This EU referendum doesn’t matter. But the next one will

Simon Jenkins in The Guardian

In 532AD the city of Constantinople was torn between two parties, the blues and greens. Everyone, aristocrat or slave, belonged to one or other. In January a chariot race between the two erupted into riots. Destruction was appalling. Half the city was gutted by fire, including the great church of Hagia Sophia. A green emperor was chosen to replace Justinian, who backed the blues and butchered 30,000 greens in response. That decided it.

Britain’s EU referendum is looking much the same. At first the pros and antis argued over tariffs and sheep meat premiums. Then they argued over top tables and “influence in Europe”. Now they pit salvation against damnation, national glory against famines, locusts, boils and immigrant hordes. The nation examines the entrails of heirs to the throne, actors and London mayors. Prince William,Emma Thompson and Boris Johnson claim meta-wisdom. On Friday the chariot race starts, and all hell breaks loose.

On Europe there is clearly no compromise between black and white, between yes and no. Yet the shallowness of the argument is shown in the antis’ neo-nationalism and the pros’ “Project Fear”. The antis are in denial over how to reconstruct a workable framework for a free-trade area after a no vote. The pros, notably the business community, have nothing to offer but “remaining in a reformed EU”.

David Cameron has laboured valiantly to deliver that reformed EU, but it was never in his gift. Nor has he done what he promised, which is materially to alter Britain’s relationship with Europe. He has probably won all that the EU could plausibly offer. But given the terms of the debate, I do not see how the reformed-EU party can honestly vote yes. The EU is unreformed. If politics were about truth, Cameron would stun the nation tomorrow by backing no.

To me the referendum as such is not the issue. The issue is the aftermath. I suspect the long-term outcome of the vote will be much the same either way. Two adjacent modern economies cannot co-exist without mutual accommodation, reflecting political and economic reality, not ideology.

During Scotland’s 2014 referendum, “independence-lite” drew ever closer in argument to “devo max”. However Scotland voted, there had to be a new deal between London and Edinburgh. The British government, threatened with losing the union, conceded half a deal, and won.

The EU cannot negotiate nimble-footed, as London did in 2014. It is too big and cumbersome, with too many national insecurities and battling lobbies. It cannot even control its borders. Already split by the eurozone, the EU could not stand more exceptionalism. Programmed to ever greater union, it has no gear-shift to “ever less”. Like Britain’s NHS, it has a dinosaur in its DNA.

Certainly a yes vote would change nothing. All that would result is that any future British government, seeking to resist Brussels power, will be hogtied by the result. The threat of Brexit, which Cameron has struggled to mobilise this past six months, will evaporate.

Instead a furious Conservative party would make the government behave ever worse towards Europe. Britain would continue to fend off immigrants, fawn on China and flog everything to east Asia. It would side with America in foreign and defence policy. Irrespective of Europe, its banks would launder money and evade tax with abandon. Britain would stay semi-detached.

On the other hand, a no vote would certainly be traumatic. It would send Britain’s pro-EU establishment into the mother of all huddles with a panic-stricken Brussels. Half of Europe’s democracies know they could lose an EU vote just now. No one really wants Britain to depart.

The dreaded article 50 of the Lisbon treaty on renegotiation would be activated. Fat-cat thinktanks would argue the Norwegian, Swiss, Australian, American and rest-of-world options. Euro-panic would morph into Euro-conspiracy. Power hates rebellion. Deals would be done.

My reading of lobbyist literature from both sides suggests that Britain would probably emerge from all this with a diluted version of associate EU membership. To ensure trade continuity – which is in everyone’s interest – it would accept much of the present EU regulation. It might even contribute to the EU budget. The UK would gain some discretion in picking and choosing. In return it would lose its present much-cited (though never specified) “influence”, through losing its vote in the council and parliament. The balance of advantage is here too opaque for anyone sensibly to call.

But if the outcome does not matter that much, what does? The answer is disruption versus inertia. Here the argument defaults to tribe. The yes tribe is composed of the insiders, the metro-progressives, the established order averse to change. The no tribe consists of the outsiders, the provincials, the instinctive radicals. On the left this is a divide between the old-style statist socialism and the new left of perpetual dissent. On the right it separates the “natural party of government” and the professional class from the grassroots, the insecure and the dispossessed.

Neither tribe is happy with the present EU, as it fails in its core purpose of holding together a disparate continent in the cause of liberal democracy. It made one mistake, the eurozone, and now faces another problem, the growth of rightwing separatism across south and east Europe. It has humiliated a British prime minister into traipsing round the capitals of Europe, pleading for help in a domestic election. It is a mess. This is the EU that would sigh with relief at a British yes vote.

A no vote would not “isolate” Britain from mainland Europe, whatever the howls of “Project Fear”. But it would traumatise EU complacency. It would press the reset button. A no vote would force the EU, or at least countries outside the eurozone, to seek a new balance between supranational regulation and free trade. However arrogant it might seem to others, Britain would have precipitated reform. That is surely what everyone wants.

There would have to be a new treaty between the EU and Britain, on whatever suite of options would emerge from negotiations. It would be tough. But since such a treaty would probably qualify the decision to withdraw, it would merit a new referendum. That is the referendum that really would matter.

JNU, BJP and Jeremiah Wright’s prayer book

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


EASTER is as good a time as any to recall Rev Jeremiah Wright’s admonition of the American political class. The noxious attack on Delhi’s premier Jawaharlal Nehru University by Delhi Police and their Hindutva cheerleaders is another fine reason to remember the pastor who baptised President Obama’s children but remains in bad odour with the right-wing political class in his country.

In a powerful sermon, he illustrates how to criticise your country and not be lynched or jailed. His slamming of America is not rooted in hatred of his country but in his love for its people as he loved people everywhere. Pastor Wright, like other ordinary people, does not have a nationalist bone.

War, he told a congregation not too long ago, does not make for peace. “Fighting for peace is like raping for virginity…When your wife or your children have been crushed by the enemy, when your mother or your father have been mowed down by the military, peace is not on your mind. Payback is the only game in town.” Are Jeremiah Wright’s words subversive for our region?

“Occupying somebody else’s country doesn’t make for peace. Killing those that fought to protect their own homes does not make for peace … We confuse government and God…We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. And [they want] us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not ‘God Bless America’; God Damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people!” It’s a long speech.

 Many Americans strongly disagreed with Jeremiah Wright. President Obama distanced himself from his sermons in an election year. But no statute or law book was thrown at him, nor was he harassed or threatened with lynching as happens in India these days. The object lesson here is that America can be accused of a million wrongs, but it remains a confident democracy that allows for dissent at home, though not be always abroad.

The Wright example is relevant for India as last week’s assault on JNU came from an insecure state that is not confident enough to take sharp criticism. The assault, ostensibly invited by some Wright-like words, triggered a heavy bout of nationalist fervour. Sadly, every party, from the left to the right, was pleading to be counted as nationalist as if that would save anyone from the state’s insidious rightist trap.

Nationalism, which Wright shunned, has traditionally been a sly, opportunistic, street-smart, malleable idea, which doesn’t do any good to any society coming under its sway. But it has always been useful for the national elites more or less everywhere, since decades. Ziaul Haq claimed to be a nationalist, so did his quarry, Z.A. Bhutto. Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, ditto. Mujib and Ziaur Rehman likewise. Hitler rode to power on nationalism, and with him his trusted aide Ernst Rohm. However, when Rohm, the head of the dreaded Nazi SA, posited that socialism in National Socialism was as important as nationalism, Hitler got him shot.

Nehru was instinctively an internationalist, but opposition pressure turned him into a nationalist albeit grudgingly, with soft hands. Then Narendra Modi arrived and declared the first prime minister as the harbinger of the nation’s dark ages. By implication, Nehru was India’s essential foe. Modi struck up a conversation with Bangladesh while assiduously hiding away the role of Indira Gandhi in its creation. Gandhi had shored up the idea of Bangladesh to claim her own nationalist baton. Modi has striven to steal her thunder but may not succeed.

His stated objective in this endeavour is, therefore, to finish off the Congress, to weed out from the roots India’s original beacon of nationhood, and, not unknowingly, supplant it with the nationalist fervour of Hindutva’s lynch mobs.

To this end Modi took into confidence the audiences in Beijing about the plot. Indians, he told the world through them, without naming names, were living a life of inferiority complex under decades of Nehru-Gandhi rule. With his advent they had got back their spine.

That spine was in evidence last week in JNU, India’s premier institution of high academic interface with the world. Calls for shooting JNU’s leftist students could be an example of the reinforced spine. Shut down the university counselled another Hindutva acolyte. The agenda to dismantle the “hub of leftism”, of course, precedes by decades last week’s meeting of some as yet unidentified students to commemorate an executed Kashmiri militant.

The Afzal Guru meeting became a ruse for a terrifying police invasion of the campus. The student leader picked up for grilling is a Marxist and it is not his politics to slam the Indian state as Rev Wright would. That may not help though. The Hindu right is hunting for communists, not Kashmiri separatists who the army takes care of.

Therefore, perhaps the most tragedy-prone nationalists anywhere today are India’s communists, not the least because they were never cut out for the job. Their creed up until early 1990s was internationalism. Then they seemed to have run out of foreign partners.

Of the internecine communist battles the world over, two or three mannerisms are staple: brotherly greetings, marginalisation of former comrades and debunking of each other. Their task was to dismantle an unequal world, but Indian communists turned the challenge into a game of blind man’s bluff. Having ground down each other more viciously than they ever did their class adversaries they have unwittingly exposed themselves to the state’s vicious moves against them, as sitting ducks. What happened in JNU had much to do with that.
Jeremiah Wright’s sermon could yet guide the comrades to their old self-assured internationalism, and wean them away from an ill-fitting nationalist makeover. Happy Easter, comrades.

The housing crisis is creating sharp-elbowed husband hunters

Grace Dent in The Independent

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen, foretelling the British housing situation in 2016, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Oh how I struggled, as a sixth-former in the Nineties, with the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.

How hideous, I thought, that a time existed when a woman would marry a man for a house. Cut forward some two decades to the era of the £80,000 mortgage deposit. How odd that marrying bricks and mortar – with an added spouse as a bonus – seems pragmatic, rather than mercenary, today.

I very much enjoyed a recent column by the writer Esther Walker, in which she admits spying her then-boyfriend Giles Coren’s slightly neglected five-bedroom London townhouse, seven years ago, and being instantly smitten. With the house, that is. Coren, as alluring as he is, came second in the equation. First, Walker says, she saw the chipped front door, the replaceable carpets and all that lovely space. Here was a home in which she could live, nest, and raise children.

It is fascinating to me that, five short years ago, a confession as gloriously candid as Walker’s would have provoked feminists into bringing down the internet. I would have been among them, perhaps. Today, I greet the same news with a relaxed shrug of acceptance.

Just five short years ago, I remained convinced that if a young woman – or a young man, for that matter – dreamed audaciously and worked very, very hard, they need not be dependent on anyone for a home. I bought my own house through sheer slog and bloody-mindedness; why couldn’t Generation Buzzfeed do the same? 

But little by little, I’ve watched the rise of single men and women trapped in later-life house-shares. I’ve seen how grown-up children are reduced to squatting like cuckoos in their parents’ back bedrooms until well after it is polite. Eventually, I was writing about the rise of strangers in London sharing bunkbeds (out of grim necessity, I should point out, not as a niche hobby).

The future seemed rather infantalising. And for women, feminism may well have flourished, but owning the house you live in, like Beyoncé sang about in “Independent Women” has fallen on its arse somewhat.

The facts are sobering: recent research by the Resolution Foundation on inter-generational fairness shows that in 1998, more than half of those earning 10 to 50 per cent of the average national income had a mortgage. This figure dropped to one in four by 2015. Within a decade, if things continue as they are, one in 10 will have a mortgage. In the late 1990s, when I was a strident youthful thing, it took determined people like me three years to save up for a deposit. Today it would take 22 years. That’s a long time to share a bunk bed, even if it’s in HMP Holloway.

This is particularly bleak in the light of new research on the rise of the “crowd worker” – people paid through online platforms such as Uber, Upwork and TaskRabbit. Here, instead of fairly paid, pensionable work which impresses mortgage vendors, there is a generation tied to their phones waiting to accept or decline piecemeal “tasks”.

Crowdworkers tend to work without benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions or minimum wage guarantees. There must – I suspect, as I’ve never worked like this myself – be a feeling for crowdworkers of being tremendously busy and usefully employed. But meanwhile, financially at least, they are treading water. I’m not sure how you conduct a family life or a relationship around crowdwork, although I’m pretty sure the people who profit from it will say that it’s this versatility that is the unique selling point.

One thing I do know is that Walker’s confession unveils an unpalatable truth about the modern British relationship. We are, increasingly, a nation of clandestine Austen heroines in search of those “in possession of a good fortune”. Be you feminist or fervent bachelor, gay, straight, male, cis or genderfluid; for the average person, marrying into property will be your best shot at “owning it” these days. And if you can charm your name on to the mortgage deeds, well, even better. The housing crisis will make sharp-elbowed, radar-eyed Chelsea husband-hunters of all of us.

In another five years, I predict that Tinder will be outmoded by a simple database of single millennials who were lucky enough to inherit – or afford – a three-bedroom house with space for a homeworking office and a nursery. Or an app which lists unwedded people with sickly parents about to cark it who, in the meantime, happen to be sitting selfishly on a five-bedroom pile in Surrey. In the future, these property owners – not the slinky, the booby or the muscular – will be the sex gods of society.
These gods will woo you with their seductive talk of land registry documents, convertable attic space and the downsides of a 20-metre back garden. You will be powerless in the face of their Farrow & Ball catalogue and hopelessly impressed that their bed is on one level and not accessed via a ladder. You will swipe right for a place to call home. Sure, deep, real love will keep you warm in bed at night. But when the place is yours, you can stick in underfloor heating and a reliable combi-boiler.

Crime, terrorism and tax evasion: why banks are waging war on cash

Paul Mason in The Guardian

Governments would love to see the end of banknotes. But what would a cashless society mean for freedom?

 

Will contactless payment help usher out cash? Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images



I can remember the moment I realised the era of cash could soon be over.

It was Australia Day on Bondi Beach in 2014. In a busy liquor store, a man wearing only swimming shorts, carrying only a mobile phone and a plastic card, was delaying other people’s transactions while he moved 50 Australian dollars into his current account on his phone so that he could buy beer. The 30-odd youngsters in the queue behind him barely murmured; they’d all been in the same predicament. I doubt there was a banknote or coin between them.

The possibility of a cashless society has come at us with a rush: contactless payment is so new that the little ping the machine makes can still feel magical. But in some shops, especially those that cater for the young, a customer reaching for a banknote already produces an automatic frown.

Among central bankers, that frown has become a scowl. There is a “war on cash” in the offing – but it has nothing to do with boosting our ease of payment or saving trees.

Consider the central banks’ anti-crisis measures so far. The first was to slash interest rates close to zero. Then, since you can’t slash them below zero, the banks turned to printing money to stimulate demand. But with global growth depressed, and a massive overhanging debt, quantitative easing (QE) is running out of steam.

Enter the era of negative interest rates: thanks to the effect of QE, tens of billions held in government bonds already yield interest rates that are effectively below zero. Now, central banks such as Japan and Sweden have begun to impose negative official interest rates.

The effect, for banks or long-term savers, is that by putting your money in a safe place – such as the central bank or a government bond – you automatically lose some of it.

Not surprisingly, these measures have led to the growing popularity of cash for people with any substantial savings. Bank of England research shows demand for cash has grown faster than GDP in many countries. So the central banks face a further challenge: how to impose negative interest rates on cash itself.

Technologically, you can’t. If people hold their savings as physical currency, it keeps its value – and in a period of deflation the spending power of hoarded cash increases, even as share prices and the value of bank deposits fall. Cash, in a situation like this, is king.

But the banks are ahead of us. Last September, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, openly pondered ways of imposing negative interest rates on cash – ie shrinking its value automatically. You could invalidate random banknotes, using their serial numbers. There are £63bn worth of notes in circulation in the UK: if you wanted to lop 1% off that, you could simply cancel half of all fivers without warning. A second solution would be to establish an exchange rate between paper money and the digital money in our bank accounts. A fiver deposited at the bank might buy you a £4.95 credit in your account.

More radical still would be to outlaw cash. In Norway, two major banks no longer issue cash from branch offices. Last month, the biggest bank, DNB, publicly called for the government to outlaw cash.

Why would a central bank want to eliminate cash? For the same reason as you want to flatten interest rates to zero: to force people to spend or invest their money in the risky activities that revive growth, rather than hoarding it in the safest place.

Calls for the eradication of cash have been bolstered by evidence that high-value notes play a major role in crime, terrorism and tax evasion.

In a study for the Harvard Business School last week, former bank boss Peter Sands called for global elimination of the high-value note. Britain’s “monkey” – the £50 – is low-value compared with its foreign-currency equivalents, and constitutes a small proportion of the cash in circulation. By contrast, Japan’s 10,000-yen note (worth roughly £60) makes up a startling 92% of all cash in circulation; the Swiss 1,000-franc note (worth around £700) likewise. Sands wants an end to these notes plus the $100 bill, and the €500 note – known in underworld circles as the “Bin Laden”.

The advantages of a digital-only payment system to the user are clear: you can emerge from the surf in only your bathing shorts and proceed to buy beer, food, or even a small car, providing your balance is positive. The advantages to banks are also clear. Not only can all transactions be charged a fee, but bank runs are eliminated. There can be no repeat of the queues outside Northern Rock, nor of the Greek fiasco last summer, because there will be no ATMs, only a computer spreadsheet moving digital money around. The advantages to governments are also clear: all transactions can be taxed. Capital controls are implicit within the system.

But there are drawbacks, even for governments that would like to take absolute control of money transactions. First, resilience. If a cyber-attack or computer malfunction took down a digital-only payment system, there would be no cash reserves in households and businesses to fall back on. The second is more fundamental and concerns freedom. In most countries, the ability to take your cash out of the bank and to spend it anonymously is associated with many pleasurable activities – not all of which are illegal but which exist on the margins of society. How tens of thousands of club-goers would pay for their drugs each Saturday night is a non-trivial issue.

Nevertheless, the arrival of negative interest rates for banks, together with new rules allowing governments to bail-in – ie confiscate – deposits above a protected minimum, are certain to increase savers’ awareness of the value of cash, and will prompt calls in earnest for its abolition.

If it happens, it would be the ultimate demonstration of the power of finance over people. As for resistance? Go ahead and try. It may be the Queen’s head on a £50 note but the “promise to pay” is made above the signature of a Bank of England bureaucrat.

Why on earth would HSBC leave a country that gives banks an easy ride?

Prem Sikka in The Guardian

Bankers in the UK have faced no prosecutions – despite their serial abuses, and the catastrophic consequences of their actions.

 

‘Perhaps someone would investigate the culture that enriches a few at the expense of many.’ Photograph: Reinhard Krause/Reuters


So, HSBC is retaining its headquarters in London. Was there ever any danger that it would quit a cosy jurisdiction with feather-duster regulation and prosecutions as rare as hen’s teeth?

Banks have little to fear here, as UK regulators and prosecutors rarely take action.

In 2012, HSBC paid a fine of $1.9bn to US authorities for its role in money laundering by drug traffickers and governments on sanctions lists. The US Department of Justice stated that the bank “accepted responsibility for its criminal conduct and that of its employees”. In 2015, the Swiss authorities fined HSBC 40m Swiss francs (£28m) for “organisational deficiencies” that allowed money laundering to take place in the bank’s Swiss subsidiary. UK regulators twiddled their thumbs.

Leaked documents showed that HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped around 30,000 wealthy clients dodge taxes. As the primary regulator of HSBC, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) promised investigations. Just a few weeks later, Martin Wheatley, the FCA chief executive found that his contract was not being renewed, even though he had some “unfinished business”. In January, HMRC told the House of Commons public accounts committee that it had abandoned its criminal investigation into the role of HSBC in alleged illegal activities.

HSBC to keep its headquarters in London



Bankers face no retribution in the UK. Iceland has sent 29 bankers to prison for their role in the 2007-08 banking crash. The UK’s overcrowded prisons could have squeezed in some bankers, but there have been no prosecutions for bringing down the industry and ushering in austerity. The UK finance industry has been a serial offender, as evidenced by mis-selling of pensions, endowment mortgages, payment protection insurance and rigging of interest rates, but successive governments have failed to prosecute.

Abuses are deeply ingrained into the bank business models that pursue ever rising profits and mega performance-related remuneration for executives. Perhaps someone would investigate the culture that enriches a few at the expense of many. Despite the fanfare of an investigation, the FCA, possibly under pressure from the Treasury, dropped its investigation into banking culture.

Auditors are paid vast sums to evaluate internal controls operated by banks. Yet all ailing banks received a clean bill of health before the 2007-08 crash. This should have prompted the regulator, the Financial Reporting Council, to act, but it did not.

Irked by this inertia, Andrew Tyrie MP, chairman of the Commons treasury committee, pressed the FRC to investigate the audits of HBOS, a bank bailed out by taxpayers in 2008. In January 2016, some eight years after the events, the FRC said that it is considering making some “preliminary inquiries”.

It is not only regulators, prosecutors are missing too. In the US, Citicorp, JPMorgan, Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS have pleaded guilty to manipulating the foreign exchange rates, and traders have also been convicted of rigging a benchmark interest rate known as the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor). In the UK, the Serious Fraud Office has recently lost six cases of alleged rigging of Libor. It previously botched investigation into the collapse of Icelandic banks.

Deep reforms of the finance industry are not on the government agenda. After the banking crash, the government sought to take the heat out of the public debate by appointing an Independent Commission on Banking, under the chairmanship of Sir John Vickers. Its 2011 report recommended ringfencing retail banking from speculative trading. In the interest of stability, the report recommended that banks have a broader capital base to enable them to absorb shocks. Both remain unimplemented. Last Sunday, Vickers complained that the Bank of England had watered down the proposals, and banks might not have enough financial buffers to survive the next crisis.

The above is just a small illustration of the shameless appeasement of the finance industry by the UK government. It is hardly surprising that HSBC and other financial behemoths find London attractive. The finance industry may welcome the government’s capitulation, but the rest us are repulsed by the stench of scandals and bailouts. The UK’s regulatory system has utterly failed and needs to be redesigned.

I'd never kissed a Tory - then I married one

A growing number of parents aren't keen on their children finding love across the political divide Credit: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Lucy Mangan in The Telegraph


There is a scene in the eighties sitcom Bread, about the Catholic, working class Liverpudlian family the Boswells, in which one of Nellie Boswell’s sons plans to bring A Homosexual round for tea. “But Joey,” she whispers urgently, “what do they eat?”

Twenty five years later a similar scene played out in my own house when I told my parents I was bringing a Tory home – a boyfriend, for their inspection - except that they would have been happy to feed him anything, up to and including poison.

My mother was an NHS doctor and my father worked in the theatre. Their naturally left-leaning tendencies had been aggravated by Thatcher’s – um, let’s call them deleterious - effects on those two fields and weren’t much improved by their experiences putting two daughters through state school, as our milk, playing fields, books and local education authorities disappeared.


Lucy's left-wing parents were deeply dicombobulated by her Tory boyfriend Credit: Geoffrey Swaine-REX Shutterstock




I didn’t even meet a Tory until I went to university and now here I was bringing one home. I would go on to get engaged, marry and breed with him. My parents would still like to poison him.

In this, it turns out, they are not alone. A new study just out from YouGov shows that the proportion of parents who would be deeply discombobulated by their son or daughter bringing home a partner of a different political persuasion from them has almost doubled in the last eight years.

Among Labour-supporting parents 28 per cent would be “unhappy” and 10% “very upset” by such an occurrence, and nearly one in five Conservative supporters would be upset if their child married a Labour supporter.

You can understand the impulse. Parents (and I speak as one myself now) want their children to be safe and happy and both those things are felt to be most likely found in what you already know. It’s also an impulse that plays into a wider current mood where everything is becoming more tribal. Politics, obviously, has the increasingly spare, ruthless, Conservatism of Cameron and Osborne on the one hand and the (potentially) Stalinist purgative of Corbyn on the other.


 

Political party rosettes.






This mirrors the increased extremism of the Republican and Democratic parties in the US. The social divide between reds and blues over there is almost complete and there is real shock occasioned and stigma attached to any reaching across it – romantically or simply in terms of friendship.

Everywhere there is an increasing drive towards homogeneity, towards only mixing with your own kind. On Facebook we get in touch with old friends, friends of those friends, other people whose interests provably dovetail with ours before they even appear on our feeds.

On Twitter we self-select and then go to furious war with anyone or anything that appears in our timelines with which we disagree.

Life becomes an echo chamber in which we all squat like smug, fat toads until we have to bestir ourselves to fight another battle against incomers, with their nasty new thoughts and their horrible ways. Once they are banished completely we can fall gently into complacent lethargy and never move again.


Arnold Schwarzenegger and his now ex-wife Maria Shriver - Shriver was a Democrat while Schwarzenegger was a Republican. Credit: John Taylor




This is bad in life and worse in marriage. I am still not sure, a decade on since meeting him, whether my husband’s Toryism makes him mad or bad, but it does make him interesting to know. Yes, there are times when I would prefer a more peaceful, harmonious life.

I would like, for example, to be helped with the recycling without having to listen to a diatribe about environmentalism (or “a blend of anti-human, self-praising crypto-paganism that’s gone too far”) or to watch Newsnight without explosions of rage about bias and the “bloated, Byzantine, bureaucratic nightmare that is the BBC” or have our friends round for dinner without at least half of them being served slaughtered sacred cow as the main course.

I would like to be able to give money to people who beg on the streets without my husband rolling his eyes. That one I would like very much.

But it does banish boredom, which is surely one of marriage’s greatest enemies.


 

Different political persuasions in marriage is better than boredom.


Another thing parents should bear in mind when staring down the barrel of a politically-incompatible potential in-law is that he or she might not be as bad as you think. It may just be your left/right bigotry talking. In no other area of life do we cleave as strongly as we do to party political prejudices.

I was raised to believe that Tories ate boiled babies for lunch and kebabbed kittens for fun. Down on the ground though, they are, like the left, a mixed bunch.

Yes, some are, as I was taught, uncaring people who envisage the world as an immutable entity comprising the powerful and the people they tread underfoot, believing they are among the former, especially if they stick close to their friends from school.

But others are drawn to the idea of freedom – freedom to do things, freedom not to do things, freedom to change things, freedom to keep things the same. My husband genuinely believes in the philosophy of helping people to help themselves.

I think this ignores the people who need extra help, but he sees it simply as another way of phrasing the “give a man a fishing rod” principle. And on we go, slightly less bored, slightly more open-minded perhaps than if we agreed.


 

Both the left and right are far from perfect.


I was raised to believe that the left was perfect. Always protecting the underdog and promoting the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, especially via fair and sufficient taxation. Publicly-funded fishing rods for all!

In real life, of course, things are more complicated. No-one ever told me, for example, that there is nothing more rigid than the liberal orthodoxy and that sometimes supporting Labour would feel more like attending a religious revivalist meeting than anything else, or that the average liberal reacts to any kind of disagreement as if it were a mortal sin.

Nevertheless, despite these growing disappointments, I will forever remain committed to such splendid ideas as an unprivatised health service, taxing companies according to their profits and to the belief that there are some people who can’t haul themselves up by their own bootstraps and shouldn’t be expected to.

Each side, it turns out, takes all sorts. The left talks a lot of rubbish and so does the right. From the bits that aren’t rubbish, we are all free to pick and choose and, except for the few committed and/or craven ideologues amongst us, we will all probably end up with stuff from each side.

Whisper it, we are probably all a lot closer than we think. Now, if you will excuse me I have a baby to boil and some kittens to skewer in preparation for Valentine’s Day. I’m sure he will be taking the anti-human, self-praising, crypto-pagan bins out for me in return. Compromise, people – it’s everything.

The Shashank Redemption - Why not make administrators our role models?

ROB STEEN in Cricinfo

By putting a stop to the brief reign of the Big Three, Shashank Manohar has managed to do something that defied criticism © Getty Images


I simply couldn't believe all the filth which came out of their mouths. All day long. And to anyone. It was hilarious but unrepeatable, and because I wanted them to treat me as one of the lads, I accepted it.

You really know how to control a match buddy. It's a f***ing joke.

Two snapshots of sport in 2016, both from Australia, the nation that, some might say, put the "tit" in competitive.

That first reverberant sound bite emerged last week from England wicketkeeper Sarah Taylor, semi-fondly reminiscing about her recent experiences as the first woman to play the highest grade of male club cricket for Northern Districts in Adelaide. Somewhat unsurprisingly, she discovered that her ears and sensibilities were not going to be spared. As Bryan Ferry so eloquently put it, "Boys will be boys will be boys-yoy-yoys…"

The second, decidedly unsound bite came during last month's Australian Open, when that gifted but very naughty overhead smasher Nick Kyrgios hit fresh heights in his impressive assault on John McEnroe's all-time record for sporting officials harangued, abused and ridiculed. Indeed, at the end of the match in question, Kyrgios approached James Keothavong, the latest object of his loathing, and told the British umpire he was "a terrible referee", thus achieving the notable double of being at once searingly honest and hopelessly wrong.

What distinguishes the verbals encountered by Taylor from those delivered by Kyrgios, of course, is that the former occurred during a match that was not covered by the all-seeing, almost-all-hearing broadcasters. What further unites them is that the rules of the respective games, at amateur and professional level alike, empower the enforcers to penalise the offensive offenders. It is in the now-histrionic court of public approval that things get messy.

Naturally, there are those - almost invariably the sort of folk who claim to have first-hand memories of the '60s but were already too old to join in the fun - who will assure you that bad behaviour during a sporting contest is a strictly late-20th-century curse, triggered by the advent of unseemly rewards and the TV-fuelled obsession with personalities and controversy. This is, of course, absolute rot.

For no justifiable reason, playing sport for a living - unlike acting or singing or dancing or painting - means not only having to behave yourself, but being seen to behave yourself.

Ask Colin McDonald. Roused by Mike Atherton's recent contention that Fred Trueman and Brian Statham were England's No. 1 all-time co-manipulators of the new cherry, the dogged former Australia opener recently reflected on the might of Frank "Typhoon" Tyson: "I will never forget the remarks made by my opening partner Jim Burke during the 1959 Adelaide Test after a Tyson bouncer: 'If you bowl another one of those I'll knock your block off with this bat.' 'Will yer?' replied Frank. Not wishing to enjoy being the recipient of a similar delivery, my pleasant rejoinder to Tyson on his way back to his mark was 'Well bowled.'"

In emailing those wincing reminiscences to the Times, McDonald perhaps unwittingly highlighted the preposterousness of what might best be termed the sporting contract - that timeless unwritten constitution that obliges professional sportsfolk to seek victory at any cost but behave like a pre-pubescent Mormon; the same unwritten constitution that simultaneously obliges our competitive artists to remember, above all, that it's only a blimmin' game.

For those who regard ungentlemanly conduct as perpetually indefensible, last week's Under-19 World Cup game between West Indies and Zimbabwe in Chittagong proffered much to get high and mighty about. With one over remaining and the Zimbabweans requiring a further three runs, Richard Ngarava was "mankaded" by Keemo Paul, sending waves of disgust rippling around the planet.

Indeed, it says all too much about cricket's self-deluding self-image that a photograph of the incident made its way onto the English sports pages even though not one of Blighty's nine national daily papers sent a correspondent to the tournament - thus missing the lethally precocious magnificence of Alzarri Shaheim Joseph, a skyscraping Antiguan beanpole who seems destined to put Kemar Roach and Jerome Taylor to shame by becoming the millennium's first great lean, mean Caribbean pace machine.

In principle, this column agrees wholeheartedly with Tony Cozier: the notion of being honour-bound to deliver a pre-emptive warning is more than a little stupefying. For one thing, it's not as if we expect batsmen to stick their hand up and inform the bowler they're about to suddenly take guard the other way round. For another, baseball, cricket's uppity younger brother, has always been more clear-cut: if a runner is caught straying off base while sneakily seeking a head start, he's out and that's it. No ethical posturing or accusations of moral bankruptcy here. In fact, such dismissals are so common they have their own incriminating name: "picked off".



If Ched Evans wins his appeal and is re-signed by Sheffield United, will he be greeted with apologies? © Getty Images


Should we be perturbed that teenagers such as Paul appear to be every bit as prepared as their elders and alleged betters to seek any legitimate advantage available rather than concern themselves with something so nebulous as "the spirit" of the game? The opposite conclusion should be drawn: their priority is to demonstrate that they are capable of making the leap from outstanding amateurs to - at the very least - competent professionals.

For no justifiable reason, playing sport for a living - unlike acting or singing or dancing or painting - means not only having to behave yourself, but being seen to behave yourself. On and off the park. Why rugby flankers or NFL tight ends - whose job is to disrupt the opposition by virtually any means necessary - should be expected to be angels beyond the touchline is utterly beyond this column's ken. Since successful athletes tend to peak in their late 20s, all this column can say is that when it was that age, it was about as mature as day-old cheddar. Then there are the stresses and strains of doing one's job in public, unaided by an editor or body double, never mind in the incessant glare of the octopus otherwise known as the media. Shouldn't compassion be more prevalent than self-righteous, hypocritical indignation?

This is not to say there are not intensely problematic cases. Nor decry the many Sheffield United FC fans - among them the Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis-Hill, whose name was removed from a stand at Bramall Lane after she, along with many others, threatened to end their loyalty should the club re-sign the convicted rapist Ched Evans. Nor fault Atlanta Falcons for releasing Michael Vick in 2009 after the quarterback had spent 21 months in jail for running a dogfighting ring. Vick, though, rediscovered his mojo by kind permission of the Philadelphia Eagles. As for Evans, who has always maintained his innocence, his case has been referred to the Court of Appeal. What happens if the verdict is reversed? Would United re-sign him? Would (anti) social media resound with apologies?

"I'm not paid to be a role model. I'm paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court." Thus, in a largely forgotten 1993 commercial, stated the NBA star Charles Barkley, hitting the nail squarely on the head. "Funny how big shots accept all the trappings of role model-dom - especially the residual commercial cash - before they renounce their broader responsibilities to society," retorted Phil Mushnick in the New York Post. Meanwhile, in Sports Illustrated, Barkley's fellow NBA alumnus Karl Malone jabbed hard: "Charles... I don't think it's your decision to make. We don't choose to be role models, we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one."

Begging to differ was the Boston College sociologist Michael Malec, former editor of theJournal of Sport and Social Issues. "In essence Barkley is correct. If you want to emulate what he does on court, you've got a wonderful model there. That doesn't necessarily mean he ought to be a model as a father or husband."

Time, then, for a radical rethink: if we really must have role models, should we not look to the administrators, the purported adults? Plainly, suggesting even a tiny proportion fit the bill is tantamount to proposing that the next best option is Robert Mugabe (the current No. 1 global dictator, according to Forbes magazine, just ahead of Bashar al-Assad). Fishing a good guy out of the alphabet soup containing such toxic ingredients as the ICC, IOC, IAAF and FIFA, is akin to locating a needle in the Pacific Ocean.

Tim Wigmore was spot on when he pointed out that, before India - with a little help from their equally greedy, yellow-bellied pals in Australia and England - started muscle-flexing in earnest, the ICC was scarcely a model of enlightened governance. On the other hand, quoting the questionable wit and dubious wisdom of Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's former chief of staff ("Never let a serious crisis go to waste") was perhaps not the wisest choice.

Emanuel, after all, "seems committed", attested that zealous American scourge of bad sports Dave Zirin, "to win the current spirited competition as the most loathsome person in American political life". As mayor of Chicago, Emanuel demonstrated how the profits generated by spectator sport can distort social values. Having overseen the closure of 54 schools and six mental-health clinics under the justification of a "budgetary crisis", he handed over $100 million-plus to DePaul University for a new basketball arena.

What, then, of Shashank Manohar? In terminating the mercifully brief reign of the "Big Three" with suitable prejudice, he should be feted as the first major sporting administrator in recent memory to do something that defied criticism. Nonetheless, there are no fewer than three Ranji Trophy sides in his own state. As reader Jose P observed in a comment: "The diversity, and complexity of the well-entrenched multiple power centres within the BCCI structure, is a thousand gordian knots knotted into a more complex humongous knot."

Still, let's be generous and optimistic out there: anyone for the Shashank redemption?