years at least, will benefit from its historical unique selling point: its mild and rainy climate. Its problem will be that millions of Africans will try to move there. 

On the upside, many Africans will soon, for the first time ever, have access to energy (thanks to solar panels) and medical care (as apps monitor everything from blood pressure to sugar levels, and instantly prescribe treatment). But as Africa gets hotter, drier and overpopulated, people will struggle to feed themselves, says the United Nations University. So they will head north, in much greater numbers than Syrians have, becoming the new bogeymen for European populists. Patrolling robots — possibly with attack capabilities — will guard Fortress Europe. 

Everywhere, automation will continue to eat low-skilled jobs. That will keep people angry. Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford university’s Martin School recalls workers smashing up machines during the British industrial revolution, and says: “There was a machinery riot last year: it was the US presidential election.” American workers hit by automation overwhelmingly voted Trump, even though he doesn’t talk about robots. 

Soon, working-class men will lose driving jobs to autonomous vehicles. They could find new jobs servicing rich people as cleaners (a profession that’s surprisingly hard to automate), carers or yoga teachers. Young men will develop new notions of masculinity and embrace this traditionally feminine work. But older working-class men will probably embrace politicians like Trump. 

The most coveted good of all — years of life — will become even more unfairly distributed. The lifespans of poor westerners will continue to stagnate or shorten, following the worldwide surge in obesity since the 1980s. Many poorer people will work into their seventies, then die, skipping the now standard phase of retirement. Meanwhile, from the 2020s the rich will live ever longer as they start buying precision medicine. They will fix their faulty DNA and edit their embryos, predicts Vivek Wadhwa, thinker on technology. (I heard him and Frey at this month’s excellent Khazanah Megatrends Forum in Malaysia.) Even if governments want to redress inequality, they won’t be able to, given that paying tax has become almost voluntary for global companies. 

The country hit hardest by automation could be China (though Germany could suffer too, especially if its carmakers fail to transform). China’s model of exploiting cheap factory labour without environmental regulations has run its course, says Wadhwa. “I don’t think we need Chinese robots.” Even if China’s economy keeps growing, low-skilled men won’t find appealing careers, and they won’t even have the option of electing a pretend system-smasher like Trump. The most likely outcome: China’s regime joins the populist trend and runs with aggressive nationalism. 

Troubled regimes will also ratchet up surveillance. Now they merely know what you say. In 10 years, thanks to your devices, they will know your next move even before you do. Already, satellites are monitoring Egypt’s wheat fields, so as to predict the harvest, which predicts the chance of social strife. Meanwhile, western politicians will probably keep obsessing over newsy identity issues. My prediction for the 2020s: moral panics over virtual-reality sex.

The economists have had another terrible year. It's time for a complete re-think

Jeremy Warner in The Telegraph


This may or may not be a good time for democracy, but one thing is certain about the past year of political upsets; it’s heaped further humiliations on the economics profession.

A substantial majority of economists thought the mere act of voting for Brexit would pole-axe the economy. Not only did voters ignore these warnings, but so far the “experts” have proved almost wholly wrong.
Internationally, the story is much the same. The profound shock to global confidence anticipated by the International Monetary Fund, the OECD , Uncle Tom Cobley and all, failed to materialise; Brexit had no discernible impact on the world economy. Having cried wolf over the short term consequences, the profession should not be surprised if rather more credible warnings of pain delayed are widely disbelieved.

Similarly with Donald Trump, where the widely expected economic and market mayhem his election would supposedly unleash has so far been conspicuously absent. This collective misreading has been widely attributed to the perils of “groupthink” – where opinion hugs the consensus for fear of derision - or more conspiratorially, to vested interest and deliberately misleading intent.

But there is in fact a more prosaic explanation; that as a discipline, the dismal science has quite simply lost the plot. All over the shop, economics seems incapable of answering the great questions of our time. Are we heading for deflation or inflation? Are we locked in secular stagnation or have we finally put the financial crisis behind us?

The conceit of modern economics is that it sees itself as an evidence-based science, yet if it could ever be such a thing, it is today no nearer its goal than when Adam Smith penned the Wealth of Nations, and in some respects, a good deal less so.

In a devastating recent analysis, the American economist Paul Romer asserted that macro-economics has been going backwards for more than three decades, with economic modelling succumbing to what he has called “mathiness”, an obsession with mathematic laws and equations which bear very little relation to the real world, ignore the lessons of other disciplines and are frequently out of touch with the inherently unpredictable nature of human behaviour.

When he wrote his treatise, Adam Smith was not an economist at all, but a professor of moral philosophy, yet many economists have come to believe that they should be as divorced from moral judgement as scientists – that economics should be a technical discipline free of ethical concerns. In the battle between moralism and mechanism, mechanism won. Unlike science, however, it doesn’t appear to have delivered anything remotely useful.

Few of the profession’s more recent failings should have come as any great surprise, for they merely follow the monumental breakdown in economic analysis exposed by the financial crisis. The Queen’s faux naïve question of economists at the time – “how come nobody saw this coming” – has yet to be answered.

As Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, pointed out in a recent lecture, economic models provided an exceptionally poor guide to economic dynamics at the time of the financial crisis. Even after the crisis erupted, the profession seemed oblivious to its likely consequences. Virtually all the economic forecasts produced in the final quarter of 2007 – that’s after the collapse of Northern Rock - were not just mildly wrong about the coming year, but spectacularly so. Few saw any possibility even of a downturn, let alone the worst recession since the 1930s.

Mainstream economic modelling failed spectacularly during the financial crisis and has largely failed since

This failing has been explained by the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Lucas thus: “The simulations were not presented as assurances that no crisis would occur, but as a forecast of what could be expected to occur conditional on a crisis not occurring”. Thanks for nothing.

A somewhat similar excuse is proffered by HM Treasury for its ill judged analysis of the short term consequences of a vote for Brexit. This was not a prediction, but a “scenario”, it is claimed, based on two assumptions that turned out to be wrong – that Article 50 would be immediately triggered, and that there would be no countervailing monetary action by the Bank of England. Yet in truth, it was always obvious both that Article 50 would not be immediately triggered, and that the Bank of England would indeed take action to support the economy.

A stone when dropped will always fall to the ground. Human behaviour is by contrast far less certain, the result of a complex series of interactions which will always be inherently unpredictable, or what Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, has called “radical uncertainty”. The trouble with much modern economic modelling is that it assumes the laws of physics can indeed be applied to economics, or that behaviour will always respond to given inputs in a particular way. Time and again this has been proved incorrect.

The risks of this serial inability to diagnose what’s happening in the economy lie not just in the social costs of extreme events, or in wrong-headed policy response to them. It has also made mainstream macro-economics the object of political derision, which is in turn undermining public trust in key aspects of institutional and policy orthodoxy, including central bank independence and inflation targeting, which by and large have served us well.

Already we see some of this backlash in Trumponomics, where established norms, evidence and constraints are rejected in favour of policy based on instinct and narrowly perceived American self interest, including protectionism. These cranky alternatives threaten even worse outcomes than the faulty economics of the past.

Mr Haldane sees some reason for hope in reformed modelling, and in particular in so-called “Agency Based Models”, which take account not just of the observable environment, but also the behaviour of other agents which interact with it. Big Data promises to give these models even better predictive qualities.

Long applied to air traffic control, disease prevention, pharmaceutical drug trials and many other practical fields, use of ABMs in macro-economics is still very recent and far from commonplace. We can but hope they represent the great leap forward proponents claim.

One notable sceptic is the economist Paul Krugman, who claims that the old models didn’t fail, or rather that his own relatively simplistic Keynesian modelling predicted almost exactly the failure in post-crisis macro-economic policy. Ah, the path not taken. The beauty of this line of argument is that we’ll never know whether a different approach would have worked better.

Whatever the answer, economists need to be far more circumspect about prediction, as well as the uses their work are put to by the political class, where there is a growing tendency to cite the “experts” who seem to support the party line as true visionaries and dismiss the ones who don’t as useless propagandists. Pick your poison.

But let’s not entirely despair; undeterred by the low regard in which the discipline is held, there are apparently more students applying to do economics at university than ever. Economics may have lost its mojo, but plainly not yet its fascination.

Calls for 'complete overhaul' of UK university application process

Sally Weale in The Guardian

University and College Union wants to move away from applications based on predicted grades after study finds just 16% are correctly forecast

 

UCU is calling for a post-qualifications admissions system. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images




University workers are demanding an overhaul of the UK higher education application system after a report revealed that five out of every six predicted results for A-levels turns out to be wrong.

Research commissioned by the University and College Union (UCU), which analysed the results of 1.3 million students over a three-year period, found that the majority of students applying to university are predicted better results than they ultimately achieve.

The study by Dr Gill Wyness of the University College London Institute of Education revealed that just 16% of applicants’ grades were predicted correctly; three-quarters were over-predicted and 9% were under-predicted.

Under the current system, most students make applications to universities based on their predicted grades, which leads to uncertainty for both students and institutions when results differ from predictions – as they frequently do. Many students end up securing places through the clearing system. 

The UCU is advocating a new post-qualifications admission system where students only apply after they have received their final results, which would create greater certainty for both student and institution. The union also believes it would get rid of the growing use of unconditional offers, which it describes as “unethical”.

UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said the report exposed the majority of predicted grades as little more than “guesstimates”, which were an inadequate basis on which young people and universities were asked to make key, life-changing decisions.

“This report is a damning indictment of a broken system, not the hardworking teachers tasked with the impossible job of trying to make predictions,” said Hunt. “The results strongly support our call for a complete overhaul of the system, where students apply after they receive their results. It is quite absurd that the UK is the only country that persists in using such a broken system.”

The research found that state schools were most likely to overpredict; it also found that the grades of the most able students from disadvantaged backgrounds were the most likely to be underestimated, which in led them to apply to lower-tariff institutions for which they were overqualified.

Wyness’s report states: “The UK’s unique system of grade prediction has been widely criticised by policymakers and the media, yet the system has remained unchanged for many years. I find a high level of inaccuracy of grade prediction. Among the best three A-levels students achieve, only 16% of higher education applicants’ grades are accurately predicted.

“However, the vast majority of applicants actually receive predictions that are too optimistic for the grades they actually go on to achieve, with 75% of applicants achieving lower grades than predicted.

“It seems highly inefficient to continue with a system in which life-changing decisions are made, and scarce university places are allocated, on the basis of inaccurate information.”

Researchers analysed the top three A-level results from all participants who sat A-levels in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and went on to higher education, involving approximately 452,000 entrants a year.

A UCU survey last year found that 70% of staff were in favour of change to a system with applications after results rather than before. The UCU argues that it would enable greater transparency in the application and admission process, particularly given the lifting of the cap on student numbers.

If economists want to be useful again they need to redeem themselves

Allister Heath in The Telegraph

Imagine that you kept getting it wrong, not just a little, but completely and utterly.

When times were bad you thought they were good, and when they were good you thought they were bad. You argued against successful solutions, and in favour of failed ones. You predicted a rise when in fact a fall materialised; to add insult to injury, you clung to your old ways of thinking, refusing to change apart from in the most trivial of ways. In normal industries you would be finished: your collection of P45s would fill half a drawer, and you would long since have been forced to retrain into somebody of more value to society.

But not in one profession. Yes, dear readers, I’m referring to the systemic, cultural problems of modern, applied macroeconomics, in the public as well as private sectors, where failure continues to be rewarded.

Economists who make all the wrong calls keep their jobs and big paychecks, as long as their faulty views echo the mainstream, received wisdom of the moment. I spent five years studying economics, and I still love the subject. At its best, economics is the answer to myriad problems, the prism through which to view the vast majority of decisions.

But I’m deeply frustrated with some of its practitioners: all those folk who predicted that the third quarter would see very little or negative growth, when in fact the economy grew by a remarkable 0.5pc, the most important statistic of recent times.

For political and psychological reasons, one small and rather unreliable snapshot had become all-important. Had that (preliminary and approximate number) been in negative territory, or close to zero, the outcry would have been deafening and reverberated around the world. The markets would either have slumped or more likely, bounced back, on the assumption that Brexit would be reversed. Yet the opposite happened, and the economy did well (France grew by just 0.2pc during the same time).

Combined with the news that Nissan will be sticking with the UK, it was a great week for Brexit, made all the better by the announcement of Heathrow expansion. Brexit won the referendum, lost the immediate aftermath, won the next few months and has now won again.

Of course, the war continues, and will do so for years. There are huge challenges looming. But this was the week that the economics profession was further discredited. The forecasts were not just completely wrong – my guess is that they were actually downright harmful, shaving growth in areas where elites that are most likely to be swayed by economists decisions.

Economists have form: most backed the euro, failed to see the financial crisis coming, missed the dot.com bubble and the Asian crisis, loved the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and never understood the Thatcherite revolution.
Previous generations failed just as badly: the vast majority loved Keynesian economics during the 1970s, read and recommended a textbook that thought that the USSR would eventually overtake America, backed corporatism, failed to predict the 1929 crash and provided all of the wrong answers in the 1930s.

One problem is groupthink, another is the inability to be objective. But the biggest problem is a faulty paradigm: a fundamental flaw at the heart of the models and assumptions of the economic mainstream, aided and abated by an academic establishment which excludes dissenters from its journals and top faculties.
So if economists want to be useful again, they should do two things.

First, we need a proper Parliamentary inquiry into the failures of the Treasury model and official forecasting before and after Brexit. There is an argument for this to be extended to the Bank of England and even to the private sector. Economists need to cooperate, if even anonymously: are some under pressure to toe various lines? If not, what is the real reason for such a succession of flawed consensuses?

Second, the real threat to the economy is absurd decisions such as the ruling that Uber drivers should be treated like employees (on the basis that the US firm exerts too much control and direction over drivers, even though they are free to choose their hours and commitment).

If not reversed, this judicial activism will destroy jobs and push up prices; it is a shame that such a good week ended on such a sour note. The Government may need to legislate to make it clear that Uber and other similar enterprises are platforms, not employers. If economists want to redeem themselves, they should explain why flexible markets are good and why it would be a genuine disaster if we kill off the sharing economy with red tape.

How Little do Experts Know- On Ranieri and Leicester, One Media Expert Apologises

In July of last year I may have written an article suggesting that the Italian was likely to get Leicester City relegated from the Premier League

 

Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri lifts the Premier League trophy. Photograph: Carl Recine/Reuters


Marcus Christenson in The Guardian


No one likes to be wrong. It is much nicer to be right. In life, however, it is not possible to be right all the time. We all try our best but there are times when things go horribly wrong.
I should know. In July last year I sat down to write an article about Claudio Ranieri. The 63-year-old had just been appointed the new manager of Leicester City and I decided, in the capacity of being the football editor at the Guardian, that I was the right person to write that piece.

Claudio Ranieri: the anti-Pearson … and the wrong man for Leicester City?



I made that decision based on the following: I have lived and worked as a journalist in Italy and have followed Ranieri’s career fairly closely since his early days in management. I also made sure that I spoke to several people in Greece, where Ranieri’s last job before replacing Nigel Pearson at Leicester, had ended in disaster with the team losing against the Faroe Islands and the manager getting sacked.

It was quite clear to me that this was a huge gamble by Leicester and that it was unlikely to end well. And I was hardly the only one to be sceptical. Gary Lineker, the former Leicester striker and now Match of the Day presenter, tweeted “Claudio Ranieri? Really?” and followed it up with by saying: “Claudio Ranieri is clearly experienced, but this is an uninspired choice by Leicester. It’s amazing how the same old names keep getting a go on the managerial merry-go-round.”

I started my article by explaining what had gone wrong in Greece (which was several things) before moving on to talk about the rest of his long managerial career, pointing out that he had never won a league title in any country and nor had he stayed at any club for more than two seasons since being charge at Chelsea at the beginning of the 2000s.

I threw in some light-hearted “lines”, such as the fact that he was the manager in charge of Juventus when they signed Christian Poulsen (not really a Juventus kind of player) and proclaimed that the appointment was “baffling”.

I added: “In some ways, it seems as if the Leicester owners went looking for the anti-Nigel Pearson. Ranieri is not going to call a journalist an ostrich. He is not going to throttle a player during a match. He is not going to tell a supporter to ‘fuck off and die’, no matter how bad the abuse gets.”

Claudio Ranieri instructs his players during Greece’s defeat by the Faroe Islands, the Italian’s last game in charge of the Euro 2004 winners. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP

Rather pleased with myself – thinking that I was giving the readers a good insight to the man and the manager – I also put a headline on the piece, which read: “Claudio Ranieri: the anti-Pearson … and the wrong man for Leicester City?”

I did not think much more of the piece until a few months later when Leicester were top of the league and showing all the signs of being capable of staying there.

After a while, the tweets started to appear from people pointing out that I may not have called this one right. As the season wore on, these tweets became more and more frequent, and they have been sent to me after every Leicester win since the turn of the year.

At some point in February I decided to go back and look at the piece again. It made for uncomfortable reading. I had said that describing his spell in charge of Greece as “poor” would be an understatement. I wrote that 11 years after being given the nickname “Tinkerman” because he changed his starting XI so often when in charge of Chelsea, he was still an incorrigible “Tinkerman”.

It gets worse. “Few will back him to succeed but one thing is for sure: he will conduct himself in an honourable and humble way, as he always has done,” the articles said. “If Leicester wanted someone nice, they’ve got him. If they wanted someone to keep them in the Premier League, then they may have gone for the wrong guy.”

Ouch. Reading it back again I was faced with a couple of uncomfortable questions, the key one being “who do you think you are, writing such an snobbish piece about a dignified man and a good manager?”

The second question was a bit easier to answer. Was this as bad as the “In defence of Nicklas Bendtner” article I wrote a couple of years ago? (The answer is “no”, by the way, few things come close to an error of judgment of that scale).

I would like to point out a few things though. I did get – as a very kind colleague pointed out – 50% of that last paragraph right. He clearly is a wonderful human being and when Paolo Bandini spoke to several of his former players recently one thing stood out: the incredible affection they still feel for this gentle 64-year-old.

All in all, though, there is no point defending the indefensible: I could not have got it more wrong.


At the start of this piece I said that no one likes to be wrong. Well, I was wrong about that too. I’ve enjoyed every minute of being embarrassingly wrong this season. Leicester is the best story that could have happened to football in this country, their triumph giving hope to all of us who want to start a season dreaming that something unthinkable might happen.

So thank you Leicester and thank you Claudio, it’s been quite wonderful.

The Guardian's pessimistic take on Corbyn let our readers down

Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian

For many of our readers and potential readers, the Labour leadership result was a singular moment of hope, even euphoria. It was the first time many of our young readers felt anything like relevance to, let alone empowerment within, a political system that has alienated them utterly.

The Observer – a broad church, to which I’m doggedly loyal – responded to Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide with an editorial foreseeing inevitable failure at a general election of the mandate on which he won. For what it’s worth, I felt we let down many readers and others by not embracing at least the spirit of the result, propelled as it was by moral principles of equality, peace and justice. These are no longer tap-room dreams but belong to a mass movement in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe.

It came as a disappointment – as I suspect it did to others who supported Corbyn, or were interested – to find such a consensus ready to pour cold water on the parade. To behold so little curiosity towards, let alone sympathy with, why this happened.

Of course the rest of the media were in on the offensive. Our sister paper the Guardian had endorsed a candidate who lost, humiliated; the Tory press barons performed to script. Here was a chance for the Observer to stand out from the crowd. But instead, we conjoined the chorus with our own – admittedly more progressive – version of this obsession with electoral strategy with little regard to what Corbyn says about the principles of justice, peace and equality (or less inequality). It came across as churlish, I’m sure, to many readers on a rare day of something different.

I accept that we are a reformist paper, and within those parameters one has to get elected. But that should not mean a digging-in by, and with, the parliamentary inside-baseball Labour party whose days and ways of presenting politics like corporate management selling a product (or explaining a product fault) have just been soundly rejected by its membership. Why embed with MPs in a parliament no one trusts against the democratic vote outside it?

And anyway, what if? Who, five years ago, would have predicted Syriza’s victory in Greece or bet on Podemos taking Madrid and Barcelona, now preparing for a role in government? It’s not as though the Observer’s accumulated editorials disagree that much with Corbyn.

During Ed Miliband’s Labour, the Observer robustly questioned the health of capitalism – our columnist Will Hutton calls it “turbo-capitalism”. We urged support for a living wage and the working poor, and the likes of Robert Reich and David Simon have filled our pages with more radical critiques of capitalism than Corbyn’s.

Anyway, how much of what Corbyn argues do most voters disagree with, if they stop to think? Do people approve of bewildering, high tariffs set by the cartel of energy companies, while thousands of elderly people die each winter of cold-related diseases? Do students and parents from middle- and low-income families want tuition fees?

Do people like paying ludicrous fares for signal-failure, delays and overcrowding on inept railways? Do people urge tax evasion by multinationals and billionaires, which they then subsidise with cuts to the NHS? Post-cold war, who exactly are we supposed to kill en masse with these expensive nuclear missiles? What’s so good about the things Corbyn wants to drastically change?

Even more fundamental is the appeal to principle and morality – peace, justice and internationalism – which drove the Labour grassroots vote, and was spoken at the rally for refugees which Corbyn made his first engagement and for which this newspaper stands absolutely. Why not embrace those principles, or at least show an interest in the fact that hundreds of thousands of people just did? Which better reflects the Britain we want: Corbyn’s “open your hearts” or Cameron’s “swarm”?

The parliamentary bubble – and our editorial – calculate that we cannot fundamentally change Britain on the basis of these aspirations, even if many people yearn to. In the acceptance speech, Corbyn should have appealed beyond the party in which he is steeped; perhaps he too inhabits a different echo-chamber.

But this isn’t about Corbyn, it’s about why he’s suddenly there. And what an appalling lesson to draw: someone is overwhelmingly elected to falteringly but seriously challenge that stasis and order of things – by urging peace, justice, republic and equality – only to be evicted by the deep system into a lethal ice-storm the moment he leaves the tent, like Captain Oates, though not of his own volition.

And even if middle England is more adverse to radical politics than middle Spain or Greece, does that mean we have to align with this mainstream stasis, just because it is so? What’s the point of principles if their trade-off for power is a principle in itself? Why have principles at all?

The legal philosopher Costas Douzinas argues for a separation of words: using “politics” to describe horse-trading between parties, which feign differences but actually agree, and “the political” to describe antagonisms that really exist in society. On that basis, why start with the stasis of “politics” to approach “the political”, rather than the reverse: invoke “the political” to challenge the stasis of “politics”? Especially alongside Greece, Spain and elsewhere.

Instead of a stirring leader, which did not have to endorse Corbyn but could celebrate the spirit of the vote along with those who delivered it, we’ve left a lot of good, loyal and decent people who read our newspaper feeling betrayed.

“There’s something happening in here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”, wrote Stephen Stills in 1967. It’s a good description of where we are with all this – we don’t as yet have the map whence this came, where it’s going or even what it is.

Dave Crosby sang: “Don’t try to get yourself elected” (from a mighty number called “Long Time Gone”). Along with almost half this country, I was inclined to agree, but Corbyn’s election throws Crosby’s dictum into question, just as to cut Corbyn down would prove Crosby right. “We can change the world” sang Graham Nash. But are we only allowed to try if middle England, the media and parliament try too?

The lessons of history for Jeremy Corbyn

Martin Wright in The Telegraph


Conventional wisdom has it that Labour’s newly-elected leader will be taking the party back to the past. The most commonly imagined point of destination is the 1980s. Corbyn, we are told, is a latter day Michael Foot, whose tenure on Labour’s leadership will give us a Labour civil war and a decade or more of Tory dominance. A more positive historical allusion, has been offered by Melissa Benn, writing in the Guardian, who has argued that Corbyn is the direct heir of the Labour Party’s founding father, Keir Hardie. While both analogies are tenable, a more accurate parallel might be traced between Corbyn and a less well-known past Labour leader, George Lansbury.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn Photo: Getty Images


Lansbury took over the leadership of the Labour Party in 1932, in the wake of the disastrous economic crisis that had destroyed Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government in 1931. MacDonald had nurtured the Labour Party into a position of power over the preceding two decades, but abandoned its rank and file in the moment of crisis to join a National Government with the Conservatives. The Labour establishment – seen by many in the movement as heroes only a few years previously – were, by 1932, seen by most socialists as traitors. The demoralised Labour Party was decimated in the 1931 General Election, and Lansbury was elected leader because he was viewed as the embodiment of honesty, purity and principle. Is this beginning to sound familiar?

Like Corbyn, Lansbury was a London politician who was located firmly on the left of the Labour Party – his first political home as a socialist was in the revolutionary Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Like Corbyn, he was a “veteran” MP who had taken part in the struggles of what seemed like a previous age; by the time he secured the leadership of his party he was already in his 70s.

Like Corbyn, Lansbury was a habitual rebel, and a thorn in the side of his party’s moderate leadership. As editor of the Daily Herald he supported just about every shade of Left-wing rebel tendency available. He campaigned for Communists to be allowed to join the Labour Party. In the period before the Great War he’d gone to prison for the incitement of militant unlawful protest on behalf of the suffragettes. He was imprisoned again in 1921, when serving on Poplar Council, for contempt of court, after refusing to implement what he considered to be an unfair rates system. Like Corbyn, Lansbury was a life-long pacifist. He was the main organiser of the mass anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar Square in August 1914. He was also prepared to meet – against his better judgement - some pretty questionable individuals in pursuit of peace, including, in 1937, Hitler and Mussolini. By comparison, maybe meeting Hamas isn’t so big a deal.

 The parallels between Corbyn and Lansbury are so close that one might think that Corbyn is the ghost of Lansbury stalking the Labour Party. But what might history tell us about the Party’s current predicament? Lansbury’s leadership has traditionally been seen as a period of crisis for Labour – a spell in the proverbial wilderness. Lansbury inherited a depleted and divided party, struggled to make an impact against the overwhelming tendencies of the time, and by 1935 was driven from its leadership by his more right wing colleagues. Corbyn will need to be an exceptionally resourceful and gifted leader, not to mention lucky, if history is not to repeat itself in this respect.

Even if this is the case, though, Corbyn’s period as Labour leader need not be without significance. Lansbury’s tenure on the leadership may have been short, but it was not devoid of success. Like Jeremy Corbyn, Lansbury was a magician of mass-mobilisation. He managed to inspire more respect and devotion among grass roots socialists and labour supporters than arguably any other Labour leader before or since. He connected with Labour’s core supporters and mobilised them in a way that meant the Labour Party survived when it may have perished. He reconnected a wounded, demoralised and betrayed party with its core values and beliefs. Crucially, he created a political space in which the socialists of the future – among them Aneurin Bevan and Clement Attlee – could develop and prosper. And we all know what they managed to achieve.

Perhaps the real lesson that a bit of historical perspective can teach us about Corbyn’s remarkable coup doesn’t concern his electability, or alleged lack of it. After all, those that warn that he is unelectable haven’t done too well at winning elections themselves in recent years. No, history tells us that the Labour Party is experiencing a period when it needs to be revitalised, democratised and brought back into contact with its all-too-forgotten core beliefs. Like Lansbury over 70 years before him, Corbyn might well be the man for the job. If so, the really interesting question becomes not whether Corbyn can win in 2020, but who, out of the new MPs who were prominent in nominating and supporting him, will be the Bevans and Attlees of the future?

Why Hawk-Eye still cannot be trusted

Russell Jackson in Cricinfo

Imran Tahir's appeal against Martin Guptill looked straightforward but Hawk-Eye differed © AFP

Enlarge

I don't trust the data. Don't worry, this isn't another Peter Moores thinkpiece. It's Hawk-Eye or ball-tracker or whatever you want to call it. I don't trust it. I don't trust the readings it gives.

This isn't a flat-earth theory, though flat earth does come into it, I suppose. How on earth can six cameras really predict the movement of a ball (a non-perfect sphere prone to going out of shape at that) on a surface that is neither flat nor stable? A ball that's imparted with constantly changing amounts of torque, grip, flight, speed and spin, not to mention moisture.

----- Also Read

Abolish the death penalty in cricket; I mean the LBW

------

When Hawk-Eye, a prediction system with a known and well-publicised propensity for minor error (2.2 millimetres is the most recent publicly available figure) shows a fraction less than a half of the ball clipping leg stump after an lbw appeal, can we take that information on face value and make a decision based upon it?

During Tuesday's World Cup semi-final, my long-held conspiracy theory bubbled over. How, I wondered, could the ball that Imran Tahir bowled to Martin Guptill in the sixth over - the turned-down lbw shout from which the bowler called for a review - have passed as far above the stumps as the TV ball-tracker indicated? To the naked eye it looked wrong. The predicted bounce on the Hawk-Eye reading looked far too extravagant.

Worse, why upon seeing that projection did every single person in the pub I was in "ooh" and "aah" as though what they were seeing was as definitive and irrefutable an event as a ball sticking in a fieldsman's hands, or the literal rattle of ball on stumps? Have we just completely stopped questioning the authority of the technology and the data?

Later I checked the ball-by-ball commentary on ESPNcricinfo. Here's what it said: "This is a flighted legbreak, he looks to sweep it, and is beaten. Umpire Rod Tucker thinks it might be turning past the off stump. This has pitched leg, turned past the bat, hit him in front of middle, but is bouncing over, according to the Hawkeye. That has surprised everybody. That height has come into play here. It stays not-out."

Why don't we question the authority of a technology that has a well-publicised margin of error?  © Getty Images

Enlarge

It surprised me, but did it surprise everybody? Probably not. More TV viewers seemed to accept the call than question it. When you've watched enough cricket though, some things just look a little off. To me this one didn't add up. Guptill made another 28 runs, not a trifling matter in the context of the game.

A disclaimer: though I distrust it for lbw decisions, I'm not saying that Hawk-Eye is all bad. It's great for "grouping" maps to show you where certain bowlers are pitching the ball, because tracking where a ball lands is simple. What happens next I'm not so sure on, particularly when the spinners are bowling.

To be fair, Hawk-Eye's inventor Paul Hawkins was a true pioneer and has arguably made a greater contribution to the entertainment factor of watching cricket on TV than many actual players manage. That's the thing though: it's entertainment. In 2001, barely two years after Hawkins had developed the idea it had won a BAFTA for its use in Channel 4's Ashes coverage that year. It wasn't until 2008 - seven years later - that it was added as a component of the Decision Review System. Quite a lag, that.

On their website, admittedly not the place to look for frank and fearless appraisal of the technology, Hawk-Eye (now owned by Sony) claim that the fact TV viewers now expect a reading on every lbw shout is "a testimony to Hawk-Eye's reputation for accuracy and reliability". But it's not, is it? All that it really tells us is that we are lemmings who have been conditioned to accept the reading as irrefutable fact upon which an umpiring decision can be made. But it's a prediction.

Not even Hawk-Eye themselves would call it a faultless system. Last December the company admitted they had got a reading completely wrongwhen Pakistan's Shan Masood was dismissed by Trent Boult during the Dubai Test. In this instance, the use of only four cameras at the ground (Hawk-Eye requires six) resulted in the operator making an input error. Why it was even being used under those conditions is more a question for the ICC, I suppose.

It's not all bad: Hawke-Eye gives great insight into where bowlers are pitching their deliveries  © Hawk-Eye

Enlarge

The Masood debacle highlights an interesting issue with regards to the cameras though. Understandably given the pay cheques at stake and that Hawk-Eye is a valuable component of their coverage, TV commentators rarely question the readings even in cases as puzzling as the Masood verdict. Mike Haysman is one who stuck his neck out in a 2011 Supersport article. Firstly, Haysman echoed my earlier thought: "The entertainment factor was the exact reason they were originally introduced. Precise decision-making was not part of the initial creative masterplan." The technology has doubtless improved since, but the point remains.

More worryingly though, Haysman shone a light on the issue with the cameras upon which Hawk-Eye depends. At that point an Ashes Test, for instance, might have had bestowed upon it a battalion of deluxe 250 frame-per-second cameras, whereas a so-called lesser fixture might use ones that captured as few as 25 frames-per-second. Remember: the higher the frame rate the more accurate the reading. Put plainly, for the past five years the production budget of the rights holder for any given game, as well as that game's level of perceived importance, has had an impact on the reliability of Hawk-Eye readings. Absurd.

As a general rule, the more you research the technology used in DRS calls, the more you worry. In one 2013 interview about his new goal-line technology for football, Paul Hawkins decried the lack of testing the ICC had done to verify the accuracy of DRS technologies. "What cricket hasn't done as much as other sports is test anything," he started. "This [football's Goal Decision System] has been very, very heavily tested whereas cricket's hasn't really undergone any testing." Any? Then this: "It's almost like it has tested it in live conditions so they are inheriting broadcast technology rather than developing officiating technology." Does that fill you with confidence?

Hawkins and science-minded cricket fans might bray at the suggestion that Hawk-Eye can't be taken as law, but in lieu of any explanation of its formulas, machinations and the way it's operated (also known as proprietary information) it's hard for some of us to shake the doubt that what we're seeing with our eyes differs significantly from the reading of a computer.

Will the next Pope be the last one - Yes, says St Malachy The Ominous

A 12th century clairvoyant has foretold the end of papacy!

 

Pope Benedict’s sudden resignation has stunned the world, and pundits are searching for motivations beyond his plea of old age. To complicate matters, there’s also a strange 900-year-old prophecy involved.

According to a famous prophecy made by St Malachy in the 12th century, there would be 112 more popes. Pope Benedict, who resigned, was the 111th. And whoever is elected Pope in the next few days will be the 112th. During the papacy of this final pope, says the prophecy, Rome—and the Church—will be wiped out! To quote its ominous words: “The City of Seven Hills shall be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge shall judge the people.”

Rubbish, one might say. We’ve heard a lot of lunatic Doomsday predictions, and the Mayan prophecy is still fresh in our minds. But this time there’s one small difference: St Malachy actually described each of the 111 popes till date with eerie accuracy, summing up each one with a vivid Latin phrase. And so far he’s never been wrong.

For example, he described Pope Paul VI (1963-78) as ‘Flos Florum’, meaning ‘Flower of Flowers’. Paul VI’s coat of arms, as it happened, featured three iris blossoms. His successor, Pope John Paul I, was described as ‘De Medietate Lunae’, or ‘Of the half moon’. This was puzzling, because the description just didn’t seem to fit. But one month later, when John Paul I suddenly died, one realised that he’d become pope at the time of the half moon and died by the next half moon. His successor, Pope John Paul II, was described as ‘De Labore Solis’, or ‘Of the eclipse of the sun’: it turned out he was born during a solar eclipse!

People have been talking about the prophecy of the popes with increasing frequency since the 1970s, as the end of the line drew closer. In 2005, when John Paul II, the 110th pope, died, people looked at the prophecy again, in anticipation, and found the next pope described as ‘Gloria Olivae’, or ‘The Glory of the Olive’.(Editor's Comments - the relation to Ratzinger is unexplained though!)  But what did this mean? Some people thought it somehow signified Israel; others said it meant the new pope would be a Benedictine, an order symbolised by the olive. Sure enough, the conclave ultimately elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a Benedictine priest from Germany, who—to seemingly reinforce the prophecy—took the name Pope Benedict xvi, after the founder of the order.

St Malachy, a clairvoyant bishop, while on a visit to Rome in 1139 CE, is said to have fallen into a trance and seen a vision of all the popes till the end of time. When his prophecies were published, the Vatican tried—for obvious reasons—to suppress them, but failed. In his final prophecy, St Malachy refers to a pope he calls ‘Petrus Romanus’, or ‘Peter the Roman’, adding darkly, “In extreme persecution, the seat of the Holy Roman Church will be occupied by Peter the Roman, who will lead his sheep through many tribulations, at the end of which the City of Seven Hills shall be destroyed, and the dreadful Judge shall judge the people.”

So which one of the current papal candidates is ‘Peter the Roman’? Sure enough, one of the front-runners is named Cardinal Peter Turkson, so it could very possibly be him! But, more importantly, what will be the ominous “many tribulations” that the people will be led through? What will be the events leading up to that ultimate “destruction”? And who is the “dreadful Judge” who will appear in judgement? Cardinal Turkson is now aged 65, so we can presumably expect the scenario to be played out anytime within the next twenty years—before, say, 2033.

Cardinal Turkson may not necessarily be the one, though, for Peter means ‘the rock’, and that could be a metaphor, not simply a name. As in the case of Nostradamus, St Malachy’s clues are sometimes cryptic, and become clear only after the fact. Pope Benedict XV, for example, was referred to as ‘Religio Depopulata’, or ‘Religion laid waste’, and when he became pope in 1914, nobody could understand the relevance of this. However, as his papacy unfolded, World War I and the Russian revolution made the meaning of the phrase terribly clear. But regardless of who the next pope will be, one thing is evident: the prophecy mentions only 112 more popes. There is no 113th.

---

(The writer is an advertising professional.)

Wave a banknote at a pundit and he'll predict anything

Of course it is outrageous to jail scientists for honest errors, but it is legitimate to hold them to some account

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Thursday 25 October 2012 19.30 BST

Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi

On the evening of 5 April 2009, Luigi Guigno of L'Aquila in Italy was phoned by a sister terrified by tremors under their village. He told her not to worry. Government experts in "the forecasting and prevention of major risks" had just been on the news declaring there to be "no danger" of an earthquake. They need not go out into the street. A few hours later an earthquake struck and Luigi, his pregnant wife, their son and 300 others were crushed to death.

This week a local judge jailed six of the scientists, not for failing to predict the quake but for giving what he regarded as reckless reassurances. He fined them £6m and disbarred them from public office. World scientists condemned the verdict as inquisitorial and medieval. Britain's Lord May said it ignored the basic nature of scientific inquiry. Luigi's relatives disagreed. A local official said simply: "Some scientists didn't do their job."

When a forester fails to predict that a tree might fall and it kills someone, he is arrested. The same goes for a train mechanic who fails to repair a carriage, a cook who poisons a customer and a builder whose house collapses. They didn't mean to kill, but they failed to forecast what might ensue from their defective expertise.

Why does the same not apply to the professional scientists, experts and pundits on whose predictive genius so much of our life depends? The answer is that they claim protection, either through (usually weak) self-regulation or by pleading Lord May's fifth amendment, that the nature of scientific inquiry exonerates them of harmless mistakes.

This week agriculture ministers were left floundering by conflicting scientific guidance on bovine TB and badgers. Transport ministers were humiliated by statisticians failing to predict revenue on the west coast railway. The Totnes MP, Sarah Wollaston, called attention to the hysterical 2009 swine flu "forecast", which panicked Whitehall into blowing £500m on dubious Tamiflu, whose test results it refused to disclose.

Yesterday we were told that the nation was recovering from a second "dip" in a recession, which its forecasters had failed to predict. This is despite government economists being served by ever more powerful computers and mathematical models. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has been called to account for this failure.

Science has rarely enjoyed greater status. Schools are in thrall to it. Broadcasters grovel at its feet, with hours of programmes devoted to children gazing adoringly at scientific researchers, depicted as funny, garrulous, lovable role models. Science has taken the place of religion in a cocoon of uncritical certainty. Those who claim the title "scientist", be it natural or social, expect to combine the immunity of diplomats and the infallibility of popes. Science is merging into scientology.

Of course, Lord May is right, that academic inquiry must proceed uninhibited by risk from error. That is what universities are for, and why they should stay independent of the state. But the Italian geologists were not doing research: they were paid to apply their expertise to keep the public safe. They were not researching, but advising. They failed catastrophically.

The truth is that there is one law for the officer class and another for the poor bloody infantry. When experts trained to detect seismic phenomena fail, their fraternity does not criticise or review their work, but treats them as innocent and relieves them of blame. If an ordinary worker miscalculates the risk, if trains crash, trees fall, rivers are polluted or foodstuffs rot, he goes to jail. The difference is not in class of error but in class of person.

Since the dawn of time, people have craved prediction against uncertainty. They have paid soothsayers, witchdoctors, stargazers and palmists. They ask journalists at parties: "Who is going to win the American election?" and seem cheated if the reply is "I just don't know."

Some people are paid to forecast. Their job is to make assertions about the future, assessing likelihood over a spectrum of certainty. When a scientist says this or that "will happen", we expect it to have greater credence than if he had merely gazed into the entrails of a sacred goose.

The worst offenders are meteorologists. A Devon entrepreneur, Rick Turner, declared last month that he would sue the Met Office for inaccurate and "persistently pessimistic" forecasts, which had cost his region millions of pounds in lost revenue. I hope he wins. The gloomy Met Office, seemingly in the pay of the outbound tourism trade, is reckless with other's people's livelihoods. The weather on the Welsh coast this summer was not ideal, but it bore not the slightest resemblance to the daily "forecast" of it on the radio. The sun shone for far more hours than it rained, yet the forecast kept people away in droves. And there was never any hint of correction or apology.

Prediction matters to people. If the variables are too great, science should shut up, rather than peddle spurious expertise. But you can wave a banknote in a pundit's face and he will predict anything you like. Of course, it is outrageous to jail scientists for honest errors, but it is not outrageous to hold them to some account. When did Lord May's Royal Society last inquire into a scientific scandal? Journalists, like bankers, are getting hell these days for their mistakes. Why let seismologists off the hook?