The Rohingyas - The forsaken people

Natasha Shahid in The Friday Times

Who are the Rohingya people and why does everyone disown them? Natasha Shahid attempts to answer these questions 

Outsiders in their own country

“The Rohingya come from Burma, but for many years have fled repression there to Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. […] Primarily because the Burmerse government denies them citizenship, most are stateless.” – David Mathieson,Perilous Plight: Burma’s Rohingya Take to the Seas


Of the approximately two million Rohingya alive today, 800,000 live in Burma, 200,000 in Bangladesh, 50,000 in Malaysia and around 500,000 live scattered over the Middle East, where they went looking for work. But can the Rohingya call any of these countries their home? Their treatment by the two proposed countries of their origin – Burma and Bangladesh – does not suggest so: while one has a majority tied up in refugee camps, the other is bent upon killing them to the last man. What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?





Rakhine, the state where most of the Rohingya community is settled

History of the Rohingya People

The origins of the Rohingya people are disputed. Followers of Islam and belonging to the Indo-Aryan stock, they themselves say that they are natives of Rakhine, the south-western Burmese state which shares its northern border with Bangladesh. Others suggest that they are of Bengali origins, and that their language is a derivative of the Bengali language. Alistair D. B. Cook suggests that their movement originated in the Middle East, and brought them to Rakhine after crossing the rest of South Asia.

Whatever their origins, most scholars agree that the Rohingya have been residents of Burma since around the 15th century AD. Archaeological evidence reportedly suggests that the Rohingya have lived in the country since the times of the Kingdom of Mrauk U (1425 AD – 1785 AD). And yet the Burmese government insists that they are not one of their “historical ethnic groups”: the major reason behind their persecution at the hands of the Burmese authorities.



One of the many boats floating on the Indian Ocean, with no country willing to let it anchor

What did the Rohingya do to deserve this fate?

Under British rule, Bengalis were encouraged to repopulate the fertile region of Arakan (now Rakhine), and the boundaries between Bengal and Arakan were removed. So, in all practicality, Bengal and Arakan became a single state making it easier for the Bengali people – who were majority Muslims – to travel to and from Arakan. This migratory trend resumed at the time of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement in 1971, when many Bengalis fled their country and settled in Arakan, instead. The Burmese government insists that most of the people who form the Rohingya community today belong to this stock: another reason behind their attempts to expel the community from the country.

During the Second World War, Japan successfully captured Burma but the British fought the Japanese invading forces on Burmese soil. After the Japanese were ousted, Burma’s Rohingya formed a political party – Arakan Muslim League – which started a political movement to be absorbed into East Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India. The party sent a request to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, himself, in May 1946 to include Arakan in his partition plan. Jinnah turned the request down, replying that he could not intrude in Burmese affairs.

Apparently Jinnah’s rejection led the Rohingya to abandon their political cause, not seeing any use in pursuing it. They decided to take up arms, instead. The target of this armed movement, termed by the Rohingya as a jihad, was at first the separation of the Mayu region in the north of Arakan – where most of their population resided – and its annexation with East Pakistan. When the Burmese government refused to cater to these demands, the Rohingya mujahideen declared jihad on their own government. There was a time when these armed rebels controlled almost all of northern Arakan, forcing the non-Rohingya inhabitants of the state to flee their homes.

This jihadist movement continued for about a decade before the Rohingya rebels finally laid arms between 1957 and 1961, primarily as a result of a military operation initiated to crush the uprising. This is when the displacement of the Rohingya began, which continues to this day.





Another abandoned boat


The Rohingya’s Current Status

After being crushed by the Burmese government in the 1960s, the Rohingya rebellion re-immerged at the time of the East Pakistani separatist movement. At the moment, it is believed to be receiving aid from Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and even from some countries, including Pakistan.

The recently accelerated attempts of the Burmese government at the genocide and expulsion of the Rohingya people has brought the country into the international spotlight – for all the wrong reasons. The persecution of the Rohingya, especially under the nationalist, pan-Buddhist military rule (1962-2011) has had terrible repercussions for the community. General Ne Win, the first military ruler of Burma who assumed control of the country in 1962, expelled Muslims – all Muslims, not just the Rohingya – from the army, and in 1982, under a new citizenship law, the Rohingya were declared as non-nationals.

It didn’t stop with the government: Burma’s citizens – mostly Theravada Buddhists – had an equal share in victimizing the Rohingya people. It was the Buddhist monks who initiated an anti-Muslim movement in 2001, in which pamphlets like Myo Pyauk Hmar Soe Kyauk Sa Yar (“The Fear of Losing One’s Race”) were distributed in the common public. In the same year, 200 Muslims were killed and 11 mosques were burnt down by common Burmese citizens. It is said that this movement was in retaliation to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in March, 2001 by the Taliban. The claim is very likely true, as the Burmese government brought down two mosques – Han Tha Mosque and Taungoo Railway Station Mosque – on the demands of angry Buddhist monks, who wanted to “avenge” the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

Clearly Muslims aren’t the only ones who are over-sensitive about their religion.

Since 2012, there have been repeated anti-Muslim riots in Rakhine and elsewhere in Burma that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Muslims. An anti-Muslim riot can be sparked in Burma for a reason as little as a Facebook photograph, or for no reason at all – it’s like a haystack simply waiting to catch fire.




Verbal abuse: a member of the Burmese bureaucracy once termed the Rohingya “ugly as ogres”

Exodus

With the state of their lives in Burma, the Rohingya Muslims have no option but to leave their home country – if they can call it that. But where would they go? At the moment, they don’t seem to care. The Rohingya are fleeing Rakhine by the boatful whenever they can, even though they know their journeys do not have any destination. Many have fled to Bangladesh, where they are being kept in refugee camps. Many have managed to make it to the Middle East and Japan, while some have even reportedly made it to Karachi. These are the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones? They are stranded mid-sea with nowhere to go. We can only imagine what the state of their lives in their native country must have been for them to rather float endlessly in the middle of salty waters with no food to eat and no water to drink.

Shoddy Science - Study showing that chocolate can help with weight loss was a trick

Kashmira Gander in The Independent

A journalist seeking to lay bare how the research behind fad diets can be “meaningless” and based on “terrible science”, has revealed how he tricked international media into believing that chocolate can aid weightloss.

Posing as Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D, the research director of the fabricated Institute of Diet and Health, biologist and science journalist John Bohannon ran what he called a “fairly typical study” used in the field of diet research.

German broadcast journalists Peter Onneken and Diana Löbl asked Bohannon to conduct a clinical trial into the effects of dark chocolate, as part of a documentary exposing how simple it is for bad science to make headlines.

“It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded,” Bohannon wrote of his in an article for io9.com.

To collate their data, the team asked 5 men and 11 women aged between 19 to 67 to follow either a low-carbohydrate diet, or the same diet but with an added 1.5oz of dark chocolate. Meanwhile, a control group were asked to eat as normal.

While the data showed that the group which ate a low-carb diet while indulging in dark chocolate lost weight 10 per cent faster and had better cholesterol readings, Bohannon stressed that the study was set up for failure.

“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result.”Bohannon explained that thanks to a method known as "p-hacking", the study could have just as likely shown that chocolate helped sleep or lowered blood pressure as the threshold for data being classed as "significant" is just 0.05 per cent.

THE STUDY COULD HAVE JUST AS LIKELY SHOWN A POSITIVE EFFECT ON BLOOD PRESSURE THAN WEIGHT LOSS, SAYS BOHANNON (PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES)
 

After a journal was duped into accepting the shoddy study for money, Bohannon and his colleagues then put together a press release which would be irresistible to journalists and editors looking for a story.

The research was splashed across newspapers and websites across 20 countries in half a dozen languages, seemingly proving how easily dodgy science can circulate across the world’s media.

However, some have questioned the ethic behind the study, with one commenter writing below the piece:

"Going out of their way to court media coverage (that was going to repeat the story but never, ever follow up on the hoax once it was revealed — and this is a hoax) was ethically problematic,” one commenter said.

"If you want to uncover the shady workings, that didn’t really help. It seems like only the people who were already aware of the problems are going to be reached by this reveal."

The stunt came after Bohannon exposed how “open access”science journals were willing to publish deeply flawed research claiming that a drug had anti-cancer properties.

In the investigation for the prestigious journal Science, he revealed the dangers of abandoning the peer-review process expected in science publishing.

A Canadian's views on India

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Missing Virender Sehwag?

Harsha Bhogle

I think I am missing Virender Sehwag. To be fair, this is a wonderful bunch of young players and they are carrying the baton delivered to them by an extraordinary group. I find Ajinkya Rahane most pleasing to the eye, Rohit Sharma’s 264 was an audacious innings that stretched our imagination, the fielding is better than it has been and there are fast bowlers out there who don’t aspire to be medium-pacers. And I will tell people when I am old that I saw Virat Kohli bat. Cricket is still great fun but I am missing Sehwag.

Sehwag had me sitting on the edge of my seat. Always. It was like watching a thriller except that when you watched it the next time, you still didn’t know what was coming next. He was jaw-dropping, he was hair-wrenching. You rolled your eyes and you threw your head back. You looked at the scoreboard and it always showed you a different number. He could be exhilarating, he could be frustrating. He took you on a joyride and he laughed while you held on to your seat in fright.

I always thought Sehwag played cricket the way it was originally meant to be played. The numbers happened. 8586 runs in Test cricket @ 49.34 with 23 centuries. Those were brilliant numbers but we don’t need them to explain Sehwag. Or to fight his case in an argument. In cricket’s most native form, the bowler bowls to get a batsman out and the batsman plays to hit the ball. You got the feeling Sehwag didn’t worry beyond that. Only if he couldn’t hit the ball, he blocked it. You hardly ever analysed Sehwag’s innings, you just enjoyed them.

But he wasn’t a blind basher. Talking to him about cricket, and sadly those moments were too rare, you always came away thinking you had spoken to someone with an uncluttered, confident mind. “The batsman is always scared,” he once said, “but the bowler must be too. He must also think, if I bowl a bad ball where will Sehwag hit me!” The thinking behind that is clear and it has the simplicity that is disarming. If the bowler knows the batsman isn’t going to hit him, he isn’t afraid of bowling a bad ball. But he is most likely to bowl a bad ball when he is afraid of the consequences of bowling one.

We often talk, in sport, of playing to the fear in the enemy camp. Often we never get that far because of the fear in our own mind. A tense cricket match is as much about managing skill as it is about managing fear. There is scarcely a calm mind on a big day. Maybe that is why Sehwag was the most feared man in an India-Pakistan match. He played with a smile, with a song on his lips but also with a calm mind, letting fear brew within the opposition. In 9 Test matches, he made 1276 runs @91.14. It would have been interesting to have measured his pulse, especially in relation to everyone else’s!

He told us, too, that it was okay to hit in the air, to hit over the top and in doing so, he recalibrated risk for all of us. We were always told, from club cricketers to Test players, that hitting in the air was inviting another mode of dismissal. For years we accepted that as the gospel, like good boys we didn’t challenge it.

But Sehwag happily hit over the top, he played into the gap over the fielder’s head where everyone confined themselves to seeking the gap between fielders. Yes, it was still risky but with new bats, it was nowhere near as threatening as everyone believed it was.

And so he has left behind a treasure of good cheer. Which among those was his best? 201* out of only 329 against Sri Lanka when everyone else was playing on a minefield and he was on the highway? 319 against South Africa from only 304 balls while chasing 540? 309 at Multan? 254 at Lahore? That ridiculous 293 from 254 balls in Mumbai when he ended day 2 at 284 not out while still in the field at the start of play? Or was it that 83 from 68 balls with India chasing 387 to win a Test? Would anyone in the world hit eleven 4s and four 6s against a target that had only so rarely been achieved in cricket history? Sehwag often talks about facing the ball, not the bowler or the situation. Surely it had to be that way that day!

I don’t know how much I am going to see of him. I absolutely enjoyed seeing him play for the Kings XI in the IPL but what of India? Maybe the eyes aren’t seeing the ball the same way, maybe the feet are heavier, maybe the bat isn’t as charged with freedom. Maybe there isn’t the same fear in the mind of the bowler running in.

The runs are drying. You wonder if you are listening to the last bars of a lilting melody. You wonder if it is time to leave the theatre. I don’t know but if it is, it’s been an unforgettable ride.

Man who killed himself at Dignitas explains decision in film

Dan Carrier in The Guardian



Jeffrey Spector, right, at dinner with his family, said his condition could have left him with neck-down paralysis at any moment and he believed in his right to dignity. Photograph: Warren Smith 

A businessman with an inoperable tumour has killed himself at an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland – after spending his last seven days making a film for his widow and three children.

Jeffrey Spector died on Monday, six years after he was diagnosed with an inoperable tumour that was growing near his spinal column.

Doctors had warned him the condition would eventually lead to paralysis and death and so Spector said he decided he wanted to be in control of the final stages of his life.

When his illness began to get worse he decided that he had no option but to travel to Switzerland due to UK law. He said: “Assisted suicide is illegal in the UK so it had to be Switzerland.”

He added that he decided it was time when his symptoms increased in severity. “I put one date off so that my daughter could do her exams – but I was going downhill and was finding it hard to use my hands. I had no pressure in my fingers.

“I felt the illness had crossed the red line and I was getting worse. Rather than go late, I am jumping the gun. I call it the least worst option, which is best for my family in the long term.”

Spector, who was the director of a number of advertising and internet firms in Blackpool, Lancashire, chose to be joined by a film crew for the last week of his life. His decision to be filmed has echoes of the death of Guernsey-based hotelier Peter Smedley, whose assisted death in 2011 was screened in a documentary by the late Sir Terry Pratchett for the BBC.

Spector, whose family joined him at the Zurich clinic, described his condition as “a walking timebomb” as he could be struck with neck-down paralysis at any moment.

In an interview released by Dignitas, Spector said he was not scared of death and added: “Never judge someone until you have worn their shoes.

“I know I am going too early. My family disagree, but I believe this is in their best interests.” Stating he wanted to be “in control of the final stages of my life”, he said: “I was a fit and healthy person and my life has been turned upside down.

“What started as backache in 2008 developed into an illness that led me to having to make this most awful decision. Friends, and most of all my family, have urged me not to go through with it.”

Spector first discovered he was ill when he complained of having a sore back and stiff neck. He collapsed at a hotel after attending a friend’s retirement party and sought medical advice. He said: “I thought I had overdone things. My legs went in the hotel room. I got back home and booked in for an MRI scan.

“The phone call from the clinic asked me to go for another scan, which revealed a large tumour high up in my spine in and around the spinal cord.

“My surgeon was confident he could remove the tumour but tests revealed it would be too dangerous. I woke up thinking it would be out, but he told me he could not even take a biopsy.”

Instead, surgeons removed bones elsewhere in his back to relieve pressure caused by the tumour, but it continued to grow.

Spector added: “Had it been lower down the spine, and I lost the use of my legs, I would have been distraught but I could cope. Where it was meant total paralysis from my neck down.”

As the tumour grew, Spector visited the Dignitas clinic and decided that he would kill himself before the tumour’s advance meant he would be unable to do so.

He said: “I know I am going too early but I had consistent thoughts without peer pressure. It had to be a settled decision by a sound mind. If I am paralysed and cannot speak, then what hope is there? I am a proud person – a dignified person, independent and self motivated. It is me who is doing this.”

In the UK, anyone convicted of assisting a suicide can face a 14-year jail term. Pressure group Dignity In Dying, which counted Pratchett as one of its patrons, have long campaigned to change the law.

Labour peer Lord Falconer proposed a bill stating that if someone has a prognosis of less than six months to live, they should be allowed to have an assisted death subject to a number of safeguards and checks. His private member’s bill was debated in the House of Lords in June 2014 and reached the committee stage in parliament in January. However, due to opponents delaying its progress, the bill did not reach the Commons before parliament was dissolved ahead of the general election.

“Some people will criticise me, but do not judge me,” said Spector. “I believe in my human right to dignity. I want the ability to have a cup of tea and hold a phone – I want to be able to do those things myself.

“I believe what I am doing is in the best long term interests of my family. They disagree, but they do accept I have my own opinion.”

A family friend said on Monday: “Jeffrey was not for changing his mind. He did not want to be unable to walk or talk.

“From the outside he appeared as normal – chatty, driving his car, but inside he knew he was getting worse. People have tried to talk him out of this, his own family have begged him.

“But if Jeffrey Spector could not be the Jeffrey Spector we all knew, because of this tumour, this was his way out.”

Concentration and Mental Toughness in Cricket

Ed Smith in Cricinfo

How we are duped by the wrapper, how we mistake the veneer for the structure underneath.

Alastair Cook's appearance is guileless, his speech polite, his behaviour dignified. Too nice? Check the record. He is the toughest cricketer England have produced for decades.

Yesterday in making 153 not out under intense scrutiny and pressure, he once again underlined his pre-eminent gift: responding to a crisis by entering a state of extended and productive concentration.

There are many widespread misconceptions about concentration. It is not so much a wilful and assertive state of mind ("I am going to concentrate hard now") as a state of freedom that flows from the absence of irrelevant thought ("There is nothing extraneous in my mind, no impediments in the road ahead").

Anyone who achieves mastery of a craft, art or profession has by definition also learned to master concentration. They may still suffer anxiety and concern in prospect and retrospect ("Will my work be good enough?", "Was my work good enough?"). But in the act itself, when the script is still being written, they must achieve a state of clarity.

That's why when you meet a brilliant performer - whatever the field - they almost always have an air of calmness and simplicity. When the game is on, their mind is free and uncluttered.

Cook's calmness is preternatural. I watched him carefully yesterday and on Saturday, studying his manner and habits between balls. The gentle walk out to square leg after each ball; the brushing away of stray dust on the pitch; the nonchalant way of standing at the non-striker's end, legs crossed, one hand on hip; the twiddle of the bat in his hands as the bowler turns, looking down at his bat for the first stride or two, then up towards the bowler. All were totally consistent, unruffled by the changing facts of the scoreboard or the corresponding level of anxiety within English cricket.

Whether Cook was watching Ian Bell edge behind as the ball swung in the anxious morning session, or if he was a contented spectator as Ben Stokes smashed England into a dominant position - neither circumstance made any difference to him. He was the same player throughout. His tempo and body language found perfect equilibrium.

It serves as a good metaphor for Cook the man as well as Cook the player. Very seldom is he knocked off kilter or thrown off balance. People have certainly tried. Consider the context of Cook's innings. Yesterday the Sunday papers suggested that Cook was batting to save his captaincy. (Not true, incidentally, as Andrew Strauss has said Cook will captain in the Ashes, but the temptation to turn genuine drama into a phony last-chance saloon often proves irresistible.) In the short term, the fortnight before the Test was dominated by the Kevin Pietersen saga, whipped up once again into full fury. In the medium term, English cricket has endured a state of near permanent crisis for months - at the top of the English game, Cook's captaincy is almost the only aspect of continuity. Widen the focus to take in the last 18 months. Cook has suffered an Ashes whitewash and then, in the summer of 2014, near universal calls for his removal as captain. All bruising, they were experiences that would have crushed many players. Captaincy exhausts and depletes almost everyone in the end. It shows no sign of hobbling Cook yet.

It has long been obvious that Alastair Cook is the finest concentrator to play for England in the modern era. He is also among the most psychologically resilient. Only now do I realise that those two facts are intimately connected. Indeed, watching Cook over the past weeks has reinforced a link I've struggled to notice before: mental strength, whatever the sphere, relies on the art of concentration.



Captaincy exhausts almost everyone in the end. It shows no sign of hobbling Alastair Cook yet © Getty Images


Concentration (the ability to filter out unnecessary noise) leads to clarity, and clarity preserves mental reserves. Quite simply, you don't waste precious focus on things that don't matter.

When I played with Steve Waugh for Kent in 2002, we had several conversations about his mental approach. One recurrent theme was that Waugh defined "toughness" as emotional stability and psychological consistency rather than outward displays of "spiritedness" or meaningless emotion. A batsman with a clear mind, no matter what is going on around him, is displaying mental toughness. The toughest players win more of those scraps, the battles that happen inside their own minds.

Waugh called it mental toughness because sport is adversarial. But that state of flow and focus has much in common with the writer who can see past the mess in his study and follow the story in his head; with the painter sketching a portrait on a noisy train; with the surgeon who tunes out the sense of panic around him when an operation is going wrong and sees only the path ahead. Concentration is not about seeing more. It is about seeing less.

Pressure, in fact, brings out the best in Cook. In the third innings of Tests, when England face a first-innings deficit, he averages 66.

Just as well. Given the nature of the Test season ahead (Australia, Pakistan, South Africa) there will be many more days when Cook will need to do what he does best: to forget the blurry frustrations in the middle distance and watch the ball onto the middle of the bat.

How to turn a liberal hipster into a capitalist tyrant in one evening

Paul Mason in The Guardian

 

World Factory … how would you cope? Photograph: photograph by David Sandison

The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break.

But that was only the start. In Zoe Svendsen’s play World Factory at the Young Vic, the audience becomes the cast. Sixteen teams sit around factory desks playing out a carefully constructed game that requires you to run a clothing factory in China. How to deal with a troublemaker? How to dupe the buyers from ethical retail brands? What to do about the ever-present problem of clients that do not pay? Because the choices are binary they are rarely palatable. But what shocked me – and has surprised the theatre – is the capacity of perfectly decent, liberal hipsters on London’s south bank to become ruthless capitalists when seated at the boardroom table.

The classic problem presented by the game is one all managers face: short-term issues, usually involving cashflow, versus the long-term challenge of nurturing your workforce and your client base. Despite the fact that a public-address system was blaring out, in English and Chinese, that “your workforce is your vital asset” our assembled young professionals repeatedly had to be cajoled not to treat them like dirt.

And because the theatre captures data on every choice by every team, for every performance, I know we were not alone. The aggregated flowchart reveals that every audience, on every night, veers towards money and away from ethics.

Svendsen says: “Most people who were given the choice to raise wages – having cut them – did not. There is a route in the decision-tree that will only get played if people pursue a particularly ethical response, but very few people end up there. What we’ve realised is that it is not just the profit motive but also prudence, the need to survive at all costs, that pushes people in the game to go down more capitalist routes.”

In short, many people have no idea what running a business actually means in the 21st century. Yes, suppliers – from East Anglia to Shanghai – will try to break your ethical codes; but most of those giant firms’ commitment to good practice, and environmental sustainability, is real. And yes, the money is all important. But real businesses will take losses, go into debt and pay workers to stay idle in order to maintain the long-term relationships vital in a globalised economy.

Why do so many decent people, when asked to pretend they’re CEOs, become tyrants from central casting? Part of the answer is: capitalism subjects us to economic rationality. It forces us to see ourselves as cashflow generators, profit centres or interest-bearing assets. But that idea is always in conflict with something else: the non-economic priorities of human beings, and the need to sustain the environment. Though World Factory, as a play, is designed to show us the parallels between 19th-century Manchester and 21st-century China, it subtly illustrates what has changed.

A worker in a Chinese clothing factory Photograph: Imaginechina/Corbis

A real Chinese sweatshop owner is playing a losing game against something much more sophisticated than the computer at the Young Vic: an intelligent machine made up of the smartphones of millions of migrant workers on their lunchbreak, plugging digitally into their village networks to find out wages and conditions elsewhere. That sweatshop owner is also playing against clients with an army of compliance officers, themselves routinely harassed by NGOs with secret cameras.

The whole purpose of this system of regulation – from above and below – is to prevent individual capitalists making short-term decisions that destroy the human and natural resources it needs to function. Capitalism is not just the selfish decisions of millions of people. It is those decisions sifted first through the all-important filter of regulation. It is, as late 20th-century social theorists understood, a mode of regulation, not just of production.

Yet it plays on us a cruel ideological trick. It looks like a spontaneous organism, to which government and regulation (and the desire of Chinese migrants to visit their families once a year) are mere irritants. In reality it needs the state to create and re-create it every day.

Banks create money because the state awards them the right to. Why does the state ram-raid the homes of small-time drug dealers, yet call in the CEOs of the banks whose employees commit multimillion-pound frauds for a stern ticking off over a tray of Waitrose sandwiches? Answer: because a company has limited liability status, created by parliament in 1855 after a political struggle.

Our fascination with market forces blinds us to the fact that capitalism – as a state of being – is a set of conditions created and maintained by states. Today it is beset by strategic problems: debt- ridden, with sub-par growth and low productivity, it cannot unleash the true potential of the info-tech revolution because it cannot imagine what to do with the millions who would lose their jobs.

The computer that runs the data system in Svendsen’s play could easily run a robotic clothes factory. That’s the paradox. But to make a third industrial revolution happen needs something no individual factory boss can execute: the re-regulation of capitalism into something better. Maybe the next theatre game about work and exploitation should model the decisions of governments, lobbyists and judges, not the hapless managers.