Match Fixing in Football and in the UK too?

Fifa wants tough sentences for criminals who are caught match fixing

• Governing body's security head says sentences 'too weak'
• More than 700 suspect football fixtures under investigation

• David Conn
• The Guardian, Monday 4 February 2013 19.51 GMT

Fifa has called for longer prison sentences for criminals involved in match-fixing after the EU intelligence-sharing agency Europol said more than 700 matches worldwide are suspected of having been manipulated.

Ralf Mutschke, Fifa's head of security and a former Interpol official, said: "Match-fixing and match-manipulation is a global problem and is not going to go away tomorrow." He argued that although "a member of the football family" can be given a life ban by Fifa, "for people outside of football, the custodial sentences are too weak, and offer little to deter someone from getting involved in match-fixing".

An unidentified European Champions League tie played in England "within the last three to four years" is one of the matches under investigation (Editor's note -Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet reported it was Liverpool’s 1-0 win over the Hungarian team Debrecen in the 2009 Champions League group stage), Rob Wainwright, the director of Europol, said. While the "focus" of the investigation is not on England, Wainwright said: "Given the scale of corruption involved, it would be naive and complacent to think that the criminal conspiracy does not affect the English game."

The Football Association said that while it takes "matters of integrity in football extremely seriously", Europol had not informed the FA of its suspicions about the Champions League tie.

"The FA [is] not aware of any credible reports into suspicious Champions League fixtures in England, nor has any information been shared with us," an FA spokesman said.

More than 380 football matches in Europe are under investigation for match-fixing, Europol said, including top-flight domestic league matches and qualifiers in the European Championship and World Cup. In addition, some 300 matches in Africa, Asia, South and Central America are suspected of having been fixed by "an extensive criminal network".

Europol said 425 people from more than 15 countries are suspected of being involved in attempts to fix the 380 matches played at different levels of professional football across Europe. Those under suspicion include players, match officials, club staff and "serious criminals". Europol calculated that more than €8m (£6.8m) in betting profits had been corruptly made, with in excess of €2m in "corrupt payments" made to football people.

"This is a sad day for European football and more evidence of the corrupting influence in society of organised crime," Wainwright said. "This is match-fixing on a scale we've not seen before, involving hundreds of criminals and corrupted officials and players, affecting hundreds of professional matches and generating very large amounts of illicit profits. It is the work of a sophisticated international organised crime syndicate based in Asia and working with criminal facilitators around Europe."

Some of the cases have been prosecuted, while others remain the subject of continued investigation. Following an investigation by prosecutors in Bochum, Germany, 14 people were convicted of match-fixing, and received prison sentences totalling 39 years. Andreas Bachmann, of the Bochum prosecution service, said that 20 further arrest warrants have been issued, along with 86 search warrants for premises in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He said the €2m Europol has calculated to have been paid in bribes should be assumed to be "only the tip of the iceberg".

Laszlo Angeli, from the central investigative chief prosecutor's office in Hungary, referred to a friendly between Argentina and Bolivia as one of the matches under suspicion.
Europol has had an investigation team, codenamed operation Veto, running since July 2011 to share information among EU countries, and is co-operating with Interpol for the matches under suspicion outside Europe. The agency alleges that the betting gangs are based in Asia – the Bochum investigation found the operation was run from Singapore – and associates were required to bribe the football people involved.

Investigations are also ongoing into alleged laundering of the proceeds in tax havens. "All those responsible for running football should heed the warnings," Wainwright said.

Fifa said that it is committed to tackling match-fixing, and aside from calling for tougher penalties also urged stronger co-operation between sporting bodies and law enforcement agencies.

Wainwright said he will be providing Michel Platini, the Uefa president, with details of the investigation, although Europol did not identify the allegedly suspicious Champions League tie, or any other match or person subject to investigation.

"Uefa is already co-operating with the authorities on these serious matters as part of its zero tolerance policy towards match-fixing," Uefa said.

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'Match-fixing is reality' says Burkina Faso coach banned in Belgium

Paul Put claims practice has always existed in football after Europol announces up to 380 matches are under suspicion

• 
• • Jonathan Wilson in Nelspruit
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 5 February 2013 18.21 GMT

Paul Put, Burkina Faso's head coach, served a three-year ban in Belgium after being found guilty of fixing two matches. Photograph: Armando Franca/AP

 

For Paul Put, the Belgian coach of Burkina Faso, the statement from Europol that it had found evidence that as many as 380 matches in Europe had been fixed came as no great surprise. He is one of the very few coaches to have been banned for fixing games, serving a three-year ban in Belgium that expired in 2011 after being found guilty of fixing two matches while manager of Lierse.

He remains adamant he was just a scapegoat and that the practice is widespread. "Match-fixing has always existed in football," Put says. "If you look at cycling, at Lance Armstrong, it's always him who is pointed at but everybody was taking drugs. It's not that I've been doing match-fixing, not at all, but it has been declared in the media like this. I also played football and I saw a lot of things. I don't think you can change it. It's unfortunate but I think in every sport you have to face those things. That is reality but what can you do about that?"

The Armstrong defence is unlikely to win Put much sympathy and it is not entirely clear whether he considers himself innocent of the charges or whether he simply regards it as unfair that he was punished when so many others who are allegedly guilty have not been.

"I accepted the ban because Fifa said I could work, so I didn't make any trouble in Belgium," he says.
Does he, then, view himself as a scapegoat? "Yes," the 56-year-old says. "It's the same like Lance Armstrong. It's the same. Everybody is pointing at Lance but without this he is the biggest champion. I don't think this is right. You have to see what's going on in football. There are a lot of big international players who are involved in match-fixing. I think it was worse in the past and these teams have survived."

What is known is that Lierse twice unexpectedly fielded reserve teams in Belgian top-flight league matches in 2005, seemingly as part of a match-fixing ring allegedly organised by the Chinese businessman Ye Zheyun. An international arrest warrant was issued against Ye in 2006 but he returned to China and denies all charges.

Lierse were the only club sanctioned and Put the only individual. Forty people, including Put, have been charged and face a criminal trial but that is unlikely to come to court for at least another two years.

"The suspension was a decision of the federation," Put says. "You always have to make an example for the whole world. We were all surprised because they took only one.

"You know there are more than 40 people. The whole of Belgian football was sick at that time. I was threatened by the mafia. My child was not safe. They threatened me with weapons and things like that. It's not nice to talk about these things but this is the reality."

So is he saying he was forced to fix games? "I was forced but 'fixing games' are big words," he says. "The team at that moment had nothing. It was in a very bad condition. There was no hope, no money, nothing.

"They made up a crazy story about match-fixing but other teams did the same. You have to see a lot of things and how it came about. It was not by our will. I am not a manager – just a coach.
"This is not a decision of a coach and a player. It is a whole team. If you want to fix a game you don't need 12 players. If you want to fix a game you can do it with one. That's what I don't understand – people didn't speak of the reality."

As the scandal broke, Put left Belgium and became the coach of Gambia, where he had significant success, taking them to a record high of 65 in the Fifa rankings. His achievements with Burkina Faso are even greater.

Apart from 1998 when they hosted the tournament, the Stallions had never progressed beyond the group stage of the Africa Cup of Nations but on Wednesday they face Ghana in the semi-finals, having gone 367 minutes in the tournament without conceding a goal.

Put regards their progress as some kind of redemption. "I have been working very hard," he says. "It was a very hard time for me and my family and my friends.

"If they point at you and you are the only one, it is hard. I've been fighting, fighting, working, working, day and night, and at least I now I have satisfaction."

He knows the route back to Belgium is probably closed forever, but Put dreams of better things. "My challenge," he says, "is to go to a big country with a big team and prove myself." What he has done with Burkina Faso will not clear his name but it may help people forget his past.

Welfare fraud is a drop in the ocean compared to tax avoidance

As Joanne Gibbons' case shows, benefit underpayments save us more than 'cheats' cost us. We need to target the real villains

• 
• • James Ball
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 February 2013 12.06 GMT

Had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was entitled she could have collected double her 'fraudulent' claims. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

 

Joanne Gibbons was sentenced to community service for claiming income support while holding down two paid jobs. Through accumulated payments of £66-a-week, the court heard, she collected £3,140 to which she wasn't entitled.

Predictably, the Daily Mail is outraged. But here's the strange twist: had Gibbons claimed the benefits to which she was actually entitled, she could have collected £130 a week through family tax credits and child benefit. In total, Gibbons' fraudulent claims cost the taxpayer around £3,100 less than claiming what she was actually entitled to.

It's the reaction to Gibbons' claims which are particularly noteworthy. Matthew Sinclair, chief executive of the Taxpayers' Alliance – an organisation rarely troubled by wealthy people's tax avoidance – tells the Mail:

"It beggars belief that somebody going to the lengths of making fraudulent claims would have actually received more in benefits had they been honest.

"It just goes to show that the current system is broken and doesn't provide the right incentives for claimants to go back to work."

This quote suggests Sinclair is perhaps even less numerate than the "benefits cheat" he's deriding. Gibbons was entitled to £130 a week in legitimate benefits, while working on two low-income jobs. This total was higher than the £66 a week out-of-work benefit she was improperly claiming (though some of the £130 a week could be claimed in or out of work).

In what sense is a system which tops up low wages a disincentive to work? Sinclair appears lost in lazy rhetoric – an all-too-common failing when it comes to chastising the millions of families, most of whom with at least one adult in work, who rely on the benefit system.

The British public believe benefit fraud is a big problem. A recent poll by the TUC showed people believe 27% of the welfare budget is fraudulently claimed.

The reality is very different. Last year, 0.7% of total benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, according to the DWP's official estimates. This totalled £1.2bn over the year. Nor is fraud getting worse – even against a background of benefit cuts and long-term unemployment fraud made up a smaller share of the welfare bill last year than it did in 2010/11 or 2009/10.

Indeed, welfare fraud is smaller than accidental overpayments due to error, which totalled £2.2bn (£1.4bn of which due to official error). It's also smaller than the amount of money underpaid to those entitled to it: £1.3bn.

In other words, if we wiped out benefit fraud tomorrow – but also eliminated the errors that deprive people of money to which they are entitled – the welfare bill would grow, not shrink.

In the context of the UK's £700bn public spending, and £150bn+ welfare bill (of which pensions and in-work benefits make up the substantial majority), benefit fraud is a relatively small revenue loss. But how does it compare to another textbook villain: tax avoidance?

Put simply, it is comparatively tiny. HMRC consistently estimates the UK's tax gap – the gap between what HMRC thinks it should receive versus what it actually gets – at more than £30bn per year. Others estimate this is far, far higher.

Of this, even conservative estimates suggest around a sixth – £5bn a year – is lost through tax avoidance, tricks to reduce tax bills which fall within the letter (if not spirit) of the law, but often fall outside what's regarded as acceptable by the public. A further sixth, at least, is estimated to be due to wholesale tax evasion: simply illegally not paying the tax that's owed.

These conservative estimates alone outweigh benefit fraud by a factor of eight, but this time not done in tens (or at most hundreds) of pounds per week by people struggling to get by; but rather by people who could afford to pay more, but prefer not to.

Benefit underpayments save us more money than benefit fraud costs us. By the most conservative estimates, tax avoidance and tax evasion outweighs benefit fraud eightfold. But the constant target of argument – "scroungers", "benefit cheats", and more, isn't the well-heeled middle classes who knock a little off their tax return, or the high-rollers with elaborate offshore schemes.

Instead, it's those at the bottom of society – for the government, perhaps, it makes it easier to sell the public swingeing cuts to the safety net that millions of families, both in and out of work, rely on to get by. For the Mail, it's easier to sell papers by buying into the easy preconceptions of their readers than bothering to challenge them.

Unfortunately, all too often, that's a view the Labour party – and others on the left – seem all too happy to go along with. If we must have national villains, surely we can do better than these?

The truth about Mahatma Gandhi: he was a wily operator, not India’s smiling saint

Patrick French in The Telegraph

The Indian nationalist leader had an eccentric attitude to sleeping habits, food and sexuality. However, his more controversial ideas have been written out of history

This week, the National Archives here in New Delhi released a set of letters between Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and a close friend from his South African days, Hermann Kallenbach, a German Jewish architect. Cue a set of ludicrous “Gay Gandhi” headlines across the world, wondering whether the fact the Mahatma signed some letters “Sinly yours” might be a clue (seemingly unaware that “sinly” was once a common contraction of “sincerely”).

The origin of this rumour was a mischievous book review two years ago written by the historian Andrew Roberts, which speculated about the relationship between the men. On the basis of the written evidence, it seems unlikely that their friendship in the years leading up to the First World War was physical.

Gandhi is one of the best-documented figures of the pre-electronic age. He has innumerable biographies. If he managed to be gay without anyone noticing until now, it was a remarkable feat. The official record of his sayings and writings runs to more than 90 volumes, and reveals that his last words before being assassinated in 1948 were not an invocation to God, as is commonly reported, but the more prosaic: “It irks me if I am late for prayers even by a minute.”

That Gandhi had an eccentric attitude to sleeping habits, food and sexuality, regarding celibacy as the only way for a man to avoid draining his “vital fluid”, is well known. Indeed, he spoke about it at length during his sermons, once linking a “nocturnal emission” of his own to the problems in Indian society.

According to Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, Mahatma Gandhi’s pronouncements on sex were “abnormal and unnatural” and “can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills… I do not know why he is so obsessed by this problem of sex”. 

Although some of Gandhi’s unconventional ideas were rooted in ancient Hindu philosophy, he was more tellingly a figure of the late Victorian age, both in his puritanism and in his kooky theories about health, diet and communal living. Like other epic figures from the not too distant past, such as Leo Tolstoy and Queen Victoria, he is increasingly perceived in ways that would have surprised his contemporaries. Certainly no contemporary Indian politician would dare to speak about him in the frank tone that his ally Nehru did.

Gandhi has become, in India and around the globe, a simplified version of what he was: a smiling saint who wore a white loincloth and John Lennon spectacles, who ate little and succeeded in bringing down the greatest empire the world has ever known through non-violent civil disobedience. President Obama, who kept a portrait of Gandhi hanging on the wall of his Senate office, likes to cite him.

An important origin of the myth was Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. Take the episode when the newly arrived Gandhi is ejected from a first-class railway carriage at Pietermaritzburg after a white passenger objects to sharing space with a “coolie” (an Indian indentured laborer). In fact, Gandhi’s demand to be allowed to travel first-class was accepted by the railway company. Rather than marking the start of a campaign against racial oppression, as legend has it, this episode was the start of a campaign to extend racial segregation in South Africa. Gandhi was adamant that “respectable Indians” should not be obliged to use the same facilities as “raw Kaffirs”. He petitioned the authorities in the port city of Durban, where he practised law, to end the indignity of making Indians use the same entrance to the post office as blacks, and counted it a victory when three doors were introduced: one for Europeans, one for Asiatics and one for Natives.

Gandhi’s genuine achievement as a political leader in India was to create a new form of protest, a mass public assertion which could, in the right circumstances, change history. It depended ultimately on a responsive government. He figured, from what he knew of British democracy, that the House of Commons would only be willing to suppress uprisings to a limited degree before conceding. If he had faced a different opponent, he would have had a different fate. When the former Viceroy of India, Lord Halifax, saw Adolf Hitler in 1938, the Führer suggested that he have Gandhi shot; and that if nationalist protests continued, members of the Indian National Congress should be killed in increments of 200.

For other Indian leaders who opposed Gandhi, he could be a fiendish opponent. His claim to represent “in his person” all the oppressed castes of India outraged the Dalit leader Dr BR Ambedkar. Gandhi even told him that they were not permitted to join his association to abolish untouchability. “You owe nothing to the debtors, and therefore, so far as this board is concerned, the initiative has to come from the debtors.” Who could argue with Gandhi the lawyer? The whole object of this proposal, Ambedkar responded angrily, “is to create a slave mentality among the Untouchables towards their Hindu masters”.

Although Gandhi may have looked like a saint, in an outfit designed to represent the poor of rural India, he was above all a wily operator and tactician. Having lived in Britain and South Africa, he was familiar with the system that he was attempting to subvert. He knew how to undermine the British, when to press an advantage and when to withdraw. Little wonder that one British provincial governor described Mr Gandhi as being as “cunning as a cartload of monkeys”.

Like poetry for software - Open Source

RAHUL DE' 

 T+  

TOPICS

computing and information technologysoftware

Open source programme creators cater to the highest standards and give away their work for free, much like Ghalib who wrote not just for money but the discerning reader

Mirza Ghalib, the great poet of 19th century Delhi and one of the greatest poets in history, would have liked the idea of Open Source software. A couplet Mirza Ghalib wrote is indicative:

Bik jaate hain hum aap mata i sukhan ke saath

Lekin ayar i taba i kharidar dekh kar

(translated by Ralph Russell as:

I give my poetry away, and give myself along with it

But first I look for people who can value what I give).

Free versus proprietary

Ghalib’s sentiment of writing and giving away his verses reflects that of the Free and Open Source software (FOSS) movement, where thousands of programmers and volunteers write, edit, test and document software, which they then put out on the Internet for the whole world to use freely. FOSS software now dominates computing around the world. Most software now being used to run computing devices of different types — computers, servers, phones, chips in cameras or in cars, etc. — is either FOSS or created with FOSS. Software commonly sold in the market is referred to as proprietary software, in opposition to free and open source software, as it has restrictive licences that prohibit the user from seeing the source code and also distribute it freely. For instance, the Windows software sold by Microsoft corporation is proprietary in nature. The debate of FOSS versus proprietary software (dealing with issues such as which type is better, which is more secure, etc.) is by now quite old, and is not the argument of this article. What is important is that FOSS now constitutes a significant and dominant part of the entire software landscape.

The question many economists and others have pondered, and there are many special issues of academic journals dedicated to this question, is why software programmers and professionals, at the peak of their skills, write such high quality software and just give it away. They spend many hours working on very difficult and challenging problems, and when they find a solution, they eagerly distribute it freely over the Internet. Answers to why they do this range, broadly, in the vicinity of ascribing utility or material benefit that the programmers gain from this activity. Though these answers have been justified quite rigorously, they do not seem to address the core issue of free and open source software.

I find that the culture of poetry that thrived in the cultural renaissance of Delhi, at the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar, resembles the ethos of the open source movement and helps to answer why people write such excellent software, or poetry, and just give it away. Ghalib and his contemporaries strived to express sentiments, ideas and thoughts through perfect phrases. The placing of phrases and words within a couplet had to be exact, through a standard that was time-honoured and accepted. For example, the Urdu phrase ab thhe could express an entirely different meaning, when used in a context, from the phrase thhe ab, although, to an untrained ear they would appear the same. (Of course, poets in any era and writing in any language, also strove for the same perfection.)

Ghalib wrote his poetry for the discerning reader. His Persian poetry and prose is painstakingly created, has meticulous form and is written to the highest standards of those times. Though Ghalib did not have much respect for Urdu, the language of the population of Delhi, his Urdu ghazals too share the precision in language and form characteristic of his style. FOSS programmers also create software for the discerning user, of a very high quality, written in a style that caters to the highest standards of the profession. Since the source code of FOSS is readily available, unlike that for proprietary software, it is severely scrutinised by peers, and there is a redoubled effort on the part of the authors to create the highest quality.

Source material

Ghalib’s poetry, particularly his ghazals, have become the source materials for many others to base their own poetry. For example, Ghalib’s couplet Jii dhoondhta hai phir wohi ... (which is part of a ghazal) was adapted by Gulzar as Dil dhoondhta hai phir wohi..., with many additional couplets, as a beautiful song in the film Mausam. It was quite common in the days of the Emperor to announce azameen, a common metre and rhyming structure, that would then be used by many poets to compose their ghazals and orate them at a mushaira (public recitation of poetry). FOSS creators invariably extend and build upon FOSS that is already available. The legendary Richard Stallman, who founded the Free software movement, created a set of software tools and utilities that formed the basis of the revolution to follow. Millions of lines of code have been written based on this first set of free tools, they formed the zameen for what was to follow. Many programmers often fork a particular software, as Gulzar did with the couplet, and create new and innovative features. (Editor's note - Newton stated the same principle on his discoveries when he said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".)

Ghalib freely reviewed and critiqued poetry written by his friends and acquaintances. He sought review and criticism for his own work, although, it must be said, he granted few to be his equal in this art (much like the best FOSS programmers!). He was meticulous in providing reviews to his shagirds(apprentices) and tried to respond to them in two days, in which time he would carefully read everything and mark corrections on the paper. He sometimes complained about not having enough space on the page to mark his annotations. The FOSS software movement too has a strong culture of peer review and evaluation. Source code is reviewed and tested, and programmers make it a point to test and comment on code sent to them. Free software sites, such as Sourceforge.org, have elaborate mechanisms to help reviewers provide feedback, make bug reports and request features. The community thrives on timely and efficient reviews, and frequent releases of code.

Ghalib was an aristocrat who was brought up in the culture of poetry and music. He wrote poetry as it was his passion, and he wanted to create perfect form and structure, better than anyone had done before him. He did not directly write for money or compensation (and, in fact, spent most of his life rooting around for money, as he lived well beyond his means), but made it known to kings and nawabs that they could appoint him as a court poet with a generous stipend, and some did. In his later years, after the sacking of Delhi in 1857, he lamented that there was none left who could appreciate his work.

However, he was confident of his legacy, as he states in a couplet: “My poetry will win the world’s acclaim when I am gone.” FOSS creators too write for the passion and pleasure of writing great software and be acknowledged as great programmers, than for money alone. The lure of money cannot explain why an operating system like Linux, which would cost about $100 million to create if done by professional programmers, is created by hundreds of programmers around the world through thousands of hours of labour and kept out on the Internet for anyone to download and use for free. The urge to create such high quality software is derived from the passion to create perfect form and structure. A passion that Ghalib shared.

(Rahul De' is Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor of Information Systems at IIM, Bangalore)

Keywords: Open Source software, FOSS software, proprietary software, Richard Stallman

After school tutors priced out the grasp of middle class parents

Middle class parents who want to prepare their children for school entrance tests face being priced out of the market by the super-wealthy who are willing to do "almost anything" to secure the best tutors.

Wealthy families from overseas are offering the best-qualified British tutors up to £80,000 a year as well as housing in order to coach them for the Common Entrance exam and guide them through GCSEs and A-levels.

Competition for the services of the best tutors has seen one family offer a prospective tutor an internship at an exclusive art gallery in Mayfair. The family wish their children, age 7 and 10, to gain places at Eton, Harrow or St Pauls.

So-called 'super-tutors' with track records of getting children into the best schools are able to command ever-increasing salaries from parents from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. Many foreign tycoons settle in London in part because of the reputation of Britain's independent schools.

As a result, middle-class parents face being priced out the market by those for whom cost is "not an issue", according to tutoring firms.

The cost for an average tutor has doubled in four years to around £40 an hour, but those who can guarantee results can charge many times more. 

The Common Entrance exam is at the age of 13 for pupils applying to many leading independent schools. It is routinely taught at prep schools but not in the state sector. Growing competition for places means some schools now demand a result of 70 per cent in every paper.

"There’s been a demographic shift," said Nevil Chiles, who founded Kensington & Chelsea Tutors a decade a go.

"A lot of money has come in from Eastern Europe and Russia. These parents are prepared to do almost anything to get the best, and the cost is not really an issue for them.”

“We get people who have heard of tutors from their friends. They’ll phone us and say: ‘I know this person works for you, we want that person and we’re prepared to pay for that’.”

Salaries of more than £50,000 a year are now commonplace for tutors working in Britain, rising to £80,000 for a top-class tutor willing to work abroad, according to Woody St John Webster, co-founder of tuition agency Bright Young Things. They can expect to receive housing and food on top of their salaries.

Asked whether middle-class families who want their children to have extra help risk being priced out of the market, he said: "Yes. That’s partly because the best teachers are so in demand their price keeps on going up and up and up."

He said the best tutors cost this much "for good reason".

“These are very important people in their lives so you’ve got to get it right and if they [the parents] get it right, the up-side is enormous.

"If you want a top graduate, who’s very energetic, knows their subject backwards and can teach it very well, then you've got to pay. These people are treated like a top-class butler. "

He added that Bright Young Things has a range of tutor options for parents, depending on ability and experience.

One recent Bright Young Things advert asked for a tutor willing to travel between Greece, Switzerland and a yacht in the Mediterranean to teach a pair of three-year old twins. The job offers an annual salary of £40-50,000.

In another, a family from Moscow offered £40,000 a year, an apartment and travel ‘in very smart style’ to an Oxbridge graduate who could provide ‘intellectual stimulation’ to a six-year old boy.

“The work is not too taxing, it mostly involves playing with the boy and doing some basic English work,” the advert says.

Another advert for a family in England calls for an after-school tutor who can coach for the Common Entrance exam and ‘get involved in extra curricular activities such as music, sport and games’. It pays £50,000 a year, plus full board.

Parents spend £6bn a year on private tuition and more than a quarter of families are using tutors to boost their children’s education, according to the survey conducted by EdPlace, which provides educational resources for parents.

Questions for Hafiz Saeed/Pakistan

by M J Akbar

A question for the internationally recognised terrorist, ideologue and mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attack, Hafiz Saeed, resident of Lahore, who has just offered sanctuary in Pakistan to our superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Pakistan was carved out in 1947 to ensure security for this subcontinent's Muslims in a separate homeland. Why, six decades later, has Pakistan become the most insecure place for Muslims in the world? Why are more Muslims being killed each day, on an average, in Pakistan than in the rest of the Muslim world put together?

This continual mass murder is not being done by Hindus and Sikhs, who were once proud residents of Punjab and Sindh but are now merely a near-invisible trace. Some Pakistan leaders even express pride in the fact that non-Muslims , who constituted around 20 per cent of the population in 1947, have been reduced to less than 2 per cent. In contrast, the percentage of Muslims in secular India has increased since independence. Hindus and Sikhs are not killing Muslims in Pakistan; Muslims are murdering Muslims, and on a scale unprecedented in the history of Punjab, the North West Frontier and Sindh. Why?

There have been riots in India, some of them horrendous. But the graph is one of ebb from the peak of 1947. When a riot does occur, as in Maharashtra recently, civil society and media stand up to demand accountability, and the ground pressure of a secular democracy forces even reluctant governments to cooperate in punishment of the guilty. When Shias, or other sectarians, are mass-murdered in Pakistan on a regular basis, the killers celebrate a "duty" well done.

History's paradox is evident: Muslims today are safer in India than in Pakistan. The "muhajirs" who left the cities of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in 1947 would have been far safer in Lucknow, Patna and dozens of cities in their original land than they are now in the tense streets and by-lanes of Karachi.

Could Shah Rukh Khan have become an international heart throb if his parents had joined the emigration in 1947? Since he is talented he would have gained some recognition on the fringes of elite society, but he could not have become a central presence of a popular culture that has seeped and spread to every tehsil and village. Nor is Shah Rukh the only Muslim superstar in Mumbai's film world; Salman Khan is bigger than him. Shah Rukh and Salman and Amir Khan do not hide their identity through an alias; their birth name is their public persona.

The television set in my office serves two main purposes: it shows cricket and offers access to an FM radio station which plays old film songs. A song by Muhammad Rafi was on the air while the previous paragraph was being written: Man re tu kahe na dheer dhare. It is a beautiful classic, written by Sahir Ludhianvi. Rafi, as his name confirms, was a Muslim. He was born in 1924 in western Punjab and came to Mumbai as a very young man in search of dreams. Those dreams had not come true by 1947. Rafi had the option of returning to Lahore. He chose to remain in Mumbai, and brought his family in what might be called the reverse direction. It was a wise choice. Mumbai made Rafi's voice immortal. Rafi, like India, was the distillation of many inspirations.

Hafiz Saeed and his ilk possess cramped, virulent minds which condemn the ragas upon which our subcontinent's music, both classic and popular, is based, as inimical. They want to destroy a shared Hindu-Muslim cultural heritage in which Muslim maestros took classical music to splendid heights under the patronage of padishahs, rajahs and nawabs . Instead of art, they possess vitriol, even as the violence they spawn turns Pakistan into a laboratory of chaos. They call themselves guardians of their nation, but they are in fact regressive theocrats who are shredding the Pakistan that Jinnah imagined.

There is an answer to the opening question. Extremists who reduce faith to a fortress do not understand a simple truth: faith cannot be partitioned. Islam was a revelation for mankind; it cannot be usurped by a minor tract of geography. Nations are created by and for men, within boundaries of language or culture or tribe. Religion comes from God; it is not a political tool for human ambition. Those who equate religion with nation distort the first and destroy the second. Pakistan has become a battlefield for dysfunctional forces because theocrats will not permit it to become a rational state.

Logic suggests a reciprocal offer: Pakistani Muslims would be safer in India. But that offer cannot extend to Hafiz Saeed. His mission is to be India's adversary. What he does not understand is that he is really Pakistan's enemy.

Inequality for All – another Inconvenient Truth?

The powerful documentary Inequality for All was an unexpected hit at the recent Sundance film festival, arguing that US capitalism has fatally abandoned the middle classes while making the super-rich richer. Can its star, economist Robert Reich, do for economics what Al Gore did for the environment?

• 
• • Carole Cadwalladr
  • The Observer, Saturday 2 February 2013 21.00 GMT

Former US labour secretary Robert Reich at an Occupy Los Angeles rally in 2011. Photograph: David Mcnew/Getty Images

In one sense, Inequality for All is absolutely the film of the moment. We are living through tumultuous times. The economy has tanked. Austerity has cut a swath through the country. We're on the verge of a triple-dip recession. And, in another, parallel universe, a small cohort of alien beings – or as we know them, bankers – are currently engaged in trying to figure out what to spend their multimillion-pound bonuses on. Who wouldn't want to know what's going on? Or how it happened? Or why? Or if it is really true that the next generation down is well and truly shafted?

And yet… what sucker would try to make a film about it? It's not exactly Skyfall. Where would you even start? Because there are some films that practically beg to be made. And then there's Inequality for All; the kind of film that you can't quite believe that anybody, ever, considered a good idea, let alone had the passion and commitment to give it two years of their life.

How did you even come up with the idea of making a film about economics? I ask the director Jacob Kornbluth. "I know! People would roll their eyes when I told them. They'd say it's a terrible idea for a film." On paper it is, indeed, a terrible idea. A 90-minutedocumentary on income inequality: or why the rich have got richer and the rest of us haven't (I say "us" because although it's focused on America, we're snapping at their heels) and which traces a line back to the 1970s, when things stopped getting better for the vast majority of ordinary working people and started getting worse.

"It always sounded so dry," says Kornbluth. "But then I'd tell people it's An Inconvenient Truth for the economy and they'd go, Ah!"

In fact, Inequality for All, which premiered at the Sundance film festival a fortnight ago, is anything but dry. It won not just rave reviews but also the special jury prize and a major cinema distribution deal, and while it owes an obvious debt to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it is, in many ways, a much better, more human and surprising film. Not least because, incredibly enough, it's actually pretty funny. And, in large part, this is down to its star, Robert Reich.

Reich is not a star in any obvious sense of the word. He's a 66-year-old academic. And he's been banging on about inequality for more than three decades. At one point in the film he looks quite downcast and says: "Sometimes I just feel like my life has been a total failure." An archive clip of him on CNN from 1991 looking fresh-faced and bushy-haired shows that he has literally been saying the same thing for decades upon decades. And yet, as he tells me cheerfully on the phone from his home in California, "It just keeps getting worse!"

These days he's a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and while he's not a figure we're familiar with in the UK, he's been part of American public life for years. At the start of the film, he introduces himself to a lecture hall full of students, telling them how he was secretary of labour under Bill Clinton. "And before that I was at Harvard. And before that I was a member of the Carter administration. You don't remember the Carter administration, do you?" The students remain silent. "And before that," says Reich with impeccable comic timing, "I was a special agent for Abraham Lincoln." He shakes his head. "Those were tough times."

Reich's books and ideas have been at the forefront of Democratic party thinking for a generation. He is an intellectual heavyweight, a veteran policymaker, a seasoned political hand, and yet he also has the delivery of a standup comedian. His ideas were the basis for Bill Clinton's 1992 election campaign slogan, "Putting People First" (they were both Rhodes scholars and he met Clinton on board the boat to England; he once dated Hillary too, though he only realised this when a New York Times journalist rang him up and reminded him). And they were still there at the heart of President Obama's inaugural address last month. America could not succeed, said Obama, "when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it". What Reich, basically, has been saying since the year dot.

What's extraordinary is how, somehow, these ideas have been translated into a narrative that shows every sign of being this year's hit documentary film. It certainly shocked Reich. He says he was amazed when Kornbluth first pitched the idea of a film. "He came and said that he'd read my book, Aftershock, and that he loved it and wanted to do a movie about it. And I honestly didn't know what he meant. How could you make a movie out of it?"

But Kornbluth has made a movie out of it. A really astonishingly good movie that takes some big economic ideas and how these relate to the quality of everyday life as lived by most ordinary people. The love and care and artistic flair that Kornbluth brought to it is evident in every frame. It was really really hard work, he tells me, to make something look that simple. But then "I grew up poor. So I've always been very aware of who has what in society." His father had a stroke when Kornbluth was five and died six years later. And his mother, who didn't work because she was raising three children, died when he was 18.

Any synopsis of the film runs the risk of making it seem dry again, but essentially it describes how the middle classes have come to have a smaller and smaller portion of the economic pie. And how, since 70% of the economy is based on the middle classes buying stuff, if they don't have any money to buy this stuff, it cannot grow. Meanwhile, the government has allowed the super-rich, the "one per cent", to take more of the nation's wealth. Half of the US's total assets are now owned by just 400 people – 400! – and, Reich contests that this is not just a threat to the economy, but also to democracy.

Kornbluth tells me that he initially had the idea of casting Reich in a feature film. "I'd seen him on TV and I just thought he'd make a great tax inspector in this film I was making. Although, actually, it turned out he was a terrible actor. But we hit it off. And I discovered that he and I share a sense of humour. I'm not a documentarian. My background is comedy. Yet I just thought that this could be an amazingly riveting film. To me it's the most important story of our time. And nobody was telling it. I kept on reading the papers and watching the news and I really wanted a story. I craved it. I just knew that to do it, we would have to make it as funny and human as possible."

And it's this, the gentle humour at the heart of the film, and the lightness of its direction, that are its winning ingredients, disguising what is, in fact, incredibly powerful. Because at heart Inequality for All is a revolutionary film. Or, at least, its dearest desire is to precipitate a revolution in the way that we think about economic matters. As Reich tells me, "the economy is not like the weather". It's not inevitable. It's not determined. "An economy does not exist in nature. We don't have to settle." And, crucially, it can be changed.

But the film's main stroke of brilliance is to put Reich, the unlikely hero, at the centre. "I had never done anything political before," says Kornbluth. "I didn't consider myself political. But seeing his example, the way that he has fought this fight for so many years has been an absolute inspiration to me. I see it in his students, they really do walk out of his lectures and want to change the world."

As in An Inconvenient Truth – or "the most lucrative PowerPoint presentation in history", as one critic called it – the film is structured around a lecture, or rather series of lectures: Reich's incredibly popular wealth and poverty class at Berkeley. But it is only loosely used as a vehicle. There are also news clips and interviews and stylised graphics and archive footage.

And what the film tries to do is thread together evidence that many people know about – the increasing struggle of the middle classes to just get by, the way that the top 1% of society has unshackled itself from the rest of us and has seen its income increase exponentially, and the ever-increasing cost of the traditional avenues of improvement, such as higher education – and weave it into a cohesive and convincing narrative. It is, in some respects, a theory of everything. Reich charts the three decades of increasing median income after the second world war, a period he calls "the great prosperity" and then examines what happened in the late 1970s to put an end to it. The economy didn't falter. It kept on growing. But wages didn't.

The figures that Reich supplies are simply gobsmacking. In 1978, the typical male US worker was making $48,000 a year (adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile the average person in the top 1% was making $390, 000. By 2010, the median wage had plummeted to $33,000, but at the top it had nearly trebled, to $1,100,000.

"Something happened in the late 1970s," we hear him tell his Berkeley class. And much of the rest of the film is working out what happened.

Some inequality is inevitable, he says. Even desirable. It's what makes capitalism tick. But at what point does it become a problem? When the middle classes (in its American sense of the 25% above and below the median wage) have so little of the economic pie that it affects not just their lives but the economy as a whole.

Reich's thesis is that since the 1970s a combination of anti-union legislation and deregulation of the markets contrived to create a situation in which the economy boomed but less of the wealth trickled down. Though for a while, nobody noticed. There were "coping mechanisms". More women entered the workforce, creating dual-income families. Working hours rose. And increasing house prices enabled people to borrow.

And then, in 2007, this all came crashing to a halt. "We have exhausted all the options," he says. There's nowhere else left to go. It's crunch time.

It's crunch time that so many working families understand too well. They may not be familiar with the theory of income inequality but they haven't been able to avoid noticing that they've got less money in their pockets. "I've always thought that kitchen-table economics is the most important topic to most people," says Reich. "Their wages, their jobs, getting by. I've always tried to relate economics to where people live. That's why I was so excited about the film."

The human stories of working American families struggling to cope are at the emotional centre of the film. At a Q&A after the Sundance screening, a third of the audience admitted that they'd cried during the film at some point.

There's Erika and Robert Vaclav, for example, who pay $400 a week to keep their daughter in after-school care so that Erika can work on the checkout at Costco. "And I'm trying to work out if I should get her a phone so that she can walk home from school alone, and I know she's OK, or if I should continue paying the money." They lost their house when Robert was made redundant from his job as a manager at the now defunct electrical retailer Circuit City. And, it gradually transpires, that he's a student in Reich's wealth and poverty class at Berkeley.

"How much money do you have in your checking account?" Kornbluth asks Erika from off camera as she drives her daughter to school. "$25," she says and her voice starts to crack and waver.

One of Reich's greatest sources of humour is himself. In the opening shots of the film, the camera follows him walking to his car, a Mini Cooper. "I sort of identify with it," he says. "It's pretty little. I feel we are in proportion. Me and my car. We are together facing the rest of the world."

Later he takes a box out of the back of his car. "I always travel with my box," he says and explains that he suffers from a rare genetic condition – Fairbanks disease – that led to him only growing to 4ft 10in in height. The box is what he always takes to public-speaking events so that he can reach the podium.

He was bullied as a child "because that's just what happens when you're small" and repeatedly beaten up. His grandmother consoled him by telling him that when he was 10, 11 or 12 he'd shoot up. He never did. "It's never been a conscious thing on my part but that feeling of being bullied, and feeling vulnerable, has stayed with me. And maybe it's because of that that I can empathise with poor people. Because they are the most vulnerable. There is no one to protect them."

In the film, he tells how he made strategic alliances with older boys who could protect him. And years later, he discovered that one of them had travelled down to Mississippi to register voters and had been tortured and then murdered. "That changed my life," he says.

"He has never cashed in," says Kornbluth. "He's an incredibly smart guy and he could have found a way to correlate that into money as so many people do. But he never has. He has absolute integrity. It's almost shocking now for someone not to do that. I mean one of the film-makers I admire is Mike Leigh. And he does McDonald's commercials and I was like 'Whoa!' when I found out but I can't hold it against him. You can't hold it against anybody who's trying to make a living. But it makes Rob all the more amazing. He doesn't sit on boards. Or on thinktanks. He draws a modest salary. He has this absolute moral compass. And he's still trying to change the world."

In the 60s and 70s, this wasn't such a surprising thing. Reich recounts how he grew up "in a time of giants". His first job was working for Bobby Kennedy. Changing the world was what everyone wanted to do.

The world has changed. Just not in the way many thought it would. We fell victim to what Reich calls "the huge lie". That the free market is good. And government is bad. Government makes the rules, Reich keeps on reminding us, over and over. And it decides who benefits from those rules, and who is harmed. And increasingly, that boils down to the rich and the poor.

Perhaps the most surprising voice in the film is Nick Hanauer's. He's just your ordinary, everyday billionaire. One of the 1%. Except that he believes – like Warren Buffett – that he doesn't pay enough tax. And that hammering the middle class, the ones who buy actual stuff, who create demand, which in turn creates jobs and more taxes, is simply bad for the economy. "I mean, I drive the fanciest Audi around, but it's still only one of them… Three pairs of jeans a year, that will just about do me."

The system simply isn't working, he says. It's put the millionaires and the billionaires, the Nick Hanauers and the Mitt Romneys – the people that Republican rhetoric describes as job creators – at the centre of the economic universe, rather than what Hanauer calls the true job creators – the middle classes.

The problem is, he says, is that they've been attacked from every side. He was one of the initial investors in Amazon, a business of which he's "incredibly proud", but he points out that on revenues in the last three months of 2012 of $21bn (£13bn), Amazon employs just 65,600 people. "If it was a mom and pop retailer, it would be 600,000 people, or 800,000 or a million."

Globalisation and technology have played their role. But so has the government. For decades, under both Republicans and Democrats the highest rate of tax didn't dip below 70%. Now, Hanauer says he pays 11% on a six-figure income. Hanauer believes that if he was taxed more, he would be better off, because his company – he's a venture capitalist and his family own a pillow factory – would sell more products, and he would, therefore, make more money.

This is inequality imposed from the top. Reich's charts show that for years, chief executives' earnings kept in step with other employees. And then in 2000-03 "It went kerbluey", by which he means off the charts.

Which is where it still is. In the UK, Royal Bank of Scotland, having covered itself in glory in the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal, is currently contemplating bonuses for its investment banking division of £250m, according to reports last week. This, to put it another way, is the annual wage bill for at least 12,500 of its call-centre workers. Because this isn't just an American problem. It's a British one too.

"If there was upward mobility it would be OK," says Reich in the film. "But 42% of children born in poverty in the USA will stay there. In Denmark it's 24%. Even in Great Britain, where they still have an aristocracy, it's 30%."

It's probably a shocking statistic for Americans to hear. The problem is that by every index you can measure, inequality is worsening in Britain. There are fewer opportunities to overcome the barriers of your birth in the UK than in any other country in Europe. One of the most chilling moments in Inequality for All for a British audience is that how, faced with the same choices that America had in the 70s, we have, in the last year or so, taken the same path.

One of the key moments for Reich was the underinvestment in education, particularly higher education in the 70s. This was when America introduced tuition fees and its workforce started to fall behind the rest of the world's. When opportunities for those from low- and middle-income backgrounds began shrinking: precisely where the UK is today.

It's not just that wages have remained flat in America – as they have in the UK – it's that the expenses of everyday life have soared, in particular education and healthcare.

Last October, an independent commission in the UK led by the Resolution Foundationpredicted that in 2020 wages for low- to middle-income families would be the same as they were in 2000. And yet everything else will have gone up. We too are facing the crunch.

In December, the Office for National Statistics found that richest 10% of people in Britain own 40% of the national wealth. In London and the south-east, one in eight households has almost £1m of assets. The bottom half of the country has no net property wealth and only £4,000 in pensions savings. For them, there is just rising prices. And the ever diminishing possibility of things ever being different for them or their children.

"Where America leads, sadly the rest of the world follows. This same thing is affecting people all over the world," says Reich. "If nothing is done to reverse this trend, Britain will find itself in exactly the same place as America in just a few years' time."

Earlier in the week, I notice that he'd tweeted: "Britain's austerity economics is complete disaster. Its economy shrinking." And pasted a link to the Wall Street Journal in which the head of the IMF took George Osborne to task. When I ask him about it, he calls our austerity economics "a cruel hoax". Cruel because "it hurts people who have been hurt enough". And a hoax because, "It simply doesn't work. Look at the figures."

It should be our crunch time too. We have more people living in poverty who have jobs than those who don't, according to Oxfam. The average British citizen – the average – is three pay cheques away from destitution. And with the entire country poised on the brink of a triple-dip recession.

Perhaps the unlikeliest thing about Robert Reich is how very chipper he is. Even though, by every measure, inequality has got worse in the United States since he started preaching his doctrine. He doesn't seem to let it get to him.

There are clips of him from the 90s when he used to be a regular pundit on Fox News, but as American politics has moved to the right, he has found himself cast as a dangerous leftie. "Robert Reich?" says a pundit on one news clip. "He's a communist. A socialist." It's not a coincidence that he makes a point of saying in the film that he is not, and never has been, a member of the Communist party. And he and Kornbluth go to extraordinary lengths not to mention the word "Sweden" or "Japan" and barely even "Germany".

No good will come of telling the American people what funny foreigners get up to. It is, instead, rather gently subversive, the aesthetic opposite of any film by Michael Moore. It tries to politely prod its viewers into looking at the world differently rather than beating them around the head with a heavy wooden bat marked "polemic".

But American politics has become so polarised, so ideologically vicious, that it's only a matter of time before it's attacked by the right as Stalinist propaganda. "But I'm used to that," he says. "I've been attacked at a personal level for the last 30 years. I'm just excited that this might trigger a debate. Though I'm trying not to get my hopes up."

Crunch time in the US is looking ugly. Reich believes that both the Tea Party and Occupy movements spring from the same sense of anger and frustration that people fear. That politics will become more polarised, more extreme, more hate-filled.

One of the key pieces of research that Reich cites is a study of tax data by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty which shows that the years of peak income inequality in America were in 1928 and 2007. Right before both crashes. "The parallels are striking," he says. It's also striking what happened in the years after 1928. How in Germany, to take a random example, worldwide depression also led to a vicious polarisation of right and left. And certain other outcomes.

Could that happen in America? "Oh good heavens, I hope not!" he says. "Though when you go into periods of economic insecurity with widening inequality which puts the middle class under stress, you create fertile ground for demagogues from left or right. The politics of hate. The politics of fear. We're already seeing that."

And yet, despite, it all, he remains hopeful. "Change has always been difficult," he says. It's why he teaches. If he can't change the world, maybe his students will. Or people who watch the film? I ask and get a classic, understated, deadpan but not entirely unoptimistic Reichian reply. "I'm trying to keep my expectations in check."