Sir John Major gets his carefully-crafted revenge on the bastards

Tory former prime minister's speech was a nostalgic trip down memory lane, where he mugged the Eurosceptics

• Simon Hoggart
• The Guardian, Tuesday 22 October 2013 16.46 BST

Sir John Major made a lunchtime speech in parliament in which he got his revenge on the Eurosceptics and other enemies Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

John Major, our former prime minister, was in reflective mood at a lunch in parliament. Asked about his famous description of Eurosceptics as "bastards", he remarked ruefully: "What I said was unforgivable." Pause for contrition. "My only excuse – is that it was true." Pause for loud laughter. Behind that mild demeanour, he is a good hater.

The event was steeped in nostalgia. Sir John may have hair that is more silvery than ever, and his sky-blue tie shines like the sun on a tropical sea at daybreak, but he still brings a powerful whiff of the past. Many of us can recall those days of the early 1990s. Right Said Fred topped the charts with Deeply Dippy, still on all our lips. The top TV star was Mr Blobby. The Ford Mondeo hit the showrooms, bringing gladness and stereo tape decks to travelling salesmen. Unemployment nudged 3 million.

Sir John dropped poison pellets into everyone's wine glass. But for a while he spoke only in lapidary epigrams. "The music hall star Dan Leno said 'I earn so much more than the prime minister; on the other hand I do so much less harm'."

"Tories only ever plot against themselves. Labour are much more egalitarian – they plot against everyone."

"The threat of a federal Europe is now deader than Jacob Marley."

"David Cameron's government is not Conservative enough. Of course it isn't; it's a coalition, stupid!"

Sometimes the saws and proverbs crashed into each other: "If we Tories navel-gaze and only pander to our comfort zone, we will never get elected."

And in a riposte to the Tebbit wing of the Tory party (now only represented by another old enemy, Norman Tebbit): "There is no point in telling people to get on their bikes if there is nowhere to live when they get there."

He was worried about the "dignified poor and the semi-poor", who, he implied, were ignored by the government. Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the bastards outside the cabinet during the Major government, was dispatched. "IDS is trying to reform benefits. But unless he is lucky or a genius, which last time I looked was not true, he may get things wrong." Oof.

"If he listens only to bean-counters and cheerleaders only concerned with abuse of the system, he will fail." Ouch!

"Governments should exist to help people, not institutions."

But he had kind words for David or Ed, "or whichever Miliband it is". Ed's proposal for an energy price freeze showed his heart was in the right place, even if "his head has gone walkabout".

He predicted a cold, cold winter. "It is not acceptable for people to have to make a choice between eating and heating." His proposal, a windfall tax, was rejected by No 10 within half an hour of Sir John sitting down.

Such is 24-hour news. Or as he put it: "I was never very good at soundbites – if I had been, I might have felt the hand of history on my shoulder." And having laid waste to all about him, he left with a light smile playing about his glistening tie.

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Steve Richards in The Independent

Former Prime Ministers tend to have very little impact on the eras that follow them. John Major is a dramatic exception. When Major spoke in Westminster earlier this week he offered the vividly accessible insights of a genuine Conservative moderniser. In doing so he exposed the narrow limits of the self-proclaimed modernising project instigated by David Cameron and George Osborne. Major’s speech was an event of considerable significance, presenting a subtle and formidable challenge to the current leadership. Margaret Thatcher never achieved such a feat when she sought – far more actively – to undermine Major after she had suddenly become a former Prime Minister.

The former Prime Minister’s call for a one-off tax on the energy companies was eye-catching, but his broader argument was far more powerful. Without qualification, Major insisted that governments had a duty to intervene in failing markets. He made this statement as explicitly as Ed Miliband has done since the latter became Labour’s leader. The former Prime Minister disagrees with Miliband’s solution – a temporary price freeze – but he is fully behind the proposition that a government has a duty to act. He stressed that he was making the case as a committed Conservative.

Yet the proposition offends the ideological souls of those who currently lead the Conservative party. Today’s Tory leadership, the political children of Margaret Thatcher, is purer than the Lady herself in its disdain for state intervention. In developing his case, Major pointed the way towards a modern Tory party rather than one that looks to the 1980s for guidance. Yes, Tories should intervene in failing markets, but not in the way Labour suggests. He proposes a one-off tax on energy companies. At least he has a policy. In contrast, the generation of self-proclaimed Tory modernisers is paralysed, caught between its attachment to unfettered free markets and the practical reality that powerless consumers are being taken for a ride by a market that does not work.

Major went much further, outlining other areas in which the Conservatives could widen their appeal. They included the case for a subtler approach to welfare reform. He went as far as to suggest that some of those protesting at the injustice of current measures might have a point. He was powerful too on the impoverished squalor of some people’s lives, and on their sense of helplessness – suggesting that housing should be a central concern for a genuinely compassionate Conservative party. The language was vivid, most potently when Major outlined the choice faced by some in deciding whether to eat or turn the heating on. Every word was placed in the wider context of the need for the Conservatives to win back support in the north of England and Scotland.

Of course Major had an agenda beyond immediate politics. Former prime ministers are doomed to defend their record and snipe at those who made their lives hellish when they were in power. Parts of his speech inserted blades into old enemies. His record was not as good as he suggested, not least in relation to the abysmal state of public services by the time he left in 1997. But the period between 1990, when Major first became Prime Minister, and the election in 1992 is one that Tories should re-visit and learn from. Instead it has been virtually airbrushed out of their history.

In a very brief period of time Major and his party chairman Chris Patten speedily changed perceptions of their party after the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Major praised the BBC, spoke of the need to be at the heart of Europe while opting out of the single currency, scrapped the Poll Tax, placed a fresh focus on the quality of public services through the too easily derided Citizens’ Charter, and sought to help those on benefits or low incomes. As Neil Kinnock reflected later, voters thought there had been a change of government when Major replaced Thatcher, making it more difficult for Labour to claim that it was time for a new direction.

The key figures in the Conservative party were Major, Patten, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke and Douglas Hurd. Now it is Cameron, George Osborne, Michael Gove, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Oliver Letwin and several others with similar views. They include Eurosceptics, plus those committed to a radical shrinking of the state and to transforming established institutions. All share a passion for the purity of markets in the public and private sectors. Yet in the Alice in Wonderland way in which politics is reported, the current leadership is portrayed as “modernisers” facing down “the Tory right”.

The degree to which the debate has moved rightwards at the top of the Conservative party and in the media can be seen from the bewildered, shocked reaction to Nick Clegg’s modest suggestion that teachers in free schools should be qualified to teach. The ideologues are so unused to being challenged they could not believe such comments were being made. Instead of addressing Clegg’s argument, they sought other reasons for such outrageous suggestions. Clegg was wooing Labour. Clegg was scared that his party would move against him. Clegg was seeking to woo disaffected voters. The actual proposition strayed well beyond their ideological boundaries.

This is why Major’s intervention has such an impact. He exposed the distorting way in which politics is currently reported. It is perfectly legitimate for the current Conservative leadership to seek to re-heat Thatcherism if it wishes to do so, but it cannot claim to be making a significant leap from the party’s recent past.

Nonetheless Cameron’s early attempts to embark on a genuinely modernising project are another reason why he and senior ministers should take note of what Major says. For leaders to retain authority and authenticity there has to be a degree of coherence and consistency of message. In his early years as leader, Cameron transmitted messages which had some similarities with Major’s speech, at least in terms of symbolism and tone. Cameron visited council estates, urged people to vote blue and to go green, spoke at trade union conferences rather than to the CBI, played down the significance of Europe as an issue, and was careful about how he framed his comments on immigration. If he enters the next election “banging on” about Europe, armed with populist policies on immigration while bashing “scroungers” on council estates and moaning about green levies, there will be such a disconnect with his earlier public self that voters will wonder about how substantial and credible he is.

Cameron faces a very tough situation, with Ukip breathing down his neck and a media urging him rightwards. But the evidence is overwhelming. The one-nation Major was the last Tory leader to win an overall majority. When Cameron  affected a similar set of beliefs to Major’s, he was also well ahead in the polls. More recently the 80-year old Michael Heseltine pointed the way ahead with his impressive report on an active industrial strategy. Now Major, retired from politics, charts a credible route towards electoral recovery. How odd that the current generation of Tory leaders is more trapped by the party’s Thatcherite past than those who lived through it as ministers.

Universities should ditch the talk of investing in the future

Instead of research academics need to focus on giving students what they want for their money: that is, a well-rounded education

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 23 October 2013

Illustration by Belle Mellor

Money talks. After two years of tuition fees at £7,000-£9,000 universities are apparently rolling in cash, and their students are demanding value for it. Universities are expected to deliver not just education but jobs. Courses are being tailored to "employability". Research is concentrated in the elite Russell institutions. Now the universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a "cultural change" to reverse the trend of too much time going on scholarship and not enough on teaching. Is this a new dawn in higher education, or a new darkness?

Willetts has celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Robbins report with a pamphlet questioning one aspect of the expansion it stimulated. Pre-Robbins, British universities devoted 60% of their time to teaching and 40% to research. Now those percentages are reversed, so that universities are "lopsided away from teaching". Only in the former polytechnics does teaching predominate.

Today's students may not realise how far this has gone, but their graduate parents might. Contact time has declined. Essay writing has halved. Fifty years ago two-thirds of students received oral (as well as written) feedback, now two-thirds get none. Willetts wonders how this was ever allowed to happen.

The answer is easy. Willetts and his Whitehall predecessors made it happen. Universities have become creatures of government, paid to do what government says. Ever since Thatcher abolished the arms-length university grants committee and eventually"nationalised" higher education in 1988, universities have followed the money.

Many academics prefer research, writing and conferencing to the hard tutorial grind. I know, as I was briefly one myself. But the price was to allow government to "assess" their work and demand ever more. They sweated over papers, often of staggering obscurity. Civil servants totted up pages and citations, and tested for "impact and translational value". Willetts may complain that students suffered, but whose fault is that?

The surge in student fees has led universities to a new accountability, not to government but to their customers. For the first time they have had to look out to their market place rather than back to their founders and traditions or up to their government. In this change in accountability research is bound to take a knock. The student market cares little about it. Students want an education that stimulates them for three years and gets them a job. Universities such as Bath are popular because they emphasise job-finding. With 40% of new graduates going into "non-graduate" initial careers, the league tables that matter are those indicating successful job placements.

To outsiders, universities remain extraordinarily conservative enclaves. They stick to the medieval three-term, three-year courses. Specialism is almost obligatory: a Briton wanting to study arts and science together had better go abroad. People at the peak of their vigour are thought unable to absorb teaching for more than six months a year, and are still sent home to help with the harvest each summer. Any business run with so little concern for new techniques of operating or delivering a service would collapse.

When research was the activity of an autonomous minority of scholars it could look after itself. Today it costs the taxpayer millions of pounds and is spread over three dozen Russell and 1994 Group institutions. Such spending has to be justified. And here universities sold the pass. In the years following Robbins, the economists Mark Blaug and John Vaizey debated whether higher education was a consumer service or an investment. Blaug advocated the former and won the argument – but he lost the war. Academics loved to think of themselves as "investing in the nation's future". But in claiming so, they conceded the field to the Treasury. If universities were an investment, where was the return?

The argument continued. Even as new undergraduates rushed to arts subjects, government became obsessed with "the nation's manpower needs" and believed this meant driving universities towards science and technology. Still today the science budget remains "ringfenced", as if it were a branch of national security – and despite decades of market evidence that Britain's prosperity was demanding more financiers, lawyers and designers.

The return from teaching that universities most often cite is graduate lifetime earnings. But this is personal rather than collective. Besides, such a validation has consequences. Three years ago 600 Bristol students staged a revolt over receiving too little teaching, fearing it would jeopardise their careers. When Surrey revealed (improbably) that all its drama graduates had jobs, it was inundated with 50 applicants per drama place.

The Institute for Public Policy Research recently advocated a return of the polytechnics as specialised vocational academies. University College London is introducing a "liberal arts" course that marries arts and science. Where universities appear to be ailing, Willetts is talking of sub-contracting them to private companies, bringing the free-school principle to state higher education. In America this mercantilist approach went to extremes when some graduates sued their old law school for training too many of them, and thus wrecking the jobs market.

There is a backlash to all this. Conservatives such as Cambridge's Stefan Collini inveigh against rate-of-return education, suggesting it means death to the humanities and reduces academics to "door-to-door salesmen for vulgarised versions of their market-oriented product". The vice-chancellor of Reading, Sir David Bell, warns against having to "put a premium on employability … on preparing students for what is to follow", as if that were some sort of betrayal. When a student has £30,000 in prospective debt round his or her neck, employability is bound to apply.

If I were an academic I would stop pretending I was "investing in the nation's future". I would stop using such language. I would try to give students what they want for their money, usually a well-rounded education and a mild sense of obligation to society, and tuck my research into my spare time. That would be my "rate of return". As long as universities play the investment game, they will find students and taxpayers alike asking to scrutinise their accounts.

From Roy Hodgson to Carol Thatcher, this fixation on celebrity gaffes tells us nothing about racism

Britain is a nation in denial. While celebrity stories grab the headlines, true discrimination is thriving and largely ignored

• 
• • Joseph Harker
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 22 October 2013

‘It was great that we celebrated Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah at London 2012, but the common conclusion, that this proved our nation was at ease with diversity, was pure delusion.' Photograph: David Davies/PA

In the past seven days two stories have shown how little we know about race in modern Britain. First, the one that dominated the headlines: what Roy Hodgson said to the England team at half-time in their World Cup qualifier, and what he meant by using the word "monkey" to refer to a black player. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion. Comment columnists and sports writers weighed in. Radio stations ran phone-ins. Arguments raged.

There's no doubt that, given the history of monkey chants at football grounds during the 70s and 80s, Hodgson was at the very least stupid and incredibly insensitive to use such a word in reference to one of his own team. It's right that he apologised. But what concerns me about this story is not whether Hodgson's a racist but the way it skews our understanding of how racism impacts on modern society. Media reporting is now all about what TV and sports personalities say, rather than what ordinary people do out there in the real world. And the discussions are always centred on whether the alleged target was justified in being "offended".

So the stories we hear are: should Carol Thatcher have called a black tennis player a "golliwog"; should England football captain John Terry have called an opponent a "fucking black cunt"; should Ron Atkinson have called a footballer a "fucking lazy thick nigger"? How should they be punished? Should they be sacked? And in too many cases the abusers quickly become martyrs, the new victims of a nation gripped by political correctness – you just can't say anything nowadays, can you?

And liberal commentators have caught on too. When talking about such issues as sexism, or gay rights, or disability, or antisemitism, their regular refrain is: "Imagine if they'd been talking about black people, just think of the fuss that would have been made."

And added to this, controversial comments by black personalities are seized upon as proof that there's an equal and opposite racism coming from the other side: Rio Ferdinand agreeing that Ashley Cole was a "choc-ice" – outrageous; Diane Abbott tweeting that "White people love playing 'divide & rule'" – the woman who campaigns against racism turns out to be just as racist herself.

In the endless coverage of all this, let's not pretend we're actually talking of racism; these are celebrity gaffe stories for the search-engine age. Though the issues are, for black people, irritating and possibly offensive, they are as relevant to racism as a cough is to tuberculosis. The fact you were once upset by a tweet doesn't mean you understand what racism's about.

The second race story last week addressed the real issues. An undercover BBC London investigation into lettings agents showed the massive extent to which black people are being denied homes – without them even knowing it. One reporter posed as a landlord and asked the agents not to show his rental property to African-Caribbean people. The agents – even the Asian ones – readily agreed. To test the agents' willingness, two other reporters, one black, one white, posed as prospective tenants. As the agents had promised, the black hopeful was told the property had gone; the white prospect was invited for a viewing.

Ten agents were found to be discriminating in this way; even more shocking, one of them said on (hidden) camera: "Ninety-nine per cent of my landlords don't want Afro-Caribbeans or any troublesome people." If true, and there's no reason to doubt his claim, it throws open all sorts of questions about how widespread discrimination is in modern Britain. This investigation, after all, took place in a city often held up as being at ease with difference. If it's happening in London, it can happen, and probably does, anywhere in Britain. And to cap it all, the black "rejects" would have no idea they were being discriminated against; they wouldn't have suspected a thing, unless this happened over and over again – in which case they'd risk being labelled paranoid for blaming it on their skin colour.

This is the true story of racism in the UK: how it is still so casual, and how it excludes and disenfranchises thousands. It's a story, though, which attracted minimal media attention. A news article in the Guardian and the Telegraph, but no interest from any other newspaper, and no battalions of columnists giving their opinions.

No celebrities involved; only black people affected. No story. As they say, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If blatant racism occurs, and no one reports it, does it exist?

How things have changed. In 1988 a similar investigation took place by undercover BBC reporters in the city of Bristol. The documentary Black and White, broadcast over five successive weekdays, exposed discrimination in jobs, housing and the leisure industry and shocked the nation. Stunned viewers asked themselves how this could be happening in a country they believed to be so tolerant, and where discrimination was supposed to be illegal.

The documentary had a massive impact, opening people's minds to the fact that racism wasn't simply about National Front marches, skinhead thugs, abuse and violence. Geoff Small, the black undercover reporter, recalls: "For weeks afterwards, white people would approach me in the street and offer their sympathy and sincere apologies for what I'd gone through." Now, however, we look back on the 70s and 80s with a sneer. We believe we're so much more sophisticated now. Alf Garnett and the Black and White Minstrel show have gone; we've heard all about police racism through Stephen Lawrence; we see black faces presenting TV shows; many minorities have been successful in business; and we've even had black faces in the cabinet. For Christ's sake, even the President of the United States is black!

These steps, important though they are, are mainly about individual achievement; and the problem is that now, in this allegedly postracial era, the rose-tinted glasses of our diversity training are in fact blinding us to the reality for most black people – which has changed little in the intervening years. In case we need reminding, jobless rates are twice as high for black people as for whites, unemployment is a staggering 56% for young black men; black pupils are less likely than their white peers to get five good GCSEs and are routinely marked down by their teachers; they are three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the overall school population; stop and search rates are over five times higher for black people; and black people are five times more likely to be jailed.

But the story Britain likes to tell itself is that discrimination has gone away – that now we're used to black and brown people living among us, the barriers have come down. It was great that we celebrated Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah at London 2012, but the common conclusion, that this proved our nation was at ease with diversity, was pure delusion. As is the dominant view that the rise in interracial relationships and "beautiful" mixed-race babies shows that racism is on the way out.

The fact it persists undiminished is, it seems, too much for our society to take. And to keep the fantasy in place, we look for excuses: if there are more black jobless it's because of their poor attitude to work; if they perform badly at school it's their laziness and culture; if they're overrepresented in the criminal justice system then they're just naturally more aggressive. If black people could only sort out these self-inflicted problems themselves, everything would be OK. After all, doesn't every business say it welcomes job applicants from all backgrounds? The doors are open, why aren't you coming in?

Needless to say, this proves problematic for genuine anti-racists. It's the problem doctors used to have in "proving" that smoking causes cancer. You can't show it in individual cases, but when you track the increase in smoking and compare it to the increase in cancer rates, it becomes obvious. As for inequality, the general statistics show the racial disparities but individual cases are almost impossible to prove, allowing the deniers to claim that no barriers exist.

We certainly need the facts and figures, but what history shows is that most of us only react to this kind of thing when we see it with our own eyes. Would the abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ever have been believed were it not for the photographic proof? Statistics, unfortunately, can be manipulated and argued over endlessly. But seeing individuals act in a certain way is far more damning. What if, for instance, the BBC team had gone undercover with recruitment agents, or in the teachers' common room, or the judges' golf club? And what about the police? Ten years ago another undercover BBC investigation caused a storm after exposing the raw racism among trainee officers, most of whom used terms of racial abuse on a daily basis.

To investigate all these would, of course, be a significant undertaking; but we need to change the terms of the debate. If we are to achieve genuine equality, which most people say they want, then we need to show how racism can operate, indeed thrive, without a sign telling the world it exists. Without visible proof, we look set for years more discrimination, and years more denial.

Cricket: Quotas: less black and white than ever

Affirmative action is among the most bitterly divisive issues of the age. Particularly in sport, which depends on fairness, which in turn begins with equality of opportunity

Rob Steen

October 23, 2013

 

	Whether quotas were right for Zimbabwe or not, their current side is one far more reflective of the nation's demographics © AFP  Enlarge

"The heroes of our nation, dedicated to building the foundation of cricket for generations to come." Thus does the Cricket South Africa website hail its most important employees. Scroll down and you'll find an even more important assertion: "We can't undo the past, but we can shape the future."

Quotas cannot undo the past: their function is to shape the future by undoing the legacy of the past. Hence the recent decision to oblige South Africa's six franchises to field at least one black African in every match (for amateur teams the requirement doubles). On the face of it, this doesn't sound terribly onerous. It's certainly a far cry from the system Kevin Pietersen insists, disingenuously, drove him to England. One fact justifies this latest condition: 22 years after readmission, Makhaya Ntini remains the sole black African to have won 30 Test caps.

Affirmative action - or, as we Brits prefer, positive discrimination - is one of the most bitterly contested issues of the age. To some it oozes pros; to others, copious cons. To some it redresses prejudice, ancient and present; to others it either ignores other socio-economic factors or simply incites another form of prejudice, usually against those unfortunate enough to be paying for the sins of their fathers. In sport, purportedly the ultimate meritocracy, affirmative action is especially divisive. It will plainly take decades, even centuries, to atone for the sins of apartheid. South African sport has sought to balance those lopsided books via selection quotas, known officially as the "target transformation" policy, a step taken to equally justified and perhaps even more turbulent effect in Zimbabwe.

The complexity of all this is captured by Fisher v University of Texas, a legal case in the USA that is threatening to reverse the 2003 landmark decision in Grutter v Bollinger. Mindful of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the US Supreme Court was tasked with deciding whether race can be a factor in deciding university admissions. In June, the case was thrown back to a lower court, a move welcomed by proponents of affirmative action: the principle, after all, had not been reversed. Recently, however, the "race-neutral" approach has even been advocated by the Project 21 leadership network, a group of African-American conservatives.

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By contrast, Kevin Brown, a law professor at Indiana University and author of a forthcoming book on affirmative action, believes it would be a "massive mistake" to substitute consideration of an applicant's socio-economic background for his or her race. "We seem to be forgetting why affirmative action was created in the first place. Yes, of course it's true that individuals from poor backgrounds, regardless of skin colour, face obstacles in obtaining the kind of academic success valued by higher education institutions. But blacks and Latinos are disadvantaged in American society, even when adjusting for socio-economic factors."

Education, of course, is much more important than sport. Besides, why should sport be expected to discriminate, however positively, when other branches of the cultural tree are not? It may be his greatest weakness, but try telling Woody Allen to hire more black actors. He would argue, not unreasonably, that he makes movies about the world he knows, a world of white masters and black servants / prostitutes / entertainers. Sport differs because its legitimacy depends on fairness, and fairness begins with equality of opportunity. Without such foundations, its social value vanishes.

Cricket first tiptoed down this rocky road four decades ago, when the International Wanderers, a private party comprising several eminent English and Australian players, took on multi-racial XIs in South Africa. Such ventures ended in 1976, after hundreds of schoolchildren were killed in Soweto while protesting the government's education policies.

How illuminating, then, to dip into Luke Alfred's The Art of Losing, published last year, and learn that just three members of the South African team at the 1992 World Cup had voted in the whites-only referendum that approved the continuation of President FW De Klerk's reforms (had the decision gone the other way, warrants Alfred, they would have had to return home mid-tournament). Ahead lay those trials by quota.

In 1998, encouraged by the ANC, the United Cricket Board of South Africa laid down the law: the starting XI for each international match should include at least four players of "colour". Quotas were also introduced at provincial level. Adherence was never strict.

The first major row erupted in 2002 when the national selectors chose Jacques Rudolph ahead of Justin Ontong against Australia, only to be overruled by Percy Sonn, the board president. As a consequence, Ontong, who counted Rudolph as a friend, endured one of the most fiery and unenviable of baptisms. Double-edged swords don't come much more jagged than this. Knowing you've been picked not on your merits but because what was once an unfortunate accident of birth was now an advantage must play merry hell with one's self-esteem.

A relentlessly controversial figure whose administrative career would bring him to the heights of the ICC presidency and the depths of fraud allegations and alcohol-fuelled public disgrace, Sonn was roundly criticised by the cricketing fraternity; yet even those who believed he should have been focusing his efforts on improving coaching facilities for black schoolchildren understood his motives. "No doubt Sonn," noted theGuardian, "has seen too many examples of lip-service being paid to a quota system while, behind the scenes, not much is being done to attack the roots of an historic injustice."

Reflecting the elitism of a sport showing few signs of gaining traction in a black community conspicuously more enamoured of football, South Africa's 2007 Rugby World Cup-winning XV numbered only a couple of non-white faces. In cricket, another sport dominated by the elite white schools, politicians and administrators believed reformation should be a top-down process, billed as "targeted transformation". "As long as we have an abnormal society," Norman Arendse, the CSA president at the time, emphasised in 2007, "quotas and targets are not only desirable but also a constitutional imperative."

	Why should sport be expected to discriminate, however positively, when other branches of the cultural tree are not?

This prompted some problematic arguments. When Graeme Smith wanted to omit Ntini from a critical World Cup match, he was obliged to justify himself in a lengthy one-on-one with the CSA chief executive,Gerald Majola. Many argued that dressing-room morale was being undermined. By 2010, according to Tony Irish, the South Africa Cricket Association CEO, matters had become intolerable: "The players feel that as soon as a racial number is set for selection of the team (whether or not one calls this a quota or a target) it leads to a divisive dynamic within the team, and it is also degrading to the players of colour who should be there on merit, yet are labelled a quota/target player."

Cue a letter sent to Arendse and his fellow board members in 2007 by a group of senior players led by Ashwell Prince, soon to become the national team's first coloured captain. In it, they demanded an end to "artificial" selection at the highest level. Later that year, Makhenkesi Stofile, the sports minister, scoffed at the quotas as "window dressing", signifying a shift towards the notion that victory on the field would be a more effective form of inspiration.

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In this sphere, Zimbabwe is well ahead of its big brother. It was the quota system that spurred 15 white players to mount a rebellion in 2004, led by Heath Streak. Today Streak is adamant that most of the nation's professionals, regardless of skin colour, were opposed to quotas and that his black colleagues, whose job options were far narrower, declined to revolt only because they feared the repercussions. The recent Test victory over Pakistan by a team far more reflective of the nation's demographics suggests that the angst has been worthwhile.

"Some sort of compensation or attempt at rectification is due to those non-white sportspeople who were directly or indirectly disadvantaged by apartheid." So acknowledged Dr Carl Thomen of the University of Johannesburg, in his 2008 book Is it Cricket? An Ethical Evaluation of Race Quotas in Sport. These "compensatory efforts", he nonetheless concluded, "must not come via the same principles which got us into the mess of apartheid in the first place". In writing his book, he sought "to show that the negative consequences of such policies far outweigh any good they may realistically claim to do".

Upon reading those sentiments a few weeks ago, I emailed the author. Surely, given the opportunities afforded the likes of Ntini and Hashim Amla, the quota system had been justified? He was not for turning. "I'm not sure that that policy was responsible [his italics] for their selection. Perhaps they were thrown in a bit earlier than otherwise, but I'm not sure you can credit the quota policies of the time with their success. The problem with quotas is that they are ethically indefensible, and they actively do damage. 'Necessity' doesn't come into it; they are evil, plain and simple."

Evil, really? How, then, do we describe apartheid? The counter-argument was summed up by my guest last weekend, John Young, a sportswriter, author and retired schoolteacher from the Western Cape and Thami Tsolekile's erstwhile agent. "Quotas were necessary precisely so that merit could be acknowledged," he reasons. "Good black players would never have been picked without them."

There's one mathematical equation we all know: wrong + wrong never = right. But sometimes being wrong for the right reasons can be preferable to being right for the wrong ones.

Action man: Give Justin Welby an issue and he will speak out

TERENCE BLACKER in The Independent 

Monday 21 October 2013

He fights the wrongdoings of the payday loaners and now the Big Six – what next?

News broke this weekend that the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duchess of Cornwall have held a meeting to discuss poverty. Both have expressed their concerns about the behaviour of payday loan firms, and have supported the idea of local credit unions. They also share a belief in a pragmatic approach to contemporary problems: Justin Welby has suggested that the Church of England might set up shop as a moneylender while the duchess joined the London Mutual Credit Union in Peckham, where she is not a resident.

All this is something of a break with the recent past. Imagine a similar meeting but between the duchess’s husband, Prince Charles, and the last Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams: the agonising over terms of reference, the anguished beard-tugging over what exactly constituted poverty, the reference to St Thomas Aquinas and Laurens van der Post, the ever-thickening fog of well-meaning abstraction.

The idea of a dynamic former oil executive taking over as head of the Anglican Church has, admittedly, taken some getting used to. Like many non-believers, I rather liked the gentle, beardy Dr Williams, with his tentative, non-prescriptive faith. I sensed that his God and my good were vague enough to be rather similar.

The new action-man Archbishop seems to have no time for windy theorising. His progress has been that of a businessman with a meeting to get through, rather than an academic wrestling with an abstruse intellectual problem.

Apart from his payday initiative with the Duchess of Cornwall, he has recently attacked energy companies for maximising profit, spoken out against the pursuit of economic growth, expressed views about same-sex marriage, regretted the influence of the colonial past in the running of the Church, welcomed tax changes for married couples, and supported the building of affordable houses.

He is, in other words, a thoroughly modern public figure, who sounds off confidently and unambiguously about the issues of the day. A glance at the nice old duffers who have preceded him – Coggan, Runcie, Carey, Williams – is enough to reveal how far he has already taken the church away from the old, grey establishment of which it was once part.

It is probably a sensible move. The words of politicians have become increasingly woolly and meaningless (last week, for example, we learned that coalition government means that the Liberal Democrats can simultaneously support and oppose free schools), and the public is looking for guidance elsewhere.

Archbishop Welby is moving towards the real shadow cabinet, the small group of public figures who speak out and influence opinion on the issues of the day. In this unofficial opposition, he could take on the role of Home Secretary, while Jamie Oliver is in charge of Health, Stephen Fry speaks on culture, and Chris Packham covers the environment. Among the junior shadow ministers can be found young thrusters like Russell Brand, Charlotte Church, Louise Mensch and Joey Barton.

In their own individual ways, these people – celebrities with attitude – have more sway over the way people think and the topics that matter than any number of the Gregs and Nicks who are in government.

They now include the Archbishop of Canterbury.

A few more telling soundbites, and he will be on The Graham Norton Show, telling twinkly anecdotes on Desert Island Discs or contributing to a “What Turns Me On” lifestyle column in one of the Sunday newspapers.

For those who like the Anglican Church to be a solid, slightly dull presence in our national life, the Welby way will no doubt be distressing – he is hardly, in the words of the hymn, a still, small voice of calm. But at a time when politicians are trying to please everyone, the press is widely distrusted, and the BBC has lost its way, perhaps it is not such a terrible thing that the Church of England has found itself a confident, slightly bumptious new voice.

Do stay-at-home mothers upset you? You may be a motherist

Women who choose to remain at home to look after their children face a torrent of prejudice. Here are four of the worst examples

 

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • theguardian.com, Monday 21 October 2013 13.15 BST

'If you were pushing anyone who couldn’t walk but wasn’t a baby, people would happily put themselves out a bit.' Photograph: Rex Features/J.Norden/IBL

Dr Aric Sigman, at a conference convened by Mothers At Home Matter (if you want a clue, as to its agenda, I refer you to the name), warned of the rise of "motherism"; a prejudice against stay-at-home mothers. Sigman is well known for his re-traditionalising intentions, to which end he has been accused of misrepresenting behavioural and neurological evidence, a charge he has denied. So, he says "motherism" is dangerous because it puts women off being stay-at-home mothers, which is the developmental ideal. I'd reject the second part of the argument, but not the first – there is a prejudice against stay-at-home mothers. There is a presentation of women who look after their own children full time as air-headed, spoilt and dowdy. However, there is also a prejudice against women who look after their children but aren't dowdy (yummy mummies); women who go back to work after having had children; women who stay out of work but also employ nannies; women who work part-time and look after their children the rest of the time.

I think the only way you could gain approval for your time-management, as a mother, would be to look after your children all the time as well as working full-time but for some socially useful enterprise (ideally voluntary work), while never relying on a man for money, yet never claiming benefits either, but God forbid that you should have a private income. Mothers in society act as whipping boys for almost all other social fissures; oh, the irony of there being no female equivalent for the phrase "whipping boy", when it is almost always a female. Oh the side-spitting irony. Here are four examples of "motherisms" at work:

1) What they say: "I don't see why mothers need these enormous buggies"

If you were pushing anyone who couldn't walk but wasn't a baby, people would happily put themselves out a bit. The act of pushing a baby, however, confers an aura of smugness about you ("look at you, so in love, with your baby") that makes it unthinkable to just help you out. There's an element of sense in this; mothers are in love with their babies, for the most part. And they would see you step into a puddle just to avoid the smallest jolt to their airsprung sleeping chariot. But it's not the end of the sodding world, is it, mothers temporarily losing their social etiquette while they fall in love with their babies?

2. What they say (at the school gates, whispered): "You never see the mother"

Even if the child is dropped off by the father, there is very little quarter given to the mother who isn't visible to the child's social circle, and not much consideration of the possibility that maybe her work starts at 9am precisely so she can get home by 6pm. I personally think this is a Freudian throwback, the resentment of children of the 70s and 80s, who were the first generation having to contend with bloody maternal no-shows at the harvest festival. It's the only rationale I can think of for why a person would think it was any of their business how a mother organised her time.

3. What they say (going in to a cafe, during the hours of standard economic activity): 'Look at all these women who don't work. I wish I could afford not to work'

I personally think the greatest misconception around childcare, shared by a huge proportion of the adult population, the people who've never done it, plus people who've done it but can't remember it, is that it is easy. It is by far the most demanding job conceived by society, wringing you out like a blood-drenched bedsheet, each day leaving you physically drained and mentally poleaxed, without even the energy to close your own mouth or hold your head upright, often making an involuntary gargling noise. Some of it's quite fun. But anyway, that's an aside. There's no economic sense to this question; if the women drinking coffee weren't looking after their children, someone else would have to, which would in most cases cost as much as their wages. So what people are really objecting to is not that mothers can afford not to work, but that they can still afford coffee.

4. What they say: 'I never have anything to say to these yummy mummies'

Dressed up as a deficiency of the speaker (I never have anything to say) it is actually a charge levelled at the mother, that she has no interests; why? Because, being "yummy", she is narcissistic and can't see beyond pilates and Brazilian hot waxing. The true resentment is of her wealth – that her life isn't one of drudgery and servitude, but spa treatments and interiors. Well, that's fine – it's possible to make a good case for objecting to wealth, since so much of it is unjustly come by. But at least object to the people unjustly coming by it. It seems a little tangential to make the wife the object of the opprobrium. All she's done is have a kid and fancy up her pubic area.