Cricket - What does it mean to be in the zone?

Nicholas Hogg

 
 

Mike Atherton on his Johannesburg epic in 1995: "... it feels like a different person out there"  © Getty Images

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The Collins American Dictionary defines being "in the zone" as "a state that produces achievement with such an extraordinary, often unlikely, degree of success that it seems to defy purely rational explanation". Google the three magic words and the more prosaic top result is a website inspired by the 2012 Olympics to "discover how our bodies work during sport, activity, movement and rest".

Whether being in the zone is a measurable phenomenon or a mystical trance, all cricketers know when they're in that halcyon space because they're scoring runs or taking wickets.

RELATED LINKS

• Ed Smith:
 
• The zone and the importance of imagination
 

• Talking Cricket:
 
• 'I've never been in the zone'
  

My first image of a cricketer in total focus is Mike Atherton in Johannesburg, 1995, when along with fighting terrier Jack Russell, he batted for 643 minutes, facing 492 balls and scoring 185 runs to stave off defeat. Chatting to Vic Marks 14 years on, Atherton observed, "Whenever I do see old footage, it feels like a different person out there. It's like an out-of-body experience… as if I'm watching somebody else." He's not the only athlete to remark on an exemplary display as a near dream-like event. When ice-dancing pair Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean recorded 12 perfect sixes (judges' scores, not boundaries) at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics, Dean would say, "I don't remember the performance at all. It just happened."

This vague recollection of a sporting excellence is not uncommon. In the grandly titled paper "Towards the Development of a Conceptual Model of Expertise in Cricket Batting", published in the 2009 Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, Juanita Weissensteiner of the Australian Sports Commission confers that "much of the anticipatory skill of experts [batsmen] occurs largely below the level of consciousness."

Therefore, if you're "thinking" rather than "feeling" at the crease, whether it be about your footwork, backlift or what's for dinner, the bails are more likely to come off.

For a bowler to "feel" rather than "think" himself into a match-winning performance, he must not be troubled - or he must find a way of ascending the many variables that may detract from the best of his abilities. As a bowler who depends on a swinging delivery to get my wickets, I have a multitude of excuses prepared: the brand of ball, foot holes, wind direction, an uneven run-up, or even a bad slice of cake at tea. Importantly, I also tend to up my game if I get hit for a couple of boundaries, that spike of adrenaline reducing thought and enhancing feeling. My swearing - usually at myself rather than opponents - is key to my performance.

And I'm not the only angry man with a ball in his hand.

When I picture bowlers in the ephemeral zone I see Bob Willis sailing down the wind at Headingley in 1981. Angered by selectors and the press, a dead-eyed Willis ripped through the Australian batting line-up, with only the tenth wicket engendering any reaction to his remarkable spell - against the stiff upper lip of the time, Willis, arms aloft, leaps into the air and briefly, very briefly, the death mask breaks into joy before he sprints through the pitch invasion and growls at the waiting journalists.

If you're "thinking" rather than "feeling" at the crease, whether it be about your footwork, backlift or what's for dinner, the bails are more likely to come off

It took a bouncer in the grille to focus the often wayward Devon Malcolm at The Oval in 1994. After a Fanie de Villiers bumper had thunked off his helmet, Malcolm made that prophetic announcement to the South Africans: "You guys are history." His first delivery nearly took off Jonty Rhodes' jaw, and the second deflected off his glove to short leg. The fire did not fade, and Malcolm finished with 9 for 57.

In Tod, Thatcher and Rahman's 2010 Sport Psychology, we can correlate Willis and Malcolm's form to Drive Theory, "a linear relationship between arousal and performance". Unfortunately, this anger = excellence formula only works with elite athletes who, through practice, application and natural talent, have achieved a "go to" skill that isn't reduced by rage. Unless anger is contained, especially with batting, technique crumbles and frustration and failure are more likely than fame and glory.

Whatever we call the optimum condition of mind and body that produces our peak performance, each player must find his own way of entering this premium space. Personality type, match-day temperament and the particular skill to be executed, from an archer steadying his body and slowing his heartbeat to a weightlifter summoning brute force, change the atmospherics of our unique zones. Glenn McGrath, a metronome of line and length, surely didn't need the firebrand to perform at his best. Flintoff, on the other hand, buoyed on by the baying fans and the big occasion, revelled in the game when the crowd roared the loudest.

Strategies to increase or decrease arousal, such as relaxing (Phil "The Cat" Tufnell kipping, or the dressing-room card schools), imagery (picturing that smite out of the ground, a leg stump flying), and self-talk (from bowlers swearing at themselves to batsmen commentating on their own innings) vary between players.

In Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket's Greatest Spin Bowlers, Amol Rajan writes that Shane Warne used sledging to help him concentrate, and that baiting Paul Collingwood about his MBE, "For scoring seven at the Oval? It's an embarrassment," was a motivating exchange. "It was making me more determined," said Warne, as if he ever needed the extra fizz to his sparkling bowling.

The zone, wherever it is, exists. Some call it a groove, others call it form. Directions to it are vague, and it may vanish as quickly as it appears. But you'll know when you are there, scoring runs and taking wickets.

Party politics needs to loosen up – the rest of us have

I don't want to be governed by people who have never made mistakes, never had the 'wrong' kind of sex or taken drugs. I propose Uslut, a party that actually knows how to party

BETA

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 25 September 2013 20.00 BST

'Justine Thornton’s dress was deemed OK. Whose agenda is this?' Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Sorry I haven't had time to prepare this properly. I haven't been coached for weeks by film directors in how to walk and talk, and say: "Here's the thing." This is not written by a team so I can only react passively to Ed Miliband's hard-twerking speech because conference season commands passivity for the few, irrelevance for the many.

Not that you would know this from the media who are sure that a new kind of socialism is stalking the land or that power blackouts are imminent if anyone votes Labour.

What is new and modern and very American about these rallies – and so many Americans have been hired in as consultants – is this concentration on the leader himself and how long he can talk for. Lauded as huge successes at the time, most people, and I am one, find these speeches inherently boring. The last time I heard a good speech was at a fringe meeting.

Still the consensus is that Ed is not as vegan as we feared and put some meat on the bones of opposition. His wife, Justine Thornton, who is more than a dress, had to wear a dress,which was deemed OK. Whose agenda is this?

Against the jubilation and "modernisation", membership of all parties is plummeting because the relationship of the leadership to the member is simply one-way. The spin, the choreographed applause, the unlikely music, the stage-managed reaction. And that is if you are actually there. Labour, of all parties, could have some relationship with anti-fracking, anti-fascist or anti–hospital closure activists but it doesn't. Activism operates separately to the hierarchies of all the parties.

During conference season, the media simply reinforce this essentially passive relationship to politics. We are merely the audience who will judge performances, much as we would Strictly Come Dancing. The establishment's refusal to examine its own role in this top-down process again ignores the reality: the era of mass party membership is over. Most people do not want to sit and be bored to death by endless speeches. Ukip functions not only as coded racism but as a protest against the old hierarchies.

The actual organisation of political parties is not a sexy topic and one that only a tiny minority of people who are in them want to address. There are apparently bigger issues than democracy being utterly dysfunctional now.

But no matter how near Ed got to saying the S word – socialism – the personality-led, top-down, private schoolboy way of politics is failing fast. In geek-speak we need to replace vertical structures with horizontal. Party politics has become ever more rigid over the years. Blair dispensed with cabinet and had a sofa government, Brown and Damian McBride, it appears had sauvignon government. We end up with bigger and bigger decisions being made by fewer people, some of them unelected.

Whether a voter or even a party member, one's relationship is subservient. No party has properly embraced social media and sees how it may help them talk to "real" people. Miliband's Twitter feed has the passion of a dead potplant. And yes, I know it's not him really, but why bother? Politicians can simply pronounce or engage. For if you are asking people to join something, what do they get in return beyond clapping policy delivered from on high and delivering flyers?

The old-fashioned nature of conference season is a total turn-off. Do you want to see celebrities laughing at bad jokes, "well-crafted" speeches, media saturation or are you completely sick of the annual spectacle that reminds us of how unrepresentative, representative democracy is?

I have no truck with any organisation that won't challenge this newly invented "tradition" of these cloned guys who have to present their wives in nice frocks. I want nothing to do with the continuing dominance of the privately schooled over the rest of us. I don't want to be governed by people who have never made mistakes, never had the "wrong" kind of sex or taken drugs. Party politics and how it presents its leaders has become more and more straight, while social attitudes have loosened.

Imagine a Ted Heath now. No wife? No frock? Gosh, they fret about diversity but the current structures cannot produce anything that resembles the actual makeup of this country.

Changing the system is the big one, but why does everyone have to lower their expectations the minute they join a party? The most radical thing Miliband said was about giving 16-year-olds the vote. By God do they need some new blood.

But we also need new ways to organise. I propose a looser, less top-down party. Uslut. In my party, we would meet when we felt like it. We would do politics differently, though that makes it sound like a dating site. Still, we have to finance it somehow.

We will hammer out some policies as and when we get some signings. Personally, I want an English parliament and nationalised energy companies. We would challenge the left and the right. We wouldn't have "women's issues" because women's issues are everyone's issues. We would be women and men and everything in between. Usluts may not clean behind the fridge and we may not win power. But we would have an actual party trying.

Is PPE a passport to power – or the ultimate blagger's degree?

Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and David Cameron all studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. What does the degree really teach you and why is it the perfect springboard to a career in Westminster and the media?

• 
• • John Crace
  • The Guardian, Monday 23 September 2013 16.59 BST

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. Photograph: Stephen Simpson/Rex Features

On their own, they aren't particularly remarkable. Taken together at York or Warwick, they still aren't anything very remarkable. But study philosophy, politics and economics(PPE) at Oxford University and you get power and influence thrown in with your degree certificate on graduation day.

At least that's the way it looks. Of the current cabinet, David Cameron, William Hague, Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond all read PPE: as did Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Danny Alexander along with about another 30 MPs. Among many others at the BBC, Nick Robinson, Stephanie Flanders, Evan Davis and Newsnight editor Ian Katz read PPE. At least eight journalists at the Guardian read PPE, with similar numbers at the other broadsheets. And tabloids, for that matter. Toby Young read PPE. Even Chris Huhne read PPE.

Some might take one look at both politics and journalism and conclude that the one thing they have in common is a talent for having a firm opinion about absolutely everything regardless and that PPE is a life lesson lesson in winging it. Others who went to Oxford certainly think that. When asked by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight if it rankled that Cameron had got a first when he had only got a 2:1, Boris Johnson, whose degree was in classics, said: "It would if it wasn't that his first was in PPE." His message was clear: PPE was an inferior degree. Though one might also wonder at the cheek of Boris Johnson for calling Cameron out as a slacker.

Slack is certainly not the word Oxford University chooses to describe PPE; only 15% of those who apply are admitted. Rather it prefers to market the course as "Modern Greats" that "brings together some of the most important approaches to understanding the social and human world around us, developing skills useful for a whole range of future careers and activities". In the first year, students study all three subjects equally, after which they can choose to drop one.

So what sort of student chooses PPE? For some it's a chance to try something new. "I had taken science A-levels but didn't want to continue any of those subjects at university," says one graduate. "PPE seemed like a safe transition. The three branches covered a lot of ground and if I found one boring or wasn't up to it, then I could drop it." Not knowing exactly what they wanted to study was also key for many other students but there are a significant number for whom the course's reputation was critical.

"There were those who had chosen PPE precisely because it was a springboard to a career in the politics or the media," says a former student. "They had their whole lives mapped out from the moment they arrived at Oxford. They knew they were going to edit the student newspaper, be president of the union and what job they were going to end up in. They probably even knew whom they were going to marry. They seemed to have got just about everything else right."

 David Cameron. Photograph: Rex

"It's definitely something that is commented on and joked about," says a graduate from Wadham. "There's a moment in The West Wing, a flashback I think, when one character is handed a napkin with 'Bartlett for President' written on as they plan to make him run for office. Well, I'd be lying if I said there weren't more than a few drunken nights that ended with someone being handed a napkin with 'X for Prime Minister' written on. People are fully aware, and much of the student union is made up of PPE students. That creates a pressure in its own way too – I certainly still think about it. I think most people who did it are interested in politics, and so it's natural to wonder if you could do it better – especially as you see more and more of your peers getting heavily involved."

PPE's reputation for being a bit of a doss compared with other courses stems not so much from the amount of work that is required – most students remember feeling they could never hope to cover all the reading they were given – but from the freedom they have to do it. While science students usually had to be in the lab every day from 9am till 5pm, PPE students could spend the entire morning in bed. Lectures are not compulsory: one of the graduates who spoke to me said he never went to a single one during his entire three years – "There was no real point so long as you did the reading" – and the three or four tutorials a week are usually arranged at a mutually convenient civilised hour later in the day. So, as one graduate put it: "If you wanted to lie in during the mornings and plan your conquest of Oxford in the afternoons, you could. As long as you got your essays done on time – you could write them at night, if necessary – there was nothing stopping you."

Most graduates say there were many more men in their year than women, but no one found it particularly macho. "Yes, it was competitive and students were ambitious," says a female graduate. "But you'd expect that at Oxford; the university is full of alpha types who are used to succeeding. About a third of the students may have made a point of wanting to show how clever they were by not dropping a subject, even though it gave them a great deal more work and didn't get them any extra benefit, but the bragging rights weren't worth a great deal as most students didn't know each other. There were so many different options and tutorial groups were so small, you could go through your entire Oxford career never talking to some people on the course."

Oxford's sales pitch for PPE describes the course as "a multidisciplinary degree designed for those who like to draw connections among political, economic and social phenomena". This is slightly misleading, as it implies that the course tutors go out of their way to help students make these connections and that the three disciplines have been tailored to complement one another. "Nothing could be further from the truth," says one graduate. "Each subject exists entirely in its own bubble and it's almost as if a don would rather die than talk to someone teaching one of the other subjects. Every don is convinced that theirs is the only subject worth doing and that the others are a bit of a waste of time. So you're left to make your own connections between the subjects."

Sometimes this works better than others. One graduate regrets having given up economics at the end of the first year. "It was taught in such a dull, theoretical way that I just couldn't see the point of it," she says. "It just didn't seem to relate to anything in real life. Only since I've left Oxford have I come to understand how central it is to understanding how the world operates."

But mostly it works like this. Students make the political, philosophical and economic connections they were always going to make. Those on the right have their rightwing views reinforced; those on the left have their leftwing views reinforced. All that's happened in the three years in between is that everyone has become a bit better informed and a lot more confident that they are right. And maybe it's just as much the social connections that are made that turn so many PPE graduates into masters of the universe: after all, many continue to orbit one another throughout their careers. "The thing is this," one graduate laughs, "PPE is such a big subject that no one can ever know everything, so we all have to bullshit like mad at times to cover up our ignorance. And we by and large get away with it. So we carry on bullshitting once we leave Oxford and most of us are still getting away with it."

The syllabus

Year 1

All courses studied equally.

Philosophy – general philosophy, moral philosophy and elementary logic.

Politics – theorising the democratic state and analysis of democratic institutions in the US, UK, France and Germany.

Economics – microeconomics, macroeconomics and mathematical techniques.

Years 2 and 3

Only two branches must be taken.

Philosophy – ethics and either early modern philosophy; or knowledge and reality; or Plato's Republic; or Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

Politics – any two of: comparative government; British politics and government since 1900; theory of politics; international politics; political sociology.

Economics – microeconomics, macroeconomics and quantitative economics

In addition to these compulsory courses, second- and third-year students may take optional papers from a choice of more than 50 courses. Compulsory courses can also be taken as options.

Arthur Morris on batting

Extracted from an interview by Steve Cannane in Cricinfo 

You used to hit over the top a bit and Bradman didn't like that, did he? Did he ever tell you to stop hitting the ball in the air?
No, never. In fact he said to me one day - and this is why I get cranky about coaches - "I don't know how you do it, but keep doing it." It means I played so differently from the way he played. In our day you had players of different physiques and they played differently. There were no coaches to tell them to perhaps end up looking like a lot of sausages coming out of a machine, all doing the same thing.

I believe in coaches teaching the fundamentals to youngsters. But cricket doesn't have a place for coaches. You have to have them in football for positions, playing. In cricket, there's no case when a bloke is bowling 100mph and drops one short for a coach to say, "Don't hook that. There's a bloke out on the field." Your little computer in your head tells you what to do. If you see kids with a lot of ability, don't coach them. Let them develop their own cricket, because they will learn to bat by watching better players play. Bradman, McCabe, Trumper had no coaches. It started when the big money came in. Then you started having coaches for everything.

Didn't you and senior players like Lindwall play a kind of coaching role to younger ones coming in, like Richie Benaud?
Very little. If they asked a question, then that's all. When you get into bad habits you can ask another player, what am I doing wrong here? But you don't need a coach to tell you that you must put your foot there or do that. I think Ian Chappell was right when he said he used coaches to get to the ground.

I would never get involved in coaching or go tell a player that this is what I think you should do. Sometimes I could say, please use your back leg a bit more, or use your feet a bit more instead of getting defensive, use your back foot to get into defence, or don't put your front foot down, because once you put your weight on the front foot, you're stuck there. Feet are the most important thing in batsmanship. It goes for everything - football, boxing. If your feet are in the right spot, you're a good player.

Do you think many modern batsmen tend to lunge on the front foot too early?
I think so. I've been seeing it, particularly in opening batsmanship. It is a very good defensive but it doesn't win games. McCabe never played forward in his life and he was the fastest batsman I saw. People tend to say, "Oh, he's on the back foot", but I found most of the players on the back foot are very fast scorers.

Why is Apple so shifty about how it makes the iPhone?

The paragon of modern tech risks losing its shine by dodging queries about Indonesia, and an orgy of unregulated tin mining

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 23 September 2013 20.30 BST

‘When asked where it obtains its minerals, Apple looks arrogant, lumbering and unaccountable.' Photograph: Eduardo Barraza/Demotix/Corbis

Are you excited about the launch of Apple's new iPhones? Have you decided to get one? Do you have any idea what you're buying? If so, you are on your own. When asked where it obtains its minerals, Apple, which has done so much to persuade us that it is deft, cool and responsive, looks arrogant, lumbering and unaccountable.

The question was straightforward: does Apple buy tin from Bangka Island? The wriggling is almost comical.

Nearly half of global tin supplies are used to make solder for electronics. About 30% of the world's tin comes from Bangka and Belitung islands in Indonesia, where an orgy of unregulated mining is reducing a rich and complex system of rainforests and gardens to a post-holocaust landscape of sand and acid subsoil. Tin dredgers in the coastal waters are also wiping out the coral, the giant clams, the local fisheries, the endangered Napoleon wrasse, the mangrove forests and the beaches used by breeding turtles.

Children are employed in shocking conditions. On average, one miner dies in an accident every week. Clean water is disappearing, malaria is spreading as mosquitoes breed in abandoned workings, and small farmers are being driven from their land. Those paragons of modernity – electronics manufacturers – rely for their supplies on some distinctly old-fashioned practices.

Friends of the Earth and its Indonesian counterpart, Walhi, which have documented this catastrophe, are not calling for an end to tin-mining on Bangka and Belitung: they recognise that it supports many people who would not find work elsewhere. What they want is transparency on the part of the companies buying the tin extracted there, leading to an agreement to reduce the impacts and protect the people and the wildlife. Without transparency there's no accountability; without accountability there's no prospect of improvement.

So they approached the world's biggest smartphone manufacturers, asking whether they are using tin from Bangka. All but one of the big brands fessed up. Samsung, Philips, Nokia, Sony, BlackBerry, Motorola and LG admit to buying (or probably buying) tin from the island through intermediaries, and have pledged to help address the mess. One company refuses to talk.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive officer, claimed last year: "we want to be as innovative with supply responsibility as we are with our products. That's a high bar. The more transparent we are, the more it's in the public space. The more it's in the public space, the more other companies will decide to do something similar". Which would be fine, if Apple did not appear to be pursuing the opposite policy.

Mobilised by Friends of the Earth, 25,000 people have now written to the company to ask whether it is buying tin from the ecological disaster zone in Indonesia. The answer has been a resounding "we're not telling you".

I approached Apple last week, and it felt like the kind of interview you might conduct with someone selling televisions out of the back of a lorry. The director of corporate public relations refused to let me record our conversation. He insisted that it should be off the record and for background only, whereupon he told me ... nothing at all. All he would do was direct me back to the webpage I was asking him about.

This states, with baffling ambiguity, that "Bangka Island, Indonesia, is one of the world's principal tin-producing regions. Recent concerns about the illegal mining of tin from this region prompted Apple to lead a fact-finding visit to learn more." Why conduct a fact-finding visit if you're not using the island's tin? And if you are using it, why not say so? Answer comes there none.

Today I asked him a different set of questions. In a previous article, in March, I praised Apple for mapping its supply chain and discovering that it uses metals processed by 211 smelters around the world. But, in view of its farcical response to my questions about Bangka, I began to wonder how valuable that effort might be. Apple has still not named any of the companies on the list, or provided any useful information about its suppliers.

So I asked the PR director whether I could see the list, and whether it has been audited: in other words, whether there's any reason to believe that this is a step towards genuine transparency. His response? To direct me back to the same sodding webpage. Strange to relate, on reading it for the fourth time I found it just as uninformative as I had the first time.

While I was tearing out my hair over Apple's evasions, Fairphone was launching its first handset at the London Design Festival. This company, formed not just to build a genuine ethical smartphone but also to try to change the way in which supply chains and commercial strategies work, looks like everything that Apple should be but isn't. Though its first phone won't be delivered until December, it has already sold 15,000 sets: to people who want 21st-century technology without 19th-century ethics.

The Restart Project, which helps people to repair their own phones (something that Apple's products often seem designed to frustrate) was at the same show, pointing out that the most ethical phone is the one you have in your pocket, maintained to overcome its inbuilt obsolescence.

This isn't the only way in which Apple looks out of date. Last week, 59 organisations launched their campaign for a tough European law obliging companies to investigate their supply chains and publish reports on their social and environmental impacts. Why should a company be able to choose whether or not to leave its customers and shareholders in the dark? Why shouldn't we know as much about its impacts as we do about its financial position?

Until Apple answers the questions those 25,000 people have asked, until it displays the transparency that Tim Cook has promised but failed to deliver, don't buy its products. Made by a company which looks shifty, unaccountable and frankly ridiculous, they are the epitome of uncool.

Make London independent to mend the north-south divide

The south may be recovering, but the north shows Ed Miliband's aspiration for One Nation Britain is far off from reality

• 
• • Larry Elliott
  • The Guardian, Sunday 22 September 2013 17.01 BST

London, Europe's unrivalled financial capital. Making it an independent city state would give the rest of Britain a competitive boost. Photograph: High Level Photography/Rex

Go to Preston and tell them that Britain is booming and the notion will be greeted with a hollow laugh. Tell the folks in Hull that the housing market has caught fire and they will assume you have taken leave of your senses. Mention in Rochdale that a corner has been turned and you are likely to be run out of town.

Ed Miliband's big idea at last year's Labour conference was One Nation Britain. This is a nice as an aspiration but bears no relation to the country we actually inhabit.

The latest growth figures are a classic example of Disraeli's dictum that there are three sorts of falsehoods: lies, damned lies and statistics. Sure, if you take the UK as a whole it is true that growth has returned. National output is expanding by 3% a year, slightly above its long-term trend.

But the country-wide average disguises considerable regional disparities, which are reflected in Britain's political make-up. Areas where the Conservatives are strong tend to have above-average prosperity; areas where Labour is strong tend to be poorer than the average. Marginal seats are clustered in those areas where the two nations collide.

House prices are one example of how regional economic performance varies. The Office for National Statistics said last week that property was 3.3% dearer in July 2013 than it had been a year earlier. But strip out London, where the cost of a home increased by almost 10%, and the south-east, and in the rest of the country prices were up by just 0.8%. That's below inflation, meaning that property prices are falling in real terms. In Scotland and Northern Ireland they are falling in absolute terms.

Now look at the regional breakdown for workless households, where the five areas with the worst record are all former industrial powerhouses lying north of a line drawn from the Severn estuary to the Wash: Glasgow, Liverpool, Hull, Birmingham and Wolverhampton. For the UK as a whole, 18% of households do not have anyone in work; in the unemployment blackspots it ranges from 27% to 30%.

At the other end of the scale, the areas with the fewest workless households are all in the south of England. Hampshire has the lowest percentage, at 10.6%, followed by North Northamptonshire (11.2%), Buckinghamshire (11.3%), West Sussex (11.3%) and Surrey (11.4%).

The north-south divide is not new. Far from it. There has been a prosperity gap for at least a century, ever since the industries that were at the forefront of the first industrial revolution went into decline. But the disparity between a thriving London and the rest has never been greater.

On past form, there will be a ripple effect from the south-east and there are tentative signs that this may be happening. But it is early days and, understandably, there is concern in the rest of the UK when it is mooted that economic policy needs to be tightened to tackle a problem that is chronic and heavily localised.

This is well illustrated in an article by Paul Ormerod published in Applied Economics Letters. Ormerod drills down into the UK labour market to see what has been happening to unemployment at the local authority level.

He notes that most labour market economists have seen the cure for unemployment as a good dose of "flexibility".

According to this approach, joblessness will only persist over time due to "rigidities" in the labour market. Remove the rigidities – such as over-generous welfare systems, employment security provisions, working time regulations, national pay bargaining – and the price of employing workers will adjust (ie reduce) to a level that will ensure that everybody who wants to work can find a job.

Unemployment blackspots

That's the theory. Ormerod tests it by looking at what has happened to unemployment over time. If greater labour market flexibility is the answer, then local authority areas with high levels of unemployment 20 years ago should have witnessed an improvement. But Ormerod finds no such correlations.

Those parts of the country that had relatively high levels of unemployment in 1990 still had them in 2010, even though the rates of joblessness went up or down according to whether the national economy was booming or struggling. "The striking feature of the results is the strength of persistence over time in patterns of relative unemployment at local level," Ormerod said.

Those who say flexibility is the answer may counter that the problem with Britain is that the labour market is still not flexible enough, and that only by making the UK more like the US can the problem of persistent unemployment be tackled. The only difficulty with this argument is that high levels of unemployment persist in America as well, although the correlation is not quite so strong as it is in Britain. This, though, may have more to do with the willingness and the ability of Americans to move than it does with the flexibility of the labour market.

Ormerod concludes: "The labour market flexibility of the theorists, beloved by policymakers, appears to be at odds with reality. This is especially the case in the UK, where relative unemployment levels persist very strongly over long periods of time. The findings certainly call into question the efficacy of policies that were designed to increase flexibility and to improve the relative performance of regions."

The cross-party support for a new high-speed rail link to the Midlands and the north is one attempt to find new ways to tackle the two nations problem. Supporters of HS2 say the cost will be worth it because the new line will lead to higher investment, increased rates of business creation and enhanced spending power in the northern regions.

Another solution to the north-south divide would be for London, rather than Scotland, to get its independence. Although Britain is not part of the single currency, London is Europe's unrivalled financial capital. From the dealing floors of Canary Wharf in the east to the hedge-fund cluster in Mayfair to the west, London is where the action is. Upmarket estate agents can tell where the world's latest troublespot is by the source of the foreign cash buying up properties in Belgravia and south Kensington: currently, it is Syria.

Were the government to publish regional trade figures, they would show that London runs a current account surplus with the rest of the UK, offset by capital transfers from the rich south to the poorer north. As an independent city state, London would have a higher exchange rate and higher borrowing costs. The rest of the country would, by contrast, get a competitive boost.

The reality is that London is a separate country. Perhaps we should make it official.

Clearing projects is not the Cabinet’s job

by Swaminathan Aiyer in Times of India

The rupee has bounced back, the stock market has soared, and finance minister Chidambaram is smiling again. This will not last, because there’s no clear strategy to remedy the economy’s structural weaknesses.

One big structural problem is the creation of ever more laws, rules and regulations. Every new rule has admirable aims like inclusivity, environmental preservation and fair land acquisition. But no law ever provides finance for staff and expertise required to implement the new regulations effectively. This overloads a bureaucracy already collapsing under old commitments. Some district collectors say they have to oversee 3,000 schemes.

No new law does cost-benefit analysis. Yet good governance requires laws that provide enough financial and administrative resources to actually work. Otherwise, we get unending delay, cynicism and corruption.

Don’t confuse this with policy paralysis: that’s a separate problem. Even when policymakers want to proceed, rules and regulations produce delays that are not merely long but cannot even be quantified or provided for. For example, the POSCO steel project in Odisha has not started despite a dozen years of effort backed fully by the chief minister. An NTPC official recently said it now took 12 years to clear and acquire land for a new coal mine. This is why, despite having the third largest coal reserves in the world, India has become a massive coal importer.

Yes, we need rules sensitive to inclusion and the environment. But they must also be designed for clearance within reasonable, predictable periods. Alas, we see no sign of this.

Chidambaram said in a recent interview with the Financial Times, “What is keeping investors out is the experience and the fear that we cannot implement a project on time…The Japanese, for example, if they have a start date, they also have a finish date... But in India they run into delays of months or years…the foreign investor is frightened by that kind of delay.”

This frightens the Indian investor no less than the foreigner. The most frightening phenomenon is that of Indian investors saying that they would rather invest abroad than in India.

I recently met a medium-scale businessman who said that earlier too, rules and regulations made honest clearances impossibly long. But quick clearances were possible through bribes. However, the recent anti-corruption mood and fear of the courts and CAG meant that, even after making payoffs, clearances did not come. The businessman said he was switching to Africa, which was highly corrupt but allowed investment to go ahead after payoffs.

To end the investment drought, the Cabinet has often met to clear projects worth lakhs of crores. Do not cheer. The very fact that projects galore cannot proceed without Cabinet intervention is a serious structural failure.

In any good system, the Cabinet makes policy, and project-by-project implementation is done by the ministries. If rules and regulations make it impossible for ministries to clear projects, the answer cannot be Cabinet meetings that guillotine the scrutiny process. Rather, the scrutiny process must be overhauled thoroughly so that clearances occur predictably within a fixed time frame, without Cabinet rescues.

RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan says repeatedly that we must slash red tape and unnecessary regulation. But where is the action? The government keeps coming out with more new laws, rules and regulations. Not a single legislative or administrative effort aims to ruthlessly prune red tape.

The problem is worst in infrastructure, without which the rest of the economy simply cannot grow sustainably. Historically, infrastructure was funded almost entirely by the government. A decade ago, the government ran out of money because it has so many other commitments. The private sector and public-private partnerships were seen as the solution. The boom in such deals was accompanied by accusations of crony capitalism.

However, constant delays have converted those crony deals into financial quicksand. Many supposedly top cronies are going bust. The stock market price of Reliance Infrastructure is down from a peak of Rs 2,584 to Rs 396 today, GMR from a peak of Rs 131 to Rs 21, GVK from Rs 85 to Rs 7, Lanco Industries from Rs 113 to Rs 18, and Lanco Infratech from Rs 84 to Rs 6. Several of these companies are sick, on life support from banks.

Historically, the government built infrastructure with long delays. The government met the resultant cost escalation through tax revenue. But when the private sector entered big infrastructure, after taking large loans, it found that even modest delays made projects unviable, and long delays could bust a company. This structural problem cannot be overcome by emergency Cabinet clearances. It needs a totally new system of predictable, reasonably rapid clearances that make Cabinet rescues completely unnecessary.