Countries are now being held to ransom by special-interest factions

Power is fragmenting. But what is the true cost to democracy?

Countries are now being held to ransom by special-interest factions – look at the Tea Party in the US or Ukip in Britain

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 25 August 2013

Supporters of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, wearing Guy Fawkes masks: 'The digital age, globalisation and higher levels of education have equipped more people to become insurgents or to form single-issue pressure groups.' Photograph: Will Oliver/AFP/Getty Images

Power is leaching from the centre, even as the complexities of national and international challenges multiply. It is the hallmark of our times. Whether political or religious leaders, CEOs or five-star generals – all are more constrained in what they can do.

This is a pattern across all societies. The digital age, globalisation and higher levels of education have equipped more people to become insurgents or to form single-issue pressure groups. It is a world where the opportunities to be a Julian Assange, Beppe Grillo, Osama bin Laden, George Soros or Nigel Farage grow by the day. Power is draining away from those in whom it is formally placed, but with no obvious substitute in sight.

As Moisés Naím writes in The End of Power, there are three interrelated dynamics gnawing away at formal power structures – what he calls "the more revolution, the mobility revolution and the mentality revolution". There are more literate, educated people worldwide than ever before who refuse to be regimented and controlled as they once were. They are mobile, migrating and exchanging information to an unparalleled degree. Moreover, fewer will take anything for granted: they expect their voice to be heard, whether on the streets of Cairo, on social media in China or in anti-fracking protests in Sussex.

Naím is the first to concede that the dispersion of power is frequently a force for good. One obvious benefit is that autocracy is on the wane. In 1989, Freedom House reckoned that only 69 countries could be counted as democracies: today, the number has reached 117.

It is also good that the chances of mass war on a 20th-century scale are shrinking: in a world of declining power,, as US generals are relearning in Afghanistan, war is won differently today. It is the fast-moving insurgent who can capture hearts and minds or the terrorist cyberhacker who ends up ahead. But as Naím wryly remarks, the decay of power even undermines the insurgent terrorist groups themselves. He reports that 26 of 45 terrorist organisations dissolved, not from being beaten militarily, but from internal strife and challenge. Al-Qaida's greatest weakness is its own factionalisation, as will be the Taliban's.

It is this tendency to fragmentation and the chorus of often irrational voices insisting that their demands be met that most concerns Naím. It may be easier to establish a single-issue NGO, a religious movement or a political faction, but that does not mean that the consequence is necessarily always beneficial.

There is now certainly hyper-competition from new religious groups, or from blogs, tweets and websites trying to sway your opinion. But the consequences can be perverse. The rise of charismatic religion may challenge centralised, formerly powerful religious groupings that have lost their way, such as Catholicism, under increasing siege from the rise of Pentecostal churches in Africa and South America. But religious fundamentalism's grip on logic and rationality is even more tenuous.

Similarly, millions of blogs and tweets have forced news consumers to fall back on trusted, established sources, aiding media concentration rather than diminishing it.

But the "more, mobility and mentality revolutions" have their most obvious malign impact on politics in general and the political party in particular. Naím observes that parties are the engine room of democracies: they gather a constellation of interest groups around a common set of principles that offer a compass for government. Everywhere, political parties are succumbing to the rise of uncompromising single-issue pressure groups, lobbyists and funders, and the corresponding decline of supporters who want common values expressed. It is now not just parties but whole countries that are held to ransom by a faction or interest group holding a simplified but impossible view of the world – Naim's "terrible simplifiers".

One obvious example is the US Republican party, now in thrall to the Tea Party movement, which sees no value in compromise, but instead worships at the altar of an imagined US constitution that allegedly guarantees a nightwatchman state. Another example is the emergence of the Pirate party in Sweden and Germany. However, interestingly, Naím sees Britain as the laboratory that conclusively proves his point. The rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and Ukip, along with the hollowing out of both the Conservative and Labour parties, make the country increasingly hard to govern .

This must, in part, explain the collapse in Labour and Conservative party membership over the past 50 years and the consequent weakening of their capacity to create formal and informal coalitions of a broad set of interest groups around common values.

Ed Miliband's and Labour's failures predictably get the most attention from the press – identikit pieces about his lack of forcefulness, clarity and too much equivocation – as if a new leader could magically solve the problem, but with no understanding of the much wider context in which any political leader now operates.

The Tory party's problems, driven by similar forces, are arguably even more acute. At any other time, David Cameron would be seen as a classic mainstream Tory. Today, he is marginalised by as many as 200 backbenchers owing their position to constituency association selectorates, some of no more than 100 activists, in thrall to "terrible simplicities" on tax, Europe, immigration and welfare.

Any genuinely tough call – to put property taxation on 2013 rather than 1991 values, accept the need for immigration, cigarette packaging or even build the HS2 train line – is made incomparably harder or is simply off-limits because of the veto of a single-issue pressure group that a party is no longer strong enough to take on.

It is the decay of power. The centre fragments and power devolves to myriad new forces that often exercise their power with narrow obsessions in mind. Who now speaks for the whole? Who keeps a macro view, mediating competing interests and conflicts and has the courage to make decisions based on a strategic view of all our interests, not just sectional ones?

Parties have to fight back –arguing better, crystallising policies better, running primaries to select their candidates to widen their appeal – as does our democracy. Representative government was a great invention. It now has to be saved from the single-issue, monomaniac, simplifying, self-interested vandals – a much more interesting position for Mr Miliband to take than a belated "me too" conversion to a referendum on the EU.

Cheating: It's in our blood

Nicholas Hogg in Cricinfo

We are built to cheat. Our DNA demands that we take the opportunities that increase our chance of survival. In Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is the bone-wielding apes who viciously club the unarmed apes. No lingering guilt about what is fair inhibits their bloody victory. But these are primates fighting over territory in a tooth-and-claw scrabble without values to impinge their survival instincts, distant cousins of refined cricketers imbued with a sense of moral duty to a sport that has long been elevated above other recreation as a bastion of fair play.

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However, it is the codified rules, empirical rather than moral, that ultimately define a sport. In football you cannot touch the ball with your hands, in rugby football you can. Bereft of guidelines a sporting contest debases back to the savannah. Medieval, unruly versions of the beautiful game involved neighbouring villages fighting to move a ball from one field to another. These riotous matches, with surging mobs hacking, wrestling and lurching back and forth across muddied fields - much like a Five Nations clash from the 1980s - were banned in 1314 by an Edward II Royal Decree that declared "hustling over large balls" as an act "from which many evils may arrive."

Cricket, conversely, has often been taught in an effort to instil morality and sportsmanship. The phrase "It's just not cricket" has been popularised to describe underhand behaviour in wider society. The MCC, the owner of the Laws of Cricket since the 18th century, included a Preamble on this "Spirit of Cricket" in its updated 2000 code: "Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game. Any action which is seen to abuse this Spirit causes injury to the game itself."

Occasionally players do contravene this near-mystical ethic of cricketing spirit. In 1981, six runs were needed from the last ball of the third World Series Cup final between Australia and New Zealand, and Australian captain Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl underarm. New Zealand's No. 10 Brian McKechnie blocked the grubber and then hurled his bat away in disgust. Outrage followed, and the Australian Cricket Board acknowledged that Chappell's action "was within the laws of the game" but as the MCC would formally state, "that it was totally contrary to the spirit in which cricket has been, and should be, played".

The unwritten code of fair play had been broken, and a week later the law was changed to ban underarm bowling. Like religion, the Spirit of Cricket is a concept universally understood but not universally practised.

In the first Ashes Test at Trent bridge, Stuart Broad edged Ashton Agar to first slip and stood his ground when he knew full well he was out. Sensing that he might escape justice, his face was that of a boy wiping away the crumbs of a stolen cookie - never has he looked more like the nefarious Malfoy from Harry Potter than when he realised his stay of execution.

It is the same player, whether on the village green or Test match arena, stuttering "I really wasn't sure if I'd hit it" who demonstrates an ancient skill - not only to others but also to oneself.

"In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage," writes philosopher John Gray in Straw Dogs. "The same is true in politics, and many other contexts."

Including, one would argue, when at the crease.

"If they believe the lie," says Victor Gombos, a psychologist at California State University, "it's easier to be convincing." That golden duck turned into a century is sweeter still if the guilty man can free himself of the crime.

The walk-or-not-to-walk conundrum is a direct test of moral fortitude against genetics - a measure of character extended to home umpires in club games when they, as well as the appealing fielders, are well aware that the ball held aloft in the keeper's glove did indeed feather their team-mate's bat - and a prime example of how lying, whether to oneself or to others, is a pre-programmed ability.

Cheating will advance too. Silicone tape and Murray Mints. Sunscreen made of beeswax. Each mutation of advantage will result in a tweak of governance

"Almost all children lie," notes the director of the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University, Dr Kang Lee. In 2010, after studying 1200 children Lee claimed that lying "is a sign they have reached a new developmental milestone" and evidence of a fast-developing brain. He was quick to negate the link between juvenile deception and graduation into adult fraudsters - and, we presume, dishonest cricketers.

Whether Broad not walking constitutes a lie is debatable. No one asked him if he had hit the ball. And, as many great batsmen have done before him, he is entitled to wait on the umpire's decision. But a cheat? If so, he is certainly not the first, or the last.

In a 2013 survey conducted for the MCC and the Cricket Foundation, one in 20 children questioned admitted they were proud to have achieved victory dishonestly. With 22 players involved in a cricket match, that correlates to at least one dedicated cheater per game. This will to sporting power, to win at all costs, was highlighted in Dr Robert Goldman's 1984 survey that claimed over 50% of athletes would take an undetectable drug that assured them five years of glory.

Darwinism teaches that a quest for truth is often contrary to our survival. The truth is that Broad edged the ball to first slip, and the deception prolonged his life. Here, the "victory" gene, as I shall briefly rename Dawkins "selfish" original, is in conflict with what is considered fair play. Morality is built on the shifting sands of time, place and culture, and in natural selection the human mind pursues evolutionary success, not values.

Therefore as we evolve, the rules, and how they are applied, must adapt too. Sporting laws that fail to keep players in check will die off like dodos. Cricket changes because we are inventive mammals with the capacity for creativity - cheating.

The DRS will improve. Hot Spot and Snicko will see and hear with Orwellian focus. The Ministry of Truth will reign over every high-definition microsecond of every televised game, and on-field umpires - such as Tony Hill on the third morning at Chester-le-Street, when the big-screen replays confirmed his error and the players were halfway off the pitch before he raised his finger to an empty wicket - will be no more than conduits for decisions made by circuit boards.

And cheating will advance too. Silicone tape and Murray Mints. Sunscreen made of beeswax. Each mutation of advantage will result in a tweak of governance. While the coming youth play warped forms of our beloved game, and we casually forget this is a sport born on grassy meadows with curving bats and gates of sticks instead of stumps - an evolving game - our fading generation will hark back to a time when cricket was cricket, and a batsman could stand his ground whether he had hit the ball or not.

Emerging market rout threatens wider global economy

The $9 trillion (£5.8 trillion) accumulation of foreign bonds by the rising powers of Asia, Latin America and the emerging world risks going into reverse as one country after another is forced to liquidate holdings to shore up its currency, threatening to inflict a credit shock on the global economy.

Fears of Fed tightening have pushed borrowing costs worldwide to levels that could threaten global recovery Photo: AFP

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph

8:38PM BST 22 Aug 2013

India’s rupee and Turkey’s lira both crashed to record lows on Thursday following the US Federal Reserve releasing minutes which signalled a wind-down of quantitative easing as soon as next month.

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, held an emergency meeting on Thursday with her top economic officials to halt the real’s slide after it hit a five-year low against the dollar. The central bank chief, Alexandre Tombini, cancelled his trip to the Fed’s Jackson Hole conclave in order “to monitor market activity” amid reports Brazil is preparing direct intervention to stem capital flight.

The country has so far relied on futures contracts to defend the real – disguising the erosion of Brazil’s $374bn reserves – but this has failed to deter speculators. “They are moving currency intervention off balance sheet, but the net position is deteriorating all the time,” said Danske Bank’s Lars Christensen.

A string of countries have been burning foreign reserves to defend exchange rates, with holdings down 8pc in Ecuador, 6pc in Kazakhstan and Kuwait, and 5.5pc in Indonesia in July alone. Turkey’s reserves have dropped 15pc this year.

“Emerging markets are in the eye of the storm,” said Stephen Jen at SLJ Macro Partners. “Their currencies are in grave danger. These things always overshoot.” 

It was Fed tightening and a rising dollar that set off Latin America’s crisis in the early 1980s and East Asia’s crisis in the mid-1990s. Both episodes were contained, though not easily.

Emerging markets have stronger shock absorbers today and largely borrow in their own currencies, making them less vulnerable to a dollar squeeze. However, they now make up half the world economy and are big enough to set off a crisis in the West.

Fears of Fed tightening have pushed borrowing costs worldwide to levels that could threaten global recovery. Yields on 10-year bonds jumped 47 basis points to 12.29pc in Brazil on Thursday, 33 points to 9.72pc in Turkey, and 12 points to 8.4pc in South Africa.

There had been hopes that the Fed might delay its tapering of bond purchases, chastened by the jump in long-term rates in the US itself. Ten-year US yields – the world’s benchmark price of money – have soared from 1.6pc to 2.9pc since early May.

Hans Redeker from Morgan Stanley said a “negative feedback loop” is taking hold as emerging markets are forced to impose austerity and sell reserves to shore up their currencies, the exact opposite of what happened over the past decade as they built up a vast war chest of US and European bonds.

The effect of the reserve build-up by China and others was to compress global bond yields, leading to property bubbles and equity booms in the West. The reversal of this process could be painful.

“China sold $20bn of US Treasuries in June and others are doing the same thing. We think this is driving up US yields, and German yields are rising even faster,” said Mr Redeker. “This has major implications for the world. The US may be strong to enough to withstand higher rates, but we are not sure about Europe. Our worry is that a sell-off in reserves may push rates to levels that are unjustified for the global economy as a whole, if it has not happened already.”

Sovereign bond strategist Nicolas Spiro said India is “caught between the Scylla of faltering growth and the Charybdis of currency depreciation” as hostile markets start to pick off any country with a large current account deficit. He said India’s central bank is playing with fire by reversing its tightening measures to fend off recession. It has instead set off a full-blown currency crisis that is crippling for companies with dollar debts.

India is not alone. A string of countries across the world are grappling with variants of the same problem, forced to pick their poison.

Kerrigan's dream turned nightmare

Why does a cricketer's long-cherished hope of performing on the biggest stage often crumble on the big day?

Aakash Chopra in Cricinfo

The sight of Simon Kerrigan bowling on day one of his Test debut made spectators stare at him in disbelief, then condemn his selection, and later feel sorry for the poor lad. His cherished childhood dream, of playing for England, had turned into a nightmare on his first day at the office.

The knowledge that many of his senior colleagues either boast Test centuries on debut, or remarkable bowling figures, must have weighed heavy too. That mindset of inflated expectations and fear of failure can affect a debutant horribly sometimes.

Kerrigan's first over went for ten runs; his next two included a huge full toss and a half-tracker that made him look woefully out of place. A stage as big as the Ashes can trigger a terrible chain of slip-ups, one leading to the next: a nasty trap with no exit.

On the one hand, the fantasy of playing for the country is so vivid and the visualisation so real, you as a debutant can almost feel your team-mates giving you high fives and the crowd standing up to applaud. On the other hand, you spend sleepless nights, twisting and turning, mulling over the possibility of being dismissed first ball, or getting hit for a four.

Days before the debut, you wear the team kit and stand in front of the mirror in the confines of your room, practising. While you're busy appreciating the gleaming national emblem on the breast of your t-shirt, performance anxiety, quite unnoticed, finds a way into the mindset. The cheers and applause you imagined are replaced by murmurs and disapproval. Doubt makes an unwelcome appearance, and pressure starts to make itself felt.

Thoughts of what if things go wrong, what if the ball doesn't come out right from the hand, what if my feet don't move when the bowler delivers, start surfacing. The more you try to shoo them away, the stronger they become. You know that you must break the chain and sleep peacefully on the eve of the game, but that's the last thing that happens. The thought of realising your dream keeps you awake, till exhaustion - emotional and physical - takes over and you crash.

Some top athletes foresee this predicament and train themselves to deal with it. Indian Olympic gold medalist shooter Abhinav Bindra stayed up many nights in the run-up to the big event. He knew that sleep might desert him on the eve of the big final, and so he meticulously prepared himself to perform in spite of a lack of sleep. As he had guessed, he couldn't sleep the night before his big performance in Beijing, but that didn't affect his performance.

Sachin Tendulkar, too, didn't sleep well for about a fortnight leading into the match against Pakistan in the 2003 World Cup. If performance anxiety can keep seasoned sportsmen on edge, spare a thought for Kerrigan, who was thrown into one of the most high-profile Tests of the year on debut.

	Thoughts of what if things go wrong, what if the ball doesn't come out right from the hand, what if my feet don't move when the bowler delivers, start surfacing. The more you try to shoo them away, the stronger they become

For him, the morning of the match, the warm-ups, the presentation of the cap, must have all passed in a jiffy. One moment you are warming up, the next you have a bat or ball in hand, practising your skill set, and then, before you've absorbed the first few drills, the captains are out in the middle for the toss. One part of you wants proceedings to slow down so you can soak it all in, the other part, impatient and excited, wants to get it all over and done with as soon as possible. Then you're there, in the middle, 45,000 pairs of eyes watching your every move. In theory you're with ten other men of your clan; in reality you're alone.

I distinctly remember playing my first ball on my Test debut. Even though I felt reasonably well prepared, I prayed I would not get out first ball. A part of me felt paralysed with anxiety. I'm glad the other part was still awake and helped me take a single off the first ball. A monkey the size of a dinosaur was off my back. Looking back at it, what if I had played and missed for a while and hadn't got a single for the first 25 balls? I'm certain I would have melted under the pressure and played a rash shot.

That was what happened to Kerrigan, unfortunately. Shane Watson, in imperious mood, went after the debutant, and he didn't know how to react. A man who had bowled over 9000 balls in first-class cricket and had taken 164 wickets ended up bowling chin-high full tosses and long hops.

It could possibly have been Kerrigan's worst-ever bowling spell at any level, and unfortunately it came in the biggest match of his career, in front of a packed house. Stage fright took control of him and the dream turned into a nightmare in the space of 12 balls. His past stats report that Kerrigan has been a much better bowler than what we saw on the first day at The Oval. But it will require a miracle comeback from him in this Test, or immense faith from the selectors and captain to restore his confidence.

He may still be able to turn it around, for a bowler doesn't only get six opportunities in an over but also many overs to bowl in a match. However, that also means that you stand to be exposed many times over, as opposed to a batsman, whose misery might last only a few balls.

The great Shane Warne and many others have recovered from forgettable debuts. Simon Kerrigan would want to find consolation in that, and the famous Zen saying, "The arrow that hits the bull's eye is the result of one hundred misses."

At last, a politician has been arrested

Mark Steel in The Independent

At last, a politician has been arrested.

The one they’ve taken in is Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, because of all the lousy things you can remember politicians doing in recent years, have any been as filthy as what she did this week, standing in a field with a placard?

Some MPs, such as Stephen Byers and others, were filmed promising to use their status to offer access to ministers, if you paid them between £3,000 and £5,000 a day. That could be seen, if you were picky about morals, as abusing your position slightly, but he only needed a mild caution, because at least he didn’t bring the good name of Parliament into disrepute by standing in front of a tree protesting about fracking.

If Caroline Lucas had any decency, instead of writing a slogan about protecting the environment on that placard, she’d have sold the space for advertising. She could still have had “Stop Climate Change” in one corner, but the rest of it would have been sold for £3,000 to £5,000 to someone reputable such as British Aerospace, and say something like “There’ll be sod-all to frack after our bombs attack”, and the reputation of our government would be intact.

Countless MPs seem to be involved in the process of lobbying, so much that it’s now an industry in which companies employ specialists to butter up politicians to influence policy, or secure the odd million-pound contract. But Caroline Lucas has taken it too far, using her position to meet a bloke with dreadlocks who lives up trees.

When Tony Blair was Prime Minister he used his post only to meet people of vital importance to the nation, like Cliff Richard and President Assad of Syria, but that Lucas woman has spent her time hobnobbing with an angry farmer and a couple who haven’t worn shoes since 1973.

Then there were all those MPs who seemed to be competing with each other to file the most imaginative claim for expenses. One of them must have thought he’d won when it was revealed he’d claimed public money to have his moat cleaned, but then must have been horrified and yelled, “Oh no, some bastard’s trumped me by claiming for a duck island.”

One or two of these were arrested, but most of them weren’t, including those who claimed tens of thousands for unnecessary second homes. Because, as they all pointed out, they weren’t breaking any rules, not like Caroline Lucas who stood only a few hundred yards from a giant drilling machine, intimidating it so much it now needs counselling at a specialist therapy unit for bullied industrial equipment.

And none of the MPs who were caught claiming all this money could possibly have been doing it for personal gain. But protesting in a Sussex village opens up so many business opportunities, lucrative sponsorship deals and chat show appearances it’s only right such selfish behaviour is what the authorities crack down on.

It could also be argued that telling a blatant lie in order to get elected could be a breach of the electoral system. To pick an example at random, if you, let’s say, won votes by pledging to abolish tuition fees but once you were elected you trebled them instead, that may bring democracy mildly into disrepute. But no one gets arrested for that, because it’s a trifle compared to the deception of Caroline Lucas, who stood for the Green Party, and then betrayed all those who voted for her by protesting in defence of the environment, a policy no one could be expected to be associated with the Green Party in any way.

Or imagine if you’d insisted, throughout an election campaign, that you would absolutely not under any circumstances raise VAT to 20 per cent, and then a week after the election you raised VAT to 20 per cent. Could that, if you were to examine it carefully, be seen to contain a hidden mistruth? Maybe, but not as much as someone who pledges to oppose fracking, and then once elected opposes fracking. Such behaviour makes a mockery of our constitution; is it any wonder politicians aren’t trusted?

Another issue that might have resulted in a small arrest could have been the politicians who led the country into a war on a premise that turned out to be a pile of nonsense. As this is a week for locking people up if they’ve jeopardised our national security, maybe that jeopardised it a bit, as it appears to have angered some people in the Middle East. But across that region the local population will be yelling, “Thank God the British have finally arrested one of their politicians. Because the one who ruined everything was that Green Party woman from Brighton. Every time she waved that placard it caused another of our buildings to collapse. Now she is arrested at last we may sleep in peace.”

Her arrest, along with the other protesters, according to a police spokesman, was due to the fact she was “disrupting the life of the village”. So now they’ll be able to carry on with their tranquil lives, enjoying the sweet morning coo of a 25-ton boring drill clacking into the earth to extract gas in a process likely to cause underground tremors, without it being spoilt by the racket of a Sussex MP standing in the mud.

British Rail - Should it be renationalised?

Privatising the railways was a disaster. It's time to renationalise

Passengers are paying a fortune to travel in overcrowded trains, so Labour, like the Greens, should seize the initiative

• 
• • Caroline Lucas
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 22 August 2013 17.30 BST

'The solution the Green party is proposing is for our railways to be brought back into public hands, with passengers having a greater say in the development of the system.' Photograph: Bruno Vincent/Getty Images

"No direction", "dithering", "rudderless". Ed Miliband isn't the first opposition leader to hear this kind of language as an election looms, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that his MPs are queuing up to offer him friendly encouragement to fill the policy vacuum.

Clearly, it's not easy being in opposition, knowing that every policy announcement can and will be used against you by the government and a hostile media. But that's why politics requires courage.

Labour now has some fantastic opportunities to get behind progressive policies that would resonate with its traditional support and with voters. One in particular is about to pull into the station. With the dreadful news last week that rail fares will go up by an average of 4.1% next year (and sincere sympathies to you if you're one of the many passengers who will be hit much harder than that), it's surely time for Labour to accept that privatisation of the railways was a disastrous failure that it should have reversed when it had the chance.

With the prime minister's former speechwriter, Ian Birrell, leaping to the defence of privatised services and talking about record levels of passenger satisfaction, surely now is the time for Miliband's team to sign up to a policy that would genuinely distinguish him from the coalition. The shadow transport secretary, Maria Eagle, sounds as if she wants to head in that direction. She recently criticised the government's determination to re-privatise the East Coast service, calling it "bizarre and dogmatic". East Coast, she noted, makes one of the highest payments to the public purse, receives the least subsidy and is the only route on which all profits are reinvested in services. So why doesn't Labour go the whole way?

The Rebuilding Rail report, published last year by Transport for Quality of Life, offers a superb analysis of the mess Britain's railways are in. It finds that the private sector has not delivered the innovation and investment that were once promised, that the costs of back-room staff have massively increased, and that the costs of train travel rose by 17% between 1997 and 2010 (while the costs of travelling by car fell). It conservatively estimates that £1.2bn is being lost each year as a result of fragmentation and privatisation. The irony is that some of the biggest profiters are the state-owned rail companies of our neighbours: Deutsche Bahn, for example, owns three UK franchises.

Birrell seeks to paint opponents of privatisation as dewy-eyed nostalgists. But the modern, efficient, clean, affordable services enjoyed in other parts of Europe offer a much better blueprint than our own past. The solution the Green party is proposing is for our railways to be brought back into public hands, with passengers having a greater say in the development of the system. The government would take back individual franchises when they expire, or when companies fail to meet their conditions. The enormous savings generated could and should then be reinvested in rail infrastructure, and to reduce the soaring cost of fares.

My private member's bill sets out the process to make this happen, and is due to have its second reading in October. I've written to Maria Eagle asking if Labour will get behind it. As a policy for Labour, it's unlikely to play well in the Mail and the Telegraph. But I suspect many of their readers – particularly those reading their papers while jammed up against a fellow commuter on an overcrowded, overpriced train – might be more receptive. And certainly there are many rank and file Labour MPs, many of whom are already backing the bill, who are desperate to see their leader prove himself as theconviction politician he says he is.

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Forget the nostalgia for British Rail – our trains are better than ever

Passengers may be grumbling about the planned fare increases, but on balance rail privatisation has been a huge success

• 
• • Ian Birrell
  • The Guardian, Thursday 15 August 2013 20.25 BST

'For all the defects of a rushed privatisation, rail has evolved into a ­privately run public transport system playing a critical and successful role in the economy.' Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi

There is a weary predictability to the political choreography. Once again, it's revealed,commuter rail fares are rising above the rate of inflation, squeezing the cost of living still further for hard-pressed families. Ministers claim they checked bigger increases; the opposition pretends it would have done differently; passenger groups scream in pain; and the unions demand a return to state ownership.

This is one area where union conservatism strikes a chord with the British public, long sceptical over the supposed benefits of rail privatisation. Many regular users see it as little more than a modern-day train robbery, with fat cat bosses cramming passengers into carriages and creaming off vast profits from creaking services. Surveys show two-thirds of voters would happily see the railways renationalised, an idea being considered by Labour.

As so often, conventional wisdom is wrong. For all the defects of a rushed privatisation, rail has evolved into a privately run public transport system playing a critical and successful role in the economy. The reality could hardly be more different to perception: passenger numbers booming, productivity rising, the number of services soaring, and customer satisfaction at near-record highs. Even those hated fare rises are not all they seem.

Modern vision is clouded by misty-eyed nostalgia for lovely old trains that once trundled around our tracks. As we hurtle along in slick modern trains with Wi-Fi and friendly service, it is easy to forget the poor punctuality and filthy carriages in the dismal days of British Rail. It was crippled by decades of under-investment, driving up fares and driving away freight – but even Margaret Thatcher saw the sale of the railways as a step too far. It was left to her successor, who forced it through too fast with civil servants told to privatise "as soon as practicable" and ensure the process was irreversible.

As one former rail boss said, the plan was half-hearted and half-baked; it was so unloved even Lord Whitelaw, Thatcher's long-suffering deputy, opposed the idea. The result in political and financial terms was a disaster, symbolised by executives of three rolling-stock firms handed the most obscene profits on a plate. The architecture of privatisation was flawed – an attempt to impose models from other industries on a complex transport system – but the ambition to introduce competition and private capital was sound.

Two decades later, some – although far from all – of the kinks have been ironed out. There remain, for example, issues over inflated hidden subsidies handed to the train operating companies. And while public spending on the railways has soared, Network Rail remains wasteful and guilty of inadequate management yet its bosses take big bonuses. The transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, should have slammed their greed rather than supported them earlier this week.

But focus on the facts. When I travel from London to watch my football team, Everton, play at home, the average journey time to Liverpool is now 37 minutes quicker than when rail was privatised. This makes a difference on a trip that is now little more than two hours. There are also more options available for travel; on some major routes, more than twice as many trains are running. Britain has an additional 4,000 services a day, a rise of one-fifth that ensures the most frequent services among eight European nations tested by a consumer group. And we have the safest railways on the continent.

The ultimate test of any market is its popularity. Here again, rail can claim success despite intense competition from bus companies and budget airlines, which only took off in this country after rail privatisation. When the plan was first promoted, Britons took on average 11 train trips a year; now we take twice that number. Since the turn of the century freight traffic has risen substantially and passenger numbers have soared by 49% – far more than under those admired state-run services in France, Germany and the Netherlands. This means the level of subsidies per passenger has fallen while revenues to Whitehall have risen by more than £1bn.

Passengers grumble with justification over a maze-like ticketing system, yet these price variations have ensured rail companies can compete on longer journeys with rivals in the air and on the roads. So yes, the cost of some fares is now ridiculous; with travellers often stung by hideous sums for peak-time travel – but away from the headlines and cries of outrage, many fares and season tickets have fallen in real terms. One test on a price comparison website found journeys in Britain mostly cheaper than similar-length jaunts in France and Germany. Overall, the average price per passenger mile has risen only 4% in real terms over the past 15 years.

More investment, more competition and more pressure on the corporate fat cats are needed. But our focus should be on improved regulation, not a reversion to failed models; indeed, in many ways rail demonstrates the potential of a part-privatised public service at a time when such policies are causing concern in other sectors. Britain should, as with other national institutions, stop being dazzled by nostalgia, ignore the groans of vested interests and focus on keeping an unlikely success story on track.

Furniture stores used fake prices, says OFT

Six High Street furniture and carpet retailers have been accused of misleading their customers with fake prices.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) said the stores had all advertised price cuts which were not genuine.

In particular, they advertised reductions from previously higher prices, which tricked customers into thinking they were getting a bargain.

So far, none of the retailers involved has been named officially.

During its inquiries, the OFT said it found systematic examples of inflated "reference pricing".

That is where a retailer claims the price "was" £500, for example, and is "now" £300.

But the OFT said that in some cases, the stores under investigation had not sold a single product at the previous higher price.

On average, it found that 95% of sales were at the lower, or "now" price, suggesting the original prices were not genuine.

It also said the problem was "endemic" within the industry.

Fines

The OFT's investigation revealed that high reference prices can persuade people to buy goods when otherwise they would not.

"Reference pricing can mislead consumers into thinking the item they have bought is of higher value and quality," said Gaucho Rasmussen of the OFT.

It also puts consumers under pressure to buy immediately, and stops them hunting for better deals elsewhere.

"Buying an item immediately means they do not get the chance to search the market for the real best deals," said Mr Rasmussen.

The OFT has ordered the six to stop the practice of misleading pricing.

If they continue the habit, the OFT has the power to fine them up to 30% of their relevant turnover.

Consumers shopping this coming weekend are being advised to ask the shops how long reference prices were used for and what percentage of sales were achieved at the higher price.

'Genuine prices'

Earlier this week, Tesco was fined £300,000 for misleading customers over what it claimed were "half-price" strawberries.

The higher prices that the offer referred to, the "reference prices", had been available for just two weeks.

However, the lower price was available over several months.

Under the pricing practices guide, administered by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, the length of the new lower price sale should not be longer than the old higher price was available for.

The same guidelines also stipulate that "a previous price used as a reference price to make a price comparison should be a genuine retail price".

Under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations (CPRs) 2008, it is illegal to indulge in misleading or aggressive advertising.