Anglo - EU Translation Guide

Cheating isn’t cheating if you don’t think it is

Luis Suárez's handball: Cheating isn’t cheating if you don’t think it is

Football is only a reflection of that society - and that doesn't say much about us

Mark Steel in The Independent

Luis Suárez should be given a job in the Cabinet. He’s the footballer who’s been called a cheat, after he handled the ball just before scoring a goal for Liverpool in the FA Cup, and experts are undecided as to how he should be dealt with. And you can see the difficulty, because with such a brazen attitude towards cheating, he ought to be running one of our major institutions.

Suárez appears to have grasped how society’s rules have changed. Under the old system, if you cheated you hoped you weren’t caught. Now you don’t mind getting caught, you just announce that cheating isn’t really breaking any rules, and carry on. Football is only a reflection of that society.

So in his next match, Suárez could place the ball in a Sherman tank and drive it through the goal, flanked by marines who assassinate the opposing goalkeeper. His manager would say, “I can’t comment as I didn’t see the incident, but his first touch was astounding”. Match of the Day would debate whether the commandos were interfering with play. And after he’d scored 60 goals this way, the Football Association would set up an inquiry, in which Suárez would say he couldn’t recall ever playing football in his life. The inquiry would propose a limit on the number of tanks in each half but this wouldn’t be implemented as Suárez would be outraged at the restrictions on his freedom.

Or he could learn from the Deputy Prime Minister, by pledging to abolish handball at all times in every way, including by the goalkeeper, with fines for anyone who even carries the ball to the ground. And then spend the next match throwing balls in the goal, before announcing: “I’m really, really sorry to have made such a foolish promise. I’m sure you’ll understand that from now on I’m going to do this in every match.”

Maybe the first part of each footballer’s training now is to study the banks. The coach says: “This lot were caught bringing the whole economic system down, but did they bother looking sheepish? No, they insisted on an extra bonus as it would be even harder clearing up the mess than it was causing it. If they can do that after causing a global recession, you can do it after diving in the box.”

As the attitude towards cheating is so similar in different fields, football pundits should be regular guests on the news. So Alan Shearer could say: “You can see from this angle, the police have definitely falsified 116 documents, but the ref hasn’t blown the whistle so they’ve got away with it.”

Some commentators suggested that Suárez should have owned up to his foul, but with the modern rules, even if he’d announced on the Tannoy, “I punched that ball in the goal ha ha ha”, the referee would have let it stand, but suggested at some point in the future someone should set up a self-regulating body made up of prominent figures from the handballing community.

Chav-bashing – a bad joke turning into bilious policy

It started as snobbery, but this week the idea that the poor are to blame for their plight may well become law

• 
• • John Harris
  • The Guardian, Monday 7 January 2013

'In almost everything we now hear about economic disadvantage, to be one of the economy's losers isn't about being a vicitm of forces beyond your control, but character failings'. Photograph: ALIKI SAPOUNTZI / aliki image li/Alamy

Six years ago, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about a phenomenon that had been bubbling away for a few years, and had started to become inescapable. It all seems rather quaint now: Prince William allegedly taking part in a "chav-themed fancy dress party" at Sandhurst; Oxford colleges hosting "chav bops"; the privately educated creators of Little Britain entertaining their devotees with comedic representations of the so-called underclass. But there it was: to be living on an estate, and in receipt of benefits, and possibly out of work, was to not just to be fair game for Oxford undergraduates, the future king and a certain kind of TV comedian, but the butt of a huge national joke. Some of us wondered where exactly what was briefly known as "The New Snobbery" was headed.

We now know. Its cultural aspects were merely the tip of the iceberg – as the Labour party engaged in the rebranding of social security as "welfare" and its ministers raged against "benefit cheats", something poisonous was being embedded at the core of our national life. While the Conservative party grimaced through a fleeting modernisation, it sat there, ready to be picked up by a Tory-led administration and taken to its logical conclusion.

Tuesday sees the Commons vote on the welfare uprating bill, via which the government wants to cap increases in working-age benefits at 1% and in the process portray Labour as – to quote the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley – the party of "skiving fat slobs". Throughout the coming year, the grim provisions of the Welfare Reform Act will be upon us, snatching away money from hundreds of thousands of people, and commencing the uncertain era of universal credit. It is a token of the government's agenda that in moving in on just about anyone who receives state help (apart from those electorally vital pensioners), they are simultaneously lionising hard-working families while snatching money off them – which is the basis of Labour's creditable opposition to the bill, though that does not quite let them off the hook. Most of the opposition seem incapable of challenging the "strivers v skivers" dichotomy, and are therefore leaving one modern shibboleth unchallenged: that even with swaths of the country economically dead, to be on out-of-work benefits is to be degenerate, and unable to grasp the soul-cleansing wonders of toil, however low paid.

Meanwhile, the same people who rage against the nanny state have become its loudest advocates. Last week, in partnership with a thinktank called the Local Government Information Unit, Westminster council came up with a report that was seemingly based on a neo-Hogarthian caricature of people on limited incomes – again, many of them actually in work. The text said this: "The increasing use of smart cards for access to leisure facilities, for instance, provides councils with a significant amount of data on usage patterns. Where an exercise package is prescribed to a resident, housing and council tax benefit payments could be varied to reward or incentivise residents." To translate: they should be able to pack anyone who is obese and on benefits off to the gym, on pain of having their money cut.

Just before Christmas, the Tory backbench MP Alec Shelbrooke issued a private member's bill proposing that all benefits aside from pensions and those covering disability be delivered via a "welfare cash card" that would only cover "priority purchases" and outlaw "luxury goods such as cigarettes, alcohol, Sky television and gambling". He was echoing noises made by people at the top of government: in June 2012, in a speech on future welfare reform, David Cameron floated the idea of paying benefits "in kind". Iain Duncan Smith is working on the same idea for "problem families". This is nothing to do with practical policy: it is about grandstanding on the basis of crass stereotypes, and the Victorian idea that only the affluent should be allowed pleasure – not to mention a weird definition of "luxury".

Last week came my favourite outburst so far. Free-market oracle John Redwood said in response to news that bookmakers are situating the majority of their addictive fixed-odds gambling machines in areas where most people don't have much money: "I put it down to the fact that poor people believe there's one shot to get rich. They put getting rich down to luck and think they can take a gamble. They also have time on their hands. My voters" – he's the MP for Wokingham, in Berkshire – "are too busy working hard to make a reasonable income." Note that distinction between people who are poor, and those who are "too busy working hard", as if he has not bothered to think about who it is who empties his office bin.

In almost everything we now hear about economic disadvantage, there is the same belief, embodied in such government schemes as the Work Programme, that 40-plus years of deindustrialisation matters not, and to be one of the economy's losers isn't about being a victim of forces beyond your control, but character failings.

This, it's often said, is what the majority of the public believe, but perhaps things are more complicated. Last week, the TUC put out the results of a survey by YouGov. On average, people apparently think 41% of the social security budget goes to those who are unemployed, and 27% is spent on fraudulent claims, whereas the true figures are 3% and 0.7% respectively. However, while 48% of people support the welfare uprating bill, 63% think benefits should go up in line with wages, prices or both. In other words, many people are confused, and their answers depend on how you phrase the questions. Funny, that.

You will not turn this unprecedented tide of nastiness and bigotry by using statistics. If it can be stopped, that will happen via arguments built on emotion, and a conversation about exactly what kind of country we ought to be. A shame, perhaps, that Rowan Williams has left Lambeth Palace: he did a pretty good job of opposing a lot of what the government was doing to the benefits system, and apparently brought most of his church with him. A pity, too, that whereas past attacks on the welfare state sparked revolts that were expressed culturally just as much as politically, people who write TV dramas, plays, songs and novels seem to have little interest in what's happening.

Over the next 12 months, some of the fundamentals of Britain's future will become clear. In the meantime, consider the words of writer and artist John Berger, written 20 or so years ago, but pertinent today: "The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash."

There is a problem with welfare, but it's not 'shirkers'

This economic model isn't delivering jobs or decent wages. The real scroungers are greedy landlords and employers

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013 22.20 GMT

‘The costs of systemic failure have ­ballooned: long-term ­unemployment has ­increased by 146% since 2010.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The glee and class contempt with which Britain's Tory leaders have set about this week's onslaught on welfare has been an object lesson in the cynical venom at the heart of David Cameron's coalition. To force through cuts in the living standards of the poorest people in the country, demonisation and division have been the order of the day.

The Conservatives back workers not shirkers, the prime minister declared, as George Osborne pictured an honest shift worker passing the closed blinds of a skiver "sleeping off a life on benefits". Tory MP John Redwood insisted betting firms target deprived areas because the poor have too much "time on their hands".

Having softened up their audience with a press campaign of tales of "scroungers" and fraudsters, the Tories couldn't have been clearer about their purpose: to turn the low paid against the unemployed, just as they've tried to set private sector against public sector workers – and the Victorians separated the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Having drawn their toxic dividing line, the game has then been to put Labour on the wrong side, in the scroungers' camp. Hence the Conservative poster campaign in advance of yesterday's Commons vote on the coalition plan to make the first general real terms benefit cuts since the 1930s, declaring: "Today Labour are voting to increase benefits by more than workers' wages."

But the signs are that the skivers versus strivers talk has been backfiring. Even Cameron's dog-whistle spinman, Lynton Crosby, has been getting worried about the tone. So no wonder Nick Clegg, who claims to be on a journey to "the centre ground", wants to dissociate his Lib Dems from the nakedly nasty party.

As the impact of this year's benefit squeeze hits home, the backlash is likely to grow. Far from targeting "shirkers", the three-year benefit and tax credit cap doesn't even mainly target the unemployed. More than 60% of those who will lose out are in work.

Among the "scroungers" Cameron will be clamping down on are 300,000 nurses, 150,000 teachers and 40,000 soldiers. The real terms cut will hit the poorest, lone parents, the disabled and women hardest, according to the government's own assessment. It will increase inequality and help tip hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

Just as 8,000 millionaires are about to get an average tax cut of over £107,000 and food banks are booming, the coalition is driving through a benefit squeeze that swamps the rise in tax allowances and targets the most vulnerable – already subject to a string of other cuts and new charges, from disability allowances to council tax.

Ministers claim the end of child benefit for the better-off in some way balances the attack on means-tested benefits. But not only is child benefit set apart in being paid overwhelmingly to women: like all universal benefits it helps to create a common social interest, can be offset with progressive taxation and becomes far easier to hack away at once restricted to the lower paid.

Of course, these cuts are being made in the name of deficit reduction. In reality, even if the logic of the coalition's austerity programme is accepted, there are plenty of other ways to find the savings made from capping benefit and tax credits (even the Blairite prince over the water, David Miliband, today denounced the cap and floated lower rate pension tax relief instead).

But austerity is failing and the underlying deficit growing. Even the IMF has now admitted it underestimated the disastrous impact of austerity programmes on growth and jobs. And cuts in the incomes of the poorest in any economy will only depress demand when the opposite is urgently needed – including to shrink the deficit.

The Tories feel safe attacking social security because a long-running media campaign has fostered a wildly inaccurate welfare mythology. On average, people think 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, when the government's own estimate is 0.7% – or around £1bn, compared to an estimated £70bn worth of tax evasion. Most payments go to pensioners, and, far from soaring ahead of wages, unemployment benefit has fallen to 11% of average earnings, compared with 22% in 1979.

That's not to say there isn't a problem with welfare. It just isn't the one the political class and media mostly claim it is. Central to the sharp increase in social security costs over the past generation have been rising joblessness and stagnating wages. Since 1980, unemployment has averaged more than three times the postwar rate, while the proportion of those in low-paid jobs has doubled to over 20%.

In other words, welfare has become a prop for the failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver jobs or decent wages. In Britain, the prop has partly taken the form of subsidising poverty pay through New Labour's tax credits, and exorbitant private rents through a massively expanded housing benefit bill.

That model has now crashed and the costs of systemic failure have ballooned: long-term unemployment has increased by 146% since 2010. What Cameron and Osborne are doing is to kick away props, not from bad employers and greedy landlords – the real welfare scroungers – but from the most deprived when they're needed most.

Labour is right to oppose real benefit cuts and support publicly backed work programmes, but wrong to endorse real terms cuts in public sector pay and private minimum wage schemes. If politicians are serious about cutting the welfare bill – instead of driving claimants deeper into poverty – there are obvious alternatives.

A crash council housebuilding programme, backed with northern European-style rent control, would slash the £21bn a year from the housing benefit bill. A living wage across the economy, combined with strengthened workplace rights, would cut the tax credit and other benefit bills. And both, combined with a public bank-driven national investment programme, would boost growth and shrink the dole bill.

Since this government will be doing nothing of the kind, expect instead the social unrest predicted by northern council leaders in response to plans for 30% cuts in local authority budgets. Polling suggests public opposition to the benefit squeeze will also spread as people find out more about who will bear the brunt. Even the Tories may come to regret their war on the poor.

An Obituary to The Welfare State, 1942-2013.

After decades of public illness, Beveridge's most famous offspring has died

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 8 January 2013

For much of its short but celebrated life, the Welfare State was cherished by Britons. Instant public affection greeted its birth and even as it passed away peacefully yesterday morning, government ministers swore they would do all they could to keep it alive.

The Welfare State's huge appeal lay in its combination of simplicity and assurance. A safety net to catch those fallen on hard times, come rain or shine, boom or bust, it would be there for all those who had paid in.

Such universality allowed people to project on to it whatever they wished. Welfare State's father, the Liberal William Beveridge, described his offspring as "an attack on Want", one of the five evil giants that had to be slain in postwar Britain. But for future Labour prime minister Clement Attlee, "Social security to us can only mean socialism".

Yet there were critics. Indeed, it is thought that as late as yesterday, an unnamed twentysomething PPE graduate at Policy Exchange was revising a document entitled "What's Wrong with Welfare?" In the end, however, it was not a rightwing think tank that killed Welfare. The proximate cause of death was a change in child benefit from being available to all to a means-tested entitlement. That marked the end of one of the last remaining universal benefits, in turn causing a fatal injury to Welfare.
It is a testimony to Welfare's powerful charm that few immediately accepted its passing. Hours after its official death, bloggers continued to talk as if it were still alive, albeit under grave threat from the perfidious Tories.

But analysts later confirmed that the change to child benefit did indeed mark the death of the Welfare State as originally envisaged by Beveridge: a "contributory" system, where those who paid in during their working lives could count on financial help from the government when in need.

It expired peacefully on Monday, 7 January, just weeks after marking its 70th birthday.
The system had suffered many attacks over the years, from politicians talking of a "welfare trap", government means-testing, and frothy-mouthed journalists reporting isolated cases of benefit fraud.
For many would-be claimants, Welfare had become a ragged system where, however deserving or needy, they weren't poor enough to qualify for benefits, or the cash involved was too small to bother claiming.

Though David Cameron spoke of a "something for nothing" culture, the opposite was closer to the truth: Welfare had become a "nothing for something" system where taxpayers chipped in but got very little back.

This was very different from the scenes that greeted Welfare's birth in 1942. Then, the BBC broadcast in 22 different languages the details of Beveridge's social insurance scheme and the Manchester Guardian repeatedly acclaimed it as a "great plan" and a "big and fine thing". The public was enthusiastic, buying more than 635,000 copies of what was formally titled the "Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services".

Yet the golden period of Welfare really came in the 60s and 70s as, thanks to the work of Barbara Castle, Jeff Rooker, Audrey Wise and others, pensions and allowances were made more generous and tied to typical earnings.

"If you were poor, you were far less behind than at any other time in contemporary British history," according to Richard Exell, a senior policy officer at the TUC and a campaigner on welfare issues for more than 30 years. "It produced a Britain that was one of the most equal societies in western Europe."

Just before Margaret Thatcher came to power, a single person out of work would get unemployment benefit worth almost 21% of average earnings; last year, jobseeker's allowance was nearly half that, amounting to just over 11%.

Welfare's big decline came in the 1980s, as the Conservatives moved more benefits from available to all to on offer only to the poor. This was justified as making public spending more efficient.

But, according to a famous and much quoted study by Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, such means-testing is far less effective and more expensive than universal benefits. In a study of 18 rich countries, the academics found that targetting benefits at the poorest usually generated resentment among those just above – and led to smaller entitlements.

This "paradox of redistribution" was certainly observable in Britain, where Welfare retained its status as one of the 20th century's most exalted creations, even while those claiming benefits were treated with ever greater contempt.

"If you look at unemployment and sickness benefit as a proportion of average earnings, then Britain has one of the meanest welfare systems in Europe," says Palme. "Worse than Greece, Bulgaria or Romania."

Some of that same meanness can be seen in the way Welfare was discussed as it moved into its sixth and seventh decades. It was no longer about social security but benefits. Those who received them were no longer unfortunate but "slackers", as Iain Duncan Smith referred to them. A recent study by Declan Gaffney, Ben Baumberg and Kate Bell of 6,600 national newspaper articles on Welfare published between 1995 and 2011 found 29% referred to benefit fraud. The government's own estimate of fraud is that it is less than 1% across all benefit cases.

The death of Welfare does not mean an end to all benefit spending. Instead, it is outlived by its predecessor, Poor Relief, in which only the very poorest will receive government cash. Analysts are unsure about the repercussions.

"I'm not aware of any country that's ever had a combination of Victorian-style poor laws and parliamentary democracy," says Gaffney.

Instead of a book of condolences, there will be a special edition of the Guardian's letters page. In separate tributes, BBC4 will air some respectful but little-watched documentaries; there will also be a truly unbearable edition of The Moral Maze.

Google shows China the white flag of surrender

By Mic Wright Tech business Last updated: January 7th, 2013 

Google's message to Beijing

Six months ago, Google loudly trumpeted a brave stand against censorship in China. Now it's quietly committed an act of cowardice. In May 2012, it announced an anti-censorship feature – under the pretext of improving search quality – with a public blog post. In December, it got rid of the measure which notified Chinese users when keywords they were searching for would trigger the country's Great Firewall content blocking system – without telling its users. The switch-off only came to light thanks to the vigilance of Greatfire.org, a not-for-profit organisation that monitors censorship in China. The group called the move "self-censorship" but it's worse than that – it's a white flag of surrender.

From the moment Google introduced the feature, the Chinese internet censors fought back. But the ingenuity of Google's engineers got round each block until they finally embedded the entire function in HTML on Google's start page. That meant to block the notifications, China would have to block Google altogether. Inevitably, the search engine did end up blocked in its entirety more than once before the feature been activated. Gmail was also subject to blocks and a noticeable slowdown in performance. In the stand-off, Google blinked first. At a time when the Chinese government is strengthening its internet censorship measures, the firm has effectively admitted it just can't beat them and is no longer willing to try.

Though Google's share of search in China is under five per cent, that still amounts to more than 25 million users, and despite moving its services to Hong Kong in 2010, it won't abandon that market. Reports in recent weeks have suggested that it's on the cusp of a partnership with local search company, Qihoo 360, to take on the dominant player, Baidu. With that in mind, it seems like a remarkable coincidence that it has now decided to throw in the towel and drop the notifications. The company's unofficial mantra – "don't be evil" – becomes more threadbare with ever year.

While it's arguable that notifying users when they were about to be censored was a small thing, it put Google on the right side of the fight for free expression. By ceasing to indicate when its results are interfered with by the Great Firewall, Google has made itself complicit in the process. The company's desire to maintain a foothold in the Chinese market outweighs its highfalutin' rhetoric on the openness of the web and freedom of speech. China's censors must be delighted that Google has silenced itself.

Needed: An exit policy for bad businessmen

S A Aiyer

Vijay Mallya has not paid employees of Kingfisher Airlines for months, and has defaulted on thousands of crores due to suppliers and creditors. Yet he has just donated three kilos of gold, worth almost one crore, to the Tirupathi temple. In August, he offered 80-kilo gold plated doors to the Kukke Subramanya temple in Karnataka. Possibly he believes that the gods can be bought off in ways that employees and creditors cannot.

How can a man who owes enormous sums to employees and creditors be free to throw gold around like small change? If there were any justice, surely the gold and golden doors should be seized from the temples and handed over to the employees and creditors. Surely they should have first right to Mallya’s assets.

After two decades of economic reform , we have not yet evolved rules that facilitate the exit of poor managements before they ruin a company beyond redemption. Kingfisher Airlines has been ground to the dust by Mallya, a liquor baron who should never have entered this space.

A free-market economy is not just a device giving owners the freedom to sack employees. It is one where creditors and employees have the right to seize a company defaulting on dues, and sack the management. The managing shareholder or promoter is only one of many stakeholders. If he cannot meet his obligations to other stakeholders , they should oust him in a true free market economy. In India, alas, our unreformed regulations and procedures leave promoters in control no matter how big a mess they make.

In the US, creditors can quickly seize a company that defaults on dues, and reorganize or sell it to a new owner . The owner can get temporary protection from creditors through Chapter 11 proceedings. In this, a judge determines whether the company is so far gone that it must be liquidated, or whether it can be saved through mutual sacrifices by creditors, employees and owners. In the process, the judge can change the owner. So, often workers survive bankruptcy proceedings , but the owner does not. That is what we should aim for in India too: an exit policy for incompetent, defaulting owners.

Kingfisher Airlines never made a profit, not even in the boom years when its rival airlines were profitable. Creditors should have moved in years ago when it became clear that the skills of a liquor baron were irrelevant for an airline. But in India creditors cannot quickly seize a company, least of all when the owner has political clout (as in Mallya’s case).

In the old licence permit raj, banks and financial institutions had to support existing managements and keep rescuing them. This has not changed despite the 1991 reforms. Banks have to keep throwing good money after bad.

Today Kingfisher is so worthless that it no longer makes sense to seize it and find a buyer. SBI Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri estimates that rehabilitating Kingfisher will cost a billion dollars. Nobody will do so — a new airline can be started for maybe just $100 million. Kingfisher has just lost its flying licence. Mallya’s hopes of being rescued by Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi look like pure fantasy.

Even if it makes no sense to seize the airline today, why not seize his liquor business? Why not seize his prize luxury possessions, ranging from paintings to yachts or jets? Why not take over his cricket team, Royal Challengers ? Why not take over his football team Mohun Bagan, and his Formula 1 racing team Force India? Why is he allowed to keep all these, along with gold that he donates to temples, when he says he doesn’t have enough to pay employees or suppliers? He has given personal guarantees to banks: why are these not being enforced?

Mallya can be congratulated on one thing. Service was top-class in Kingfisher , and the airline gained a good reputation for quality. Had the airline been seized early on, it could definitely have been sold to a new owner. However , its reputation has steadily fallen with its continuing financial crisis, leading to cancelled flights and official grounding.

I constantly hear that India has gone in for neo-liberal policies. That’s pure rubbish. Neo-liberalism would have given employees and creditors the right to quickly seize and sell a company that cannot meet its obligations. The problem is not liberalism but the continuing old illiberalism that keeps promoters in charge, forcing other stakeholders to take a hit. Temples and religious trusts can keep enormous donations from defaulters instead of handing them over to others who, in all justice, should have the first right to such money or gold. This area desperately needs reform.