The educational charities that do PR for the rightwing ultra-rich

Billionaires control the political conversation by staying hidden and paying others to promote their brutal agendas

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 18 February 2013 20.30 GMT

David Koch, of Koch Industries, pictured here in his role as chairman of Americans for Prosperity at the Defending the American Dream Summit in November 2011. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

 

Conspiracies against the public don't get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change. While inflicting untold suffering on the world's people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.
The two organisations – the Donors' Trust and the Donors' Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression of many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama's cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they're seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.

This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations, most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations. If this funding were not effective, it wouldn't exist: the ultra-rich didn't get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those that advance their interests.

A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers (paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free-market or conservative thinktanks.

Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and Discovery Institute. All pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups "increasingly function as public relations agencies".

One name in particular jumped out at me: American Friends of the IEA. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a British group that, like all the others, calls itself a free-market thinktank. Scarcely a day goes by when its staff aren't interviewed in the broadcast media, promoting the dreary old billionaires' agenda: less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, less spending by the state, less regulation for business. In the first 13 days of February, its people were on the BBC 10 times.

Never have I heard its claim to be an independent thinktank challenged by the BBC. When, in 2007, I called the institute a business lobby group, its then director-general responded, in a letter to the Guardian, that "we are independent of all business interests". Oh yes?

The database published by the Canadian site desmogblog.com shows that American Friends of the IEA has (up to 2010) received $215,000 from the two secretive funds. When I spoke to the IEA's fundraising manager, she confirmed that the sole purpose of American Friends is to channel money to the organisation in London. She agreed that the IEA has never disclosed the Donors' Trust money it has received. She denied that the institute is a sockpuppet organisation: purporting to be independent while working for some very powerful US interests.

Would the BBC allow someone from Bell Pottinger to discuss an issue of concern to its sponsors without revealing the sponsors' identity? No. So what's the difference? What distinguishes an acknowledged public relations company taking money channelled by a corporation or a billionaire from a so-called thinktank, funded by the same source to promote the same agenda?

The IEA is registered with the Charity Commission as an educational charity. The same goes for Nigel Lawson's climate misinformation campaign (the Global Warming Policy Foundation) and a host of other dubious "thinktanks". I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is outrageous that the Charity Commission allows organisations that engage in political lobbying and refuse to reveal their major funders to claim charitable status.

This is the new political frontier. Corporations and their owners have learned not to show their hands. They tend to avoid the media, aware that they will damage their brands by being seen to promote the brutal agenda that furthers their interests. So they have learned from the tobacco companies: stay hidden and pay others to do it for you.

They need a network of independent-looking organisations that can produce plausible arguments in defence of their positions. Once the arguments have been developed, projecting them is easy. Most of the media is owned by billionaires, who are happy to promote the work of people funded by the same class. One of the few outlets they don't own – the BBC – has been disgracefully incurious about the identity of those to whom it gives a platform.

By these means the ultra-rich come to dominate the political conversation, without declaring themselves. Those they employ are clever and well-trained, with money their opponents can only dream of. They are skilled at rechannelling public anger that might otherwise be directed at their funders: the people who tanked the economy, who use the living planet as their dustbin, who won't pay taxes and demand that the poor must pay for the mistakes of the rich. Anger, thanks to the work of these hired hands, is instead aimed at the victims or opponents of the billionaires: people on benefits, trade unions, Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union.

The answer, as ever, is transparency. As the so-called thinktanks come to play an ever more important role in politics, we need to know who they are working for. Any group – whether the IEA or Friends of the Earth – that attempts to influence public life should declare all donations greater than £1,000. 

 We've had a glimpse of who's paying. Now we need to see the rest of the story.

Cameron's immigration hierarchy: Rich Indians good, eastern Europeans bad

David Cameron's welcome mat to 'hardworking' Indians contrasts with attitudes towards the new EU entrants

• 
• • Alana Lentin
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 February 2013 16.00 GMT

David Cameron speaks at a business seminar in Mumbai on February 18. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images

 

In The End of Tolerance, Arun Kundnani argues that the ability to integrate in today's Britain is based less on how you look and more on whether or not you are deemed culturally compatible. This may seem like progress but the sliding scale along which humanity is now organised is not unlike the racial hierarchies of old; it's just less colour-coded. So, an English-educated Indian professional may be more acceptable than a white, jobless Bulgarian or Romanian. This is exactly on point as we witness David Cameron's rush to India, a country whose economic rise he described as "one of the great phenomena of the century".

Cameron and his entourage of CEOs and vice-chancellors will undoubtedly speed past the slums rapidly being cleared for the shiny new malls being built on every spare inch of India's major cities. The majority of Indians – arguably worse off since the advent of neoliberalism in the "largest democracy" – are not who Cameron has in mind when he talks about unleashing "India's potential".
Back in the UK, the imminent arrival of Bulgarians and Romanians with new EU rights is being painted as a make or break electoral issue. They are the victims of a "xeno-racism" that holds impoverished strangers, including whites, in its sight. In contrast, Indian students with the cash to pay premium fees to study at British universities will, according to Cameron, have the red carpet rolled out and will not, he has claimed, be subject to limits on how long they can stay and work. How such "positive discrimination" will be justified in light of the Tories' commitment to a cap on immigration in the tens of thousands per year remains to be seen.

Cultural stereotypes abound. Indians – not Pakistanis mind – are deemed hardworking and resourceful with infinite admiration for the UK and its traditions. Colonialism is rewritten as a "special relationship". Indians (Hindus) assimilate into the British way of life, speak English, and are religious moderates. They are not a drain, rather an opportunity for investment in an ailing British economy.

Romanians and Bulgarians, on the other hand, are today's "wretched of the earth", described by Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun as variably corrupt, as rapists and as pickpockets. The Tories will lose the Eastleigh byelection, he warns, unless the government puts its foot down and refuses to grant full EU rights to Romanian and Bulgarian citizens before they descend on the UK.

The comparison of Cameron's rhetoric on India and Britain's newest EU partners reveals how, on the surface at least, racism is so often influenced by economics. The successful are pitted against the scroungers, no matter the extent to which either stereotype holds water. Immigration with a capital "I" – as a headline rather than a life experience – has always needed heroes and villains, those who gave versus those who took, those who built versus those who destroyed. Racism works to attach these apparently natural attributes to whole groups of people and that is why it is never detachable from the immigration "debate". This is the message that Cameron is sending: we will tolerate those who can benefit us, but not those who fail to make us prosper.

Indians are no more universally assimilable than south-eastern Europeans are detrimental to the UK. Indeed, the opposite was once deemed to be the case when skin colour, rather than cultural compatibility, influenced migration policy more explicitly and arrivals from the east were dissidents, not purported social security hunters. Only when we decouple immigration from race will the arbitrariness of the ranking of populations according to profitability become apparent and racial generalisations – positive or negative – be shown up for the poverty of the ideas that lie beneath them.

Narendra Modi - The man who would rule India

 Ramachandra Guha in The Hindu

 

  

Like Indira Gandhi once did, Narendra Modi seeks to make his party,his government, his administration and his country into an extension of his personality.

A journalist who recently interviewed Narendra Modi reported their conversation as follows: “Gujarat, he told me, merely has a seafront. It has no raw materials — no iron ore for steel, no coal for power and no diamond mines. Yet it has made huge strides in these fields. Imagine, he added, if we had the natural resources of an Assam, a Jharkhand and a West Bengal: I would have changed the face of India.”(see The Telegraph, January 18, 2013). 

Tall claims

This conversation (and that claim) underlines much of what Narendra Modi has sought to do these past five years — remake himself as a man who gets things done, a man who gets the economy moving. With Mr. Modi in power in New Delhi, says or suggests Mr. Modi, India will be placed smoothly on the 8 per cent to 10 per cent growth trajectory, bureaucrats will clear files overnight, there will be no administrative and political corruption, poverty levels will sink rapidly towards zero and — lest we forget — trains and aeroplanes shall run on time. These claims are taken at face value by his admirers, who include sundry CEOs, owner-capitalists, western ambassadors and —lest we forget — columnists in the pink papers, the white papers, and (above all) cyber-space.

Mr. Modi’s detractors — who too are very numerous, and very vocal — seek to puncture these claims in two different ways. The unreconstructed Nehruvians and Congress apologists (not always the same thing) say he will forever be marked by the pogrom against Muslims in 2002, which was enabled and orchestrated by the State government. Even if his personal culpability remains unproven, the fact that as the head of the administration he bears ultimate responsibility for the pogrom, and the further fact that he has shown no remorse whatsoever, marks Mr. Modi out as unfit to lead the country.

The secularist case against Mr. Modi always had one flaw — namely, that what happened in Gujarat in 2002 was preceded in all fundamental respects by what happened in Delhi in 1984. Successive Congress governments have done nothing to bring justice to the survivors, while retaining in powerful positions (as Cabinet Ministers even) Congress MPs manifestly involved in those riots.

With every passing year, the charge that Mr. Modi is communal has lost some intensity — because with every passing year it is one more year that the Sikhs of Delhi and other North Indian cities have been denied justice. (They have now waited 28 years, the Muslims of Gujarat a mere 11.) More recently, the burden of the criticism against Mr. Modi has shifted — on to his own terrain of economic development. It has been shown that the development model of Gujarat is uneven, with some districts (in the south, especially) doing very well, but the dryer parts of the State (inland Saurashtra for example) languishing. Environmental degradation is rising, and educational standards are falling, with malnutrition among children abnormally high for a State at this level of GDP per capita.

As a sociologist who treats the aggregate data of economists with scepticism, I myself do not believe that Gujarat is the best developed State in the country. Shortly after Mr. Modi was sworn in for his third full term, I travelled through Saurashtra, whose polluted and arid lands spoke of a hard grind for survival. In the towns, water, sewage, road and transport facilities were in a pathetic state; in the countryside, the scarcity of natural resources was apparent, as pastoralists walked miles and miles in search of stubble for their goats. Both hard numbers and on-the-ground soundings suggest that in terms of social and economic development, Gujarat is better than average, but not among the best. In a lifetime of travel through the States of the Union, my sense is that Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and (despite the corruption) Tamil Nadu are the three States which provide a dignified living to a decent percentage of their population.

To be sure, Mr. Modi is not solely responsible for the unbalanced development. Previous Chief Ministers did not do enough to nurture good schools and hospitals, or enough to prevent the Patels of southern Gujarat from monopolising public resources. Besides, Mr. Modi does have some clear, identifiable achievements — among them a largely corruption-free government, an active search for new investment into Gujarat, some impressive infrastructural projects, and a brave attempt to do away with power subsidies for rich farmers.

Both the secularist case and the welfarist case against Mr. Modi have some merit — as well as some drawbacks. In my view, the real reason that Narendra Modi is unfit to be Prime Minister of India is that he is instinctively and aggressively authoritarian. Consider that line quoted in my first paragraph: “I would have changed the face of India.” Not ‘we,’ but ‘I’. In Mr. Modi’s Gujarat, there are no collaborators, no co-workers. He has a chappan inch chaati — a 56-inch chest — as he loudly boasts, and therefore all other men (if not women) in Gujarat must bow down to his power and his authority.

Mr. Modi’s desire to dominate is manifest in his manner of speaking. Social scientists don’t tend to analyse auditory affect, but you have only to listen to the Gujarat Chief Minister for 15 minutes to know that this is a man who will push aside anyone who comes in his way. The intent of his voice is to force his audience into following him on account of fearing him.

The proclamation of his physical masculinity is not the sole example of Mr. Modi’s authoritarianism. Like all political bullies he despises free speech and artistic creativity — thus he has banned books and films he thinks Gujaratis should not read or watch (characteristically, without reading or viewing these books and films himself). He has harassed independent-minded writers, intellectuals and artists (leading to the veritable destruction of India’s greatest school of art, in Vadodara). His refusal to the spontaneous offer of a skull cap during his so-called ‘Sadbhavana Yatra,’ while read as an example of his congenital communalism, could also be seen as illustrating his congenital arrogance.

The most revealing public display of Mr. Modi’s character, however, may have been a yoga camp he once held for the IAS officers of his State. They all lined up in front of him — DMs, DCs, Secretaries, Under-Secretaries, of various sizes, shapes, ages, and genders — and followed the exercise routine he had laid down for them. Utthak-baithak, utthak-baithak, 10 or perhaps 20 times, before a diverting Surya Namaskar was thrown in by the Master.

I do not know whether that yoga camp was held again (it was supposed to be an annual show), and do not know either how Mr. Modi appears to these IAS officers when they confront him one-on-one. But that the event was held, and that the Chief Minister’s office sought proudly to broadcast it to the world, tells us rather more than we would rather wish to know about this man who wishes to rule India.

To be sure, Mr. Modi is not the only authoritarian around in Indian politics. Mamata Banerjee, J. Jayalalithaa, and Mayawati (when she is Chief Minister) also run their States in a somewhat overbearing manner. Naveen Patnaik and Nitish Kumar are intolerant of criticism too. However, the authoritarianism of these other State leaders is erratic and capricious, not focused or dogmatic. This, and the further fact that Mr. Modi has made his national ambitions far more explicit, makes them lesser devils when it comes to the future of our country.

 

Resemblance to Indira Gandhi

Neither Mr. Modi’s admirers nor his critics may like this, but the truth is that of all Indian politicians past and present, the person Gujarat Chief Minister most resembles is Indira Gandhi of the period 1971-77. Like Mrs. Gandhi once did, Mr. Modi seeks to make his party, his government, his administration and his country an extension of his personality. The political practice of both demonstrates the psychological truth that inside every political authoritarian lies a desperately paranoid human being. Mr. Modi talks, in a frenetic and fearful way, of ‘Rome Raj’ and ‘Mian Musharraf’ (lately modified to ‘Mian Ahmed Patel’); Mrs Gandhi spoke in likewise shrill tones of the ‘foreign hand’ and of ‘my enemies.’

There is something of Indira Gandhi in Narendra Modi, and perhaps just a touch of Sanjay Gandhi too — as in the brash, bullying, hyper-masculine style, the suspicion (and occasional targeting) of Muslims. Either way, Mr. Modi is conspicuously unfitted to be the reconciling, accommodating, plural, democratic Prime Minister that India needs and deserves. He loves power far too much. On the other hand, his presumed rival, Rahul Gandhi, shirks responsibility entirely (as in his reluctance, even now, to assume a ministerial position). Indian democracy must, and shall in time, see off both.

On Narendra Modi - All The Perfumes Of Arabia.....

To those who talk of development of Gujarat under Modi I ask this question: Should the malnourished children of Gujarat eat the roads, electricity and factories which Modi has created?

MARKANDEY KATJU 

Narendra Modi is being projected by a large section of Indians as the modern Moses, the messiah who will lead the beleaguered and despondent Indian people into a land of milk and honey, the man who is best suited to be the next Indian Prime Minister. And it is not just the BJP and RSS who are saying this in the Kumbh Mela. A large section of the Indian so called 'educated' class, including a section of our 'educated' youth, who have been carried away by Modi’s propaganda are saying this.

I was flying from Delhi to Bhopal recently. Sitting beside me was a Gujarati businessman. I asked him his opinion of Modi. He was all praise for him. I interjected and asked him about the killings of over 2000 Muslims in 2002 in Gujarat. He replied that Muslims were always creating problems in Gujarat, but after 2002 they have been put in their place and there is peace since 2002 in Gujarat. I told him it was the peace of the graveyard, and peace can never last long unless it was coupled with justice. At this remark he took offence and changed his seat on the plane.

The truth today is that Muslims in Gujarat are terrorized and afraid that if they speak out against the horrors of 2002 they may be attacked and victimized. In the whole of India Muslims (who are over 200 million of the people of India) are solidly against Modi (though there are a handful of Muslims who for some reason disagree).

It is claimed by Modi supporters that what happened in Gujarat was only a 'spontaneous' reaction (pratikriya) of Hindus to the killings of 59 Hindus in a train in Godhra. I do not buy this story. Firstly, there is still a mystery as to what exactly happened in Godhra, and who was responsible for the killings. Secondly, the particular persons who were responsible for the Godhra killings should certainly be identified and given harsh punishment, but how does this justify the attack on the entire Muslim community in Gujarat. Muslims are only 9% of the total population of Gujarat, the rest being mostly Hindus. In 2002 Muslims were massacred, their homes burnt, and other horrible crimes committed on them.

To call the killings of Muslims in 2002 as a spontaneous reaction reminds one of Kristallnacht (see online) in Germany in November 1938, when the entire Jewish community in Germany was attacked, many killed, their synagogues burnt, shops vandalized, etc after a German diplomat in Paris was shot by a Jewish youth whose family had been persecuted by the Nazis. It was claimed by the Nazi Government that this was only a 'spontaneous' reaction, but in fact it was planned and executed by the Nazi authorities using fanatic mobs.

I have said in my article 'What is India?' (see on my blog justicekatju.blogspot.in as well as on the video on the website kgfindia.com) that India is broadly a country of immigrants (like North America) and consequently it is a land of tremendous diversity. Hence the only policy which can hold it together and take it on the path of progress is secularism and equal respect and treatment to all communities and sects. This was the policy of the great Emperor Akbar, which was followed by our Founding Fathers (Pandit Nehru and his colleagues) who gave us a secular Constitution. Unless we follow this policy our country cannot survive for one day, because it has so much diversity, so many religions, castes, languages, ethnic groups, etc.

India therefore does not belong to Hindus alone, it belongs equally to Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains etc. Also, it is not that only Hindus can live in India as first rate citizens while others have to live as second or third rate citizens. All are first rate citizens here. The killings of thousands of Muslims and other atrocities on them in Gujarat in 2002 can never be forgotten or forgiven. All the perfumes in Arabia cannot wash away the stain on Modi in this connection.

It is said by his supporters that Modi had no hand in the killings of Muslims in 2002, and it is also said that he has not been found guilty by any Court of Law. I do not want to comment on our judiciary, but I certainly do not buy the story that Modi had no hand in the events of 2002. He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at that time, and the horrible events happened on a large scale in Gujarat Can it be believed that he had no hand in the events of 2002? At least I find it impossible to believe it.

Let me give just one example. Ehsan Jafri was a respected, elderly former Member of the Indian Parliament living in the Chamanpura locality of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. His house was in the Gulbarga Housing Society, where mostly Muslims lived. According to the recorded version of his elderly wife Zakia, on 28.2.2002 a mob of fanatics blew up the security wall of the housing society using gas cylinders, they dragged Ehsan Jafri out of his house, stripped him, chopped off his limbs with swords, etc and burnt him alive. Many other Muslim were also killed and their houses burnt. Chamanpura is barely a kilometer from the police station, and less than 2 kilometres from the Ahmedabad Police Commissioner's office. Is it conceivable that the Chief Minister did not know what was going on? Zakia Jafri since then has been running from pillar to post to get justice for her husband who was so brutally murdered. Her criminal case against Modi was thrown out by the district Court (since the Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court found no evidence against Modi and filed a final report), and it is only now (after a gap of over 10 years since the incident) that the Supreme Court set aside the order of the trial Court and directed that her protest petition be considered.

I am not going into this matter any further since it is still sub judice.

Modi has claimed that he has developed Gujarat. It is therefore necessary to consider what is the meaning of 'development'. To my mind development can have only one meaning, and that is raising the standard of living of the masses. Giving concessions to big industrial houses, and offering them cheap land and cheap electricity can hardly be called development if it does not raise the standard of living of the masses.

Today, 48% Guajarati children are malnourished, which is a higher rate of malnourishment than the national average. In Gujarat there is high infant mortality rate, high women's maternity death rate, and 57% poverty rate in tribal areas, and among Scheduled Castes/Backward Castes. As stated by Ramachandra Guha in his article in The Hindu today, (8.2.2013) in Gujarat environmental degradation is rising, educational standards are falling, and malnutrition among children abnormally high. More than a third of adult men in Gujarat have a body mass index of less than 18.5 – the 7th worst in the country. A UNDP report in 2010 has placed Gujarat after 8 other Indian states in multiple dimensions of development e.g. health, education, income levels, etc. (see Hindustan Times, 16.12.2012 P.13) 

Mr. Guha further states in his article: “As a sociologist who treats the aggregate data of economists with scepticism, I myself do not believe that Gujarat is the best developed State in the country. Shortly after Modi was sworn in for his third term, I travelled through Saurashtra, whose polluted and arid lands spoke of a hard grind for survival. In the towns, water, sewage, road and transport facilities were in a pathetic state; in the countryside, the scarcity of natural resources was apparent, as pastoralists walked miles and miles in search of stubble for their goats. In terms of social and economic development, Gujarat is better than average, but not among the best. Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Tamilnadu are the three states which provide a dignified life to a decent percentage of their population”.

Business leaders no doubt claim that Modi has created a business friendly environment in Gujarat, but are businessmen the only people in India?

To those who talk of development of Gujarat under Modi I ask this question: Should the malnourished children of Gujarat eat the roads, electricity and factories which Modi has created?

I appeal to Indian people to consider all this if they are really concerned about the nation’s future, otherwise they may make the same mistake which Germans made in 1933.

The Left should learn about plain speaking from George Galloway

OWEN JONES in The Independent

Sunday 17 February 2013

The Right is better at communicating because it uses stories so much

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No politician is as demonised or as despised by the political and media establishment as George Galloway.

No politician is as demonised or as despised by the political and media establishment as George Galloway. It is only partly because he is afflicted with the disease of charismatic British left-wing political figures, which is to provide ample self-destructive material to feed his many enemies. He was mocked for a largely disastrous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. He has made unacceptable comments about rape – “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion” – that repulsed virtually everybody. He has made apparently sympathetic remarks about brutal dictators (although, unlike some of his detractors, he hasn’t sold them arms, funded them or even been paid by them).

A few weeks ago, he stood in Parliament to demand David Cameron explain why Britain was apparently intervening to save Mali from Islamist thugs, when it was supporting very similar groups in Syria. “Wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world,” the Prime Minister spat back, “he will have the support of [Galloway].” All sides of the House roared their approval: and so the political elite closed ranks against a man sent by the people of Bradford to express their disgust with the Westminster club.

Surprising, then, to see the response he attracted on last week’s Question Time. Yes, when he first appeared on the nation’s TV screens, a debate raged on Twitter about whether he looked more like Dr No or Ming the Merciless. And yet he was met with repeated, resounding applause from the audience. The answer is clear. Labour’s representative on the panel, Mary Creagh, spoke the language of the political elite – technocratic, stripped of passion, with too much jargon and management speak, with phrases like “direction of travel”. But Galloway offered direct, clear answers; he spoke eloquently, and with language that resonated with non-politicos; he had enthusiasm, conviction and – to borrow a Tony Benn phrase – said what he meant and meant what he said.

A lesson for Labour, then. Even a figure with a long-haul flight’s worth of baggage can be cheered if they use populist language that connects with people and their experiences. But as New Labour remorselessly helped to professionalise politics, it bred a generation of “on-message” politicians with focus group-approved lines. Verbless sentences – “new challenges, new ideas”; macho cliches – “taking the tough decisions”; platitudes like “fairness”. A new breed of political Kreminologists were assembled to decipher insufferably dull speeches and articles by politicians.

In truth, the Right is better at communicating because it uses stories so much; the Left often rely on cold facts and statistics. But people connect better with stories. The classic right-wing story of our time is to compare the national deficit to a household budget. Any serious economist will tell you this is gibberish – which house has a money printing press, and will mum get sacked if young Dan stops spending his pocket money? – but it resonates with people. “Of course – if I’m in debt, why would I borrow even more money to get out of it?” voters think, even as the Government is forced to do exactly that because of the failures of austerity. The same goes with relentless examples of scroungers in mansions full of feral children and plasma TVs. A tiny unrepresentative minority are portrayed as the tip of an iceberg, scrubbing away the reality of unemployed and disabled people; but because it taps into a very small element of truth, it resonates.

Not that I’m saying the Left should indulge in casual dishonesty or inaccurate generalisations. But policies can seem pretty abstract until they relate to human beings. Take the poisoned welfare debate: the scrounger caricature needs to be smashed with stories of low-paid workers struggling to make ends meet; unemployed people desperately looking for work; disabled people having their state support removed – all of whom are having their benefits slashed.

“Facts and figures, when used, should create a moral point in a memorable way,” explains US political linguist George Lakoff. His point is that “framing” is key: that is having, an over-arching narrative, or story. When you start using the language of your opponent, you have lost. This is exactly what several senior Labour politicians have a habit of doing. The “debate” on the welfare state is a classic example. Management-consultants-turned-politicians like Liam Byrne accept political goalposts set by the Right, de facto accepting the “scrounger” or “skiver” caricatures, leaving them playing on territory where the Tories will always win.

New Labour ideologues always feared policies that sounded too left-wing, but the truth is most voters do not think in terms of “left” and “right”, they think in terms of issues that have to be addressed, with policies that are coherent, convincing and make sense with their own experiences. The Right have a habit of using moderate language to sell radical ideas; the Left would do well to learn from them. It needs to drop clinical terms: use the price of bread or vegetables or surging energy prices rather than “inflation”, for example. The Right often use hooks in the news – like the horrific cases of Karen Matthewsor Baby P – to make a wider point, as though they reveal an otherwise ignored truth about “the other Britain”. The Left certainly should not go to such crass or tasteless lengths, but the principle remains.

The Right have turned having outriders into an artform. Take the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a big business-funded hard-right lobby group posturing  as the voice of people who pay taxes. They float radical right-wing ideas impossible for a mainstream Conservative politician to propose. In doing so, they shift the goalposts of debate to the Right. “I wouldn’t go quite as far as that, however...” a Tory MP can say, making a previously radical idea seem moderate.

The appetite for left-wing populism is greater than it has been for a generation. Much of the Establishment – from banks to the media – have been discredited by scandal. Free-market capitalism is a wreck. But the Left is a long way from learning how to put its case. Gorgeous George is one of the most charismatic politicians of our time, but also one of the most divisive, and still manages to win over the audience. You don’t have to like him; but, if you want to change the world, you do have to learn from him.    

The meat scandal shows all that is rotten about our free marketeers

This is a crisis not only for environment secretary, Owen Paterson, but for the whole Conservative party

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 17 February 2013

A laboratory worker tests beef lasagne. Photograph: Pascal Lauener/Reuters

The collapse of a belief system paralyses and terrifies in equal measure. Certainties are exploded. A reliable compass for action suddenly becomes inoperable. Everything you once thought solid vaporises.

Owen Paterson, secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs, is living through such a nightmare and is utterly lost. All his once confident beliefs are being shredded. As the horsemeat saga unfolds, it becomes more obvious by the day that those Thatcherite verities – that the market is unalloyed magic, that business must always be unshackled from "wealth-destroying" regulation, that the state must be shrunk, that the EU is a needless collectivist project from which Britain must urgently declare independence – are wrong.

Indeed, to save his career and his party's sinking reputation, he has to reverse his position on every one. The only question is whether he is sufficiently adroit to make the change.

Paterson is one of the Tories who joyfully shared the scorched earth months of the summer of 2010 when war was declared on quangos and the bloated, as they saw it, "Brownian" state. The Food Standards Agency was a natural candidate for dismemberment. Of course an integrated agency inspecting, advising and enforcing food safety and hygiene should be broken up. As an effective regulator, it was disliked by "wealth-generating" supermarkets and food companies. Its 1,700 inspectors were agents of the state terrifying honest-to-God entrepreneurs with unannounced spot checks and enforced "gold-plated" food labelling. Regulation should be "light touch".

No Tory would say that now, not even Paterson, one of the less sharp knives in the political drawer. He runs the ministry that took over the FSA's inspecting function at the same time as it was reeling from massive budget cuts, which he also joyfully cheered on. He finds himself with no answer to the charge that his hollowed-out department, a gutted FSA with 800 fewer inspectors and eviscerated local government were and are incapable of ensuring public health.

Paterson, beneath the ideological bluster, is as innocent about business as Bambi. Even the most callow observer could predict that with the wholesale slaughter of horses across the continent as recession hit the racing industry – horsemeat production jumped by 52% in 2012 – some was bound to enter the pan-European network of abattoirs, just-in-time buying, industrial refrigeration units, food brokers and giant supermarkets that deliver British and European consumers their food.

Meanwhile, the budgets of some local government food sampling units have been slashed by 70%. A Tesco beef burger containing 29% horsemeat was an accident waiting to happen. Of course it was the Food Safety Authority of Ireland rather than the FSA that blew the whistle. Businesses owned by footloose "tourist" shareholders whose sole purpose is profit maximisation in transactional markets have an embedded propensity to degrade. Consumers and suppliers alike become no more than anonymised numbers to be exploited to hit the next quarter's profit target.

The large supermarkets have said little or nothing, which Number 10 deplores. There is nothing they can say. They have lobbied for the world in which we now live. An alternative world – in which consumers were genuinely served and where it is understood that suppliers need adequate profit margins in the supermarkets' interests as much as the suppliers' own – has to be created by stakeholders, including by government. There is a codependency between state, society, business and business supply chains, anathema to Paterson with his undeviating obeisance to the virtues of a "private sector" free from such "burdens".

What the Paterson worldview has never understood is that effective regulation is a source of competitive advantage. If Britain had a tough Food Standards Agency, it would become a gold standard for food quality, labelling and hygiene. British supermarkets and food companies could become known for their quality at home and abroad, rather as "over-regulated" German car companies are, rather than first suspects when something dodgy is going on. Capitalism does not organise itself to deliver best outcomes, whatever rightwing American thinktanks might claim. There has to be careful thought, law and regulation about the obligations that accompany incorporation and ownership, how supply chains are organised and how companies are managed and financed. Otherwise disaster awaits.

And there are other bitter implications for Paterson. Geography means that Britain is inevitably part of the European food supply chain. Our efforts at better regulation – and of catching wrongdoers – have to be matched by others for everyone's sake, exactly what the EU was set up to do and is now doing. The hypocrisy of passionate Eurosceptic Owen Paterson flying to the Hague urgently to meet Europol, saying afterwards: "It's increasingly clear the case reaches right across Europe. Europol is the right organisation to co-ordinate efforts to uncover all wrongdoing and bring criminals to justice" and urging all European governments to share information with it, should not be lost on anyone. Europol holds powers from which Eurosceptic Tories, led by Paterson, urgently want an opt-out, but not in the middle of a first-order food safety and hygiene crisis.

That everything Paterson believes in is so wrong is not just a crisis for him – it is a crisis for his party and for Britain's centre-right media whose prejudices makes thinking straight in the Tory party impossible. A great country cannot be governed by politicians whose instincts and policies are at such odds with reality, so betraying the people, economy and society they govern. The horsemeat crisis is not confined to our food chain. It reveals the existential crisis in contemporary Conservatism. British democracy needs a functioning, fit for purpose party of the centre-right.

Instead, it has Owen Paterson and today's Tories.

Look to women's cricket for the game's lost pleasures

If you're a fan of spin and swing, you could do worse than become a fan of women's cricket

Sanjay Manjrekar

February 16, 2013

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	The women's World Cup has produced a high percentage of bowled and lbw dismissals, because bowlers in women's cricket tend to pitch it full © ICC/Solaris Images  Enlarge
Related Links Series/Tournaments: ICC Women's World Cup

For the last couple of weeks I have been watching and commentating on a different kind of cricket, where I have had to bite my tongue while saying things like "Bowled him!" Barring that, commentating on the ICC Women's World Cup has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

No serious comparisons can be made between men's and women's cricket, for various reasons, but watching the women's game up close has been instructive for me - for its contrasts with the men's game, and what it tells us about the evolution of the men's game.

It has been truly gratifying for me as a cricket follower to see some real spin and swing being bowled. As a rule, women seem to swing the ball more than men do, and they also do not need turners to spin the ball - all they need is a 22-yard cricket pitch. This, of course, is not to demean the men in any way, but it raises the point of how swing and spin are less and less evident in the men's game now.

The pitch at the Cricket Club of India, where the World Cup games were held, was hard and bouncy, covered by a thin layer of grass. With matches starting at 9am, our pitch reports always suggested bowling first as the obvious option after winning the toss, and spoke of how it was going to be a seamer's delight. And each time it startled me how the spinners extracted spin from the pitch, even when they were bowling first. No way would the men have found spin on that surface at that hour.

There are two simple reasons for this: female spinners flight the ball more and bowl it a lot slower than men do, with their average speed being around 65-70kph. Male spinners generally bowl around 80kph, and their trajectory is much flatter. This is why women can find turn even on a pitch with no soil exposed, to get the spin advantage.

There was a time when men used to flight the ball like the women do today, but we all know why that does not happen anymore.

One, with increasing amounts of limited-overs cricket being played, the batsmen's mindset has changed completely. Hitting the ball in the air is no more the taboo it used to be. Two, the bats have got heavier and bulkier, and the boundaries are rarely long enough. It amazes me how many times a batsman mistimes the ball and it still sails over the ropes into the stands.

This is where I find the game is unfair to the bowler: ideally such miscued shots should land in the hands of a fielder well inside the boundary, but that does not happen anymore. Given that, only really brave bowlers will bowl full or flight the ball today.

For the ball to swing, one needs to bowl it full. Over the years, with bowlers realising that full balls can be risky, as the batsman can hit you straight over the head into the stands, they have gone shorter, and this habit has stuck in Tests too. Next time, watch carefully when you see a pitch map during coverage of a men's match, and look at how many times a seamer has bowled balls that would actually have gone on to hit the stumps. They are very few. This also means they are giving themselves fewer chances to get lbws and bowleds.

What was striking in these women's matches has been the number of bowleds and lbws they have got. This is because of the full length they tend to bowl; on the pitch map we could see that most of their deliveries were pitching in the full-length area, unlike in men's cricket, where the stock delivery is just short of a good length and balls invariably sail over the stumps if allowed to pass.

Women are able to bowl full because they know very few women in the world can hit the ball out of the ground. So it does not need an especially big-hearted, courageous bowler to pitch it full or throw it up in the air as a means of deception. Even though the boundaries are shorter (around 55 metres on average), sixes are rare in women's cricket, while in men's cricket, with 70m boundaries, it is batsmen who can't hit sixes who are rare.

	Women bowl their overs quicker because they do not "mill around" like the men do. Even on a humid day, the women were rushing through their overs and running to take their positions in the field in between overs

One other reason why 50-overs men's cricket seems a drag sometimes is because men take so long to bowl their quota of overs. They invariably go overboard by 30 minutes. Women get three hours and ten minutes to bowl their 50 overs, as against men, who get three and a half hours. This, I am told, is because men tend to have longer run-ups.

But it was obvious to me that the real reason why women bowl their overs quicker is because they do not "mill around" like the men do these days. Even on a humid day, the women were rushing through their overs and running to take their positions in the field in between overs.

Visits by substitutes with drinks are infrequent, unlike in men's cricket, where it has gone completely out of control. In the women's games, every time the batter was ready, so were the fielders and the bowler.

Why are women generally so keen to finish their overs in time - even when their side is lagging in the match sometimes? Is it hefty fines or penalties in terms of money or runs? Bans? No. There is no penalty of any kind if they don't bowl their overs in time. They do it out of habit, a good habit.

The game is a lot more attractive to spectators if they get to see all its facets in one match, and those include swing and spin. It is up to administrators to ensure this. My stint covering women's cricket has confirmed what I have felt quite strongly for a while: sooner rather than later, the rule-makers will have to restrict the weight and dimensions of the cricket bat. At the moment the edges are starting to resemble the face of the bat.

Wherever possible they need to drag the boundaries further away, so a batsman will know he is taking a huge risk when he is trying to loft a full, swinging ball or a flighted, spinning delivery. If it does not come from the middle of the bat, he should know that is probably going to be the end of him. When a batsman has this doubt in his mind, watch how the game becomes more attractive than it is today.