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Friday 10 August 2012
Unscrambling The Politician’s Prose
Salman Khurshid's article Dunk us All in Liquid Oxygen doesn't quite manage to conceal that the ongoing events at Jantar Mantar reflect the anger of a great many Indians at the extent and scale of the culture of corruption in India’s political class
K.V. BAPA RAO in Outlook India
The Indian people are pretty well hardened to the ineptitude and corruption of their politicians. But, as the recent grid crash—in a week that gave us a burning train, communal riots, highway deaths, attacks on women, on top of another grid crash—shows, the politicians are always a step ahead of the people’s ability to take things in their stride. They see to it that we never lose our sense of wonder: what sort of minds, what thinking process, what value system, could possibly drive such a single-minded commitment to failure and disaster?
It’s all very well to say that they are venal and stupid; but that really isn’t any kind of answer. Consistent and massive failure in all imaginable fields is never the result of mere individuals acting out of ill-intent; it needs organization. And an organization requires a guiding value system that drives a rationale for comprehensive failure and corruption. It is this value system and shared mental process that is revealed when a politician writes the rare article for public consumption.
Back in 1946, George Orwell wrote a short but insightful essay on Politics and the English Language,
explaining the connection between badly-written prose and slimy political lies. The creator of the fictional Ministry of Truth (actually a factory of lies) made a lifetime study of the lies of public figures and the language they use for telling those lies. Orwell has this to say about politicians’ words:
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. [atrocious
and morally unjustifiable things] can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too
brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political
parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and
sheer cloudy vagueness."
Orwell’s insight was that, when politicians write badly, the rotten prose is no accident but a direct result and symptom of the rotten values and rationale that the writer is trying to conceal. No one can write without revealing their brain at work; when you write to lie and deceive, it is hard for the brain to reconcile what it believes to be true with the deception which it is being asked to perpetrate in logical and clear prose. As a result, the writing ends up failing on both fronts: the prose comes out unclear and barely coherent, while the truth peeks out from the covers, and can be extracted, with some effort by the reader. This extracted truth is the “brutal argument” that Orwell is talking about.
Indian politicians usually keep their brains well out of public view; they carefully avoiding putting words down for people to read and criticize. So, Law Minister Salman Khurshid’s recent article in Outlook affords a rare opportunity to apply Orwell’s methods to probe an Indian politician’s mind and piece together the brutal argument that he is not giving us, but is not quite able to conceal either.
Khurshid article was titled Dunk us All in Liquid Oxygen, a wry allusion to a popular quotation attributed to the late Hindi film actor Ajit, known for his roles as clownish villains spouting quirky dialogue. Torment by “liquid oxygen” at the hands of Ajit’s henchmen would leave the victim in a painful state of being simultaneously notalive (due to the liquid) and not-dead (due to the oxygen).
The piece is evidently intended as a plaint against the India Against Corruption (IAC) organization that currently involved in a national agitation (against political corruption) and hunger strike at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Khurshid professes “caring” for Anna Hazare—a prominent member of activist who has been on hunger strike—but insinuates that Hazare, while himself a good person, is, sadly, a lousy judge of character who keeps company with some very bad persons whom Khurshid ostentatiously refrains from naming. Khurshid expends a great many words on the dangers that these unnamed persons pose to the delicate fabric of society, in a darkly conspiratorial tone reminiscent of entrenched old-school demagogues inveighing against “outside agitators” out to pollute, and destroy, our precious political system.
Khurshid leaves no doubts at all about the sheer intense wickedness of these nameless enemies of the
people. He signs off with a famous verse from the famous poem, The Second Coming by the famous poet W.B. Yeats:
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
It seems that Khurshid is actually quite angry with critics who have been giving his colleagues in the political class a hard time about corruption over the past year or so. In the article, he lays the blame squarely on these critics (who are “the worst”) for a deepening cynicism in the public about politics and the political system, and by conscious omission, holds the political class blameless and unjustly maligned. It is another thing that, to the public, it appears as though the political animals have been laying into the public weal like so many drunken monkeys unleashed on a banana boat. And just as those monkeys might, politicians become very cross indeed when someone has the nerve to try to thwart their orgy.
The gorging monkey analogy is rather unkind perhaps, but still apt. If the political class is driven by visions of loaves and fishes of office dancing in their eyes, they are hardly likely to take an interest in raising their standards of service to the public above simian levels, so to speak. Colossal power failures, trains lacking safety systems that were standard elsewhere in the 20th century, deadly roadways, subsistence levels of potable water, grinning indifference to enemy attacks on the nation’s cities, unspeakable sanitation, a disgraceful health care systems, a dodgy education system—these and the rest of the dysfunctions besetting India all make sense now; they are built and maintained by the political equivalent of partying monkeys, when they can spare the time, that is.
Khurshid devotes a considerable portion of his article fretting about what is to become of India’s pluralistic political system in the face of the debilitating demands of the dark forces, that is to say, the anti-corruption activists. On the face of it, this is nonsense—corruption, or its impact, is the most pluralistic thing there is, sparing no one of whatever persuasion. Khurshid’s article is rather incoherent but not altogether useless. If we apply Orwell’s ideas, and carefully read past, and into, the vaguely-worded but relatively well-written peroration, we can expose the “brutal argument.” Here are Khurshid’s concluding words:
The role of democratic politics is to find a workable arrangement between competing claims,
ensuring, in the process, the stability of society. Where this breaks down, we are left exposed to
the forces of unwholesome upheaval, even violence. The strength of Indian democracy is our
unity in diversity. If the accommodation of legitimate interests is questioned every time, politics
will not be a place for angels and idealistic young men and women. Young India will no longer
dream, but will suffer the agony of unending nightmares. With the death of innocence in our
times, what then will we tell our children? Who will join politics or become a judge? Will we
bequeath to generations to come the lost years, because courage failed the good?
Khurshid evidently means to say that stability is paramount, and trumps all other concerns. Agitating against defalcations by the political class, harshly criticizing politicians, reacting to their bad-faith pretence at responsiveness with anger and refusing to back down--all these things are the forces of unwholesome upheaval, and lead to bad consequences like the reluctance of young people to dream about becoming politicians, to be welcomed, nurtured and mentored as Khurshid himself was by his Congress Party.
But, the conditions in which the majority of Indians are forced to live —dangerous, deprived and unsanitary conditions engineered by Khurshid’s own political class—are hardly a reasonable interpretation of stability or security, except by the inhumanly low standards that were imposed on the Indian people by persons like Khurshid, persons he evidently respects and admires. And if the Indian people don’t tear each other apart in despair and rage, it is no thanks to the politicians but due to the civilisational value system that Indians carry in their collective DNA. So, what, then, is this stability that would be threatened when politicians are criticized?
Well, the political class endeavoured, quite successfully, to insulate itself from the worst of the crippling consequences of their own corruption and comprehensive ineptitude, and the insulation has held steady. Anger directed at the political class could conceivably lead to a loss of this insulation, and politicians may have to actually put up with the consequences of their actions. With this in mind, we can now translate Khurshid’s words into plain English prose as follows, which would help us understand why he took the time to write his article:
Public corruption is not important. More precisely, it is far less important than political stability,
which is to be maintained by a system of sharing the spoils of office with all political actors who
can make enough trouble, thus pacifying them. When people actually confront corruption, but
won’t settle for a cut of the action, it disrupts this political order. In the politicians’ eyes, this is
the worst possible thing that can happen to India. Ergo, those that engage in such confrontation
are the worst possible persons and therefore deserve the harshest possible treatment.
It is serious business, but the operative phrase above is “harshest possible.”
Sometimes, harsh is less possible than at other times. After some experience, the politicians have learned to treat Anna Hazare with kid gloves. Less charismatic but still somewhat powerful colleagues of Hazare can be set apart from Hazare and blamed for destroying the country, but it is better to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability and avoid naming them, since they might possibly come around to be co-opted at some time. Then, there are powerless citizens like the hapless Gurgaon housewife Rajbala, (no doubt one of the dark forces that worry Khurshid so) whom it was entirely possible to beat to death when she irritated the politicians by protesting against corruption. In the meantime, it is only prudent that the enabling machinery of protest and confrontation be crippled by effectively criminalizing, by default, all use of the internet that Law Minister Khurshid and his powerful colleagues find objectionable.
If this is the honest rationale veiled by Khurshid’s opaque prose, then it is no wonder that, when tossing in the obligatory piety about commitment to accountability, debate and so forth, his prose dissolves into incomprehensible and self-contradictory near-gibberish:
Not for a moment should my position be thought to be seeking immunity from accountability.
Ipso facto treating it as such would mean reluctance of the adversary to join in an open debate—
the essence of democracy, in whose name many self-opinionated, harsh, even irresponsible
positions are being taken.
No one in their right mind would even try to interpret what the “ipso facto …” sentence could possibly mean. Considering the brazen opaqueness of that sentence and the evident impunity with which Khurshid utters it,what follows can only be a clichĂ©-ridden falsehood:
Let me say it with all the emphasis at my command: We stand for the fullest transparency and
accountability.
Here is Orwell again, about what lies behind such insults to the language:
"The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like
soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language
is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it
were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
When employed to camouflage a “brutal argument” with platitudes, cant and bombast, the frontal lobe of the
brain blows a fuse, prose rebels, twists itself into knots, and turns into a hideous caricature, albeit one which
still retains a flavour of the truth. What Khurshid’s article doesn’t quite manage to conceal is the reality that the ongoing events at Jantar Mantar reflect the anger of a great many Indians at the extent and scale of the culture of corruption in India’s political class. Anger induces rigidity of outlook; mass anger has a way of generating simplistic and ultimately unhelpful, even harmful answers. However, considering the depth, breadth and duration of the politicians’ malfeasance, and their stubborn imperviousness to self-correction, the expressions of anger have been rather mild, and the proposed solutions rational, lawful and fairly reasonable, for all their flaws.
Khurshid and his political colleagues are livid that people are angry with them; they simply refuse to admit the
fact that the people’s anger is entirely justified, and that it is entirely the politicians’ fault that the people are
angry. If today, the politicians feel trapped, tormented and hectored on all sides, it is but the proper and
deserved consequence of their own actions. Khurshid’s shoddily-written tantrum of an article is a symptom of the continued reliance of the politicians on bluff and bluster in their efforts to divide and neutralize the
organizers of the agitation and dissipate the people’s anger.
Khurshid’s concerns about the risks posed by the people’s anger to the stability of society are disingenuous.
The agitation has remained peaceful for over a year, a remarkable thing for a grassroots street movement.
Khurshid and his fellow politicians have vast, virtually unlimited powers, and they do use them quite ruthlessly
to protect their rather sweet little racket. Khurshid’s fear is that, once people feel empowered to scrutinize
politicians, they will turn on the politicians with the same fervour that politicians exhibit when thwarted. He
worries too much--unlike the government of which Khurshid is a member, the anti-corruption agitators, for all their anger, haven’t yet beaten anyone to death yet for confronting them, nor have they criminalized the use of the internet.
The minister is right about one thing—we do need capable young people of good character to enter the political profession, since the people cannot do without hired help to act as their proxies in the exercise of power and in the management and development of shared resources. A key requirement of the job would be the temperament to cheerfully accept intense scrutiny and criticism, even when it is unfair, all the while learning and striving to deliver higher standards of service, and communicating honestly, and clearly with the employer.
The apprentice politician might find Khurshid’s article of some use—as an Orwellian cautionary tale to show
that defending the indefensible is morally wrong and rots your prose.
Suddenly, it’s all hail multiculturalism
One year after the London riots, the national mood has changed as Britain basks in the glory of the Olympic Games
This week, a year ago, London was burning as anger over the death of a black youth in a police shoot-out spiralled into one of the worst riots in England for a generation.
The violence prompted a torrent of incendiary comment about the impact of “laissez faire” multiculturalism on British values and Britain’s way of life. A year on, as London basks in the warm glow of the Olympic Games, with several immigrants bringing glory for Britain, the mood has swung to the other extreme. There is a mass outbreak of enthusiasm for multiculturalism, famously declared “dead” by the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) not long ago. Suddenly it is seen as up there with other “unique” values that put the “Great” into Great Britain.
Athletes of foreign descent such as Mohamed “Mo” Farah, Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford, Tiffany Porter and YamilĂ© Aldama — once derided as “plastic Brits” — are being hailed as the new face of Britain’s “vibrant” racial and cultural diversity.
Ennis, daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, has been called “the nation’s new sweetheart,” and Mo Farah, who came to Britain as a nine-year-old refugee from war-ravaged Somalia, a “British legend.” Along with the Australia-born Rutherford, fondly referred to as a “ginger wizard,” they have been dubbed Britain’s “golden trio” for winning gold for their adopted country.
There is a sense that something profound has happened and, as The Times noted in a breathless editorial, “a new Britain is being born out of the best of the old Britain.”
“The prospectus that delivered the Olympics (to London) relied heavily on an account of a tolerant, multicultural Britain and it is as such that the success has followed, both inside the arenas and inside,” it said.
A year ago, Prime Minister David Cameron described Britain as a “broken society” suffering from “moral collapse” and suggested that “state culturalism” was the first step on the slippery slope to extremism. Today, he finds Britain an “inspirational country” that “makes people feel proud to be British.” He has spoken of the “awe-inspiring” performance of the multi-ethnic Team GB, and hailed London as the world’s most diverse city. A senior Conservative MP received a public dressing down for dismissing the opening Olympic ceremony as “multicultural crap.”
Many are mystified by the Prime Minister’s conversion and asking whether he is the same man who had warned that “passive tolerance” of multiculturalism was an invitation to extremism, and argued for a more “muscular” approach. “Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism,” he said at a security conference in Munich last year causing anger among immigrants back home.
Mr. Cameron’s new-found passion is simply a reflection of the national mood: he is saying what he believes people want to hear and will “connect” him to the masses. Partly that mood has been generated by the media, with newspapers making an extra effort to pick out “ethnic” faces to illustrate stories about the “wonderful” Olympic spirit that, among other things, has seen hundreds of Asian and African immigrants work as unpaid volunteers at the Games.
NEW CONVERTS
Even the notoriously xenophobic Sun is singing a refreshingly new tune. “Red, white, blue, black, brown, pink or purple — these Olympic Games have united us all,” it exulted in a report headed “Marvellous Modern Britain Unleashed Upon the World.” And, with the zeal of a new convert, added how the world had seen “the true colours of British greatness with champions of every hue — a mixed-race Yorkshire lass, a Muslim refugee and a ginger.”
“How can your heart not surge with pride when they win for Britain?” it asked.
At the rabidly anti-immigrant Daily Mail, it is a bit more hush-hush with the paper dressing up its celebration of Britain’s diversity as “conservative values in action.”
But it is celebration, nevertheless.
So, what does this sudden burst of love for multiculturalism signify? Is it an acknowledgment, finally, that in a country as diverse as Britain, multiculturalism alone can work, and a signal to the advocates of mono-culturalism to shut up shop?
An honest answer will be “no.” Sceptics warn against reading “too much” into what they believe is simply a passing phase — part of a general “feel-good” mood generated by the success of the Games and achievements of British athletes, especially those from ethnic groups. Those who know a thing or two about the fickle British temperament, mirroring its fickle weather, predict that “normal business” — i.e. moaning and carping — should resume once the Games get over this weekend.
The economy is getting worse by the day and cracks in the ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have widened while the country has been distracted by the Games.
“Just wait for the news to get out and see how quickly the euphoria evaporates,” warns an observer. But then who knows? The country may have changed this summer, and it could be the start of a deeper engagement with what the Sun andMail patronisingly used to dismiss as “multi-culti” Britain.
Tuesday 7 August 2012
What happened to the architects of the economic meltdown?
Credit crunch: elusive ghosts of the financial feast lurk in the shadows
It is half a decade this week since the 'world changed', in Adam Applegarth's famous phrase. But what has happened to the architects of economic meltdown? And has anything really changed for them?
When Adam Applegarth was forced out of a sinking Northern Rock in December 2007, it was amid the kind of numbers that tend to dance in front of your eyes. In the five years running up to the bank's spectacular crash he had been paid around £10m. During the 18 months immediately before he cashed in shares worth £2.6m. On leaving he secured a golden goodbye to be paid in monthly instalments, totalling £760,000. His pension, payable when he turns 55, is worth £304,000 a year.
The year after his exit he was glimpsed in a very familiar setting, once again turning out for the second XI of his beloved Sunderland Cricket Club. "This summer," said one of his old associates, "he will be putting his feet up. He is playing an awful lot of cricket, enjoying his motors and travelling."
In the autumn of 2009 Applegarth became a senior adviser to the American private equity firm Apollo Management, advising a new arm, the European Principal Fund, on the buying-up of distressed debt – perhaps a field of expertise. Three years on he remains in the job and shielded behind a communications firewall administered by a New York PR firm called Rubenstein Associates, whose other clients include Walt Disney, the Las Vegas Comedy Festival, and the American Kennel Club.
When I contacted them, I was handed over to a breathlessly efficient operative called Melissa, who said I should send over my questions. With a view to at least trying to get his attention, I kept them non-confrontational, and short: What does Mr Applegarth's role at Apollo involve? Could he explain how the depth of banks' problems in 2007 first revealed itself to him? And how has his life been since? Twenty-four hours later she called back: "Put us down for a decline to comment," she said.
So, on to another lead. In September 2010 it was reported that Applegarth had joined his son Greg in setting up a company called Beechwood Property Management, in which he held 55 of the 100 shares. Their documents list both men's occupation as "consultant". Their registered office is on the 11th floor of a gleaming Newcastle office block called Cale Cross House, but when I called the in-house security guard he had never heard of them. In fact, this is merely the address of their accountants – who passed on a message, with no result.
There is no entry for Beechwood Property Management in the phone directory, nor has it a website. On the face of it, it is a ghost outfit, whose existence is only noticeable to those hard-bitten people who pore over records held at Companies House.
Such is the great cloud of silence that now surrounds people who were once among the loudest voices in the financial services industry.
The reclusive lifestyle of former Royal Bank of Scotland chief Fred Goodwin barely needs mentioning. Steve Crawshaw, who turned Bradford and Bingley from a staid building society into a specialist in self-certified mortgages and left the company weeks before it had to be nationalised, has apparently retired to the Yorkshire countryside: his only publicly-recorded activity these days is as the chair of the advisory board of the School of Management at Bradford University, who forwarded him my list of questions, but I heard nothing back.
Even the few who still have heavyweight business roles keep schtum: there may be a beautiful poetry in the fact that the former HBOS chief executive Andy Hornby is now the boss of Coral bookmakers, but getting him to talk is a non-starter. "As the article does not relate to his current role at Coral he wishes to respectfully decline your request," said his spokesman.
At the height of a financialised age, it was the done thing to refer to these people as "Masters Of The Universe". Five years on, picking through the subsequent career histories of those who sparked first the credit crunch and then the crash, the suggestion of omnipotence sounds absurd. Most of the people at the centre of the events of 2007-8 tend to suggest a much less titanic stereotype: the faded rock star, often still trying to keep their hand in, well aware that the hits have dried up, the old tricks have long since turned embarrassing, and their time has passed.
Meanwhile, a very awkward question sits in the public mind: will there ever be any convincing payback?
In the US, only a tiny handful of former bankers have been criminally indicted on charges relating to the crash: most notably, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, two former Bear Stearns employees – and one-time sub-prime specialists – who were acquitted of fraud and conspiracy in November 2009. In February this year a civil case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission was settled on the basis of a $1.05m payout from the two, which the judge in charge termed "chump change".
The only big figure sent to jail for his part in two decades of crazed speculation and irresponsibility has been Bernie Madoff. By contrast, the people who bundled up the bad debt in arcane financial instruments that pushed the world to the brink of ruin are still out there: hugely diminished – but free, and hardly penniless.
Even those who steered Lehman Brothers into catastrophe and thus started the decisive crash of 2008 seem to have got away with it. In May this year an internal memo from the SEC leaked to Reuters said that after its investigation into the bank it had been "determined that charges will likely not be recommended".
Which brings us to 780 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, the location of an almost comically dull office block that looks like a giant house brick.
Inside is the HQ of Matrix Advisors. Its founder is a byword for the events of 2007-8: Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehmans, until its cataclysmic demise. Back then, he was the pumped-up corporate icon once known as "the Gorilla", the man who summed up his business style with the boast that he wanted to reach into the bodies of Lehmans' competitors, "rip out their hearts and eat it in front of them before they die".
These days he apparently flits between New York and his homes in Florida and Sun Valley, Idaho – on bog-standard commercial flights, according to witnesses – looking after a tiny outfit which provides "strategic advice to client management teams and senior employees … across all aspects of business". One source close to Fuld has said that the workforce extends to "a young guy from Lehman and two secretaries". When I called their office, I therefore had the tantalising sense that the figure most indelibly associated with the crash might only be a few yards from the person parrying my questions. Her name was Carla Schiavo: she suggested I send over a few lines of inquiry.
What, I asked, does Mr Fuld's work at Matrix Advisors involve? What are his views on the aftermath of the credit crunch and how banks and regulators have responded? What did the financial services industry need to do to recover its esteem? Eventually, Schiavo pointed me in the direction of Fuld's lawyer, a former president of the New York Bar Association named Patricia Hynes – who, predictably enough, did not deign to reply to either phone calls or emails.
Two months ago Fuld was seen at an ice hockey game between the New Jersey Rangers and the New York Devils. An eyewitness reported on the scene for the Wall Street news and gossip site Dealbreaker: "He was with two goons who were clearly his bodyguards, one sitting next to him in a tan jacket and the other one standing behind him in black. Fuld was wearing a suit … I guess to try and look like he actually has a job he was coming from before the game."
Documents filed with US regulators two years ago said Fuld's work at his new venture stretched to around 60 hours a week. Such hard graft may be a necessity: proof, as with the sale of his Park Avenue apartment three years ago (for $25.87m) that he may not be enjoying quite the life of unending luxury that some would imagine, and setting money aside for future litigation, which has so far been met from the coffers of Lehmans' insurers. There is also an abiding sense of twitchiness. When a reporter doorstepped him three years ago, he blurted out: "You don't have a gun. That's good."
For others who were intimately involved in the crash, there is a similar sense of shrunken lives, and mouths sealed shut. Kathleen Corbet was the president of the hugely important ratings agency Standard & Poors, but quit in August 2007 just as it started to become clear that the safe-as-houses triple-A ratings given to mortgage-backed securities had turned out to be illusory. She is now in charge of Cross Ridge Capital, a small private equity firm based in New Canaan, Connecticut – and did not respond to messages asking for her take on what happened in 2007 onwards, and what has transpired since.
Neither did Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, who pumped up AIG to the point that the American group became the biggest insurance company in the world – only to watch it plunge towards bankruptcy and become 80% nationalised by the US government.
He resigned two years before the start of the crash, in 2005, in the midst of the accounting scandal that began the firm's nosedive – but the fact that he avoided direct involvement in the crash presumably accounts for the fact that in controlled circumstances, he can speak with a belligerence that might suggest the events of 2007-8 never happened.
"We now have huge government, which is not the creator of opportunity – it's the private sector that creates opportunity, so our basic values are under attack," he recently said, warning against the prospect of "regulating ourselves out of business". By way of putting his money where his mouth is, Greenberg is suing the US state for $25bn, alleging that AIG's board was "coerced" into turning over control of the company to the federal government.
Such a high-profile action contrasts with the post-crash story of his old AIG colleague Joseph Cassano – the man who sold credit default swaps in London to keep the money coming in, and thereby pushed the company towards such ruin that it needed £182bn of US taxpayers' money to keep it alive. Back then, Cassano lived in an opulent townhouse behind Harrod's. He has since moved back to Westport, on Long Island Sound, where he is apparently unemployed, and uncontactable.
But if there is one man who remains the best embodiment of all the delusion and absurdity that led to the crash, it is 74-year-old Angelo Mozilo, the son of a Bronx butcher, a man so tanned that his skin looks like an orange dipped in toffee. Until July 2008 he was the chairman and chief executive of Countrywide Financial, the USA's biggest provider of sub-prime mortgages. Between 2001 and 2006 he took home something in the region of $470m.
The company crashed from August 2007 onwards, finally being bought out by the Bank Of America. In a civil case that ended in October 2010 Mozilo settled with the SEC to pay $22.5m to cover allegations of fraud and insider trading, with a further $45m going to his company's former shareholders to cover "ill-gotten gains", to be taken from BoA and Countrywide's insurers.
The SEC's director of enforcement said this: "Mozilo's record penalty is the fitting outcome for a corporate executive who deliberately disregarded his duties to investors by concealing what he saw from inside the executive suite – a looming disaster in which Countrywide was buckling under the weight of increasingly risky mortgage underwriting, mounting defaults and delinquencies, and a deteriorating business model." At the same time, Mozilo was cashing in shares to the tune of $285m.
Last year a criminal investigation into Mozilo's activities was shelved. But the intrigue swirling around him will not go away: four years after stories about his firm's dealings with American lawmakers first appeared in the media, a Congressional Committee has alleged that Mozilo ran a "Friends of Angelo" unit to grant influential members of congress preferential loans, and thereby subdue any drive to rein in his very risky kind of business.
The impact of what Mozilo and his company did cannot be overstated: it was Countrywide that led the drive to drown the international financial system in bad debt, while he was paying himself spectacular amounts of money. In Wall Street, the City and beyond, the result of what he and his colleagues were doing was a deathly panic, and the end of the boom years; in the real world, millions of people had their homes repossessed or lost their jobs and now we labour under the austerity cuts that still grip the Western economies like a vice.
In May this year a piece in the LA Times reported that Mozilo and his wife Phyllis had sold their home in Thousand Oaks, 29 miles west of near LA, for $2.9m. It described a "Georgian Colonial-style two-storey" property, sitting above the second fairway at the Sherwood Country Club, complete with "a cherry-finished library-office, five bedrooms, six bathrooms and an oversized four-car garage", along with "an infinity pool, spa, lawn and a built-in barbecue".
Reading it, you wondered if perhaps, in their own way, the Mozilos were feeling the pinch. And then came the last sentence, and the sickly scent of the high life, uninterrupted: "They hold other southern California properties in trust, in Riverside and Santa Barbara counties."
Putting a price on the rivers and rain diminishes us all
Payments for 'ecosystem services' look like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since enclosure
'The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."
Jean Jacques Rousseau would recognise this moment. Now it is not the land his impostors are enclosing, but the rest of the natural world. In many countries, especially the United Kingdom, nature is being valued and commodified so that it can be exchanged for cash.
The effort began in earnest under the last government. At a cost of £100,000, it commissioned a research company to produce a total annual price for England's ecosystems. After taking the money, the company reported – with a certain understatement – that this exercise was "theoretically challenging to complete, and considered by some not to be a theoretically sound endeavour". Some of the services provided by England's ecosystems, it pointed out, "may in fact be infinite in value".
This rare flash of common sense did nothing to discourage the current government from seeking first to put a price on nature, then to create a market in its disposal. The UK now has a natural capital committee, an Ecosystem Markets Task Force and an inspiring new lexicon. We don't call it nature any more: now the proper term is "natural capital". Natural processes have become "ecosystem services", as they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests and river catchments are now "green infrastructure", while biodiversity and habitats are "asset classes" within an "ecosystem market". All of them will be assigned a price, all of them will become exchangeable.
The argument in favour of this approach is coherent and plausible. Business currently treats the natural world as if it is worth nothing. Pricing nature and incorporating that price into the cost of goods and services creates an economic incentive for its protection. It certainly appeals to both business and the self-hating state. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force speaks of "substantial potential growth in nature-related markets – in the order of billions of pounds globally".
Commodification, economic growth, financial abstractions, corporate power: aren't these the processes driving the world's environmental crisis? Now we are told that to save the biosphere we need more of them.
Payments for ecosystem services look to me like the prelude to the greatest privatisation since Rousseau's encloser first made an exclusive claim to the land. The government has already begun describing land owners as the "providers" of ecosystem services, as if they had created the rain and the hills and the rivers and the wildlife that inhabits them. They are to be paid for these services, either by the government or by "users". It sounds like the plan for the NHS.
Land ownership since the time of the first impostor has involved the gradual accumulation of exclusive rights, which were seized from commoners. Payments for ecosystem services extend this encroachment by appointing the landlord as the owner and instigator of the wildlife, the water flow, the carbon cycle, the natural processes that were previously deemed to belong to everyone and no one.
But it doesn't end there. Once a resource has been commodified, speculators and traders step in. The Ecosystem Markets Task Force now talks of "harnessing City financial expertise to assess the ways that these blended revenue streams and securitisations enhance the ROI [return on investment] of an environmental bond". This gives you an idea of how far this process has gone – and of the gobbledegook it has begun to generate.
Already the government is developing the market for trading wildlife, by experimenting with what it calls biodiversity offsets. If a quarry company wants to destroy a rare meadow, for example, it can buy absolution by paying someone to create another somewhere else. The government warns that these offsets should be used only to compensate for "genuinely unavoidable damage" and "must not become a licence to destroy". But once the principle is established and the market is functioning, for how long do you reckon that line will hold? Nature, under this system, will become as fungible as everything else.
Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight; we'll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated and, doubtless, that it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.
All those messy, subjective matters, the motivating forces of democracy, will be resolved in a column of figures. Governments won't need to regulate; the market will make the decisions that politicians have ducked. But trade is a fickle master, and unresponsive to anyone except those with the money. The costing and sale of nature represents another transfer of power to corporations and the very rich.
It diminishes us, it diminishes nature. By turning the natural world into a subsidiary of the corporate economy, it reasserts the biblical doctrine of dominion. It slices the biosphere into component commodities: already the government's task force is talking of "unbundling" ecosystem services, a term borrowed from previous privatisations. This might make financial sense; it makes no ecological sense. The more we learn about the natural world, the more we discover that its functions cannot be safely disaggregated.
Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it. Nature offers low rates of return by comparison to other investments. If we allow the discussion to shift from values to value – from love to greed – we cede the natural world to the forces wrecking it. Pull up the stakes, fill in the ditch, we're being conned again.
Monday 6 August 2012
Africa's natural resources can be a blessing, not an economic curse
Resource-rich countries have, on average, done poorly but progress is possible if they get economic and political support
New discoveries of natural resources in several African countries – including Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique – raise an important question: will these windfalls be a blessing that brings prosperity and hope, or a political and economic curse, as has been the case in so many countries?
On average, resource-rich countries have done even more poorly than countries without resources. They have grown more slowly, and with greater inequality – just the opposite of what one would expect. After all, taxing natural resources at high rates will not cause them to disappear, which means that countries whose major source of revenue is natural resources can use them to finance education, healthcare, development and redistribution.
A large literature in economics and political science has developed to explain this "resource curse", and civil-society groups (such as Revenue Watch and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative) have been established to try to counter it. Three of the curse's economic ingredients are well-known:
• Resource-rich countries tend to have strong currencies, which impede other exports
• Because resource extraction often entails little job creation, unemployment rises
• Volatile resource prices cause growth to be unstable, aided by international banks that rush in when commodity prices are high and rush out in the downturns (reflecting the time-honoured principle that bankers lend only to those who do not need their money).
Moreover, resource-rich countries often do not pursue sustainable growth strategies. They fail to recognise that if they do not reinvest their resource wealth into productive investments above ground, they are actually becoming poorer. Political dysfunction exacerbates the problem, as conflict over access to resource rents gives rise to corrupt and undemocratic governments.
There are well-known antidotes to each of these problems: a low exchange rate, a stabilisation fund, careful investment of resource revenues (including in the country's people), a ban on borrowing, and transparency (so citizens can at least see the money coming in and going out). But there is a growing consensus that these measures, while necessary, are insufficient. Newly enriched countries need to take several more steps in order to increase the likelihood of a "resource blessing".
First, these countries must do more to ensure that their citizens get the full value of the resources. There is an unavoidable conflict of interest between (usually foreign) natural-resource companies and host countries: the former want to minimise what they pay, while the latter need to maximise it. Well-designed, competitive, transparent auctions can generate much more revenue than sweetheart deals. Contracts, too, should be transparent, and should ensure that if prices soar – as they have repeatedly – the windfall gain does not go only to the company.
Unfortunately, many countries have already signed bad contracts that give a disproportionate share of the resources' value to private foreign companies. But there is a simple answer: renegotiate; if that is impossible, impose a windfall-profit tax.
All over the world, countries have been doing this. Of course, natural-resource companies will push back, emphasise the sanctity of contracts, and threaten to leave. But the outcome is typically otherwise. A fair renegotiation can be the basis of a better long-term relationship.
Botswana's renegotiations of such contracts laid the foundations of its remarkable growth for the last four decades. Moreover, it is not only developing countries, such as Bolivia and Venezuela, that renegotiate; developed countries such as Israel and Australia have done so as well. Even the United States has imposed a windfall-profits tax.
Equally important, the money gained through natural resources must be used to promote development. The old colonial powers regarded Africa simply as a place from which to extract resources. Some of the new purchasers have a similar attitude.
Infrastructure (roads, railroads, and ports) has been built with one goal in mind: getting the resources out of the country at as low a price as possible, with no effort to process the resources in the country, let alone to develop local industries based on them.
Real development requires exploring all possible linkages: training local workers, developing small- and medium-size enterprises to provide inputs for mining operations and oil and gas companies, domestic processing, and integrating the natural resources into the country's economic structure. Of course, today, these countries may not have a comparative advantage in many of these activities, and some will argue that countries should stick to their strengths. From this perspective, these countries' comparative advantage is having other countries exploit their resources.
That is wrong. What matters is dynamic comparative advantage, or comparative advantage in the long run, which can be shaped. Forty years ago, South Korea had a comparative advantage in growing rice. Had it stuck to that strength, it would not be the industrial giant that it is today. It might be the world's most efficient rice grower, but it would still be poor.
Companies will tell Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, and Mozambique to act quickly, but there is good reason for them to move more deliberately. The resources will not disappear, and commodity prices have been rising. In the meantime, these countries can put in place the institutions, policies, and laws needed to ensure that the resources benefit all of their citizens.
Resources should be a blessing, not a curse. They can be, but it will not happen on its own. And it will not happen easily.
Why Kofi Annan had enough over Syria
The UN's special envoy and the Bric countries have got increasingly frustrated with the west's domineering consensus on Damascus
When the history of Syria's catastrophic civil war comes to be written, 30 June 2012 will surely be recognised as the only true moment of hope. On that day in Geneva the five permanent members of the UN security council united behind a communique calling for a transition to a democratic system in Syria and the formation of a government of national unity in which opposition leaders and members of the current government would share power.
They called for a firm timetable for elections in a fair environment. And, with an eye on the chaos that followed the US-imposed scheme of de-Ba'athification in Iraq, said the continuity of government institutions and qualified staff in Syria's public services must be preserved. This included the military and security forces – though they must in future adhere to human rights standards.
They also called on the Syrian government and opposition groups to re-commit to a ceasefire. Sensible, detailed and constructive, the communique was also remarkable for what it did not contain. Although the call for a government of national unity meant Syria's authoritarian regime should be dismantled, the security council's permanent members did not mention the usual cliche of "regime change", which over-personalises complex issues by focusing on the removal of a single towering personality. There was no specific demand for Bashar al-Assad to resign, let alone as the precondition for negotiations between the government and its opponents, as western states and most Syrian opposition groups previously insisted.
In short, the communique appeared to move the US, Britain and France, as well as Turkey and Qatar, which also attended the Geneva meeting, to an even-handed stance at last. It marked Kofi Annan's finest hour as the UN and Arab League's special envoy.
A few days later, Russia circulated a draft resolution at the UN in New York to endorse the new approach. It urged member-states to work in the co-operative spirit of the Geneva text, extend the UN monitors' team in Syria and press for a ceasefire. Then came the spanner. Britain, France and the US proposed a rival resolution with the one-sided elements that provoked earlier Russian and Chinese vetoes – punishment of Assad if he did not comply, threats of new sanctions, no word of pressure on the opposition and veiled hints of eventual military force by referring to chapter seven of the UN charter.
The resolution was a disaster, and it is no wonder that in explaining his resignation (in a Financial Times article on Friday) Annan highlighted the security council's failure to endorse the Geneva recommendations. Annan remains too much of a diplomat to take sides openly but his disappointment with the big western states for their "finger-pointing and name-calling" of Russia and China over Syria is clear.
His frustration is shared by the new powers on the international stage that are increasingly angry with the domineering western consensus on many issues. When the UN general assembly debated a Saudi resolution last week that followed the west in calling for sanctions and Assad's departure, Brazil, India and South Africa all objected. In the west it is easy to pillory Russia for rejecting internationally imposed regime change by saying Vladimir Putin fears a "colour revolution" in Russia (even though there is no such prospect). China's democratic credentials can be sneered at. But when the three other Brics, which hold fair, orderly, and regular elections, object to the western line on Syria, it is time to take note. Indeed, the west did adjust. It got the Saudis to water down the draft lest it receive less than half the world's votes.
The retreat was only tactical. The Obama administration promptly announced it is "accelerating" its support to Syria's rebels by giving them intelligence and satellite data on troop movements. Annan's disappointment must be massive. Until he started work in February, the military pattern in Syria had been consistent for several months – occasional forays by rebels into urban areas followed by excessive reaction by government troops, with artillery, snipers, and mass arrests.
Since then, apart from a few days of relative quiet in April when a ceasefire partially held, Syria has seen a huge influx of arms to the rebels, growing involvement by foreign special forces, and the infiltration of al-Qaida jihadis and other Salafists. What began as a peaceful uprising and then became local self-defence has been hijacked. Under Saudi, Qatari and US leadership, and with British, French and Israeli approval, it has turned into an anti-Iranian proxy war.
This does not mean the democratic aspirations of Syria's original protesters should be abandoned, or that the Syrian government should not start to implement the Geneva principles for transition that Annan briefly persuaded the big powers to accept. The outlook is too desperate. As tens of thousands flee their homes, and the destruction of Aleppo – and perhaps soon of Damascus – looms ever closer, a ceasefire and political compromise have never been more urgent.
Friday 3 August 2012
12 British quirks
Avoiding terms of address
British speakers of English try to avoid addressing each other by any sort of title. While speakers of French politely address strangers as "monsieur" or "madame", the British are tongue-tied at the point of interaction, hoping that simple proximity will indicate to whom they are talking. These days, it's considered condescending to use "sir" or "madam", unless the speaker is in a clearly-defined "service" role. To fill this gap, the locals have developed various colloquial circumlocutions. In London, for example, "guv[nor]", "mate" and "squire" are employed by males (according to complex rules) to address unknown males, with "darling" or "love" (rather questionably) filling the gap for males speaking to females. Further north, "petal" is a possible variant on "love", while in western Scotland "pal" is used to address unknown males. In south Hampshire, the guv/pal equivalent is the linguistically intriguing "moosh". What the British never, ever do is follow the American tradition and address those driving taxis as "driver", those serving at table as "waiter" or those working the hotel switchboard as "operator". To our ears, this is the height of condescension, verging on rudeness, and will ensure that the cab stops on the wrong side of the road, drinks orders are unfilled and the call is misrouted. Y'all remember that now.
Nick Stevenson, London
Tea
As any self-respecting Brit will tell you, there is not a lot that a cup of tea can't fix. Rough day at work? Put the kettle on. Broken heart? Pour yourself a cuppa. Alien invasion? You'll be ready for an apocalypse as soon as you've had your brew. But it's not all so straightforward. Choosing how to take your tea is a deceptively complex task - it's almost a political statement. Black with lemon immediately identifies you as a frequenter of Sloane Square, daaaaahling. Lots of milk and more than three sugars? You must be a builder - we'll assume you want a fry up on the side. If you take your char(coal) with minimal milk and maximum brewtime, we'll know you were born and bred up north, pet. Even new-fangled inventions such as camomile, peppermint and dandelion tea have their place in society (among new age hippies). The British relationship with tea is so important that employers have traditionally allowed their staff tea breaks to enjoy some alone time with their beverage of choice. We even have a mealtime named after it. So you see, tea is more than a drink to us Brits - it's a way of life. Phew, I'm feeling rather emotional after that - now, where's my mug?
Sian Morgan, London
Garden types
Many Brits aspire to having a garden, and some are a delight to behold, with roses, lavender, a lovingly mowed lawn and a water feature. Others, especially front gardens, never realise their full potential and are used instead for car parking, or displaying the colourful array of containers in which domestic rubbish is required to be placed for collection. Gardens are usually enclosed by a fence, a wall or a hedge. The latter may be a source of conflict between neighbours, with disputes about its exact location, extent or height leading to acts of vandalism, physical attacks, court cases and occasional homicides. Some gardens are populated by gnomes. These small plastic figures assume a variety of poses, and may even be seen "fishing" - although not necessarily within reach of water. They, too, can lead to hostilities - gnomes have been knocked to the ground, mockingly re-sited, even stolen. Some Brits have allotments as well as, or instead of, gardens - these are detached plots, located elsewhere. Allotment-owners are a friendly but often competitive breed. A local allotment and garden Show is a good place to witness these characteristics - and also marvel at colossal cabbages. Britain's gardening "elite" have their gardens listed in a special yellow book and open them to the public.
Pat Richardson, Richmond, Surrey
Saying sorry
Visitors should be wary of the word sorry - it has endless nuances. For instance, if I inadvertently step on your toe we should both immediately say sorry. I'm sorry for having stepped on your toe - you say sorry to imply it was your fault really, or at least no one is quite sure, so both should say sorry. It also means no hard feelings. But when I say "sorry to bother you, but…" I'm not really apologising, just prefacing a request for some trivial favour, or bit of information. Such as: "Sorry to bother you, but do you have the time?" However, if you hear "sorry?" as a question you're most likely being asked to repeat something not quite heard or understood. But don't get carried away with your new knowledge. If someone pronounces sorry a "so-ree" with a strong emphasis on both syllables then that is bad news. They are not sorry at all, just being sarcastic. Maybe someone has mildly offended them - perhaps by accusing them of the unforgivable sin of queue-jumping. Their "so-ree"then means "shut it mate". But occasionally, very occasionally, sorry really does mean sorry. If someone says: "I'm so sorry to hear your mother has died" they probably are sorry. Not always, but probably.
Mike Pollak, Birmingham
White van man
The 21st Century incarnation of the "man on the Clapham omnibus", who has an opinion on everything and will kindly share it with you whether you wish to hear it or not. In previous generations he took the guise of Essex man - hard working, hard drinking, Sun reading, football supporting but to his eternal credit it was all about wife Shaz and two little cherubs, Chelsea and Dwayne. The steady stream of white vans that will accompany the participants and delegates along the Olympic Route Network - seemingly not owned by any company or corporation - are filled with the men described above. And yes they are men. For no woman could easily slip into this world of well thumbed Nuts magazines strewn across the top of the dashboard beside crushed polystyrene cups that once contained tea of an unrivalled colour and strength. Ironically these are the very men without whom the Olympic Park would still be just a pipe dream, a drawing on an architect's board. Visitors to our great land will take some convincing but these people are the unsung heroes, the thing which keeps Britain great. Cash is the preferred method of payment and their "building" skills are dubious. But we are a better place for having them.
Brian Hopcroft, Harlow, Essex
The sporting 'if only'
In every major sporting tournament, the British are always optimistically hopeful that this year our lad will win. Commentators and pundits come up with all kinds of reasons to show why this year will be different from last and we enthusiastically lap it up in the hope that maybe, just maybe, they might be right. We love to support the underdog which, coincidentally, is usually our own player. The more our man wins, the more we begin to speculate that he is going to win the Big One yet his final defeat in the final rounds doesn't so much surprise us, as resign us to the thing we are now so used to. Any win from decades past is held as a golden age when sportsmen were honourable and footballers didn't fall over. Every match has an if only moment: "If only he hadn't missed that shot", or "if only he'd been a stronger player" which helps justify why our sportsman lost and encourages us to remember that next year, just next year, he might win. And the next year the pundits remind us of last year's "if only" moment and we're off again, supporting a man who will probably never quite make it. Still, as long as we beat the French.
Rebecca Stevens, Cambridge
The War
The War - always meaning World War II - is as alive in the collective British consciousness as if it only ended five years ago. A melange of manic cheerfulness, stiff upper lips, atrocious food, doodlebugs, and muddling through. Equally evocative are the sounds of the time - big band dance numbers, and the warbling note of the air raid siren - and ladies' fashions - severe, economically cut, but with a certain dour style, and neat, off-the-shoulder hairdos, topped (in my mother's case) with a jaunty WAAF forage cap. It is an awful example of how propaganda can take hold and become history. History is laid down by the survivors - the images we all remember so well were composed with a good deal of thought by the powers that be - the Ministry of Information and the BBC - with a definite end in mind; to endure, to tough it out, to hang on until things got better. Something very similar was attempted during the Cold War, but met with far less success - the Cold War was nasty but theoretical, whereas WWII was nasty but actually happened. As a Baby Boomer, I just remember the post-war atmosphere - grey, tatty, somewhat regimented. We ate baked cod, mashed potatoes and boiled carrots off plates that did not match.
Luce Gilmore, Cambridge
The love-hate relationship
The art of the love/hate relationship has been taken to new heights/depths by the great British public. France, Germany, modern architecture, Americans, tradition - all have come in for a drubbing at the hands of the British populace while we simultaneously sup French wine, munch German sausage, defend London's skyline to anyone who dare deny its beauty, buy and do all things American and cling to traditions with no discernible purpose in the modern era. Even the London 2012 Olympic Games has acquired its fair share of naysayers and doom-mongers. Yes, the British are a people with conflicted souls and we're not afraid to show it. We dislike everything until someone else professes to dislike it too; then we love it with all our national heart, defending it with some of the most irrational arguments and justifications ever heard. The international traveller to London this summer may find the love/hate relationship difficult to master, risking falling afoul of the "rules" by joining in with the discord only to have the tables turned on them as the hate turns to love in an instant and we start defending the very thing we previously disparaged. Couple the love/hate relationship with the famous British self-deprecation and you end up with the archetypal London taxi driver.
Chris Angel, Woking, Surrey
Greetings cards
Although the first mind-boggling experience for any foreigner visiting the UK is to wash your hands - why on earth two taps - it's the greeting cards that are a true mystery. It is considered very bad manners not to respond to even a minor favour with a "thank you" card, be it accepting your parcel from a postman while you're not at home, giving you a lift to the station or sending you a birthday card. It is sometimes argued that you should reply to a "thank you" card with a "thank you for the thank you card" card, although the choice of those on the market is still rather scant. Other significant cards that are enthusiastically used by - it has to be said - mainly English and sometimes British women, are "Get well soon!" and "So sorry you're leaving" (not necessarily in that order). Among men it is more popular to sign rather than to buy and send greeting cards. Men who do not have a woman to send cards do not bother even with birthday cards. The excessive use of the greeting cards as well as the popularity of eBay are two of the reasons why Royal Mail still exists. But that's a story for another 212 words.
Agnieszka Rokita, Long Buckby
Cricket
Despite being loved and played in England and those parts of the world which used to be pink on the map (Canada excepted), cricket is both the nation's summer game and a cause of bafflement for the rest of the world. Questions naturally arise about the game - how can a match last for five days and yet still end in a draw? Note that a "draw" is not to be confused with a "tie" which is a completely different kettle of fish. Then there is the small matter of cricket language. For example, the majority of the batting side sit inside a dressing room. The two that are actually out batting are said to be "in", until they are "out" when they return indoors. Fielding positions are a minefield of the obscure. Why is there a fielding position called "third man" when there are no first, second or fourth men? As for the rules of the game themselves, there are 42 laws of the game. Unfortunately each law has dozens of clauses. For example, there are 11 ways in which a batsman can be given out. Unfortunately only the most ardent quiz nut knows them all. As for googlies, silly mid-off, and lbw, I'm afraid 212 words is simply not enough.
Neil Hancox, Ware
The two-fingered salute
What some foreigners, especially Americans, don't know is that asking for two beers by raising two fingers - with the back of your hand to the person that you are facing - is considered a rude gesture. Legend has it that the gesture originated in the Hundred Years War that was fought between England and France in the 14th Century. One of the English military advantages was the longbow and skilled archers. As an interesting side note, all able-bodied men were required to practise archery on Sundays, and several sports including football were banned because they interfered with archery practice. The legend goes that when an archer was captured by the French, they would chop off the two fingers on his right hand that he used to draw the bow, thus rendering him useless as an archer. Therefore, brandishing those two fingers to the French became a gesture of defiance. These days, it's a general-use rude gesture similar to the one-fingered salute that's favoured in America, which is also used here. So when asking for your two pints of lager in the pub, if you feel the need to raise two fingers to illustrate your request, please make sure that you have the back of your hand facing yourself, not the barman.
Tamara Petroff, Maidenhead
Anoraks
In Great Britain an "anorak" is not just an item of clothing, but a person completely obsessed by a little-known subject. These people will go to conventions - and I have heard it said that the collective noun for anoraks is a "convention" or a "parliament" - on such subjects as aircraft, railway trains, politics, kites, golf and many other subjects. The term anorak originates from trainspotters, who can be seen at Britain's railway stations wearing rather dirty weatherproof jackets with a notebook and pen in hand. The more fanatical and fussy of these people are known as rivet counters and are admired by fellow anoraks. Anoraks often appear on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. They talk endlessly about the minutiae of politics and even get rivet counters, the party leaders, on to the programme, for this the BBC employ anoraks to carry out the interviews. Some anoraks specialise - the aircraft anorak is a good case. They are either military or civil aircraft spotters. The military spotters have a reputation for getting arrested for spying. The civil spotters can often be seen on a bus going or coming away from Heathrow Airport discussing the various aircraft they have seen lately. Anoraks are harmless and visitors should not be scared of them.
Doug Jones, Harrow, Middlesex, UK.
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