A living wage is vital, morally and economically

There are strong economic reasons for a living wage. And even stronger moral ones

• 
• • Observer editorial
  • The Observer, Sunday 21 July 2013

Henry Ford in one of his automobiles made during the early 1900's. He set a good example on paying a decent wage. Photograph: Superstock/Getty Images/SuperStock RM

News of a refreshingly different approach to business came from the low budget chain, Sports Direct. It is responsible for selling one in four pairs of trainers in the UK, a rise in sales of 45% since 2006. Mike Ashley, billionaire owner of the chain, has devised a staff bonus scheme that means 2,000 Sports Direct staff, some earning £20,000, will receive £100,000 each. Ashley has spoken volumes in the ongoing and ever more urgent debate about what constitutes a fair society and who gets what in Britain in wages, bonuses, profits and shareholders' dividends.

Ashley's action stands in sharp contrast to the decision of Network Rail's 44 members (the equivalent of shareholders) to give five senior executives, already on substantial salaries,a bonus of £2m if certain targets are met in 2015.

Manuel Cortes, general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association (TSSA), rightly describes this as "rewarding failure".

"These bosses will be on board a very lucrative gravy train," he is reported as saying, "while the poor passengers pay through the nose with annual above-inflation fare rises."

As a recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), points out, it isn't just fares that are rising. The average family is in a vice. The minimum cost of living has soared by 25% in the past five years as wages have flatlined. Childcare costs are up by 37%, energy costs by 39% and food costs have increased by 24%, with an even greater hike still to come, according to Philip Clarke, chief executive of Tesco, speaking to the Observer yesterday.

Now, to reach an adequate standard of living, JRF says that a lone parent requires £25,600 a year and a working couple with two children need £19,400 each. The freeze in child benefit, the decision to uprate tax credits by just 1% and the increase in the cost of essentials faster than inflation means that a working couple with two children will be £230 a year worse off. That may not seem much to those fortunate enough to earn significantly more than the median salary of £21,583 but a person on a minimum wage working 40 hours a week, receives less than £13,000 a year.

These families are also about to navigate several weeks of school holidays. Perpetual struggle itself exacts a price. Donald Hirsch, author of the JRF report, says: "There is a growing gulf between public expectations of the living standard everyone should be able to afford and their ability to earn enough to achieve it." That is grossly unjust. It is also economically unsound.

As John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, argues on these pages: "The scale of low pay in Britain is a national scandal." Five million people – 3 million of them women – and four out of five working in the private sector, receive pay so low they are subsidised by £4bn a year from the taxpayers' purse. "Why aren't those who are profiting from their workers paying up?" the archbishop rightly asks. "Why is government having to subsidise businesses who don't pay their employees enough to live on?"

In a search for some of the answers, the Living Wage Commission, created by the left-of-centre organisation Compass, has established a year-long investigation into the future of the living wage, its value and the barriers to its implementation, to report in 2014, chaired by the archbishop. It is timed to influence the manifestos of the political parties in the 2015 general election. The Observer welcomes the inquiry. Since last year, it has published a series of articles on the working poor that have received a remarkable response from readers, so it concurs with the archbishop of York when he says: "We need to have a national conversation about low pay in Britain."

The voluntary living wage is set at £8.55 an hour in London and £7.45 in the rest of the UK. The statutory minimum wage is set at £6.19 an hour for those over 21, due to rise by 12 pence in October. For well over a decade, the charity Citizens UK has led the campaign that now means almost 300 companies pay the living wage to more than 45,000.

Supporters are recruited from across the political spectrum, including Boris Johnson, Ed Miliband and Alex Salmond, as well as leaders of most of the faiths. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, says: "It's something we should be shouting about."

The Catholic bishops have also asserted: "Fair wages are essential to the common good of society."

The moral argument is strong, but so, too, are the economic drivers. Henry Ford paid his workers $5 a day not so they could buy his motor cars but to retain staff, reduce absenteeism, improve motivation and control training budgets.

According to JRF, child poverty costs taxpayers £25bn a year despite the fact that 57% of children in poverty have at least one working parent. Research by the thinktanks IPPRand the Resolution Foundation suggests that in many sectors, the cost of the living wage would be minimal. Banking, construction and computing companies, for instance, would see roughly 1% added to their wage bill; even the retail sector would see only a 5% rise.

We are on a precipice. Household debt, according to Aviva Family Finance, has risen by 40% in 12 months. As the Resolution Foundation has warned, a rise in interest rates could tip more than a million families into the abyss and still the number of children slipping into poverty continues to increase.

The living wage is by no means the entire answer but it is a vital strengthening of the safety net. Instead, according to JRF, the new benefit, universal credit, is likely to make the economic situation for many working families worse, not better.

As Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, has pointed out: "This is not the way capitalism is meant to work." He adds: "The division of spoils has reached a level that, if unaddressed, threatens to be dangerously destabilising, socially and politically."

There are strong economic reasons for a living wage. And there are even stronger moral ones. It is unjust that workers at the bottom of this country's pay scale suffer so egregiously while executives, CEOs and shareholders help themselves to a disproportionate share of the spoils.

These spoils are often built on the back of the lowest paid workers. This is unjust and unfair. And, ultimately, that unfairness will build tensions and frictions that will become unbearable. A strong and healthy society is one where everyone feels appreciated and fairly remunerated. A living wage would benefit us all in creating a stronger and happier nation.

Ignore the hype: Britain's 'recovery' is a fantasy that hides our weakness

A tiny rise in GDP is nothing to celebrate while the UK economy is as dysfunctional as ever

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 21 July 2013

A rise in GDP will be celebrated as proof of George Osborne's wisdom – but the dysfunctions of the UK economy are still firmly in place. Photograph: Rex Features

Next Thursday we will get a further taste of what it is like living in an one-party state. The estimate for GDP growth in the second quarter will be published – predicted to rise between 0.2% and 0.3%, confirmation that a triple dip recession has been avoided and the economy is on the mend. Expect an over-the-top reaction from our centre-right media.

George Osborne's sagacity will be lauded to the skies, and scorn poured on all those who have criticised economic policy or worried about Britain's economic structures. It will be another chance to swing opinion behind the Conservative party – all the more effective because the coverage will reproduce the co-ordination of a government propaganda machine without any formal instruction being given.

Economies are like corks. They have inbuilt upward momentum driven by productivity and population growth. That momentum can be reversed for 18 months or two years in a typical recession when investment and consumption have run ahead of themselves, and of necessity fall back. But like a cork the economy will eventually bounce back to the surface – where it would have been had the recession not happened.

What we are witnessing is that natural bounce – but very weak, extraordinarily slow and no prospect of any substantive follow-through once the economy returns to 2008 levels of output some time next year. What usually takes no more than two years will have taken six – the slowest recovery for more than a century. Exports are effectively unchanged, even to faster growing non-EU countries, despite a 25% devaluation. Company investment has collapsed by 34%. Real wages are 9% below their peak – they rose in every other postwar recession – and are set to fall further. The profound dysfunctions of the British economy, despite wild claims otherwise, remain firmly in place.

What is so dismaying is that hopes that investment and exports would lead recovery have been completely dashed. Instead the British are returning to what they are best at – running down their savings and borrowing enormous mortgages, partially guaranteed by the state under the Help to Buy scheme, to force up house prices.

I did not join the chorus of criticism of Help to Buy when it was launched: it was a clever, time-limited Keynesian use of the public balance sheet to support a distressed part of the economy, and no recovery is conceivable without some rise in house prices rekindling animal spirits and lifting confidence. What was wrong was: to superimpose it upon a market that privileges buyers who want to let rather than own; the Treasury vetoing an extension to lending to business in general; and not recognising that the same Keynesian thinking is needed across the board.

What takes me aback is the determined way the national conversation is skewed towards the inadequacies of the public sector, however concerning – avoidable deaths in the NHS or extravagant pay-offs for BBC executives – without any parallel focus on the inadequacies of the private. The Coronation festival for the Queen was meant to be a celebration of British innovation. Yet there were only three large company pavilions in the Palace gardens – GSK, Bentley and Jaguar Land Rover (owned by the Indian Tata) – and a host of tiny companies dealing in niche luxury goods. The contrast with the industrial and innovative power that could have been mobilised when she began her reign 60 years ago is painful.

Moreover, back then, economic power would have been drawn more equally across the country. There were certainly regional imbalances in the 1950s but compared with today they were trivial. Outside London and the south-east there was no private sector job creation in the decade to 2008. Today these regions possess little more than what Karel Williams of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change calls a "foundation economy" – the structures that deliver the likes of electricity, food and hospital care but with virtually no private sector entrepreneurial activity. The average size of a British-owned manufacturing company in the regions, he says, is 14 – subcontracting workshops and downmarket complements to those niche luxury companies.

The problem is too few of either develop into companies of any scale. Their owners are too transactional, unsupported or plain greedy, and the financial system that supports them too fickle, disengaged and commission-hungry. Almost no new major British companies have emerged over the past 20 years while dozens that have taken decades to grow have been assimilated into global multinationals, their strategies dictated outside Britain. Some, of course, make a vital contribution to our economy. But this is no basis on which to launch anything but a fitful recovery and weak investment. Yet no fundamental questions are asked.

Instead the Conservative party, and the commentators who support it, live in Fantasy UK, in which the problem is regulation and the EU. The first initiative of David Cameron's new business team in Downing Street has been to ask British businesses to identify those EU regulations most hindering British growth. I conducted my own straw poll in London's Tech City. Brussels and the EU were simply not on the radar. Instead the list included the financial system's aversion to risk, immigration controls keeping out talented foreigners, and BT's inability to provide high-speed broadband.

The debate has to change. Companies in Britain – domestic or foreign-owned – need the prospect of a sustained growth of demand. The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, hinted at establishing a target for growth and inflation combined – nominal GDP – but was beaten back by the austerity defenders. He should stick to his guns. We have to create ownership and financing structures – scaling up the proposed Business Bank fast — that permit companies to grow and stay owned, as far as possible, in Britain. We have to get fundamentally serious about infrastructure. The LSE growth commission's proposal for an interlocking system of infrastructure strategy board, infrastructure bank and independent planning commission is a good starting point. The housing market needs root and branch reform. Above all, there has to be a sense of mobilisation.

But instead we have nonsense babble about the EU being all that is holding us back; huge prizes for essays on EU exit as a focus for intellectual effort (courtesy of the Institution of Economic Affairs); and endless nostalgic festivals and celebrations about world wars one and two. Welcome to Fantasy UK.

Suryakireedam.... a pathos filled song from Devasuram

Lyrics by Girish Puthencherry

Sooryakireedam veenudanju raavin thiruvarangil (2) (The crown falls n shatters in the sacred hours of the early morning)

 Paduthiri aalum prananil eetho nizhalugal aadunnu neerum (As the soul burns, painful shadows come to play)

Sooryakireedam veenudanju raavin thiruvarangil




Nenjile piri shannngile theerthamellaaaam vaarnu po (") (The sacred water drained from the conch in my heart.)
 Naama japaamritha manthram chunnndil klavu pidikum sandhya neram (When, the sunset prayers and manthras taint my lips)

Sooryakireedam veenudanju raavin thiruvarangil
Paduthiri aalum prananil eetho nizhalugal aadunnu neerum
Sooryakireedam veenudanju raavin thiruvarangil

Agniyay karal neeeerave mookshamaargammm neetumo (2) (While the fire burns my soul will it be enough to obtain moksha)

Ihapara shaaabam theeran amme ini oru jenmam veendum tharumo (Or for all my curses to be dispersed, mother will you have to give birth to me for a second time)

Sooryakireedam veenudanju raavin thiruvarangil
Paduthiri aalum prananil eetho nizhalugal aadunnu neerum
Sooryakireedam veenudanju raavin thiruvarangil

Why not... privatise the NHS

 By Brian Wheeler

Politics reporter, BBC News

A look at eye-catching policy ideas that are often talked about but never seem to feature in UK general election campaigns.

The background

The NHS was created by the post-war Labour government in 1948. For the first time, hospitals, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists and opticians were brought together under one organisation to provide services free to the public at the point of delivery.

The central principle - that health services will be available to all and financed entirely from taxation - has been an article of faith in British politics ever since. David Cameron is the latest in a long succession of prime ministers to vow that the NHS is "safe" in his hands and would not be "privatised".

But privatisation is a slippery concept. Some see it in the opening up of NHS services to more private competition. Others argue that the word "privatisation" would only apply if Britain dismantled the NHS altogether and adopted a US-style private health insurance system instead - and that the NHS's status as "sacred cow" is blocking constructive debate about its future.

Thomas Cawston: The case for privatisation

Competition is a "bogey" word in the NHS.

Yet this hostility to competition and private providers is a uniquely British obsession.

Diverse providers of healthcare are common throughout Europe.

In Germany for example a third of hospitals are run by charities, a third by for-profit companies and a third by government. Sweden has invited private providers to provide GP clinics and hospital services. By contrast only 3% of the NHS budget is spent by private providers in England.

The reason for competition is that can drive real improvements in care.

To take one current example, patients with chronic back pain in Bedfordshire will soon enjoy a much better service. The local NHS has asked different organisations to suggest the best way to deliver all musculo-skeletal healthcare services for the next five years.

All qualified providers, including NHS hospitals, GP practices and private companies, are invited to submit bids to provide a world class service at the greatest value for money.

The winning bidder will be the one that gets the different parts of the NHS to work together successfully so that patients are treated as quickly as possible. The competition will deliver new thinking and NHS patients will benefit.

Competition also puts patients at the heart of the NHS.

Poll after poll shows patients value their right to choose which hospital to go to and what treatment they receive. Yet without competition patients would have to "like it or lump it" and choice remains the privilege of the rich who can afford to buy their way out of the system.

Opponents of competition argue that it will fragment NHS services.

In fact, those services are already fragmented, which is one cause of the current crisis in A&E admissions.

The Bedfordshire initiative shows that competition can join up NHS services, to the great benefit of patients.

Oliver Huitson: The case against privatisation

It is not clear where the evidence base for competitive, privatised health provision comes from.

This is perhaps why the Conservatives and the private health industry, including the "think tanks" they fund, rely on a handful of soundbites. Respectable economic theory and the evidence from real-life healthcare both disprove their case - competitive markets fit healthcare exceedingly poorly.

When markets are introduced into healthcare provision, providers chase income, costs soar, health outcomes suffer, fraud increases, and the system of universal care coverage collapses.

The public need only look at what's happening to out-of-hours care already - a stream of scandals, capped by an A&E crisis. Blaming this on NHS "fragmentation" is quite extraordinary. The privatised service, with less qualified staff to cut costs, has seen an increase of 50% in the rate of calls referred to A&E since 2010.

Sweden put "competition at the heart" of their NHS. "Choice" grew in affluent urban areas where privately-owned clinics pushing unnecessary care now abound. Of the 196 new clinics that opened in Sweden, all privately-owned, 195 were in wealthy areas.

The newly privatised Dutch system showed similar problems. The GP organisation tried to address it by asking newly qualified GPs to take positions in rural practices. For this "interference with the market" the national competition regulator fined the GP association 7.7m Euros!

Competition puts revenue, not patients, at the centre of care. It's a legal requirement for firms to maximise shareholder value - not patient wellbeing. This is why the public consistently oppose privatisation; it converts a public health service to a "fantastic business", in Cameron's words.

"Choice" is often a fantasy, as commissioners, patients and charities will soon learn; a warm buzzword used to mask the fact the NHS is being changed to a profit-led market without the public's consent.

Cricket Betting in India

For the better – or worse?

Ed Hawkins in Wisden India

 | 

2 July 

It is just not possible to bet on the minutiae of a match, including that of a bowler sending down a pre-designated no-ball. © Getty Images

 

Never meet a hero, they reckon. But what of a villain? Say hello to Vinay, from Bhopal, capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. He is an illegal bookmaker, which also makes him a scourge of the game, and a malevolent, match-fixing mobster. Right?

When I met Vinay in a hotel lobby, the reputation of his brethren – there are estimated to be more than 70,000 bookies in India – preceded him. All, bar those who work at race courses (where gambling, so the argument goes, is based on skill rather than luck, and therefore socially acceptable) are illegal. It is said – by the ICC, corruption officers, national boards and player bodies – that the illegal bookies are dangerous men from the underworld. People fear them. And so, in truth, did I, as I waited for Vinay, nervously tapping my feet to inane pan-pipe music.

Yet when he arrived, I immediately felt at ease. There was no cloak, no dagger. His smile was brilliant, his handshake warm, his enquiry after my health genuine. We had already exchanged emails, Twitter messages and phone calls. What followed was a crash course in India’s vast gambling industry. Over several weeks as part of my research for a book on corruption in cricket, I would spend time living with him and his family, and watch him run his business (he also owned a construction firm); I would hide from the police, learn how bookies control betting markets, and hear of fixes before they happened. When we parted, I told Vinay of my initial apprehension. “Me?” he guffawed. “This is too much amusement for me. I hope you know me now, ya? But perhaps I understand why you were like this. Bookmakers in India are supposed to be all bad. No. We are trying to make our living in a corrupt country, and we do this by taking any opportunity we can.”

The backdrop to my visit was the sound of exploding myths. Chief among them was the notion that it is possible to place a bet on a no-ball, a misconception that called into question the precise nature of the conviction of Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamer in the spot-fixing trial of November 2011 – though there is no doubt that the News of the World sting showed them to be corruptible. But preconceived notions about corruption in cricket simply collapsed, for it is just not possible to bet on the minutiae of a match: a batsman scoring a certain amount of runs, a fielder being placed in a particular position, a bowler operating from a specific end – or even sending down a pre-designated no-ball. Why? Because just as Indian bookies are not the threatening hoodlums of popular depiction, neither are they knuckledragging imbeciles. “Do you think we’re fools?” asked Vinay. “If someone says they want this no-ball bet for big monies, and I’m Ladbrokes in London, I tell them to go away. No bookmaker in the world takes this bet.”

One does not need to be invited into Vinay’s home to understand that any bookie worth his salt would suspect that this customer had inside information. Yet throughout the Southwark trial of the three Pakistanis and their agent, there was a wilful acceptance that the News of the World would have been able to place a bet on the timing of a no-ball, had they so wished. This was clear from the sentencing remarks by Mr Justice Cooke: “Bets could be placed on these no-balls in unlawful markets, mostly abroad, based on inside advance knowledge of what was going to happen… Individuals in India were making £40,000–£50,000 on each identified no-ball. On three no-balls, therefore, the bookmakers stood to lose £150,000 on each bet by a cheating punter.”

In fact, this is impossible. The illegal Indian market is highly organised and, crucially, uniform. It offers only four markets for its gamblers: match odds, innings runs (known as lambi), brackets (the number of runs scored in a certain amount of overs), and lunch favourite (essentially, betting that the team who are favourites at lunch in a Test, or at the innings break in a limited-overs match, will go on and win the game). In the case of the lambi and brackets, a spread is set for the number of runs to be scored, and gamblers bet over or under.

The odds for these markets are provided by four syndicates, who have reached the top of the food chain through their expertise in the field. They charge a fee to bookmakers to use those odds, then take a cut of the profits from all over the country. Think of the syndicates as wholesalers, and the bookies as convenience-store owners, who buy the goods, then sell them on. Vinay is what is known as a first-tier bookmaker. Occasionally, because he is highly regarded, he acts as one of the syndicate heads, who are often based in Mumbai or Dubai, sending out odds to bookies lower down the chain; bookmakers from the second, third or fourth tiers have fewer customers, and receive the odds via SMS, with the syndicate able to reach hundreds of them at once using bulk messaging software. “All bookies in India are connected,” said Vinay. “They will send on the prices to even more.”

Because the syndicates are so dominant, the potential for the manipulation of markets is obvious. And it is certainly more profitable than paying a bowler to overstep. “The Indian market is very big and powerful,” Vinay told me just before England’s One-Day International against India at Hyderabad in October 2011. “There are much smarter ways to manipulate betting. Look, I’ll show you.”

On his laptop he logged on to Betfair, the person-to-person betting exchange with more than four million customers around the globe. After it was announced India had won the toss, he sent updated odds to 200 bookmakers across the country. On the match-odds market, India were favourites at 1.95 (even money would be 2.00). These decimal odds translate into the traditional fractional odds used in the UK as 20-21: in other words, if you bet £21 you can win £20.

“Now watch how I move the Betfair market,” said Vinay. When he sends the SMS to his cohorts instructing them to lower the odds, they flood Betfair with money – or, to be precise, with people prepared to place bets at these odds. He explained: “It is currently India 1.95. Watch how they become 1.85 in line with our odds… wait, you’ll see here how it works… we want to get India short.” Vinay was keen to price India as short as possible because he knew most of his punters would back the home team. Since an Indian victory would have been certain to cost him money, he wanted to discourage punters from backing them. Seconds later, he chirped: “There, you see: India 1.85 now on Betfair. We have moved the market.” And all this from a text message which simply read: “India 85”.

Unfortunately for cricket and the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, some fixes are almost impossible to prove. © AFP

This, of course, is not corruption – just the sheer weight of (illegal) Indian money. Yet no matter what wagers are struck, the bookmaker and the syndicates are able to avoid losses by using betting exchanges to hedge their bets. For example, a bookie may have accepted a wager from any Tom, Dick or Hari of £10 on England to win at even money. This has the potential to cost the bookie £10. However, when England’s odds during the game drift to 6-4 (greater than even money) – either because momentum has shifted towards India, or because Vinay has manipulated the market from a hotel room in Bhopal – the bookie can lay off, or hedge, his bets. The original bet risks him £10. But by placing a wager himself on England at odds of 6-4 for £10, he stands to win £15 if he’s successful: £15 minus £10 is a guaranteed profit of £5. (In the case of an Indian win, Vinay would have hedged his position too, although – because of the amount of money wagered on India – he would be merely seeking to reduce his losses to a manageable level.) Now consider the potential when four or five figures are involved.

Hedging is not illegal, but it shows that corruption is not an exact science: there is more than one method and more than one protagonist. The assumption that it is largely bookmakers who fix matches would appear to be wrong. Vinay worries that punters close to players or officials do the fixing, costing him money. Yet there seems little doubt that the all-powerful syndicates have massive influence, as well as the funds and organisational ability, to fix elements of matches – or even the results themselves.

The bookies and the professional punter can be considered enemies, in the mould of the old-fashioned pork-pie-hat-wearing odds-maker and his traditional chancer customer. It is a war for inside information: who knows more? The only consistent loser is the less clued-up customer, who is in effect betting blind. The syndicate operates a subtle fix. By sending out false odds via their bookies, they tempt customers into taking them. Vinay gave the example of how, armed with prior knowledge that a well-known Test match in 2011 would not end in a draw – when a draw looked at one stage the only possible result – the odds were set so that more people would bet on the stalemate. This is a ruse that hundreds of thousands fall prey to, and the money tots up.

The professional punter can do likewise, but he is a simpler operator. His original way of making money from fixes, which would have been used in the days of Hansie Cronje – and before the betting exchanges were commonplace – is less sophisticated. It requires much poking and prodding of contacts up and down the country, hoping minions will then place the bets correctly. It is a system that primarily takes advantage of the sheer size of the industry: a few lakh in Mumbai (one lakh equals 100,000), a few more in Delhi, a few more somewhere else. Next week, mix it all up again in an attempt not to draw attention to the scale of the enterprise – and hope you don’t get found out.

“The punter will have his friends placing the bets all over,” said Vinay. “There is a big connection. Some punters are connected like the bookmakers are connected. If a punter has 50 friends, he can get 50 bets.” The aim of fragmenting his bets by placing many smaller ones instead of a couple of large ones is to prevent the bookmaker from suspecting inside knowledge. The subtle nature of the sting fuels the belief that a wide array of markets are available to bet on in India. But it is not because there is a betting market for fielding positions that a syndicate or punter has cajoled a captain into moving a fielder from third man (there is no such market). It is because, without a third man in the first ten overs of a one-day international, more runs are likely to be scored. This allows the syndicate to set false odds on a bracket, knowing that, if they offer runs in the first ten overs at, say, 70–75, most gamblers will bet under. Similarly, a punter who has a close friendship with a batsman might have arranged for him to score fewer than 25. This will give him an edge when it comes to the lambi, bracket and match odds. If it sounds like insider trading on the stock market, that is precisely what it amounts to.

Unfortunately for cricket and the ICC’s Anti-Corruption and Security Unit, it is almost impossible to prove. The fixes are so minute – at least in terms of the impact on the match result – as to be virtually undetectable. How, for example, could the ACSU prove in court that a batsman has scored deliberately slowly for just one over in a Twenty20 match to sate a syndicate or a punter playing the brackets?

But the ACSU do not help themselves by failing to grasp how the illegal market in India works. They were embarrassed when Ravi Sawani, their former boss, admitted in the Southwark trial he had not heard of the term “bracket”. They should also be pilloried for failing to grasp the nuances of spot-fixing, wrongly believing there are manifold markets for bookmakers or gamblers to exploit. Yet we should not simply criticise the governing body. Rarely are players, the collective, admonished. “It’s down to them to take ownership,” said an ACSU source. “A few players have said: ‘There should be more ACSU people.’ No, we should have 20 guys on the field naming the two who are at it.”

There is hope – but only a little. If India’s bookmakers were legalised, they would have to operate exactly like Ladbrokes or William Hill. That would mean an end to the credit system, where bookies accept customers on trust. Instead, they would need money in their account to wager. And to have an account, they would have to hand over their personal details. When accounts are kept and verified, you have a paper trail. If you have a paper trail, you have no rogue punters setting up fixes with their friends in cricket teams. At a stroke, the potential for corruption would be reduced by half.

Vinay is not convinced: “People say: ‘Legalise betting in India and fixing will stop.’ Yes. We are ready to pay tax. I’m tired of paying off the police. But it will not stop fixing. Never.”

 

Ed Hawkins is the author of Bookie Gambler Fixer Spy: a journey to the corrupt heart of cricket’s underworld.

The chimera of Dalit capitalism

NISSIM MANNATHUKKAREN

The HinduVENTURING OUT: It is shocking that Dalit liberation seeks to join hands with capitalism at a juncture when it is at its carnivorous worst. The picture is of Milind Kamble, chairman, DICCI (centre) and others at an entrepreneurship meet in Hyderabad.

The recent launch of the first Dalit venture fund occasions an examination of the moral and ethical emptiness of capitalism

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics

                                                                                                                                                 B.R. Ambedkar

If only Milind Kamble, founder of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) and Chandra Bhan Prasad, Dalit thinker, columnist and DICCI mentor, had imbibed the wisdom of Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, a classic work in African-American studies, they would not have been such virtuoso performers of the ballad of Dalit capitalism (which claims Black capitalism among its inspirations). And this ballad is increasingly getting mainstream attention as evidenced by the interview of the duo in a famous talk show after the recent launch of the first Dalit venture capital fund.

The fundamental argument made by them is that it is time for Dalits to change their image of being perpetual victims (always in need of state support through reservations and doles) to that of being in charge of their own destiny — to put it pithily, “Dalits are not only takers, they are givers.” And what better way to achieve this than Dalits becoming capitalists themselves, and welcoming with open arms, economic reforms and globalisation: “we see that there is an economic process, that capitalism is changing caste much faster than any human being. Therefore, in capitalism versus caste, there is a battle going on and Dalits should look at capitalism as a crusader against caste.”

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IN THE U.S.

It is, of course, understandable that an oppressed people would look to any and every avenue that would help overthrow the shackles of oppression. In that sense, the limited use of the market in dissolving some of the millennia-old feudal and caste hierarchies has to be acknowledged. But to move from that to romanticising the relationship between capitalism and caste is completely different, especially when it is done in an anodyne and vacuous manner as Prasad does: “along with globalisation came Adam Smith to challenge Manu. So that’s why for the first time, money has become bigger than caste... bigger than Marx, bigger than everybody because in this marketplace, only your ability is respected.” And “Montek [Singh Ahluwalia] is a friend of Adam Smith and Adam Smith is an enemy of Manu, so therefore, Montek is our friend.

If indeed the market is a level playing field, one wonders why is it that after centuries of glorious capitalist growth and decades of Black capitalism in the headquarters of world capitalism, African-Americans languish at the bottom of socio-economic indicators. In 2011, the poverty rate among blacks was 28.1 per cent, almost three times the rate for non-Hispanic whites. In the prison capital of the world, African-Americans are incarcerated at almost six times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, thus constituting almost a million out of a total prison population of 2.3 million! So much for a market place that respects one’s ability. If capitalism is so democratic and benign, why is it that its biggest crisis since the Great Depression — the financial crisis in 2008 — had a particularly devastating effect on the African-American population?

The Pew Research Center analysis shows that the median wealth of white households was a staggering 20 times that of black households in 2009. This was the largest gap in 25 years and almost twice the ratio before the crisis.

Despite the optimism that people like Prasad and Kamble exude about Dalits becoming equal participants in a democratic capitalism, there are other Dalit and non-Dalit scholars who have demonstrated the immense barriers for Dalit entrepreneurs within the so-called capitalist market, and the ugly casteism that marks corporate India.

But my concern is not about the inability of Dalits to become capitalists within a structure marked by gargantuan economic and social inequalities, but about the moral and ethical emptiness of capitalism as a liberatory mechanism for an oppressed people. When Chandra Bhan Prasad speaks in glowing terms about the four Mercedes Benz cars that Rajesh Saraiya, the richest Dalit businessman, worth about $400 million and based in Ukraine, owns, he does not ponder about the gross inequalities that characterise the global capitalist system which bestows such bounties on a minuscule number at the expense of the vast majority who inevitably pay the price.

THE FLAW

The fundamental flaw in the argument for Dalit capitalism is that it merely seeks to find an equal space for Dalits within what is inherently an exploitative system: thus the hitherto exploited sections of the people will now play the role of exploiters. In sum, Dalit capitalism, while it seeks to dismantle age-old hierarchies and discriminations, is hardly bothered about the new oppressions perpetrated by capitalism.

What is particularly shocking is that Dalit liberation seeks to join hands with capitalism at a juncture when it is at its carnivorous worst. The Golden Age of capitalism and industrialisation has given way to “casino capitalism,” driven by financial speculation and what Marx calls as “fictitious capital.” The greatest example of this is the crisis of 2008. In a desperate bid to sustain its profit margins, capitalism resorts to, in the words of distinguished professor of anthropology and geography David Harvey’s words, “accumulation by dispossession” — privatisation of public property, forcible expulsion of peasant and indigenous populations from their lands, unbridled exploitation of natural resources and so on.

Rather than grapple with the question of a comprehensive transformation of political, economic and cultural relations towards equality in society, Dalit capitalism ingratiates itself with the present exploitative order. There are no radical questions asked, like that of reparations for slavery in America (theHarper’s Magazine estimated the value of reparations to be over $100 trillion for forced labour from 1619 to 1865). Instead, Dalit capitalism becomes the new darling of mainstream media simply because it refuses to question the commonsense of market as the saviour. As a prominent columnist gushed about the Dalit venture capital fund: “This is a vision of shared equality among castes, not of trickle down. It is a vision of Dalit entrepreneurs taking their place at the top of the pyramid and offering to share their profits with investors from all castes that historically dominated them.”

Ultimately, what is most disturbing is that Dalit capitalism is mainly inspired by the “economic thought of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar”! The great man would definitely turn in his grave when he sees his followers seeking the liberation of his people through capitalism when global multinational capital is pillaging the Aymara people of Latin America for oil and minerals, and the Ethiopian peasants for land. In an interlinked world, the former’s destiny is irrevocably tied to the latter.

Cricket - Dhoni and the revelation that at first wasn’t noticed

MAKARAND WAINGANKAR in the hindu

  

APDhoni’s success did not come overnight. Nor was his selection in the Indian team a fluke.

 

Watching Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s career graph can make any one believe in miracles. The man with the Midas touch has been a revelation to experts ever since he arrived on the scene.

Dhoni’s success did not come overnight. Nor was his selection in the Indian team a fluke. He had been playing the Ranji Trophy for Bihar from 2000. But where Dhoni’s fate was different from that of others like him was the introduction of the Talent Resource Development Wing (TRDW) of the BCCI. No one noticed talent in his zone, which tended to promote players from one state, something the then selection committee chairman Kiran More objected to.

TRD officers P.C. Podar and Raju Mukherjee were scavenging for talent, hopping from one match to another in Jamshedpur during the Ranji one-dayers in 2003-04.

They came across a 22-year-old opener who was whacking bowlers all over the place. They promptly fed their assessments on the National Cricket Academy website and the chief TRDO Dilip Vengsarkar strongly recommended Dhoni for the India ‘A’ tour of Kenya.

MUST THANK HIS STARS

Within a year, Dhoni was in the Indian team to Bangladesh. Everything said and done, Dhoni has to thank his lucky stars for getting noticed in the first place.

He was fortunate that Vengsarkar’s recommendations were accepted by More’s selection committee.

More, being a wicketkeeper himself, wasn’t happy initially with Dhoni’s keeping abilities but every decision maker felt that Dhoni was a special talent. Dhoni gave the impression that he enjoyed pressure situations.

In an interview in Dr. Rudi Webster’s book, ‘Think Like a Champion’, Dhoni says, “I see pressure as an opportunity to do well. If you are under pressure you should not see it as a danger and give in to it.

DEALING WITH PRESSURE

“People say a lot of negative things about pressure. Pressure to me is just an added responsibility.

That is how I look at it. It’s not pressure when God gives you an opportunity to be a hero for your team and country.

“If you expect pressure and have a plan to deal with it you will know exactly what to do when it comes, and more often than not you will use it in a positive and productive way.

“The best way to deal with it is to stay in the moment and not get trapped in the past or caught up in the future on the result or on what might happen.

If you stay in the moment, calm your mind and focus on the process you won’t feel much pressure.”

The way Dhoni plays in the death overs is a mystery beyond explanation but these words of his certainly unravel some secrets. Webster’s book deals with many interviews of V.V.S. Laxman, Rahul Dravid, Sir Garfield Sobers and Greg Chappell.

It focuses on the psychological aspects of cricket, which is often referred to as “mental strength”.

Dhoni is candid in admitting that his technique isn’t of international standard. However, a glance at his performance (11567 international runs, 424 catches and 111 stumpings) shows that he has done what many great technicians of the game haven’t. To him, performance counts.

Technique is important of course, but Dhoni isn’t the kind to be a slave to technique.

The psychological aspect of the game that he emphasises should be an eye opener for people who are stuck with the baggage of technique.

Technique without performance is worthless; it can be at best used for technical comparison and nothing else.