Brexit and Trump have exposed the left’s crucial flaw: playing by the rules

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian


 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon


Join me in a little thought experiment. Imagine, if you would, that the Brexit referendum had gone the other way, 48% voting to leave and 52% to remain. What do you think Nigel Farage would have said? Would he have nodded ruefully and declared: “The British people have spoken and this issue is now settled. Our side lost and we have to get over it. It’s time to move on.”

Or would he have said: “We’ve given the establishment the fright of their lives! Despite everything they threw at us, they could only win by the skin of their teeth. It’s clear now that British support for the European project is dead: nearly half the people of this country want rid of it. Our fight goes on.”

I know which I’d bet on. Next, imagine what would have happened if, as a result of that narrow win for remain, a gaping hole in the public finances had opened up as the economy reeled, and even leading remainers admitted the machinery of state could barely cope. Farage and the rest would have denounced the chaos, boasting that this proved they had been right all along, that the voters had been misled and therefore must be given another say.

As we all know, reality did not work out this way. Next week the chancellor will deliver an autumn statement anchored in the admission that, as the Financial Times put it, “the UK faces a £100bn bill for Brexit within five years”. Thanks to the 23 June vote, the forecast is for “slower growth and lower-than-expected investment”.

Meanwhile, the government will reportedly have to hire an extra 30,000 civil servants to implement Brexit – that’s 6,000 more than the total staff employed by the European Union. In other words, in order to escape a vast, hulking bureaucracy we’re going to have to build a vast, hulking bureaucracy. (But these bureaucrats will speak English and have blue, hard-cover passports, so it’ll be OK.) Even the leavers don’t deny the scale of the undertaking they have dumped in our collective lap. Dominic Cummings, the zealot who masterminded the Vote Leave campaign, this week tweeted a description of Brexit as “hardest job since beating Nazis”. Sadly, there was no room for that pithy phrase on Vote Leave posters back in the spring.


The government will reportedly have to hire an extra 30,000 civil servants for Brexit – 6,000 more than the EU's total

And yet you do not hear remainers howling – as the leavers would if the roles were reversed – that this is an outrage so appalling it surely voids the referendum result. “We never voted for this,” they’d be bellowing, through the megaphone provided to them by most of the national papers, as they read that Brussels is likely to demand Britain cough up €60bn (£51bn) in alimony following our divorce.

Instead, the 48% exchange ironic, world-weary tweets, the electronic equivalent of a sigh, each time they read of some new hypocrisy or deception by the forces of leave. The single market is a perfect example. As a few, admirable voices have been noting, during the campaign the loudest Brexiteers were at pains to stress that leaving the EU did not mean leaving the single market. “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market,” said Daniel Hannan. “Only a madman would actually leave the market,” said Owen Patterson. In the spring, Farage constantly urged us to be like Norway – which in fact pays through the nose and accepts free movement of people in order to remain in the single market. Yet now we are told that the vote to leave the EU was a clear mandate to leave the single market, and we’ve got to get on with it.

The correct response to this should be fury, along with a stubborn commitment to use every democratic tool at our disposal to stop it happening. We know that’s what the other side would do, if the boot were on the other foot. But just look at the state of the official opposition. Labour’s Keir Starmer is struggling valiantly to oppose the government on Brexit without appearing to defy the will of the people. He’s arguing for a bespoke arrangement, one that would give Britain full, tariff-free access to the single market, as well as highlighting the risks of leaving the customs union – and, above all making the case that saving the economy matters more than reducing immigration. (Theresa May clearly thinks it’s the other way around.)

I’d prefer an even simpler message: the people voted to leave the EU, not the single market, and Labour should fight for Britain’s place in the latter. But at least Starmer’s message is coherent. The trouble is, it’s undermined from the very top. This week the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, far from opposing Brexit, urged Labour to “embrace the enormous opportunities to reshape our country that Brexit has opened for us”.

That’s not resistance. It’s surrender. And there has been similar weakness on the question of triggering article 50. MPs should withhold their vote until they know exactly what kind of Brexit the government intends. Yes, the government has the right to implement the people’s will. But the people voted to head for the exit; they were given no say over the destination once we’ve gone. Parliament can legitimately use its leverage to flush out some answers.

The point is, none of this is any more than the right would do. And this nods to a wider weakness, one that afflicts the centre-left, broadly defined, on both sides of the Atlantic. Too often, we play nice, sticking to the Queensberry rules – while the right takes the gloves off.

A prime example is unfolding right now. The final tallies of the election show that Hillary Clinton won at least a million more votes than Donald Trump. Oh well, shrug most Democrats: the electoral college is the system we have and, under those rules, we lost. True. But just imagine if Trump had won the popular vote by a seven-figure margin, only to be denied the presidency in the electoral college. Do we think he would have been a good sport and accepted it?

Happily, we don’t have to imagine. We can look at the tweets he posted in 2012, when he briefly thought Mitt Romney had garnered more votes than Barack Obama. “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” he said. He called for people to take to the streets and stage a “revolution”. As he put it, “phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one [sic]!”

We can laugh at the inconsistency, but the contrast is striking. Democrats grumble but abide by the rules; Republicans immediately dial up the rhetoric and denounce their opponents as illegitimate, eventually paralysing their ability to act. That was the admitted strategy of congressional Republicans in the first Obama term: a determined effort to prevent him governing at all.

Democrats don’t play that game. Obama constantly strove to be “bipartisan”, even appointing Republicans to key jobs. (The FBI director, James Comey, was a Republican appointee, yet Obama renewed his term – with fateful consequences. A Republican president would not have hesitated to install his own man.)

Again and again, one side bows to the rules and to what’s fair – while the other focuses on the ruthless exercise of power. We’re seeing it now, as Trump stacks his team with a bunch of bigots. I know which approach is the more high-minded and public spirited. But the result is that today, in both Britain and America, the right has power and next to nothing standing in its way. No one wants the left to behave like the right – but it’s time we fought just as hard.

On the other hand

Or why it may not be a bad idea to reverse your bat grip


SB TANG in Cricinfo


One summer's day, some 34 years ago, seven-year-oldMike Hussey was at home in the beachside Perth suburb of Mullaloo doing what he always did on a morning in the last week of December: watching the Boxing Day Test on TV. After seeing his hero Allan Border take Australia to the brink of a famous victory, only to fall an agonising three runs short, Hussey went out into his backyard and did something that few Australian cricketers have done before or since: he changed hands, permanently.

Hussey is naturally right-handed. He writes right-handed, plays tennis right-handed, brushes his teeth right-handed, picks up a spoon right-handed, and throws and bowls with his right arm. When he first picked up a cricket bat, he picked it up right-handed. But on that fateful sunny morning he decided to try batting left-handed, like Border, and ended up sticking with it for the rest of his life.

In so doing, Hussey may well have inadvertently bequeathed himself a natural technical advantage, for if there is one thing that the two main schools of batsmanship that exist in Australia - the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) school and the native autodidactic school headed by Sir Donald Bradman and Greg Chappell - agree on, it is this: a grip with a firm top hand and loose bottom hand is optimal for good batsmanship.

Logically it is easier for a batsman who holds the bat with his naturally stronger hand as the top hand (and his naturally weaker hand as the bottom hand) to grip it with a firm top hand and a loose bottom hand. When Hussey switched to batting left-handed, his naturally stronger right hand became his top hand. That wasn't what motivated his change - he did it "purely" because he "wanted to be like Allan Border" - and even when he became a world-class batsman, Hussey was generally not conscious of "the dominance of one hand over another", except when batting at the death of a one-day or T20 game. It was then, he told the Cricket Monthly, that he took the firm top-hand, loose bottom-hand grip to its logical apotheosis:

"At the end of a one-day game or a T20 game, when you're looking to basically hit sixes every ball… I made a conscious effort to really loosen the grip of my bottom hand. So I'd basically just rest the bottom hand [on the bat] on one finger - my index finger - because I was finding that when I was looking to slog, even though my bottom left hand was my less [naturally] dominant hand, it was gripping the bat too hard and taking control of the bat too quickly and affecting my swing. I wasn't hitting through the line of the ball as well as I would have liked."

Greg Chappell, Cricket Australia's first full-time national talent manager, has a clear vision for how Australia can continue to nurture its distinctive style of cricket - aggressive, attacking and winning. A firm-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip - a trait that Bradman himself believed to be "of supreme importance when playing a forward defensive shot" - is part of that vision. "It is", says Chappell in a recent interview with the Cricket Monthly, "essential for good batsmanship".

Firstly, he explains, such a grip enables a batsman to obtain the optimal bat swing - a pendular motion that maximises his chances of hitting the ball in the middle of the sweet spot. A batsman with that grip "initiates" the movement of his bat with his top hand and relegates his bottom hand to "a secondary role in the initiation [process]" as "the fulcrum". This naturally encourages him to pick up his bat so that, in his backswing, it is pointing between first slip and gully. His bat will then naturally and automatically drop back down onto the line of the ball when he is executing a straight-bat shot. The bat will "be on line [with the ball] from the top of the backswing all the way through the intended shot".

Secondly, a firm-top-hand-loose bottom-hand grip helps a batsman to stay balanced, with his weight on the balls of his feet like a champion boxer ready to throw (or ride) a punch, able to "move forward or back" into the optimal position to play the ball and synchronise the movements of his entire body.

The MCC agrees with Chappell insofar as both its instructional books constantly emphasise the importance of playing with a strong top hand, a high front elbow and a loose bottom hand, especially when executing forward defensives and front-foot drives. The problem is that the MCC's two specific written injunctions regarding how to pick up and grip a bat make it inherently difficult for batsmen to use a strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip. The MCC instructs batsmen to pick up the bat so that "the back [knuckle-side] of [their top] left hand, if the bat is held upright, is fac[ing] somewhere between mid-off and extra cover" and the hands form, with the thumb and first finger of each, two aligned Vs whose central line runs "half-way between the outer edge of the bat and the splice".

Pick up a bat with that MCC-prescribed grip and attempt to play a straight drive, off drive or cover drive. You will find that that grip encourages you to push through the shot with a firm bottom hand that shuts your bat face towards the on side. That is certainly what a young Chappell - saddled with the MCC grip taught to him at the age of five by a local youth coach with a very English pedagogy - found. Even after making his Sheffield Shield debut at the age of 18, he scored "about three-quarters" of his runs through the on side, a limitation so acute that it was the subject of much sledging from his opponents (and team-mates). Chappell recalls, in his 2011 autobiography Fierce Focus, that his own captain at South Australia, Les Favell, said to him, "I hope you won't lose sight of the fact that there are two sides of the wicket".

The firm bottom-hand tendency created by this grip is exacerbated by the explicit written instructions issued by the MCC to kids in Cricket - How to Play: pick up a bat as if you are "gripping an axe" with two hands to chop some wood that is lying on the ground. This instruction would - according to sports scientists David Mann, Oliver Runswick and Peter Allen - typically encourage kids to pick up a bat with their dominant hand as the bottom hand on the handle. Logically, this would make them more likely to play with a strong bottom hand.

In England, the influence of the MCC's coaching scriptures has always been strong. This can be seen in the faithful reproduction of the MCC's two injunctions regarding a batsman's grip in coaching manuals authored by the likes of Geoff Boycott and Robin Smith. In Australia, the influence has generally been much weaker. Seven of Australia's top 15 Test run scorers - Neil Harvey, Matthew Hayden, Michael Clarke, Justin Langer, Mark Taylor, Mike Hussey and Adam Gilchrist - have gripped a cricket bat with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand, suggesting either a blissful ignorance or a deliberate contravention of the MCC's two injunctions.

Bradman certainly didn't use the MCC-prescribed grip. Instead, as he wrote in The Art of Cricket, he gripped the bat in a manner that felt "comfortable and natural" to him, forming with the thumb and first finger of each hand two aligned Vs whose central line ran through the splice line of the bat. This meant that when he played a forward defensive, the back of his top hand faced him (and its palm faced the bowler). This neutral grip made it easier to hold the bat with a firm, controlling top hand and a loose bottom hand. As Bradman explained, "it curbs any tendency to follow through [with a strong bottom hand when playing the forward defensive]".

And it was Bradman who, on a balmy, almost cloudless December morning in 1967, advised a 19-year-old Chappell to ditch the MCC grip in favour of the Bradman grip. Chappell heeded the advice for the rest of his long and illustrious career, during which he became renowned throughout the cricket world for his piercing straight drives and cover drives. That advice, acknowledged Chappell in Fierce Focus, "transformed my game".

The Cricket Monthly spoke to seven cricketers of varying ages, three of whom - 68-year-old Chappell, 27-year-old Tim Buszard and 23-year-old Kevin Tissera - are bottom-hand natural, and four of whom - 45-year-old Justin Langer, 41-year-old Hussey, 34-year-old Ed Cowanand 20-year-old Matt Renshaw - are top-hand natural.

For want of a well-established term, this article will refer to batsmen who grip a bat with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand as "top-hand natural" and those who grip a bat with their naturally dominant hand as their bottom hand as "bottom-hand natural".

None of those interviewed - not even Renshaw and Buszard, whose dads are cricket coaches - can recall being expressly directed on how to pick up and grip a bat when they first encountered one. Their earliest cricketing memories are of playing in their backyard, local park and/or beaches with their dads, siblings and mates, using whatever materials were available. For Hussey, those materials initially consisted of nothing more than "a couple of big sticks" as bats and "some little rocks" as balls.

"I certainly don't remember [being directed how to pick up and grip a cricket bat]," says Langer. "It was just a natural instinct [to pick up the bat left-handed]. I can't remember anyone coming out and saying, 'You should be a left-hander or a right-hander.'"

Like many Australian cricketers, Cowan learnt the game in his backyard and at the local park - conveniently located across the road from his family home - with his dad and two older brothers, and didn't encounter formal coaches until he was about 14. He is completely right-handed, but he bats left-handed and has always done so. As an uncoached kid he wasn't conscious of the technicalities of holding a bat; however, as a teenager, he met the late Peter Roebuck, whose coaching and mentorship would have a profound and positive impact on him.

Roebuck firmly believed in having a strong top hand and theorised that batsmen who bat with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand "have accidentally gained an advantage for themselves". He expressed that belief and theory not only in his unequivocal columns in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald but in his coaching sessions with the teenage Cowan, "consistently letting [him] know that he had an advantage he should be using". Cowan recalls: "Probably at 14, I realised it felt like I had an advantage because it was easier to craft a technique with my top hand being my [naturally] dominant hand."

Langer became aware earlier because, somewhat unusually for an Australian cricketer, he was exposed to coaching at a young age. "When I was… maybe eight or nine years old," he recalls, "my dad brought my first cricket coach around to the backyard and he taught me the basics of the game - his name was Bryn Martin and I still remember him. He used to come on Sunday mornings, talk about the basics and particularly about having a tight-top-hand-and-loose-bottom-hand grip, doing most of my batting through my top hand." That made perfect sense to Langer, who soon realised that that grip came "more naturally" to him because his naturally dominant right hand was his top hand on the bat.

Renshaw, Queensland's rising star, thinks that his small size and consequent lack of physical strength as a junior naturally encouraged him to play with a strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip because he "couldn't really play the big shots… with that bottom hand". He wasn't conscious of top-hand versus bottom-hand dominance as a kid, but is now of the opinion that his "top-hand dominance definitely helps" him to hit straight.

It should be noted that, although it is easier for top-hand natural batsmen to have a strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip, numerous great bottom-hand natural Australian Test batsmen - such as Bradman, Steve Waugh and Chappell - have possessed that grip too. Chappell is "a right-hander through and through" and "batted right-handed" with his naturally stronger right hand as his bottom hand, but, he explains: "I know in my batting my top hand [which was my naturally weaker left hand] was my dominant hand. We were fortunate that our father understood [the importance of having a dominant top hand and a very light bottom hand] and drilled that into us from a very early age."

Although, in Australia at least, top-hand natural batsmen are nothing new - Neil Harvey played his first Test, against India at the Adelaide Oval, in January 1948 - it appears that more and more of them are appearing at Test level across the globe. Sports scientists, led by Dr Florian Loffing at the University of Kassel in Germany, recently discovered, after examining every Test cricketer with a batting average of at least 30, that the proportion of them who are top-hand natural has been growing steadily over time: 0% of those who made their Test debut in the 1880s were top-hand natural; for those who made their Test debut this decade, the figure is 33%.

The issue was highlighted by a recent research article in Sports Medicine by Mann, Runswick and Allen. They studied a sample of 43 professional batsmen (who had played first-class and/or international cricket) and 93 amateur batsmen (with less than five years' experience) and found that 40% of those professional batsmen batted with their naturally dominant hand as their top hand, whereas only 9% of the amateur batsmen did so.

Some media reports seemed to suggest that the article concluded that there is a universally "right" batting grip (namely, the top-hand natural grip) and a universally "wrong" batting grip (namely, the bottom-hand natural grip). However, the research itself did not say that. Mann, a capable Australian club cricketer, told the Cricket Monthly that he would "be quite horrified" if the research was misinterpreted to suggest that there is a universally "right" and "wrong" batting stance. "My background is fully in skill acquisition, and I would be the strongest advocate of not using a 'one-size fits all' [technique]. I very much advocate needing to embrace what a player's own technique is, and to not change technique."

That being said, Mann believes that their research "suggests that there is actually an advantage to batting reverse-stance [that is, being top-hand natural] and it does provide a better chance of becoming a professional batsman". That hypothesis is supported by Chappell's postulation that "there is a very good chance" that top-hand natural batsmen have a natural technical advantage, "because it's probably more likely that they are going to use their top hand" in adopting a firm-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip.

Natural-hand dominance is unquestionably a salient factor in batsmanship. However, it is only one part of a much larger story. Every single cricketer and coach interviewed for this article underlined that batting is, in Chappell's words, "a whole body exercise". "Human beings", he explains, "are a lever system. The bat is the last lever in the chain." The legs "set up" the lever system and "what you want is a chain reaction where everything happens efficiently and effectively at the right time."

Trent Woodhill is a sports science graduate of the University of New South Wales and one of the most respected batting coaches in Australia, currently working with Melbourne Stars, Royal Challengers Bangalore, and David Warner. He expands the analysis of natural-side dominance to encompass the batsman's entire body, believing that most batsmen have a leg and a hip that they are naturally more comfortable hitting off. As a coach, he always tries to "work out where [an individual batsman's natural] dominance lies" so that he can help the batsman find the technique that's best for him.

Woodhill points out that Virat Kohli is, like Steve Waugh, a bottom-hand natural right-handed batsman who naturally prefers hitting off his back leg. This enables him to play outrageous shots, such as a back-foot square drive off a near yorker just outside off stump, directing the ball behind point with minimal foot movement. "As long as he transfers his weight through his dominant [back] foot," Woodhill says, "he can move his feet as little or as often as he likes."

By contrast Ricky Ponting, a bottom-hand natural right-handed batsman who naturally prefers hitting the ball off his front leg, "just in front of his left knee", could never play the squarish, back-foot drives and cuts that come so naturally to Kohli and Steve Waugh. But he could play other shots that they couldn't, such as the front-foot drive on the up through the covers, and his vicious trademark pull shot against balls that many other batsmen found too full to pull.

A batsman's naturally dominant hitting leg is not necessarily his naturally favoured kicking leg. Warner, Langer and Cowan kick a football with their right foot but are more comfortable hitting the ball off their back - left - foot. By contrast, Steve Smith, Hussey and Renshaw favour kicking a football with, and hitting a ball off, the same leg: their right.

Langer explains that he felt comfortable "pushing off his dominant [right kicking] leg to get back" to play his favourite cut and pull shots. Cowan thinks that his current-day preference for hitting off his back left foot is "just a product of first-class cricket. Even though I'm a front-foot player… [in that] I tell myself to go forward when the ball is released, I think that's so I can push back and play off my back [foot]." He adds that his ten-year-old uncoached self would have favoured hitting off his front foot.

This logic of interconnectedness applies with equal force to the hands themselves. Ian Renshaw, an expert in human movement and skill acquisition at Queensland University of Technology, who has worked extensively with CA as a consultant (and also happens to be Matt Renshaw's father), told the Cricket Monthlythat the batsman's two hands work as a unit. "It's not helpful to look at it as the hands working separately because they don't." Richard Clifton - Glenn Maxwell's personal coach - concurs: the hands "have to work together" as "one unit".

The clearest illustration of this is the straight drive for four or six. As Bradman explained in The Art of Cricket, "there should be a complete follow through" with the bottom hand snapping through fully to finish off the "full-blooded drive" so that, when the stroke is completed, the toe of the bat is pointing at the wicketkeeper's head. Ian Renshaw calls this the "Bradman finish".

Perhaps the finest exemplar of the Bradman finish today is Maxwell, who routinely drives fast bowlers for flat, straight sixes because, as Clifton explains, his top hand "pushes through" and his bottom hand "rips through", giving him both accuracy and power. Maxwell is, like Bradman, bottom-hand natural, which gives him an advantage over top-hand natural batsmen in this particular area - when playing front-foot drives, he finds it easier to rip his naturally stronger bottom hand through to achieve the Bradman finish.

Even the most ardent proponents of the strong-top-hand-loose-bottom-hand grip agree that the bottom hand comes into play for certain shots. As Bradman put it, "the left-hand [that is, the top hand] position must remain firm irrespective of the attempted stroke", but the strength of the bottom hand should vary depending on the shot being played. For example, the forward defensive should be played with a loose bottom hand, whereas the pull shot requires the bottom hand to "predominate" to complete the follow-through.

All four of the top-hand natural batsmen interviewed for this piece - Langer, Hussey, Cowan and Matt Renshaw - recall having good forward defensives as kids. Hussey was "not great" at whipping balls off his pads, and his sweep, pull and hook shots were "not dominant". Langer explains that, as a kid, "I wasn't a powerful hitter through the leg side because I wasn't as strong with my bottom hand" but "I used to use [my loose bottom hand] to control the ball through the leg side, to hit areas and gaps". So "instead of hitting a lot of balls through midwicket, I used to get a lot of balls down to fine leg". Even as a world-class Test batsman, who by the end of his career "swept everything" against spin, Langer found that, "instead of a hard sweep in front of square leg", his sweep shot was "more a lap shot" hit behind square leg. "I tend to just caress it through the leg side," Langer explains, "because I was more top-hand dominant."

Interestingly, despite being a top-hand natural batsman Cowan found that, as a kid, the shot that he played most easily and consistently was the bottom hand-dependent work off his pads. "I think," he says, "that that's a left-handed batsman thing" - junior right-arm bowlers tend to bowl a lot of balls at junior left-handed batsmen's pads - "rather than [a] top- or bottom-hand [thing]".

Cowan and Langer have always favoured pulling and cutting, shots that require their naturally weaker bottom hand to snap through. There are clear environmental and physiological reasons for that - because Cowan and Langer were small for their age, they tended to receive a lot of short balls and had to find a way to counter that; and since they were both naturally more comfortable hitting the ball off their back foot, the pull and hook shots became the natural solutions to that challenge.

Neither Cowan nor Matt Renshaw swept much when they were kids, and Renshaw found it difficult to whip balls off his pads. Even today, Renshaw reckons that his reverse sweep and his switch hit, which derive their power from his naturally stronger top hand, are better than his conventional sweep.

On a sunny Melbourne afternoon in early March, I chatted with the Victorian batsman Peter Handscomb over a coffee on Chapel Street. As we were wrapping up, he shared his thoughts on the next stage of batting's evolution - future generations of batsmen will routinely practise batting both left- and right-handed, and then, come game time, select whichever hand is optimal for a particular bowler.

Two weeks later, in Australia's opening game of the World T20 campaign, Handscomb's friend and Victoria team-mate Maxwell confronted a left-arm orthodox spinner, Mitchell Santner, bowling around the wicket on a slow, gripping pitch in Dharamsala. For the first three deliveries of the 15th over, Maxwell took guard right-handed, then switched to left-handed at around the time Santner jumped into his delivery stride. The left-handed Maxwell worked the first ball with a straight bat through midwicket for two, blocked the second ball (a yorker on off stump) and mishit a sweep off the third ball (a leg-stump full toss) to backward square leg for a single.

On air, Michael Slater was left scratching his head ("What is going on? Aw, again, well, as I said, I reckon he makes batting hard"), but his fellow commentator Tom Moody pointed out that there was an undeniable method to this seeming madness. "Maxwell's thinking, I'm assuming, that he's trying to hit with the spin… " Matt Renshaw didn't watch the game live, but when I explained the match scenario and pitch conditions, he was quick to say: "That would've been probably one of the best options at the time for him."

Thirty-four years earlier, when confronted in the Ranji Trophy by a left-arm orthodox spinner turning it square on a raging turner, Sunil Gavaskar switched to batting left-handed (while continuing to bat right-handed against the other bowlers). Incredibly, he compiled a patient, unbeaten 18 to secure a draw.

Unlike Gavaskar, though, Maxwell only batted left-handed for three balls. A week later, Woodhill - who works with Handscomb and Maxwell at Melbourne Stars - prophesied that, sooner or later "there will be that unique player… who will come out and bat left-handed when the left-arm spinner's on and then when the offspinner comes on, he'll bat right-handed".

Fast forward another three weeks and the scientist David Mann told me of his slightly different, but related, theorem:

"Wherever possible, it's good to actually be able to bat both ways for as long as possible. I mean, at some point you probably do need to specialise. But my initial observation in this whole area was actually of David Warner. So we used to play indoor cricket together when he was young and we would bat together… and he could bat equally well right- or left-handed. Even at that stage [when Warner was about 13 or 14 years old], it wasn't clear which he would actually end up preferring to do."

At least four current elite batsmen in Australia - Warner, Finch, Matt Renshaw and Maxwell - routinely practise batting the other way round. None of the 12 cricketers and coaches interviewed for this piece said they had noticed any Australian kids regularly practising batting both left- and right-handed. However, Hussey observed that thanks to batsmen like Warner and Maxwell, "I probably have noticed kids more often turn around and muck around with batting both left- and right-handed."

In Woodhill's opinion, one factor hindering the evolutionary step of batsmen regularly practising left- and right-handed is current protective equipment: "Right-handed gloves are so different to left-handed gloves, they just haven't got the same protection. And same with the thigh pads as well - small inner [back] thigh pad and a larger [front] one. So until gear is developed to be able to do both, there's a physical risk involved [in batting the other way round]." It came as little surprise when Clifton subsequently said that, as a teenager, Maxwell owned a left-handed thigh pad.

Both Matt Renshaw and Woodhill believe that, at some point in the future, batsmen will regularly switch hands. Indeed, from a broader historical perspective, it's surprising that it hasn't happened already. Highly proficient switch hitters have been part of Major League Baseball since at least the late 19th century, and prior to the 1990s, many of Australia's finest batsmen, from Victor Richardson to Harvey to Norm O'Neill to Bill Lawry to Ian Chappell to Greg Chappell to Border to Brad Hodge, spent their winters playing high-level baseball.

If the latest generation of Australian batsmen has a standard-bearer, it is the 20-year-old Renshaw, the fifth highest run scorer in last summer's Shield, runner-up for the Shield Player of the Season award, and the youngest batsman picked in this winter's Australia A squad. The left-handed Renshaw is, in many senses, a classical opener. He is patient and enjoys batting for long periods. He doesn't hold a Big Bash contract, is yet to make his List A debut for Queensland, and his season strike rate of 40.95 was the lowest of last summer's top ten Shield run scorers. Those facts are fairly well known.

What is less well known is that Renshaw has switch hit a six at Lord's, a shot that came as little surprise to those who know that he has been practising batting right-handed since he was a boy. "I can't really remember whether it was [my idea] or Dad's," he says. "I can just remember watching people play reverse sweeps and I thought that would be pretty cool. And so I started trying to bat right-handed."

He has had both the switch hit and the reverse sweep in his armoury since he was a teenager. Of the two, he is "more comfortable playing the reverse sweep because when you go for the switch hit, you have to swap everything and the bowler can change where he is going to bowl it". He'll only play the higher risk switch hit if there is a good reason to do so. He did it at Lord's because "it was an offspinner [bowling] to a short boundary on the off side".

Renshaw is yet to see any batsman do what Handscomb predicted that the next generation would do - change hands during a game to suit the bowler they're facing - but says, without skipping a beat, "I've definitely talked about it with Dad".

Coaching manual’s axe effect: When left is actually right

SURESH MENON in The Hindu


David Gower.


In Pakistan, Sadiq Mohammed turned to it to increase his chances of being picked for the side; in India, Sourav Ganguly converted so he could use his brother’s equipment; in Australia Mike Hussey was merely emulating his hero Allan Border.

These are all sound reasons for batting left-handed. But recent research has shown that there may be stronger scientific reasons than emotional or practical ones for the natural right-hander to bat left-handed.

It might seem illogical that batsmen should be classified according to the placement of their weaker hand or the use of the less dominant eye. The conventional right hander watches the approaching bowler with his left eye while the top hand, responsible for controlling and guiding the bat, is his weaker hand.

Gower’s logic

That elegant left-hander David Gower once said, “Both right-handers and left-handers have been horribly misnamed because the left-hander is really a right-hander and the right-hander is really a left-hander, if you work out which hand is doing most of the work. So from my point of view, my right arm is my strongest and therefore it’s the right hand, right eye and generally the right side which is doing all the work. Left-handers, as such, should be called right-handers.”

It is too late for that, of course!

It might be logical, though — but cricket is not a logical or natural sport like soccer is; it might even seem irrational, and that is part of its charm.

Gower’s position has recently been endorsed by science. Research in Amsterdam’s Vrije University suggests that a “reverse stance”, with the dominant hand on the top might be the most efficient way to bat, and successful international players use that technique. The paper is published in the journal Sport Medicine.

Professor Peter Allen who led the study said: “The ‘conventional’ way of holding a cricket bat has remained unchanged since the invention of the game. The first MCC coaching manual instructs batters to pick up a bat in the same manner they would pick up an axe.”

Besides Gower himself, Adam Gilchrist (who plays tennis right handed), Matthew Hayden, Kumar Sangakkara, Chris Gayle, David Warner, Ben Stokes are conventional left handers who are right-hand dominant, while the reverse is true in the case of batsmen like Michael Clarke and Inzamamul Haq. Sachin Tendulkar, uniquely, batted and bowled right-handed but signs autographs left-handed.

Left-handed batsmen benefit from being less common, with bowlers struggling to adapt. Left-handers play right-arm medium-pacers bowling across their bodies from round the wicket which feeds into their bread-and-butter strokes. The not-quite-glance, not-really-a-hook that left-handers play fine off their hips is unique to them. Both Gower and Lara played it exceptionally well.

Misnomer?

But did we really misname them, as Gower suggested? Coaches do tell their wards about the role of the top hand and the part played by the bottom hand in strokes such as the cut and pull. But few can explain why in that case, a batsman has to lead with his weaker side.

One possible explanation for the switch (if it is indeed that) may be that the drive being a stroke that calls for timing rather than power, the weaker top hand can handle that and leave the forcing strokes to the stronger hand. It is also easier for the bottom hand to manipulate the wrists when it needs to be rolled to keep the ball down.

In Right Hand, Left Hand, winner of the Aventis Prize for Science Books, Chris McManus says that around 10% of the population and perhaps 20% of top sportsmen are left-handed. He makes the point that left-handers have the advantage in asymmetric sports like baseball, where the right-handed batter has to run anti-clockwise towards first base after swinging and facing to his left.

Sometimes the asymmetries, he says, are subtle, as in badminton, where the feathers of the shuttlecock are arranged clockwise, making it go to the right, so smashes are not equally easy from left and right of the court. Sometimes, of course, the left-hander is at a total disadvantage, as in polo, where the mallet has to be held in the right hand on the right side of the horse, or in hockey, where the sticks are held right handed.

South Africa’s Graeme Pollock played tennis right-handed, but golf left-handed (he wrote with his right hand). Garry Sobers was left-handed in everything he did.

Indefinite conclusions

I don’t know what conclusions can be drawn from this. Perhaps the left-hander whose right hand is the stronger hand plays the top-hand shots like the drive better than most. And the one with the stronger left as bottom hand plays the shots square of the wicket better.

Coaching, cultural and visual biases may ultimately decide whether a child takes up his stance right-handed or left. From then on, familiarity and comfort dictate. As does pragmatism. The “dominant side” theory is usually a retrospective explanation.

Chhattisgarh Government Strips Forest Community of Land Rights

Manon Verchot

In an unprecedented move, the Chhattisgarh government cancelled land rights of tribal communities in the Surguja district to make way for coal mining.

Land rights of people in the Ghatbarra village were written off after land was allocated to the Rajasthan Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RVUNL) and Adani Minerals Private Limited.

The Gram Sabha (village council) of Ghatbarra gained their land in 2013 as part of the Forest Rights Act. Under the act, the government can divert forest land use for different purposes with the consent of tribal groups. In 2014, Ghatbarra and 19 other villages opposed mining developments on their land, but the government overrode this opposition earlier this year. There are no provisions for the cancelling of the land rights, according to Nitin Sethi of Business Standard.


What is the Forest Rights Act?

In India, millions of people depend on forests as a source of livelihood, but most of this land belongs to the government. These communities are often victims of bonded labour and extortion, and are regularly evicted from their homes.

The Forest Rights Act (FRA) was established in 2006 to protect the rights of tribes and traditional forest dwellers. It grants forest communities the right to collect non-timber forest products, access to grazing grounds and water bodies, and the right to claim land.


The FRA provides for the diversion of forest land for non-forest use by obtaining free and prior informed consent from the communities who have a claim over the forest patch in question. It clearly lays down that such diversion should happen only at the Gram Sabha level – 3/4th of the members of the Gram Sabha should be present and 50% of them need to agree to the diversion. The specific process is clearly laid down in the Act and any other process is in contravention of the FRA and unconstitutional.Priya Pillai, Senior Campaigner, Greenpeace India

A villager transports fodder on his bullock cart on the outskirts of Raipur. This image is for representation purposes only. (Photo: Reuters)


What Are the Consequences of Cancelling Land Rights?


Forest communities are dependent on forests for their livelihood, but without any rights, they will lose access to the resources they depend on.

This development is very worrying because it is the first time rights have been taken away. It sets a very bad precedence. It is going to have huge implications all over the country.- Tushar Dash, Forest Rights Researcher, Vasundhara

According to Dash, there are around 150 million forest tribal people in India, and 1 lakh 77 thousand villages affected by forests in India. Government actions that deny the rights of these people would have repercussions that would ripple throughout the country.

I'd never kissed a Tory - then I married one

A growing number of parents aren't keen on their children finding love across the political divide Credit: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Lucy Mangan in The Telegraph


There is a scene in the eighties sitcom Bread, about the Catholic, working class Liverpudlian family the Boswells, in which one of Nellie Boswell’s sons plans to bring A Homosexual round for tea. “But Joey,” she whispers urgently, “what do they eat?”

Twenty five years later a similar scene played out in my own house when I told my parents I was bringing a Tory home – a boyfriend, for their inspection - except that they would have been happy to feed him anything, up to and including poison.

My mother was an NHS doctor and my father worked in the theatre. Their naturally left-leaning tendencies had been aggravated by Thatcher’s – um, let’s call them deleterious - effects on those two fields and weren’t much improved by their experiences putting two daughters through state school, as our milk, playing fields, books and local education authorities disappeared.


Lucy's left-wing parents were deeply dicombobulated by her Tory boyfriend Credit: Geoffrey Swaine-REX Shutterstock




I didn’t even meet a Tory until I went to university and now here I was bringing one home. I would go on to get engaged, marry and breed with him. My parents would still like to poison him.

In this, it turns out, they are not alone. A new study just out from YouGov shows that the proportion of parents who would be deeply discombobulated by their son or daughter bringing home a partner of a different political persuasion from them has almost doubled in the last eight years.

Among Labour-supporting parents 28 per cent would be “unhappy” and 10% “very upset” by such an occurrence, and nearly one in five Conservative supporters would be upset if their child married a Labour supporter.

You can understand the impulse. Parents (and I speak as one myself now) want their children to be safe and happy and both those things are felt to be most likely found in what you already know. It’s also an impulse that plays into a wider current mood where everything is becoming more tribal. Politics, obviously, has the increasingly spare, ruthless, Conservatism of Cameron and Osborne on the one hand and the (potentially) Stalinist purgative of Corbyn on the other.


 

Political party rosettes.






This mirrors the increased extremism of the Republican and Democratic parties in the US. The social divide between reds and blues over there is almost complete and there is real shock occasioned and stigma attached to any reaching across it – romantically or simply in terms of friendship.

Everywhere there is an increasing drive towards homogeneity, towards only mixing with your own kind. On Facebook we get in touch with old friends, friends of those friends, other people whose interests provably dovetail with ours before they even appear on our feeds.

On Twitter we self-select and then go to furious war with anyone or anything that appears in our timelines with which we disagree.

Life becomes an echo chamber in which we all squat like smug, fat toads until we have to bestir ourselves to fight another battle against incomers, with their nasty new thoughts and their horrible ways. Once they are banished completely we can fall gently into complacent lethargy and never move again.


Arnold Schwarzenegger and his now ex-wife Maria Shriver - Shriver was a Democrat while Schwarzenegger was a Republican. Credit: John Taylor




This is bad in life and worse in marriage. I am still not sure, a decade on since meeting him, whether my husband’s Toryism makes him mad or bad, but it does make him interesting to know. Yes, there are times when I would prefer a more peaceful, harmonious life.

I would like, for example, to be helped with the recycling without having to listen to a diatribe about environmentalism (or “a blend of anti-human, self-praising crypto-paganism that’s gone too far”) or to watch Newsnight without explosions of rage about bias and the “bloated, Byzantine, bureaucratic nightmare that is the BBC” or have our friends round for dinner without at least half of them being served slaughtered sacred cow as the main course.

I would like to be able to give money to people who beg on the streets without my husband rolling his eyes. That one I would like very much.

But it does banish boredom, which is surely one of marriage’s greatest enemies.


 

Different political persuasions in marriage is better than boredom.


Another thing parents should bear in mind when staring down the barrel of a politically-incompatible potential in-law is that he or she might not be as bad as you think. It may just be your left/right bigotry talking. In no other area of life do we cleave as strongly as we do to party political prejudices.

I was raised to believe that Tories ate boiled babies for lunch and kebabbed kittens for fun. Down on the ground though, they are, like the left, a mixed bunch.

Yes, some are, as I was taught, uncaring people who envisage the world as an immutable entity comprising the powerful and the people they tread underfoot, believing they are among the former, especially if they stick close to their friends from school.

But others are drawn to the idea of freedom – freedom to do things, freedom not to do things, freedom to change things, freedom to keep things the same. My husband genuinely believes in the philosophy of helping people to help themselves.

I think this ignores the people who need extra help, but he sees it simply as another way of phrasing the “give a man a fishing rod” principle. And on we go, slightly less bored, slightly more open-minded perhaps than if we agreed.


 

Both the left and right are far from perfect.


I was raised to believe that the left was perfect. Always protecting the underdog and promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, especially via fair and sufficient taxation. Publicly-funded fishing rods for all!

In real life, of course, things are more complicated. No-one ever told me, for example, that there is nothing more rigid than the liberal orthodoxy and that sometimes supporting Labour would feel more like attending a religious revivalist meeting than anything else, or that the average liberal reacts to any kind of disagreement as if it were a mortal sin.

Nevertheless, despite these growing disappointments, I will forever remain committed to such splendid ideas as an unprivatised health service, taxing companies according to their profits and to the belief that there are some people who can’t haul themselves up by their own bootstraps and shouldn’t be expected to.

Each side, it turns out, takes all sorts. The left talks a lot of rubbish and so does the right. From the bits that aren’t rubbish, we are all free to pick and choose and, except for the few committed and/or craven ideologues amongst us, we will all probably end up with stuff from each side.

Whisper it, we are probably all a lot closer than we think. Now, if you will excuse me I have a baby to boil and some kittens to skewer in preparation for Valentine’s Day. I’m sure he will be taking the anti-human, self-praising, crypto-pagan bins out for me in return. Compromise, people – it’s everything.

Beware Russia’s links with Europe’s right

Moscow is handing cash to the Front National and others in order to exploit popular dissent against the European Union

• 
• • Luke Harding
  • The Guardian, Monday 8 December 2014 18.09 GMT

‘The Front National confirmed last week that it had taken a whopping €9.4m loan from the First Czech Russian bank in Moscow.’ Photograph: Eric Gaillard/Reuters

It sounds like a chapter from a cheesy spy novel: former KGB agent, chucked out of Britain in the 80s, lends a large sum of money to a far-right European party. His goal? To undermine the European Union and consolidate ties between Moscow and the future possible leader of pro-Kremlin France.

In fact this is exactly what’s just happened. The founder of the Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, borrowed €2m from a Cyprus-based company, Veronisa Holdings,owned by a flamboyant character and cold war operative called Yuri Kudimov.

Kudimov is a former KGB agent turned banker with close links to the Kremlin and the network of big money around it. Back in 1985 Kudimov was based in London. His cover story was that he was a journalist working for a Soviet newspaper; in 1985 the Thatcher government expelled him for alleged spying. (During the same period Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden.)

In Paris, the FN confirmed last week that it had taken a whopping €9.4m (£7.4m) loan from the First Czech Russian bank in Moscow. This loan is logical enough. The FN’s leader, Marine Le Pen, makes no secret of her admiration for Putin; her party has links to senior Kremlin figures including Dmitry Rogozin, now Russia’s deputy prime minister, who in 2005 ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan “Clean Up Moscow’s Trash”. Le Pen defended her decision to take the Kremlin money, complaining that she had been refused her access to capital: “What is scandalous here is that the French banks are not lending.” She also denied reports by the news website Mediapart, which broke the story, that the €9.4m was merely the first instalment of a bigger €40m loan.

The Russian money will fuel Marine Le Pen’s run for the French presidency in two years’ time. Nobody expects her to win, but the FN topped the polls in May’s European elections, winning an unprecedented 25% of the vote; Le Pen’s 25 new MEPs already form a pro-Russian bloc inside the European parliament.

In part, the Moscow loan can be understood as an act of minor and demonstrative revenge. It follows President François Hollande’s decision to postpone the delivery to Moscow of the first of two Mistral helicopter carriers, in a deal worth €1.2bn. His U-turn follows considerable western pressure, in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its ongoing covert invasion of eastern Ukraine.

But there is also a more profound and sinister aspect to the Moscow cheque. Since at least 2009 Russia has actively cultivated links with the far right in eastern Europe. It has established ties with Hungary’s Jobbik, Slovakia’s far-right People’s party and Bulgaria’s nationalist, anti-EU Attack movement. Here, political elites have become increasingly sympathetic to pro-Putin views.

According to Political Capital, a Budapest-based research institute which first observed this trend, the Kremlin has recently been wooing the far-right in western Europe as well. In a report in March it argued that Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is now a “phenomenon seen all over Europe”. Moscow’s goal is to promote its economic and political interests – and in particular to ensure the EU remains heavily dependent on Russian gas.

In Soviet times the KGB used “active measures” to sponsor front organisations in the west including pro-Moscow communist parties. The Kremlin didn’t invent Europe’s far-right parties. But in an analogous way Moscow is now lending them support, political and financial, thereby boosting European neo-fascism.

In part this kinship is about ideology or, as Political Capital puts it, “post-communist neo-conservatism”. The European far right and the Kremlin are united by their hostility to the EU. Since becoming president for the third time in 2012, Putin has been busy promoting his vision for a rival Eurasian Union. This is an alternative political bloc meant to encompass now-independent Soviet republics, with Moscow rather than Brussels as the dominant pole.

The Kremlin has also discovered that the western political system is weak, permeable and susceptible to foreign cash. Putin has always believed that European politicians, like Russian ones, can be bought if the money is right. According to US diplomatic cables leaked in 2010, Silvio Berlusconi has benefited “personally and handsomely” from energy deals with Russia; the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Putin’s greatest European ally, sits on the board of the Nord Steam Russian-German gas pipeline.

Far-right and rightwing British politicians, meanwhile, have also expressed their admiration for Russia’s ex-KGB president. In March Nigel Farage named Putin as the world leader he most admires, and praised the “brilliant” way “he handled the whole Syria thing”. In 2011 the BNP’s Nick Griffin went to Moscow to observe Russia’s Duma election. Afterwards he announced that “Russian elections are much fairer than Britain’s”. Last week Griffin tweeted praise for Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language TV propaganda news channel: “RT – For People Who Want the Truth”.

There are many ironies here. In his state of the nation address last Friday, Putin implicitly compared the west to Hitler, and said it was plotting Russia’s dismemberment and collapse. In March Putin defended his land-grab in Crimea by arguing he was rescuing the peninsula from Ukrainian “fascists”. A few weeks later a motley group of radical rightwing European populists turned up in Crimea to watch its hastily arranged “referendum”.

Tactically, Russia is exploiting the popular dissent against the EU – fuelled by both immigration and austerity. But as rightwing movements grow in influence across the continent, Europe must wake up to their insidious means of funding, or risk seeing its own institutions subverted.

Switzerland's immigration 'victory' over the EU is a fairytale sold by the far right

Eurosceptics are lining up in praise of the defiant vote, but the fallout for Swiss people could be devastating

• 
• • Claudia Gnehm-Laubscher
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 11 February 2014 17.40 GMT

The French National Front party leader Marine Le Pen. Photograph: Nicolas Tucat/AFP/Getty Images

The winners of the Swiss referendum on EU immigration now tell a story that has become ingrained in Swiss lore: that poor, powerless peasants have cast off their evil foreign lords and masters. Not surprising, then, that after engineering the victory, the billionaire member of parliament Christoph Blocher, of the populist rightwing Swiss Peoples Party (SVP), stated: "Now we take power in our own hands again, the government must represent the will of the Swiss people in Brussels – the sooner the better."

The supposed victory of the Swiss David over the EU Goliath has been applauded by Geert Wilders of the Dutch far-right Freedom Party (PVV) and in France by Marine Le Pen's National Front. The Eurosceptic FPÖ in Austria and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are also now demanding that voters in their countries should have the same say on EU matters, particularly immigration.

Switzerland, however, is a poor model for these countries to emulate. The Swiss don't need an EU exit because all they have is à la carte bilateral accords with the union. The free movement of citizens was the bitter pill the right had to swallow for goodies such as participation in EU research programmes, transit agreements, or police and asylum co-operation. Thanks to the latter, Switzerland can, for example, repatriate asylum seekers to EU countries.

If Britain, the Netherlands and other countries think they can break away from the EU while cherry-picking the bits they still want, like the Swiss have, they are dreaming. Switzerland could only ever opt for an all-or-nothing agreement – with a guillotine clause. This means that if one bilateral agreement is broken, as far as the EU is concerned all the rest is invalid too, and the fallout is potentially devastating. The Swiss business community, our hospitals, schools and colleges, tourism and the building industry which rely on an EU workforce are appalled. Students who benefit from EU exchange programmes and the energy sector which wants to sell its storage capacity to the EU all now fear that their future is called into question.

To see Switzerland as a role model for autonomy or the repatriation of sovereignty is a misjudgment of the reality. The more bilateral accords Switzerland gathered, the clearer it became that Switzerland was merely enacting EU law in a "self-governed" way. Autonomy was an illusion. In 2012, the council and the commission of the EU made clear to the Swiss that no new bilateral agreements would be possible unless Switzerland took on board all future EU reforms and developments. Since then, Swiss demands for a bilateral agreement on services and energy have stalled – and now there will be no accord anytime soon.

Of course, Blocher and his followers still believe that the EU will give us a helping hand whenever we need it. But what EU governments want from Switzerland is tax on the undeclared money of their citizens deposited in Swiss banks. Blocher's story of the poor peasant who opposes the foreign king is, in the face of Swiss wealth, ridiculous. The Italians whose workers are no longer welcome in Switzerland now say they want the tax being hidden by Italians in Swiss bank accounts – and if necessary they will name and shame tax dodgers like Germany does.

If anything Switzerland should be a bad model for EU countries. It was not only ultra-conservatives in the Swiss-German countryside who voted in favour of ending EU immigration. It was also the many workers, faced with competition from cheaper migrant labour, commuters in overcrowded trains and middle-class families who can no longer afford flats in the cities. Yet these moderate voters – they are estimated to account for 20% of the yes voters – received little to calm their fears. They wanted rent controls, measures to guard against wage dumping and minimum salaries. But there was no clear support from employer associations, the companies that profit most from the free movement of workers, nor the government.

So their perfectly rational concerns were exploited by the fear campaign waged by the rich Pied Pipers of the right. There are many more such Pied Pipers going around Europe with easy, popular solutions, including the scapegoating of immigrants, in an attempt to win the votes of those with justifiable fears. Switzerland has an unemployment rate of 3.5%; there is a lot to lose.

Switzerland is not a model for more wealth with autonomy in the EU. Its competitive advantages such as banking secrecy and low holding taxation are waning, and its most important resource, the brain power of the people, is now curtailed by immigration quotas. Switzerland is a stark warning to those EU companies, organisations and professionals who reap the fruits of the single market and the globalised economy, while giving little or no thought to the millions of ordinary workers who would miss out if the EU project came unstuck.

Take the enemy to lunch

Elizabeth Lesser - Take the Other to Lunch

The right to Offend

Pritish Nandy in The Times of India

Implicit in the freedoms we cherish in our democracy is our right to offend. (Editor - Is this so?) That is the cornerstone of all free thought and its expression. In a country as beautiful and complex as ours, it is our inalienable right to offend that makes us the nation we are. Of course I also recognise the fact that this right attaches to itself many risks, including the risk of being targeted. But as long as these risks are within reasonable, well defined limits, most people will take them in their stride. I am ready to defend my right to offend in any debate or a court of law. But it’s not fine when mobs come to lynch you. It’s not right, when they vandalise your home or burn your books or art or stop you from showing your film or, what’s becoming more frequent, hire thugs to kill you. Authors, journalists, painters, and now even activists and rationalists are being openly attacked and murdered.

It’s a constant challenge to walk the tightrope; to know exactly where to draw the line when you write, paint, speak.(Editor - Isn't this contradictory to the implicit right to offend statement at the introduction?) The funny thing is truth has no limits, no frontiers. When you want to say something you strongly believe in, there is no point where you can stop. The truth is always whole. When you draw a line, as discretion suggests, you encourage half truths and falsehoods being foisted on others, you subvert your conscience. In some cases it’s not even possible to draw a line. A campaigner against corruption can never stop midway through his campaign even though he knows exactly at which point the truth invites danger, extreme danger. Yet India is a brave nation and there are many common people, ordinary citizens with hardly any resources and no one to protect them who are ready to go out on a limb and say it as it is. They are the ones who keep our democracy burning bright.

Every few days you read about a journalist killed. About RTI activists murdered for exposing what is in the public interest. You read about people campaigning for a cause (like Narendra Dabholkar, who fought against superstitions, human sacrifices, babas and tantriks) being gunned down in cold blood. Even before the police can start investigations, the crime is invariably politicised. Issues of religion, caste, community, political affiliation are dragged in only to complicate (read obfuscate) the crime and, before you know it, the story dies because some other, even more ugly crime is committed somewhere else and draws away the headlines and your attention. And when that happens, criminals get away. We are today an attention deficit nation because there’s so much happening everywhere, all pretty awful stuff, that it’s impossible for anyone to stay focused.

Even fame and success can’t protect you. Dr Dabholkar was a renowned rationalist, a man of immaculate credentials. Yet he was gunned down by fanatics who thought he was endangering their trade in cheating poor and gullible people. Husain was our greatest living painter. He was forced into exile in his 80s because zealots refused to let him live and work in peace here. They vandalised his art; hunted down his shows, ransacked them. Yet Husain, as I knew him, was as ardent a Hindu as anyone else. His paintings on the Mahabharata are the stuff legends are made of. A pusillanimous Government lacked the will to intervene.

Another bunch of jerks made it impossible for Salman Rushdie to attend a litfest in Jaipur. Or go to Kolkata because Mamata Banerjee wanted to appease a certain section of her vote bank. For the same reason Taslima Nasreen was thrown out of Kolkata in 2007 by the CPM Government. Even local cartoonists in the state are today terrified to exercise their right to offend simply because Mamata has no sense of humour. Remember the young college girl on a TV show who asked her an inconvenient question? Remember how she reacted?

When we deny ourselves the right to offend, we deny ourselves the possibility of change. That’s how societies become brutal, moribund, disgustingly boring. Is this what you want? If the answer is No and you want to stay a free citizen, insist on your right to offend. If enough people do that, change is not just inevitable. It's assured. And change is what defines a living culture.

Fleeing the light - Political Parties and The Right to Information Act

ARUNA ROY

NIKHIL DEY in THE HINDU

  

 

Political parties have acted as judge, jury, supplicant and advocate in their move to amend the RTI Act and exempt themselves from its purview. Their rhetoric on transparency is more hollow than ever

A friend called the other day, and said: “I want to congratulate all of you in the RTI community, because you have managed to do what no one, and nothing else has managed to for a long time: bring about unity and unanimity in the political class.” His comment, laced with irony and sarcasm was not far from the truth.

The Central Information Commission (CIC) decision to classify political parties as public authorities and bring them under the RTI Act has kicked up a storm in our democratic polity.

The reaction of the parties to the Central Information Commission order that political parties will be considered public authorities under the RTI has been poor in content and abysmal in form. It is a pity that the opportunity provided for the politician to transform into a statesman is lost in the muddle of apprehension and self-interest. For a country that is unanimous in its opinion that electoral politics and democratic governance are being perverted by the undue influence of money, and vested interests, both the content and the form of reaction are important.

Let us understand the content first. Through the one line amendment, political parties in parliament are seeking to carve out an exclusive space for themselves beyond the reach and purview of the RTI Act. While all other associations or bodies constituted by law, can come under the purview of the RTI Act, an insertion “explains” that by law, this will exclude any association of persons registered under the Representation of Peoples Act.

Here are a set of implications that arise from this quick and potentially decisive amendment: The representatives of the people, have made it clear that they do not want to be answerable to the people. By removing themselves completely from the purview of the transparency law, they are preventing any obligation they might have to directly answer any query from the citizen on any issue.

This amendment dramatically exposes the extent of doublespeak. Many politicians have shared their concern with the growing influence of money, and even political parties have expressed distress that the use of unaccounted money is completely perverting the democratic political system. While parties across the spectrum have publicly reiterated their commitment to full financial transparency, the content of this “consensual” amendment has revealed the truth. By proposing a blanket exemption for themselves from the RTI Act, it is clear that they are not willing to answer questions of the citizen on anything- even financial matters.

Credibility gap

The yawning gap between ‘statements submitted’ and real expenditure during elections is no secret. Recent statements by politicians have exposed dramatically what real election spending to "secure" a seat means. This does not end with party issues but also determines key appointments in government. Is it surprising that the citizen wants to know where the money comes from and where it goes?

This amendment would negate one of the biggest opportunities we have had to identify, and fight the misuse of money in politics. Let us not have any illusions. Fighting corruption, and corporate/commercial influence in politics is only possible with the help of the ordinary citizen. The RTI has evolved into a decentralised process that allows an ordinary person to interface at her own expense and with her constitutional legitimacy as a sovereign citizen. The multiple uses of the Act to improve government functioning are so many that they defy enumeration. Accepting applicability of the RTI is therefore seen as the one stated intent of any structure to lay itself open to scrutiny and accountability. It is the many questions that citizens will pose, in a million places across the country, that will shine the torch, search, probe, expose, audit, and actually help regulatory institutions like the income tax department, and the election commission to eventually bring about real change and political reform.

Legitimate objections

This is not to say that we do not understand the complexities of political activity, and the need to keep some internal discussions out of the public domain. We do not feel that every question that is asked by every citizen needs to be answered under this, or any other law. The technical reading of the Act by the CIC brought political parties under the purview of the RTI Act as public authorities. The technical implication of being classified a ‘public authority’ has led to many legitimate objections from party leaders. Even with the current CIC decision, the concerns could have been “technically” addressed without amending the act – even through some amendments to the rules, perhaps. After all, even the defence establishment keeps strategy and internal matters out of the public domain while subjecting itself to, and benefiting from the purview of the RTI Act.

The nature of the political response has been even more disappointing and unacceptable. When a privileged class closes ranks to impose its decision, it is “technicalities” with the inevitable fallout that will determine the outcomes. Politicians know that substantive constitutional principles override technicalities of law. That is why perhaps in this case alone they were not willing to take the risk of taking the CIC decision to court.

And now the likelihood is that they will pass this amendment in their own court without even allowing the matter to go to the Standing Committee of Parliament. Can any institution be judge, jury, supplicant, and advocate, in a matter in relation to itself? Is this interpretation of privilege constitutional? Is it ethical or logical?

Eventually, none of us want to weaken the political system, or burden it with questions that will not allow it to function. But a blanket exemption can surely not be the means to make a political system strong, transparent, and accountable. This has led to the belief that freedom in internal matters and strategy like candidate selection is only a red herring to take the attention away from the real worry of financial disclosures.

If there had to be an amendment, it was incumbent upon parliamentarians to show that the political class was going to overcome technicalities to improve the scope of the law, not curtail it. People focus on substantive issues- not the technicalities. They want parties to live up to their rhetoric of transparency, and their stated desire to fight corruption in politics. This was in fact a historic opportunity lost to the exigencies of obvious and immediate self- preservation. It could have been used to enforce greater transparency not only amongst the political class, but also to expand direct coverage of the RTI to all institutions and organisations who spend public funds. In finding the substantively correct way of broadening coverage of the RTI, the political class, would not only have created a standard for themselves, but for the whole fabric of Indian society.

That would have been a huge quantum leap towards a healthy and ethical society.