Take the DRS out of the players' hands

Umpires should be empowered to use technology to improve their decision-making

Ian Chappell

January 27, 2013

If the BCCI had more faith in its hand-picked television commentators and allowed them to discuss the DRS on air, it might discover there are some like-minded souls out there - i.e. people who are equally sceptical of the system.

If ever evidence was needed that there are flaws in the Decision Review System, they were amply provided in the SCG one-dayer between Australia and Sri Lanka. With Michael Clarke having used up Australia's sole review, David Warner and Moises Henriques were then ambushed by incorrect umpiring decisions. Both batsmen got healthy inside edges to deliveries but were adjudged lbw.

Those SCG examples contradict the assertion of Dave Richardson, who was the ICC general manager when he spoke to a gathering of Channel 9 commentators at the Gabba prior to the 2009-10 series against West Indies. He told the commentators: "The DRS is designed to eradicate howlers and get the right decision." At the time I thought, how can you guarantee the correct decision will be reached when there are a finite number of unsuccessful reviews?

I suspected the individual aspect of a team game would ensure the bulk of the reviews would be utilised by top-order batsmen. As former Australian prime minister Paul Keating shrewdly observed, "Always bet on self-interest because you know it's a goer."

Little did I realise that the DRS would also become more of a tactical ploy than a review system. In the same way that West Indies in their heyday slowed the over rate down on the odd occasion they were in danger of losing a game, the DRS is often used as an unwarranted trick in strategy. Umpiring decisions and over rates should never be a part of cricket's tactical fabric.

The DRS, in the unreliable hands of players, is being used more for 50-50 decisions than to eradicate howlers. If a team's best batsman is at the crease and the side is in trouble, a review will almost always result - more a case of self-preservation than any highly principled attempt to be a part of improving the umpiring standard.

The constant reviewing of 50-50 decisions can only undermine the confidence of the umpires, and more importantly, is likely to change their decision-making thought process.

There never has been, nor will there ever be, a case where a 50-50 decision causes animosity on the cricket field. Players are conditioned to accept that one day these decisions will go your way and the next they'll go against you. What does cause animosity on the field is the absolute howler that can change the course of a match. Andrew Symonds being given not out to an obvious caught-behind early in his innings and then going on to score 162 not out in Sydney is a classic example of a howler that caused great animosity on the field. It also led to a terse retort from the normally equitable Anil Kumble at the after-match press conference.

One of the founding principles of the game is also flouted when the DRS is put in the hands of players. As kids we were told the umpire is right, so always accept his decision without question.

The DRS also interrupts the flow of the game. Some of the more exciting moments, like the celebration of a crucial wicket or a brilliant catch, are put on hold, never to be recaptured, as the review process grinds to a conclusion. It would be a case of criminal interference to interrupt the celebration of a hat-trick with a torturous review.

Surely it's time to put any review system in the hands of the umpires so that it stops being a tactic, rids the game of the howler, and on most occasions, brings a satisfactory outcome. Trying to devise a system that produces the correct decision is not possible at the moment (and probably never will be) and attempting to achieve that aim robs the game of one part of the delightfully enticing human element.

It's time to seriously rethink the DRS. It's a topic that should involve a lot of discussion and input from ex-players and some robust debate on commentary.

A Telling Silence

The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. And the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes.

GEORGE MONBIOT

You can learn as much about a country from its silences as you can from its obsessions. The issues politicians do not discuss are as telling and decisive as those they do. While the government’s cuts beggar the vulnerable and gut public services, it’s time to talk about the turns not taken, the opportunities foregone: the taxes which could have spared us every turn of the screw.

The extent of the forgetting is extraordinary. Take, for example, capital gains tax. Before the election, the Liberal Democrats promised to raise it from 18% to “the same rates as income” (in other words a top rate of 50%), to ensure that private equity bosses were no longer paying lower rates of tax than their office cleaners (1). It made sense, as it would have removed the bosses’ incentive to collect their earnings as capital. Despite a powerful economic case, the government refused to raise the top rate above 28%. The Lib Dems protested for a day or two (2), and have remained silent ever since. In the parliamentary debate about cuts to social security, this missed opportunity wasn’t mentioned once (3).

But at least that tax has risen. In just two and half years, the government has cut corporation tax three times. It will fall from 28% in 2010 to 21% in 2014 (4,5). George Osborne, the chancellor, boasted last month that this “is the lowest rate of any major western economy”(6): he is consciously setting up a destructive competition with other nations, creating new excuses further to reduce the UK rate.

Labour’s near-silence on this issue is easily explained. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who were often as keen as the Conservatives to appease corporate power, the rate was reduced from 33% to 28%. Prefiguring Osborne’s boast, in 1999 Brown bragged that the rate he had set was “the lowest rate of any major industrialised country anywhere, including Japan and the United States.” (7) What a legacy for a Labour government.

As for a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions, after an initial flutter of interest you are now more likely to hear the call of the jubjub bird in the House of Commons. According to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a tax rate of just 0.01% would raise £25bn a year, rendering many of the chamber’s earnest debates about the devastating cuts void (8). Silence also surrounds the notion of a windfall tax on extreme wealth. And to say that Professor Greg Philo’s arresting idea of transferring the national debt to those who possess assets worth £1m or more has failed to ignite the flame of passion in parliament would not overstate the case(9).

But the loudest silence surrounds the issue of property taxes. The most expensive flat in that favourite haunt of the international super-rich, One Hyde Park, cost £135m. The owner pays £1,369 in council tax, or 0.001% of its value(10). Last year the Independent revealed that the Sultan of Brunei pays only £32 a month more for his pleasure dome in Kensington Palace Gardens than some of the poorest people in the same borough (11). A mansion tax – slapped down by David Cameron in October (12) – is only the beginning of what the owners of such places should pay. For the simplest, fairest and least avoidable levy is one which the major parties simply will not contemplate. It’s called land value tax.

The term is a misnomer. It’s not really a tax. It’s a return to the public of the benefits we have donated to the landlords. When land rises in value, the government and the people deliver a great unearned gift to those who happen to own it.

In 1909 a dangerous subversive explained the issue thus. “Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived. … the unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.” (13)

Who was this firebrand? Winston Churchill. As Churchill, Adam Smith (14) and many others have pointed out, those who own the land skim wealth from everyone else, without exertion or enterprise. They “levy a toll upon all other forms of wealth and every form of industry.”(15) Land value tax recoups this toll.

It has a number of other benefits (16). It stops the speculative land hoarding that prevents homes from being built. It ensures that the most valuable real estate – in city centres – is developed first, discouraging urban sprawl. It prevents speculative property bubbles, of the kind that have recently trashed the economies of Ireland, Spain and other nations and which make rents and first homes so hard to afford. Because it does not affect the supply of land (they stopped making it some time ago), it cannot cause the rents that people must pay to the landlords to be raised. It is easy to calculate and hard to avoid: you can’t hide your land in London in a secret account in the Cayman Islands. And it could probably discharge the entire deficit.

It is altogether remarkable, in these straitened and inequitable times, that land value tax is not at the heart of the current political debate. Perhaps it is a sign of how powerful the rent-seeking class in Britain has become. While the silence surrounding this obvious solution exposes Labour’s limitations, it also exposes the contradiction at heart of the Conservative Party. The Conservatives claim, in David Cameron’s words, to be “the party of enterprise”(17). But those who benefit most from its policies are those who are rich already. It is, in reality, the party of rent.

This is where the debate about workers and shirkers, strivers and skivers should have led. The skivers and shirkers sucking the money out of your pockets are not the recipients of social security demonised by the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party, the overwhelming majority of whom are honest claimants. We are being parasitised from above, not below, and the tax system should reflect this.

Forget Europe – the markets hold the real unaccountable power

An unholy matrimony between finance and politics has undermined democracy: it's time it was reinforced

• 
• • Mark Serwotka
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 January 2013 19.30 GMT

'We still have the tin-hatted Conservatives with no heart, their Lib Dem counterparts without the brains to realise they’re sealing their own fate, and a Labour party still lacking the courage to put up a real fight' … The Wizard of Oz at West Yorkshire Playhouse. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Listening to economics being discussed in the media is like being read a fairy story. In any fairy story you need a monster, and in this case it's "the markets": unseen, but seemingly all-powerful. Job losses, public service cuts, wage freezes, privatisation, even cuts to benefits for disabled people can be justified by saying "the markets" demand it.

But what are the markets? Who comprises them and why are they so powerful? I didn't vote for them and I doubt you did either – yet they apparently have the power to dictate policies to elected governments and, in the case of Italy, to even select the government.

This is not an abstract debate. If we are to understand the economic system we live under, what went wrong to cause the crash, and how we are to change it, we need to deal with facts, not myths. At the height of the crash the curtain was pulled back, Wizard of Oz-like, to reveal the markets as nothing more than a cabal of rich men serving their own interests.

Yet sadly, we still have the tin-hatted Conservatives with no heart, their Lib Dem counterparts without the brains to realise they're sealing their own fate, and a Labour party still lacking the courage to put up a real fight.

If people don't understand these things, they are susceptible to the argument that "there is no alternative" and that the medicine of austerity is unpalatable, but necessary.

Do you remember when in 2007 people queued outside hospitals desperate to remove their loved ones from the unsafe hands of doctors and nurses, or when in 2008 the entire public sector stood on the precipice due to the excessive greed of jobcentre workers and teachers?

No? Because it never happened. Yet the myth that the public sector caused the crash was allowed to develop, and the dangerous conclusion allowed to take root that hacking back the public sector would solve the crisis. It hasn't and it won't – as even the IMF is beginning to realise.

The myth-making, the diversionary tactics, the crash and our failure to recover from it is the story of how the finance sector came to be lauded by all major political parties.

But it also had another effect, to undermine democracy. The unholy matrimony between finance and politics jettisoned public interest in three key ways:

Firstly, deregulation. Successive governments created markets for the finance sector by removing restrictions on what the sector could do. By the crash, the regulators barely understood the complex structures they were supposed to be regulating.

Secondly, it redistributed wealth to the rich. Through slashing corporation tax and the higher rate of income tax, the super-rich grabbed an even larger share of the national wealth. This meant more wealth accumulated to fewer and fewer people. Instead of funding public services – starved of cash during the Thatcher years – more of British capital poured into the City of London.

The third and final element was privatisation. Entire industries – from the railways and telecommunications, to gas, electricity and water – were taken out of collective public ownership. This transferred power over them from the ballot to the wallets of a few, the directors and shareholders who have extracted billions from them.

This week David Cameron made a speech about the need to repatriate powers from Europe. Sections of the press and Ukip leader Nigel Farage rant incessantly about the alleged influence of Brussels over our lives, but that pales into insignificance compared to the unaccountable power of the large financial institutions.

So a few vocal Little Englanders have forced the prime minister to respond to their agenda. When what we really need is to assert our democracy over the tyranny of the markets, in the interests of the many.

Medical Research Fraud

Cambridge is top university for 'sugar daddy dating'

More than 150 female students at Cambridge University signed up for "sugar daddy dating" to help pay their tuition fees last year, according to an online dating website.

Suger daddy dating: 168 female students at Cambridge University signed up for "sugar daddy dating" last year. Photo: Juice Images

By Andrew Marszal, Digital Education Editor

10:51AM GMT 22 Jan 2013

61 Comments

More female students at Cambridge University signed up for "sugar daddy dating" than at any other British university last year, according to an online dating website.

Some 168 Cambridge students joined SeekingArrangement.com – a controversial US-based internet dating website which matches attractive young women with wealthy, usually older men – last year. Eight of the other top 20 universities using the website were based in London.

SeekingArrangement.com is frequented by male business executives on an average income of £170,000 per year. Women who sign up can agree to exchange their time and affection for lavish dates, expensive shopping trips and, in some cases, regular cash allowances.

The website – which specifically targets university students by offering a free premium membership to users with a university email address – also reported a 58 per cent increase in all university students enrolling in 2012.

The current academic year is the first in which undergraduates can be charged up to a maximum £9000 in annual tuition fees. According to the website, the average female university student using the website receives £5000 per month from their "benefactors" to "cover the cost of tuition, books and living expenses". 

“College should be an opportunity to expand the mind and experience new things," said Brandon Wade, CEO and founder of SeekingArrangement.com. "Unfortunately, because of the of recent tuition hikes, the college experience has become greatly unbalanced.”

He added: “While some may argue that these women are just using men for their own personal gain, I believe that they are proactive in pursuing a higher education.”

Although a survey conducted last year by the website found approximately 80 per cent of all relationships conducted through SeekingArrangement.com involve sex, Wade has rejected criticism that the nature of the site could be interpreted as a form of prostitution.

Speaking last year, he said “sugar babies” – young women using the website – were “intelligent and goal-oriented ladies, while sugar daddies are respectful gentlemen.”

He wrote on his website: “Because the relationship between a sugar daddy and a sugar baby is romantic in nature, most sugar relationships will likely involve 'sex' ... And because a sugar daddy is expected to be the generous gentleman, 'money' will always be spent on the sugar baby. I don’t see anything wrong (or illegal) with that!"

University students now comprise 44 per cent of the site's worldwide membership.

'Old people should hurry up and die', says Japan deputy leader

Taro Aso, Japan's deputy prime minister, has been forced to pedal back from a suggestion that old people should "hurry up and die" to save the state the cost of providing them with medical care.


Mr Aso, who has a reputation for speaking indelicately, was commenting at a meeting of the National Council on Social Security Reforms on Monday on the heavy burden imposed on the nation's finances by prolonging patients' lives with treatment.



Describing patients with serious illnesses as "tube persons," Mr Aso, who is 72, said they should be "allowed to die quickly" if they want to, Kyodo News reported.



"Heaven forbid I should be kept alive if I want to die," he said. "You cannot sleep well when you think it's all paid by the government. This won't be solved unless you let them hurry up and die."



Mr Aso later issued a statement retracting some of his remarks and admitting it had been "inappropriate" to make such comments in public.



Mr Aso became renown for his asides during a brief stint as prime minister in 2009, during which he told a group of university students that young people should not get married because they are too poor and are therefore not worthy of respect from a life partner.

 That insight was followed by the declaration that followers of the world's religions should learn from Japan's work ethic.


"To work is good. That is a completely different way of thinking to the Old Testament," Mr Aso said in January 2009. "We should share that philosophy with many other nations."



Three months previously, he offended doctors by saying many of their number "lack common sense." The same day, he upset parents at a kindergarten by informing them that parents are often the ones that need to be disciplined, not their children.



Mr Aso also managed to offend the Democratic Party of Japan by comparing it with the Nazi Party, people with Alzheimer's disease and China, which he described as "a significant threat."

Atheism 2.0