The barefoot government

Bunker Roy in The Indian Express

Since 1947, Indians have not spoken out so strongly and clearly for a completely new brand of people running government. Mercifully, there are no ministers educated abroad. Thankfully, none of them has been brainwashed at Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, the World Bank or the IMF, subtly forcing expensive Western solutions on typically Indian problems at the cost of the poor. Look what the high-powered, foreign-returned degree-wallahs have reduced this country to. They wasted opportunities to show the inner strength of what is essentially Indian because they never really knew their own people living in Bharat. In the eyes of the world, we have lost our self-respect, dignity and identity.

All the ministers now have gone through average government schools. Some have never been to college. Many have experienced poverty, exploitation, injustice and discrimination at some point of time in their lives. It is truly the first barefoot government ever to be voted into power in independent India. Where else in the world would you have a one-time tea-seller on a railway station becoming prime minister, shaping the destiny of more than one billion people?

The first example the Modi government must set is by drastically reducing the perks and privileges of MPs. Free power, food, housing, travel to those whose personal assets run into crores and a Rs 2 crore annual fund for development (read patronage) for over 500 MPs is costing the exchequer nearly Rs 2,000 crore. Only the prime minister will be able to make it happen and, at the same time, stifle any dissent from BJP MPs. The time is now.

No other government in the world has a Class 12-pass woman minister speaking as an equal to almost 120 heavily qualified, on paper, vice chancellors (90 per cent male). Today, as we judge them, the VCs are all too intellectually and morally fatigued. There is something dreadfully wrong with an education system that produces graduates from even private, expensive, snobbish schools and colleges who are still prejudiced about caste, class, religion, sex and colour. These “graduates”, who roam the streets of small towns and cities by the thousands, call themselves “educated”, practice the worst forms of cruelty, slavery and crimes against humanity, against society and in their own families. Indeed, some of them rose to the level of their incompetence by becoming ministers in previous governments, reinforcing the status quo, wasting vast public resources by implementing silly Western ideas, listening to foreign-returned “experts” and making a hopeless mess of this country. The tragedy is that they cannot see the colossal damage they have done to the very fabric of this country.

Now they will call me a “namak haram” because I went to Doon School and St Stephen’s College and I am trashing my own kind. They deserve it. Their snobbish elitist education has made them arrogant, inaccessible, insensitive and devoid of any humanity or humility. Just because they received a Western education, they think they know their country. Superficially, they may know urban India but they are clueless about rural Bharat.

Alvin Toffler, in his book Future Shock, said, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be someone who cannot read or write. It will be someone who is not prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn.” In the 40 years that I have lived and worked with the rural poor in Rajasthan, what have I learnt that I did not manage to make my own kind “unlearn and relearn”?

It was not for want of trying. What did the prime minister, the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and finance minister of the decimated UPA government have in common? They were all “educated” abroad. They were all for subsidising the rich and cutting subsidies for the poor. They had no idea about real poverty and hunger and how the rural poor survived, expecting the whole country to be gullible enough to believe that the rural poor today could survive on Rs 27 per day.

Out of sheer ignorance of rural realities and showing extremely poor political judgement, the three of them almost managed to strangle the MGNREGA. The MGNREGA prevented migration by the millions into cities. The bungling and corruption by village officials notwithstanding, the rural poor now have more money to spend on food, clothing, housing and essentials. So, of course, prices will go up.

The prime minister is evidently serious about improving the quality of life of the rural poor, as he eloquently stated in his speech on Independence Day. So what are the out of the box solutions that need to be considered urgently?

The MGNREGA should stay with “Modi-fications”. Pay minimum wages, which the Congress’s three armchair foreign-returned economists so stubbornly and unethically refused to do, in spite of a high court order. Make it more transparent and accountable, take action against corrupt officials exposed in social audits to set an example. Pass the public grievance bill in Parliament as soon as possible. Call a meeting of respected grassroot practitioners across political ideologies who know the MGNREGA from the village level and follow up on their recommendations.

The focus has to be on innovative job creation in the rural areas. Provide 100 days of employment at minimum wages to construct low-cost toilets for girls and rooftop rainwater harvesting tanks for drinking water, tree plantations and flush toilets in rural schools by the thousands. Construct rural godowns to store food grains instead of letting nearly 5 million tonnes of grain just rot in the open. Start community colleges on Gandhian lines instead of sending delegations of “experts” on education to study the American model. There are enough indigenous examples to replicate and scale up.

Civil society is riddled with defeated politicians and retired bureaucrats who, having lost their power, influence and privileges, have started NGOs. While they were in power, they did not lift a finger to help them. When these has-beens have nothing better to do, they start NGOs. They give genuine small civil society organisations a bad name. Maybe it is time to revive the debate of the 1980s on the need for a code of conduct for NGOs. The code would expect them to have a simple lifestyle, take a living wage instead of a market wage and observe the laws of the country.

If we are fighting against crony capitalism, we should also fight against cronyism in NGOs. When the Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology (CAPART) was closed down and replaced by a Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation (BRLF) in September 2013, it was done in complete secrecy. The BRLF was never widely publicised and civil society was never invited to contribute to its formation. It is designed to benefit a handful of select organisations — cronyism of the worst kind. It was so much in contrast to the open debate that galvanised the voluntary sector over the code of conduct and which preceded the merger of the People’s Action for Development India (PADI) and the Council for Advancement of Rural Technology (CART) to form CAPART in 1986.

What needs to be done? Replace the national advisory council (NAC) with a voluntary action commission (VAC). The mandate of the VAC should be to identify the thousands of genuine grassroots groups who have an FCRA registration and submit their report to the home ministry. It is not the job of the home ministry to judge the incredible work of community-based organisations. A lot of effort has gone into the formulation of the BRLF. Let it remain. But demand of the existing management if they have the self-respect to resign en masse and let the new government bring in new members.

Cricket interview: Glenn McGrath

Courtesy: Abhishek Purohit in Cricinfo

"When I was bowling well, I had already worked out the next two overs - what I was going to bowl and where I was going to bowl" © Getty Images

There is this line in your autobiography: "I can't ever remember having a bad dream about bowling. When I dreamt about cricket, I just bowled the ball I wanted to."
That is positive reinforcement. I used to call it visualisation. The night before a game, I'd think about who I was playing, and then how I'd bowled against those guys, if I had got them out previously. While I was playing, I could recall nearly all my wickets and how I got the batsman out.

If you continually watch yourself do something well, it has a positive effect. If you sat down and watched yourself bowling, batting or fielding badly, it will probably have the equal effect. I just found that worked for me. Even when I played I'd visualise at the top of my mark the ball carrying through and what I wanted to deliver.

Was that how you had always been, or did you have to work on it?
I don't know, I think it is something that came pretty naturally. I am quite a positive person. I always try to see the good in every situation, the good in everybody. My wife has a go at me every now and then that I can still see too much good in people sometimes, when they probably do not deserve it. I have always been the glass-half-full person. Even if we lost a game, I'd work on the positives and then think about where we could improve.

Early into your career, you had a major injury and you had to work hard on your fitness. Everyone talks about physical fitness for a fast bowler. You were probably one of the strongest bowlers mentally. How important is mental strength for a fast bowler?
I came back from the West Indies in 1995. I'd torn my intercostal, one of my side muscles, where you get your power from for a fast bowler. I weighed 77 kilos, which is about 25 kilos less than what I am now. I was injured, and I thought that if I want to stay playing at this level, which I was absolutely loving, I was going to have to do something differently. So I found a trainer, who was one of the toughest, and worked with him. He made me nearly unbreakable. That was my attitude with what I wanted to do. I think being physically fit and strong is hugely important for a fast bowler.

On the other side of things, you have to be mentally strong as well. My strength was probably more the mental side of the game rather than the skill side. I always had that self-belief that I was good enough. You have got to believe you are good enough, otherwise there is no point to it. I was prepared to work as hard as I could. The old saying: "The harder you work, the luckier you get" is very, very true. I would never give up. I was never satisfied. I'd always want to improve and do better next game. I felt we could win from any situation no matter how bad it was. I'd say I never gave up. I loved what I did, and if you have a real love and passion for what you do, you can't help but be successful.

	"I probably sledged myself a lot more than I sledged the batsman, because I had such high expectations of myself"

I always had a game plan, what I was looking to achieve. When I was bowling well, I had already worked out the next two overs - what I was going to bowl and where I was going to bowl. It is just that mindset - knowing your game and yourself, how you work at your best and what you are looking to achieve. I never had any doubts when I was playing. I never worried about another bowler coming in and taking my position. All the focus was on what I wanted to achieve, and how I was going to go about doing it, and I just went out and did it.

Where would you say these values came from? Is it an Australian way or from the farm, from your early years?
I'd like to say it is a little bit of an Australian attitude. There were some batsmen in the team who did not like it when I made predictions and targeted batsmen of the other team. Maybe it was my upbringing - the country attitude. When you grow up on a farm you are instilled with a certain work ethic from a young age. We were driving tractors, working on the land, from a young age.

Everyone has a conscious decision to make from any situation. They can either look at it from a negative perspective and let it affect them or look at it from a positive one and use that. I love life and I want to make the most of it. I try to live in the now as well. Don't think too much about the past - just experiences that have taught me things. Growing up on a farm and having that freedom as a young fellow and what my parents instilled in me - it all led me in that direction.

Shane Warne called your bowling method the torture technique. Drips on the forehead till the batsman gives up. Did you think of it that way?
The old Chinese water torture. Just drying them up, not letting them get any easy runs, slowly building the pressure until they got out or were shot mentally. I'd like to think I did a little bit more than slowly torture them, but it is an interesting comment from Warnie.

How did you zero in on that method, coming at the taile-end of an era where fast bowlers looked to intimidate batsmen? Yours wasn't physical intimidation, it was more mental.
If I could have bowled 160kph or 100mph, I would have definitely been bowling that fast. Physically, I could not. But what I did do well is, I could land the ball. I had pretty good accuracy and I could get good bounce. I was not that quick, I did not swing the ball a great deal, but what I could do, I did very well. That was my strength.

I only looked to get a batsman out one of three ways: bowled, lbw or caught behind. I thought it is pointless bowling middle stump because it would take all my slips out and it makes it easy for batsmen to score runs on the leg side. So off stump, or just outside, was where I wanted to bowl.

I had that mental strength and I loved the challenge of bowling to guys who were classed the best. I loved bowling in pressure situations. If I miss anything in cricket, it is being in those pressure situations, where it comes down to you having to perform for the team to win. That is what I loved.

"I only looked to get a batsman out one of three ways: bowled, lbw or caught behind" © Getty Images

People saw some of your qualities in Mohammad Asif. He said that line was mandatory and that he hated giving runs off the pads. How important was line to you?
I hated giving the batsman even a single. If the batsman hit me for four, it wasn't because he hit a good shot. It was because I had bowled the ball where he could hit me for four. So I was a bit annoyed with myself. It is all about control. Bowling the ball in the right area, hitting the deck, top of off stump, where the batsman is not sure whether to come forward or go back. A lot of people call it the corridor of uncertainty. That is what I try to stipulate when I speak to young bowlers at the MRF Pace Foundation - that it is about control.

You look at Mitchell Johnson. He is still bowling 150kph, but he has got control now, and that makes him a lethal bowler. If the bowlers have control, they can bowl it where they want to. They are going to be a lot more effective, be able to build pressure, and are going to get a lot more wickets.

I do not like to see guys substitute pace for control. You just need to work harder on getting that control without giving up something else. If you have got control and pace, you are a pretty dangerous bowler.

That length seemed irritating even on television. What do you do with that length? Do you come forward or go back? Was that length natural?
It was pretty natural. I never looked at the spot on the wicket where I wanted to bowl. It was always sort of locked in at the top of my mark that this is the type of delivery I want to bowl and it is all about feel. The last thing I wanted to do was bowl it where the batsman wanted it to come. It is that in-between length where they cannot really come forward or go back. If they go forward it is not quite there, if they go back it is not there and they nick. That length is a different length on every wicket. You have to assess the conditions, the bounce, the seam, and then you have to adjust accordingly. I think that was one thing I did. I could adjust to the wicket very quickly, find out that length in that corridor of uncertainty and try to capitalise on that.

They used to call you the Metronome. How hard is it mentally to stick to control? You had decent pace. Didn't you ever feel like indulging yourself?
I look at those things as a compliment. Precision is something I look upon fondly. My goal was to bowl what I classed as the perfect game, where every ball I bowled went exactly where I wanted to bowl it. That is what I was striving for. That does not mean I have to bowl every ball on the same spot. You can still intimidate them with short-pitched bowling, with aggressive fields, set a person up for an inswinging yorker, but it is just about being able to land the ball where you want to land it. Being a fast bowler at the end of the day is an aggressive thing. It is just not being aggressive with sledging. It is about body language, attitude, field placements. It is about the way you bowl. You have got to be the whole package.

How important was bounce to you? Ricky Ponting has said that it is more bounce than pace that gets batsmen out.
Speaking to the guys who were classed the best batsmen in the world - you mentioned Ricky there, [Brian] Lara, [Sachin] Tendulkar, [Rahul] Dravid, guys like that, they said they would rather face someone bowling at 150kph who skidded the ball on rather than someone who bowled mid-130s and got that bounce.

That was one of my weapons. If I tried to bowl too fast, I'd probably go a bit low and I lost that bounce, which I felt was a more dangerous weapon than an extra 4-5kph in pace. That was my strength. I could bowl good areas and I got bounce and a bit of seam movement and that brought all my catchers into play.

	"If I had had coaching when I was younger, they would have probably tried to get me side-on. My body just found the most natural way to bowl and it worked for me"

What was your attitude to sledging? Was it an additional weapon?
Yes and no. Some batsmen, if you have a bit of chat to them, they went to water. Someone like Lara, if you had a chat to him one day, you'd get him out because he'd go to water. Next day, if you have a chat to him, that's it, you are never going to get him out. So it worked against some batsmen, for some it didn't.

It is not something where you went out and said, "We're going to target this guy. We are going to sledge him." For me, personally, I probably sledged myself a lot more than I sledged the batsman, because I had such high expectations of myself. And half the time if I said something to the batsmen it was probably more out of frustration that I didn't achieve what I wanted to with that particular delivery.

It is part of the game. Test cricket is a test physically, skill-wise and mentally. And probably the mental side of the game is bigger than the other two.

How did you succeed in the subcontinent? Did you modify your approach, because not many overseas fast bowlers have done well here?
I tried to adjust to the conditions as quickly as I could. What are the positives of being a fast bowler in India? To me, the new ball is hard. It will carry through okay, so you have to use the new ball. Then the ball gets a bit soft, it stops swinging. Just got to keep it tight, work on the ball, then you are going to get reverse swing and all of a sudden it comes back into the bowler's favour. That is all I concentrated on. Use the new ball when it is hard and when it is old, look after it, get reverse swing, and set fairly straight fields and bowl a lot straighter than what you would in Australia.

That is all I tried to do, and again, I was trying and looking at the positives, or what the game plan was on these wickets, in these conditions, and how to best succeed. I still did not want to go for runs. I never set a batsman up by giving him runs. I could not bring myself to do that.

Did you have to be more patient in Asia?
It still comes back to execution and control. My stats in India were not too bad compared to the rest of the world. I did not worry that I was bowling in India compared to Australia and the UK. It was just a challenge that I enjoyed. To be classed a good bowler or a great bowler, you have got to be able to perform in every condition, every country, on every type of wicket. Patience, working to a game plan, bowling in partnerships - they were all part of the game. But ultimately my motivation was taking wickets. The end result was that I was looking to get that batsman out.

There were reverse-swing exponents like Wasim and Waqar. And guys like you and Curtly Ambrose made seam bowling famous at that time. Was it always seam for you?
Pretty much so. When I first got selected to play for Australia, a lot of people were saying you have to bowl a consistent outswinger to be successful at Test cricket. And I wanted to be successful at Test cricket so I started swinging the ball. I remember a Test I played against England at the Gabba in the 1994-95 series and I was swinging the ball quite a lot. I ended up with match figures of none for 101 at the end of that match and did not play the next three games. I went back and thought, "Well, I got picked for a reason. I got picked because of the way I bowl. So I am just going to stick to that. That bounce. That seam movement. And building pressure." That was a good learning experience. Listening to other people did not work for me. I tried it and I learned from it.

My strength was hitting the deck, coming from fairly high, using that bounce and hitting the seam. Sometimes that would carry straight through, sometimes it would come back in off the seam, predominantly more so than away, but that natural variation there was enough to unsettle a lot of batsmen.

That fast incutter. Was that an effort ball? 
It was more a natural delivery. Looking at my action - because I jumped in a bit at the end - I had a strong core, which allowed me to stay tall without falling away. But it meant I had to go across myself, which lent itself to hitting the wicket and going in to the right-hander or going away from the left-hander.

Did you always have a repeatable action?
That is the way I bowled. I didn't have any coaching. The first coaching I'd ever had, I was 22. And I did not model myself on anyone else. That held me in good stead, because back when I was growing up, it was all "get side-on". Dennis Lillee had the classical side-on action and he was my hero growing up. So if I had had coaching when I was younger, they would have probably tried to get me side-on. Who knows where I could have been? I may not have ever played. My body just found the most natural way to bowl and it worked for me.

Nowadays we know a lot more about coaching. There is front-on and side-on, even somewhere in between. As long as your hips and shoulders are in line, it does not matter where you are within that range. Your back will be fine. It is when your shoulders and hips get out of line that you have problems.

"With Warnie, the partnership we had was quite amazing. Two totally different styles of bowling but two very similar bowlers in the way we went about it" © Getty Images

You lost a bit of speed towards the end. How did you make up for it?
It wasn't a conscious thing to lose speed. That is the way it happened. But then it is all about control and bowling where you wanted to. Look at Jason Gillespie, who was a similar style of bowler to me but a little bit quicker. A lot of batsmen would play and miss because though they picked the line, it bounced and seamed and was past the bat before they could adjust. Whereas when I hit the deck and it did something off the wicket, the batsman would see it and had time to adjust and maybe just follow it. I got a lot more edges because of that. The fact that I was not express sometimes worked in my favour.

Those legendary partnerships - McGrath-Warne, McGrath-Gillespie - which one was dearer to you?
They were both equally important. I loved bowling with Jason at the other end. We still have a great friendship and I always enjoyed that. With Warnie, the partnership we had was quite amazing. Two totally different styles of bowling but two very similar bowlers in the way we went about it. He and I had very good control. We could build pressure from both ends and I can definitely thank Shane for a lot of my wickets, and he has come out and said he thanks me for some of his wickets as well. To bowl with Shane at the other end was something pretty special. We won the majority of the Test matches we played in and took over 1000 Test wickets between us. They are not bad stats.

Were you and Curtly Ambrose similar bowlers?
I think similar in what we delivered. Curtly just did it so easy. He was so loose: just come up and hit the deck and he could really get bounce and seam. He was one of the bowlers I admired from among those I played against. Curtly had two or three gears where he could crank it up. He was always pretty relaxed but if you got under his skin or fired him up, all of a sudden he could bowl another 5 to 10kph quicker and then he was a real handful.

Probably a good example is our results of bowling to Michael Atherton. I got Athers out 19 times in Tests and Amby got him 17 times. So the fact that we were similar bowlers was unfortunate for Athers. Probably a style of bowling he did not enjoy the most.

Did it get too easy against Athers as it went on?
You'd never say it was too easy. There was only one time where I got him out where I felt it was probably a bit too easy. And that was his last Test. I wasn't bowling that quickly, it was gun-barrel straight as the batsmen say. And I was outside off stump, and he just kept playing and missing. So I thought I'd get one a bit straighter, he just nicked it to Warnie at first slip. And I thought, "it should not really be that easy." But I think probably Athers was a bit shocked. Definitely had a mental edge over him at that stage.

One of my childhood memories is Lara trying to defend against you off the back foot and a bail going up in the air. What were those battles like?
I enjoyed bowling against guys who were classed the best. That really tells you how good you are. I loved bowling to Sachin, Brian. That wicket you are mentioning there was in the 1999 World Cup, at Old Trafford. We were under the pump, we had to win every game to stay in the World Cup. Lot of people say it was an amazing delivery. I think it did just enough to beat Brian's bat and just clipped the top of off. Mark Waugh said it was gun-barrel straight, that Brian just played the wrong line, and it wasn't anything special.

How quickly you remembered that dismissal. Do you still remember most of your dismissals?
Some dismissals I remember. Back when I had 360-370 Test wickets, I could sit here and write them all down in order and picture how I got them out. I guess that was my motivation, and my goal was taking wickets. Bit long in the tooth now and the brain does not work as well as it used to, but I can still remember certain series, certain Tests and what have you.

Did it ever change for you under different captains? Or were you always the same?
No, the game plan was pretty similar as it went on. It was only the West Indies series in 1995 where our game plan was to bowl aggressively to their bowlers, to bowl lot of short-pitched stuff to intimidate them, to show them that we were here to win.

Housing in the UK: The nightmare of renting started in Westminster

The human kennels we hear about didn’t spring up by accident. This broken market is the result of 30 years of bad housing policy

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 25 August 2014 20.22 BST

'Report after report shows that homes in the private rental sector are far worse than either council housing or those under owner-occupation.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Two foot three inches isn’t much. It’s only a little higher than the world’s smallest woman, Jyoti Amge. Your average two-year-old has long rocketed past that line. Glue a couple of my school rulers together and you’re nearly there.

To get to their rented room in Hendon, on the outskirts of north London, tenants of Yaakov Marom had to crawl up a staircase with a head height as low as 2ft 3in (69cm). True, in parts they could stretch up to 3ft 11in (119cm) – which is just about enough headroom for an Ewok. For the privilege of sleeping in a human kennel, a couple were paying Marom £420 a month.

Blame it on my own frayed synapses, but I can no longer get quite so shocked by such stories. How many versions of it have we seen before? Beds in sheds; lodgers in garages; tiny studios let for huge sums. As this paper reported on Saturday, just down the road from Marom’s palace is another rental, offering a single bed suspended from the ceiling by two metal chains. This macabre cross between a hammock and a torture chamber can be yours, friends, for £760 a month, parking permit extra.

All these dispatches from bedsitland tell us two things. First, the private rental market is red-hot – otherwise, landlords wouldn’t be trying to monetise every patch. And second, the private rental market is badly broken.

Welcome to the new age of landlordism, in which the property-owner has all the power and the renter hardly any choice. This year’s English Housing Survey revealed that the number of private tenants had outstripped those in social housing for the first time in its history.

The disparity between those tenures is like the gulf between day and night, between a home and a rabbit hutch. Council tenants get security of tenure and controlled rents; shorthold tenants pay up to four times as much and under most contracts are only ever two months’ notice from getting turfed out of their homes. Yet the impossibility of first-time buying, and the scarcity of public housing, means the private rental market has taken off. The 2001 census showed 1.9m households renting privately in England and Wales – now there are 4m in England alone.

Report after report shows that homes in the private rental sector are far worse than either council housing or those under owner-occupation. One in three are officially classed as non-decent, while one in five are dangerous enough to present a category one hazard – that is, a severe threat to the health or safety of anyone who lives there. All those tenants’ tales you’ve heard or read about permanently broken boilers or mould carpeting the walls aren’t just anecdotes; they cohere into a statistical truth. One of the richest countries in history is fostering 21st-century slums.

It’s in these conditions that millions of people will live for good. Rental is no longer a stepping stone for students and young professionals; instead, it’s fast becoming a terminus. Well over a million families with children now rent. Just as lack of choice has triggered the rise of private renting, so it will keep a growing number of households stewing there. Polls suggest that around 80% of Britons would rather own a home than rent; the lack of new homes suggests that many under-35s without rich parents will be renting for decades to come.

Let me make the obvious disclaimer: not all landlords are on the take, nor are all tenants angels mindful of fixtures and fittings, and keeping the music down. Not that it matters, because a market characterised by this much demand doesn’t really reward good landlords or penalise bad ones. Because the laws give the landlord the power. Because anyone can set up as a letting agent, without qualifications or licensing – and to be one is to own a printing press of made-up fees. Because even if tenants complain, they could face a retaliatory eviction. Because unless a council is tipped off, they’ve probably been too badly hit by cuts to find a scam (Marom had already been banned by Barnet from letting out his second-floor room; but it still took nearly 18 months for officers to catch him at it).

It’s easy to look at this market, with its surveys indicating that 92% of landlords rent out property on the side, and conclude that the entire thing is an epic, ugly accident. Not so: this is Westminster’s creation. Since Margaret Thatcher – at least – successive governments have promised a property-owning democracy, all the while laying the ground for a new landlordism. Thatcher did the most, privatising council homes through right-to-buy, then bringing in the Housing Act 1988 – the big bang for the private rental sector, shredding the last vestiges of rent controls and most protections for tenants. John Major presided over the assured shorthold tenancy and the buy-to-let mortgage. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown refused to countenance the building of new public housing. David Cameron’s contribution has been the Localism Act, which requires councils to put homeless people in the private rental sector: £11bn for build-to-rent, and more right-to-buy.

Whatever the rhetoric, home ownership in England is back down to where it was in 1987. One in three former council homes are now held by private landlords. Tory, Labour and Lib Dems have all taken turns in creating a regime that – as James Meek notes in Private Island, his excellent new book on Britain’s privatisations – “puts more money into the hands of a small number of the very wealthiest people”. To underline the point: this is our money, including the £20bn we pay every year in housing benefit that swiftly goes into landlords’ hands.

That’s the backdrop against which you should judge the current promises made by all the parties to bring in a few extra protections for tenants. None talk of licensing landlords – despite the calls from town halls – let alone guaranteeing more public housing. To do so would be to attack a sector the political classes have cultivated for three decades, and has grown too powerful to hack back – a sector that includes much of the Commons: one in four Tory MPs are landlords, as are one in eight Labour MPs. As for the new housing minister, Conservative Brandon Lewis, would it really surprise you to learn that the parliamentary register has him down as a private landlord?

I envy the Scots. If only we English could also shake up our democracy

With its independence vote Scotland is able to ask big questions about its destiny. I have no idea what that feels like

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • theguardian.com, Monday 25 August 2014 12.41 BST

'I do not know what it is to be Scottish and feel utterly disconnected from Westminster politics. I only know what it is to be English and feel like that.' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Imagine having a say, an actual say, in how your country is run. You might even consider big questions, like the distribution of wealth, the dividing up of resources, your tiny country’s place in the big bad world. You may go down the pub and argue with your friends about what your identity actually means, you may be already certain and slag off those who think differently on Twitter, you may be wavering on several issues. You may be just 16 and able to vote for the fist time in your life.

This may or may not be my business, depending of course which way Scotland votes in a few weeks time, but as this referendum hoves into view with another televised debate tonight, my main emotion is perhaps pathetically English. It is one of envy.

This conversation, this questioning about who you are, how you are to live and who is to be in charge, shows the essential internal organs of a political system being openly tested and examined. Here in Albion, there appears to be only stubbornly undiagnosed organ failure. I do not know what it is to be Scottish and feel utterly disconnected from Westminster politics. I only know what it is to be English and feel like that.

Every time I voice that, inevitably, I am told that somehow I should vote more. When and where exactly? Instead I see that power clusters in ever closer elites at the top of society. These closed shops hug themselves tighter than David Cameron’s wetsuit. The problem, we are told, is that Cameron surrounds himself with yes men. And the trouble with Ed Miliband is that he surrounds himself with people who are very similar to him, and so it goes on until the only real alternatives on offer are Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson. Some choice.

As I see it the Scots are always patronised by talking about independence in terms ofmarriage, divorce, and breaking up the CD collection. Yet I wonder what kind of relationship ever existed in the first place. It has long been apparent that what has gone on in the south-east, and in the City of London in particular, has clearly not been faithful to any of the values of a fairly basic social democracy. It has been about strident privatisation and the dismantling of the welfare state. Scotland at least gets the chance to reject this, English people don’t.

Because many of us have never lived in a United Kingdom. These words mean nothing to me.

Whatever the Scots decide, England will shake. And it needs shaking. If England is actually a Tory land and needs Scotland as a Labour colony, then England should face up to itself, and its demons.

Independence is also often framed in terms of maturity. Is Scotland ready for independence? Surely it is the other way round. Is England grown-up enough to see itself the way it actually is? For that, we would have to be seen and heard, reconnected to the democratic processes, and be far more honest with ourselves than we are often prepared to be.

The best debates about Scottish independence have asked big questions and often there are no easy answers. There is a truthfulness in that. Imagine if England could ask the same questions of itself instead of assuming that all was settled long ago. Imagine if we could do this without ceding to Ukip-style regression.

Scotland will do whatever it does. As I watch from afar, I cant help thinking for us English, chance would be a fine thing.