Pakistani Author Tarek Fatah in Aap Ki Adalat 2016

Nissan is an early sign of the downturns and the divisions Brexit could bring

Will Hutton in The Guardian

One of the few advantages of Brexit is that the unfolding debacle may be the trigger for the deep economic, political and constitutional reform that Britain so badly needs. It will only be by living through the searing events ahead that people will become convinced that the indulgent Eurosceptic untruths they have been fed are not only economically disastrous but open the way to forms of racism that most Britons, Leave voters included, instinctively find repellent. Brexit will force home some brutal realities.

Leave voters in Sunderland – 61% in favour – will have woken up on Friday to the news that Renault Nissan, the largest car plant in Europe and a crucial pillar of the local economy, employing 7,000 people, has deferred all new investment until the details of Brexit are clear. The chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, explained that it was not because the company did not value its Sunderland plant, its most efficient. Rather, as a major exporter to the EU, its profitability depends on the prevailing tariff regime, which promises to change sharply for the worse. “Important investment decisions,” he said, “would not be made in the dark.”

It is hard to fault Ghosn’s reasoning. Gaining control of EU immigration is both a matter of personal conviction and a political necessity for Theresa May. But how can that be squared with ongoing membership of the customs union that defines the single market and which requires acceptance of free movement? Concessions can only be minimal without wrecking the EU’s core structures. Moreover, the Tory hard Brexiters, wedded to the notion of a clean break from an EU they detest, are in the political ascendancy.

One senior official tells me that a hard Brexit is inevitable: the best that can be hoped for is perhaps some agreement on the movement of skilled people, but beyond that the future is trading on the terms organised by the World Trade Organisation.

If so, Renault Nissan will face up to 10% tariffs on the cars it ships to the EU. Unless the UK government is prepared to compensate it, a bill that could top £350m a year, it cannot make new investments. The Sunderland economy will be devastated. The same is true for the entire UK car industry. Last Wednesday,Jaguar Land Rover made similar remarks: if the position had been more explicit and fairly reported rather than airily dismissed as Project Fear, the wafer-thin 3,800 majority for Leave in Birmingham might have switched their vote.

Every part of our economy involved in selling into Europe will be affected both by the rise in tariffs and by the new necessity to guarantee that our products and services meet EU regulatory standards, the so-called passport. This doesn’t only apply to the City where 5,500 UK registered firms turn out to hold the invaluable passport, but to tens of thousand of companies across the economy.

The Brexiters insist the losses will be more than compensated for by the wave of trade deals now open to be signed, but trade deals take many years to negotiate. More crucially, there is no free-trade world out there; rather, there is a series of painstakingly constructed, reciprocal entries to markets, the biggest of which we are now abandoning. Liam Fox is delusional, as former business minister, Anna Soubry, declares, to pretend otherwise.

Nor do hard Brexiters confront the fact that alongside China and the US, Britain has accumulated a stunning $1tn-plus stock of foreign direct investment. Nearly 500 multinationals have regional or global headquarters here, more than twice the rest of Europe combined. They are here to take advantage of our ultra pro-business environment – so much for the Eurosceptic babble about being stifled by Brussels – and trade freely with the EU. Britain was becoming a combination of New York and California, with a whole continental hinterland in which to trade. Hard Brexit kills all that stone dead and puts phantoms in its place.

The years ahead will be ones of economic dislocation and stagnation. But the impact goes well beyond the economic. Hard Brexit legitimises anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant sentiment. When Britain’s flag outside the EU institutions is brought down and Messrs Farage, Davis, Johnson, Redwood, Fox et al delightedly hail the sovereignty and supremacy of Britishness, it could signal a new round of street-baiting of anybody who does not look and sound British: expect more attacks on Poles and Czechs from Essex to Yorkshire.

Politicians of right and left are fighting shy of delivering the condemnation this deserves. Rachel Reeves’s remarks at the Labour fringe, warning of a social explosion if immigration were not immediately curbed, show how far the permissible discourse on immigration and race has changed. Britain has moved over the past 50 years from being one of the most equal countries in Europe to the most unequal. The result is rising social tension, with immigration the tinder for enmity and hate. The hard-working immigrants who add so much vitality and energy to our society are blamed for ills that have deeper roots. Brexit has made this harder to say.

This conjunction of the economically and socially noxious horrifies not only me but also many Tories. Scotland’s Ruth Davidson, a bevy of ex-ministers, some in the cabinet and a large number of backbenchers are keenly aware of the slippery racist, culturally regressive and economically calamitous course their Brexiter colleagues are set on and are ready to fight for the soul of their party. George Osborne is positioning himself as their leader. It is an impending civil war, mirroring parallel feelings in the country at large.

Beyond that, the referendum raised profound constitutional questions. In other democracies, treaty and constitutional changes require at least 60% majorities in either the legislature or in a referendum. Britain’s unwritten constitution offers no such rules: a parliamentary majority confers monarchial power so a referendum can be called without any such framing. Article 50 is to be invoked without a parliamentary vote: a change of government in effect without a general election.

In good times, the constitution interests only obsessives. Suddenly, Britain’s constitutional vacuity is part of a deep national crisis. The economic and political structures, along with the biased media, that delivered this are rotten. The question is whether the will – and political coalitions – can be built to reform them. If not, Britain is sliding towards nasty, sectarian decline.

Trumper, Pujara and the art of dominating a spinner

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo

It was a distinct pleasure to watch India bat in the first Test against New Zealand. It was good to see spin bowling played so well.

I especially enjoyed the play of Cheteshwar Pujara. I love the way he quickly gets back to either play a forcing shot through the covers or a pull to the midwicket boundary. Many batsmen limit themselves by "closing off" when they play the pull shot, but Pujara opens up, thrusting his left leg towards the square-leg umpire, and creates a wider arc in which to place the ball. He was well supported by M Vijay, a dangerous opponent because he handles the new ball competently and can extend his innings by playing spin bowling well. This pair and Virat Kohli give India a trifecta of batsmen who can dictate terms to opposition spinners.

As well as watching the Test on television, I was also in the process of reading Gideon Haigh's excellent new book, Stroke of Genius. It's about Victor Trumper's batting artistry captured in one photograph, titled "Jumping Out". In his playing days, Trumper extolled the virtue of footwork with this simple philosophy: "Spoil a bowler's length and you've got him."

This statement accords with the best use of the feet against a top-class legspinner that I've witnessed. Following VVS Laxman's magnificent 2000-01 series against Australia in general and Shane Warne in particular, I asked Warne how he thought he had bowled. "I didn't think I bowled badly," replied Warne. "You didn't," I answered. "When a batsman comes out three metres and drives you wide of mid-on and then when you go higher and shorter to tempt him with the next delivery, he's quickly onto the back foot and pulls through midwicket, that's not bad bowling."
In the words of Trumper, Laxman's nimble footwork, ensured "he'd got him [Warne]." It's this type of decisive footwork that allows a batsman to dictate the bowler's field placings. Both Pujara and Vijay did this exquisitely by employing the late cut and either the square cut or the forcing shot off the back foot. By playing both shots, they forced the fielding captain to place a man behind as well as just in front of point. When a captain has to expend two men patrolling a limited area, it leaves some inviting gaps elsewhere.

Good footwork is not only decisive, it's also physically demanding if you play a long innings. Pujara, like my former team-mate Doug Walters, the best player of offspin bowling I've seen, pushes back with intent. If Mitchell Santner had done something similar instead of just swivelling in the crease, his admirable rearguard action may have continued longer.

Too many batsmen are easily tempted into lazy footwork. They either prop forward one pace or just swivel on the back foot rather than advancing to attack the delivery or quickly retreating to allow more time to place the shot.

Some right-hand batsmen also limit themselves by moving outside off stump to thwart offspinners. This theory is flawed because it's based on survival rather than on developing a method that creates more scoring opportunities as opposed to than fewer.

As well as stifling scoring opportunities, this theory also opens batsmen up to being ambushed by smart bowlers like R Ashwin. He achieved such a dismissal when he cleverly out-thought Ish Sodhi to bowl him behind his pads.

The more proficient a spin bowler, the more attacking a batsman's thought process needs to be. This doesn't mean coming up with ways to belt him to or over the boundary but rather thinking of how to score regularly and frustrate the spinner. This is a demanding process both physically and mentally and isn't achieved by lazy or leaden footwork.

For some time India has been the leading light in producing batsmen who are devoid of gimmicks and rely on tried and tested methods to score at every opportunity. Whatever development methods India are employing for their young batsmen, the rest of the cricket world should start taking notice.

Saudi Arabia is the flagging horse of the Gulf – but Britain is still backing it as an answer to Brexit

Patrick Cockburn in The Independent


Why does the British Government devote so much time and effort to cultivating the rulers of Bahrain, a tiny state notorious for imprisoning and torturing its critics? It is doing so when a Bahraini court is about to sentence the country’s leading human rights advocate, Nabeel Rajab, who has been held in isolation in a filthy cell full of ants and cockroaches, to as much as 15 years in prison for sending tweets criticising torture in Bahrain and the Saudi bombardment of Yemen.

Yet it has just been announced that Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, are to make an official visit to Bahrain in November with the purpose of improving relations with Britain. It is not as though Bahrain has been short of senior British visitors of late, with the International Trade Minister Liam Fox going there earlier in September to meet the Crown Prince, Prime Minister and commerce minister. And, if this was not enough, in the last few days the Foreign Office Minister of State for Europe, Sir Alan Duncan, found it necessary to pay a visit to Bahrain where he met King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa and the interior minister, Sheikh Rashid al-Khalifa, whose ministry is accused of being responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses on the island since the Arab Spring protests there were crushed in 2011 with the assistance of Saudi troops.

Quite why Sir Alan, who might be thought to have enough on his plate in dealing with his area of responsibility in Europe in the era of Brexit, should find it necessary to visit Bahrain remains something of mystery. Sayed Ahmed Alwadei, director of advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, asks: “Why is Alan Duncan in Bahrain? He has no reasonable business being there as Minister of State for Europe” But Sir Alan does have a long record of befriending the Gulf monarchies, informing a journalist in July that Saudi Arabia “is not a dictatorship”.

The flurry of high level visits to Bahrain comes as Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, awaits sentencing on next week on three charges stemming from his use of social media. These relates to Rajab tweeting and retweeting about torture in Bahrain’s Jau prison and the humanitarian crisis caused by Saudi-led bombing in Yemen. After he published an essay entitled “Letter From a Bahrain Jail” in the The New York Times a month ago, he was charged with publishing “false news and statements and malicious rumours that undermines the prestige of the kingdom”.

This “prestige” has taken a battering since 2011 when pro-democracy protesters, largely belonging to the Shia majority on the island, were savagely repressed by the security forces. Ever since, the Sunni monarchy has done everything to secure and reinforce its power, not hesitating to inflame Sunni-Shia tensions by stripping the country’s most popular Shia cleric, Sheikh Isa Qassim, of his citizenship on the grounds that he was serving the interests of a foreign power.

Repression has escalated since May with the suspension of the main Shia opposition party, al-Wifaq, and an extension to the prison sentence of its leader, Sheikh Ali Salman. The al-Khalifa dynasty presumably calculates that US and British objections to this clampdown are purely for the record and can safely be disregarded. The former Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond claimed unblushingly earlier this year that Bahrain was “travelling in the right direction” when it came to human rights and political reform. Evidently, this masquerade of concern for the rights of the majority in Bahrain is now being discarded, as indicated by the plethora of visits.

There are reasons which have nothing to do with human rights motivating the British Government, such as the recent agreement to expand a British naval base on the island with the expansion being paid for by Bahrain. In its evidence to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Government said that UK naval facilities on the island give “the Royal Navy the ability to operate not only in the Gulf but well beyond in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and North West Indian Ocean”. Another expert witness claimed that for Britain “the kingdom is a substitute for an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in the Gulf”.

These dreams of restored naval might are probably unrealistic, though British politicians may be particularly susceptible to them at the moment, imagining that Britain can rebalance itself politically and economically post-Brexit by closer relations with old semi-dependent allies such as the Gulf monarchies. These rulers ultimately depend on US and British support to stay in power, however many arms they buy. Bahrain matters more than it looks because it is under strong Saudi influence and what pleases its al-Khalifa rulers pleases the House of Saud.

But in kowtowing so abjectly to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf kingdoms, Britain may be betting on a flagging horse at the wrong moment. Britain, France and – with increasing misgivings – the US have gone along since 2011 with the Gulf state policy of regime change in Libya and Syria. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in combination with Turkey, have provided crucial support for the armed opposition to Bashar al-Assad. Foreign envoys seeking to end the Syrian war since 2011 were struck by British and French adherence to the Saudi position, even though it meant a continuance of the war which has destabilised the region and to a mass exodus of refugees heading for Western Europe.

Whatever the Saudis and Gulf monarchies thought they were doing in Syria, it has not worked. They have been sawing off the branch on which they are sitting by spreading chaos and directly or indirectly supporting the rise of al-Qaeda-type organisations like Isis and al-Nusra. Likewise in their rivalry with Iran and the Shia powers, the Sunni monarchies are on the back foot, having escalated a ferocious war in Yemen which they are failing to win.

In the past week Saudi Arabia has suffered two setbacks that are as serious as any of these others: on Wednesday the US Congress voted overwhelmingly to override a presidential veto enabling the families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. In terms of US public opinion, the Saudi rulers are at last paying a price for their role in spreading Sunni extremism and for the bombing of Yemen. The Saudi brand is becoming toxic in the US as politicians respond to a pervasive belief among voters that there is Saudi complicity in the spread of terrorism and war.

The second Saudi setback is different, but also leaves it weaker. At the Opec conference in Algiers, Saudi Arabia dropped its long-term policy of pumping as much oil as it could, and agreed to production cuts in order to raise the price of crude. A likely motivation was simple shortage of money. The prospects for the new agreement are cloudy but it appears that Iran has got most of what it wanted in returning to its pre-sanctions production level. It is too early to see Saudi Arabia and its Gulf counterparts as on an inevitable road to decline, but their strength is ebbing.