Friday 13 February 2015
What does 'to be human' mean?
'To be human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel - sometimes in horror- at your inability to control your own actions.' Jonathan Haidt.
Migrating to Canada? Changes in Canada's immigration policy
Murtaza Haider in The Dawn
It used to be a sure shot thing: arrive as a foreign student in Canada, graduate with a degree or a diploma, and apply for permanent residency.
But the changes in the Canadian immigration regulations, which came into effect on January 1, have turned a sure thing into a game of chance, where the Canadian government will draw names from a pool of candidates, who will then be invited to apply for permanent residency.
If you were planning to take on huge debts to finance your studies in Canada in hope for a permanent residency later, be careful. After accumulating huge student loans, you will still have to compete with other skilled workers to get a shot at permanent residency — for only those jobs for which no Canadian worker is available.
While the new regulations have added new challenges for foreign students in Canada, they have also improved the odds for highly-skilled professionals and trades. Instead of a 'first come, first serve' basis, the new immigration regulations will fast-track those prospects whose skills are more in demand in Canada.
As a prospect, one needs a job offer from Canada for advance standing, even before one applies for permanent residency.
The Canadian immigration system was a huge mess. In 2012, 280,000 applicants were waiting to hear back on their applications. The system lacked coordination with the labour markets. Physicians were getting permanent residency, whereas their odds to practice medicine in Canada were very low. This changed in 2012, when the government returned all under process applications and started afresh.
While the changes may look drastic, they benefit those whose odds of finding an employment and adjusting in Canada are stronger.
Despite the changes, Canada will still welcome over 172,000 individuals under the economic class of migrants in 2015.
Application by invitation only
A key difference in the new system is that only those prospects who meet a certain threshold will be invited to submit a formal application for permanent residency.
The two-tier system invites prospects to create an online profile with the government. A new scoring algorithm will automatically score the prospect; for which the maximum achievable score is 1200. Based on the current needs of the labour markets, the federal government will draw names from the pool of prospects several times during the year to admit over 172,000 skilled workers.
These changes guarantee that the system is not overburdened by applicants who are less likely to adjust in Canada.
Who wants to be an immigrant?
The new regulations make a direct connection between the needs of the labour markets and the skill sets of aspiring immigrants. The government has made the task rather simple for applicants to determine the labour market needs in Canada. The aspirants must visit the Canada job bankto learn about the vacancies.
Most readers of this blog will be up for a surprise. Canada is not particularly looking for engineers, doctors, research scientists, or journalists. In fact, the largest number of vacancies are for retail sales clerks (5,572 openings), followed by cooks.
For South Asian men with higher qualifications this may not sound very appetising: Canada needs caregivers (nannies), cashiers, and cooks – not computer scientists.
Canada’s higher education system produces enough highly educated and trained professionals to fill the entry level positions in engineering and applied sciences. The Canadian labour markets demand skilled trades (plumbers, electricians, and truck drivers), retail sector workers, and obviously caregivers to look after the very young and the very old.
The engineers and doctors who immigrated in the past 20 years learned this bitter lesson after they landed in Canada. The new immigration system now links the aspirants to jobs, thus minimising the risk of a mismatch between immigrants’ skills and labour market needs.
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Over the past 20 years, I have met with numerous Canadian immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia who claim to have been duped into immigrating to Canada. They were surprised at how hard it was to find a job, let alone pursue careers as immigrants. In fact, recent immigrants are the new face of urban poverty in Canada, which I reported on earlier in 2012.
The immigrants have, to a large extent, themselves to blame.
They applied to immigrate to Canada without researching their odds for employment. Doctors, for instance, arrived without exploring the licensing requirements to practice medicine in Canada. They are the most vocal group among the disgruntled immigrants.
The Canadian government also shares the blame for the archaic point system it used to qualify applicants for immigration. Even when Canada faced serious shortages for truck drivers (the most common profession among Canadian males), the government was busy admitting doctors and engineers.
Instead of prioritising younger applicants, the system brought in middle-aged workers, who were schooled before computers became ubiquitous. The older workers were educated, but not necessarily skilled for Canadian needs. In addition, they were set in their ways and found it hard to change habits and work ethics. The result was obvious:
Canada has the most educated cab drivers and security guards in the world.
The new regulations are not without risks and inherent shortcomings.
For instance, the aspirants with a job offer from Canada will be given priority to apply for permanent residency. The invitees will have up to two months to send in their formal application, which the Canadian government promises to process within six months. The process may take up to eight months before the worker with a job offer is allowed entry into Canada.
What employer will be willing to hold a vacancy for eight months for a worker living thousands of miles away?
Still, the new system does a better job of setting expectations for aspiring immigrants and Canadian employers. Though the critics of the system are wary of the discretionary powers assumed by the government, they must realise that when immigrant workers fail to adjust in Canada, the governments have to bear the burden of supporting the families of unemployed workers.
By prioritising those applicants whose skills are more in demand, the system improves the odds for new immigrants to succeed in Canada and not be a burden on the taxpayers.
As HSBC shows, we’ve been timid and pathetic in dealing with tax dodgers
Prem Sikka in The Guardian
The parliamentary hearing on HSBC, chaired by Margaret Hodge this week has further exposed the cosy arrangements between big business and those who are supposed to be collecting its taxes. Revelations of organised tax avoidance and even evasion don’t lead to any investigations, prosecutions and fines, it appears. And Lin Homer, the chief executive of HMRC, faced angry questioning from MPs who accused her department of failing to serve taxpayers’ interests.
While the UK dithers, other countries, notably the US, are taking meaningful action against the tax avoidance industry. In 2013 Ernst & Young was fined $123m for its past misdemeanours after admitting “wrongful conduct” over the sale of tax avoidance schemes. Some staff also received prison sentences. In 2005 KPMG was fined $456m after it admitted to a fraud that generated at least $11bn in phoney tax losses for clients. A number of the firm’s former senior personnel were jailed.
And US regulators have targeted lawyers: a former Jenkens & Gilchrist employee received an eight-year sentence and a $190m fine for promoting fraudulent tax avoidance schemes. Another was jailed for 15 years.
There have been other massive fines for tax-dodging schemes: Credit Suisse was made to pay $2.6bn; UBS $780m, and Deutsche Bank $554m. All these illustrate how the US, the supposed home of deregulation and light-touch regulation, deals with organised tax avoidance. Periodic hearings by its Senate committees have led to action by the tax authorities and the department of justice. One programme rewards individuals who expose tax problems at their workplace. Whistleblowers can receive up to 30% of the tax proceeds resulting from their information. In 2013 122 whistleblowers shared awards totalling $53m.
Britain’s efforts to recoup taxes are pathetic by comparison. As Hodge said to Homer yesterday: “One of my feelings of anger with you is that you sit there waiting for people to come. You don’t go out and police in the way other authorities are doing.”
No doubt all those addicted to tax avoidance, in whatever country, are able to game the rules and play cat-and-mouse with the tax authorities. These practices are deeply embedded in contemporary entrepreneurial culture. That’s why strong measures are needed to counter them.
But Britain lacks effective institutions and the political will to deal with the tax-avoidance industry. Hodge’s public accounts committee hearings have not been followed up with action by any government department.
The UK has a fragmented regulatory system. HMRC, the Serious Fraud Office, the Treasury, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Department of Justice, professional bodies and others are all keen to pass the buck. The overlapping structures result in duplication and waste. With an annual budget of about £35m, the SFO is incapable of fighting banks and giant law and accountancy firms.
Tax courts and tribunals have often declared avoidance schemes to be unlawful, but this has not been followed by investigations, fines or prosecutions. Despite winning some cases, HMRC has not even sought to recover legal costs from any of the parties.
One reason for HMRC’s timidity is the lack of personnel and resources. The economic case for investment to check tax avoidance is unanswerable: evidence suggests that for every £1 spent in 2013/14 by HMRC’s large business service – which deals with the UK’s largest and most complex businesses – an additional £97 was recovered. The local compliance unit, which handles smaller businesses and wealthy individuals, collected an additional £18 for every £1 spent the same year.
But it seems the government is not listening. It has cut HMRC funding, badly denting its efforts to expose wrongdoing. This leads to false economies, such as the HMRC relying on professional bodies to deal with the tax avoidance schemes promoted by big accountancy firms. This has to stop. No such firm has ever been disciplined or fined for peddling abusive tax avoidance schemes, even after the courts declared them unlawful.
We’ve heard ministers announce proposals, but these are rarely fully implemented. For example, in April 2013 the government introduced rules to ban companies and individuals who took part in failed tax avoidance schemes from being awarded government contracts. In practice, no such business has been barred.
This week’s revelations in the Guardian and the House of Commons show how flawed is our policing of tax dodgers. It’s clear these abuses will continue until, like others countries, we send out a tough signal that tax evaders will be caught – and punished severely.
Thursday 12 February 2015
Germany faces impossible choice as Greek, Spanish and Italian austerity revolt spreads
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph
The political centre across southern Europe is disintegrating. Establishment parties of centre-left and centre-right - La Casta, as they say in Spain - have successively immolated themselves enforcing EMU debt-deflation.
Spain's neo-Bolivarian Podemos party refuses to fade. It has endured crippling internal rifts. It has shrugged off hostile press coverage over financial ties to Venezuela. Nothing sticks.
The insurrectionists who came from nowhere last year - with Trotskyist roots and more radical views than those of Syriza in Greece - are pulling further ahead in the polls. The latest Metroscopia survey gave Podemos 28pc. The ruling conservatives have dropped to 21pc.
The once-great PSOE - Spanish Workers Socialist Party - has fallen to 18pc and risks fading away like the Dutch Labour Party, or the French Socialists, or Greece's Pasok. You can defend EMU policies, or you can defend your political base, but you cannot do both.
As matters stand, Podemos is on track to win the Spanish elections in November on a platform calling for the cancellation of "unjust debt", a reversal of labour reforms, public control over energy, the banks, and the commanding heights of the economy, and withdrawal from Nato.
Europe's policy elites can rail angrily at the folly of these plans if they wish, but they must answer why ex-Trotskyists threatening to dismantle market capitalism are taking a major EMU state by storm. It is what happens when 5.46m people lack jobs, when 2m households still have no earned income, and when youth unemployment is still running at 51.4pc, and home prices are down 42pc, six years into a depression.
It is pointless protesting that Spain's economy is turning the corner, a contested claim in any case. There comes a point when a society breaks and stops believing anything its leaders say.
The EU elites themselves have run their currency experiment into the ground by imposing synchronized monetary, fiscal, and banking contraction on the southern half of EMU, in defiance of known economic science and the lessons of the 1930s. It is they who pushed the eurozone into deflation, and thereby pushed the debtor states into accelerating compound-interest traps.
It is they who deployed the EMU policy machinery to uphold the interest of creditors, refusing to acknowledge that the root cause of Europe's crisis was a flood excess capital flows into vulnerable economies. It is they who prevented a US-style recovery from the financial crisis, and they should not be surprised that such historic errors are coming back to haunt.
The revolt in Italy has different contours but is just as dangerous for Brussels. Italians may not wish to leave the euro but political consent for the project but broken down. All three opposition parties are now anti-euro in one way or another. Beppe Grillo's Five Star movement - with 108 seats in parliament - is openly calling for a return to the lira.
Mr Grillo proclaims that Syriza is carrying the torch for all the long-suffering peoples of southern Europe, as it is in a sense.
"What’s happening to Greece today, will be happening to Italy tomorrow. Sooner or later, default is coming," he said.
Premier Matteo Renzi staked everthing on a recovery that has yet to happen. He is running out of political time. Deflation is overwhelming the fiscal gains from austerity. Italy's public debt has jumped from 116pc to 133pc of GDP in three years. The youth jobless rate is 44pc and still rising. Italian GDP has fallen 10pc in six years, and by 15pc in the Mezzogiorno. Italy's industrial production has dropped back to the levels of 1980.
The leaders of Spain and Italy know that their own populists at home will seize on any concessions to Syriza over austerity or debt relief as proof that Brussels yields only to defiance. They have a very strong incentive to make Greece suffer, even if it means a cataclysmic rupture and a Greek ejection from the euro.
Yet to act on this political impulse risks destroying the European Project. Europe's Left would nurture a black legend for a hundred years if the first radical socialist government of modern times was crushed and forced into bankruptcy by Frankfurt bankers - acting at the legal boundaries of their authority, or beyond - choosing to switch off liquidity support for the Greek financial system.
It would throw the Balkans into turmoil and probably shatter the security structure of the Eastern Mediterranean. It is easy to imagine a chain of events where an embittered Greece pulled out of Nato and turned to Russia, paralysing EU foreign policy in a self-feeding cycle of animosity that would ultimately force Greece out of the union altogether.
The charisma of the EU - using the Greek meaning - would drain away if such traumatic events were allowed to unfold, and all because a country of 11m people wanted to cut its primary budget surplus to 1.5pc from 4.5pc of GDP and shake a discredited Troika off its back, for that is what it comes down to.
One is tempted to cite Jacques Delors' famous comment that "Europe is like a riding bicycle: you stop pedalling and you fall off" but that hardly captures the drama of what amounts to civil war in a union built on a self-conscious ideology of solidarity.
"The euro is fragile. It is like a house of cards. If you pull away the Greek card, they all come down,” warned Greece's finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
“Do we really want Europe to break apart? Anybody who is tempted to think it possible to amputate Greece strategically from Europe should be careful. It is very dangerous. Who would be hit after us? Portugal?" he said.
George Osborne clearly agrees. The worries have been serious enough to prompt a one-hour Cobra security meeting. "The risks of a miscalculation or a misstep leading to a very bad outcome are growing,” said the Chancellor.
Currency guru Barry Eichengreen - the world's leading expert on the collapse of the Gold Standard in 1931 - thinks Grexit might be impossible to control. "It would be Lehman Brothers squared,” he said.
This is not the view in Germany, at least not yet. The IW and ZEW institutes both argue that Europe can safely withstand contagion now that it has a rescue machinery and banking union in place, and must not give in to "blackmail".
Such is the 'moral hazard' view of the world, the reflex that led to the Lehman collapse in 2008. "If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn't have done it," the then-US treasury secretary Tim Geithner told EMU leaders in early 2011, the first time they were tempted to eject Greece.
The fond hope is that the European Central Bank can and will smooth over any turbulence in Portugal, Italy and Spain by mopping up their bonds, now that quantitative easing is on the way. Yet the losses suffered from a Greek default would surely ignite a political firestorm in Germany.
Bild Zeitung devoted two pages this morning to warnings that Grexit would cost Germany €63bn, or much more once the Bundesbank's Target2 payments though the ECB system are included. The unpleasant discovery that Germany's Target2 exposure can in fact go up in smoke - despite long assurances that this could never happen - might make it untenable to continue such support.
It is unfair to pick on Portugal but its public and private debts are 380pc of GDP - the highest in Europe and higher than those of Greece - making is acutely vulnerable to toxic effects of deflation on debt dynamics.
Portugal's net international investment position (NIIP) - the best underlying indicator of solvency - has reached minus 112pc of GDP. Public debt has jumped from 111pc to 125pc of GDP in three years. The fiscal deficit is still 5pc. The country's ranking in global competitiveness is close to that of Greece.
"The situation in Portugal is very different," says Paulo Portas, the deputy premier. Sadly it is not. Once you violate the sanctity of monetary union and reduce EMU to a fixed-exchange system, the illusion that Portugal is out of the woods may not last long. Markets will test it.
Only two people can now stop the coming train-wreck. Chancellor Angela Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schauble, a man who masks his passion for the EU cause behind an irascible front.
Syriza have made a strategic blunder by turning their struggle into a fight with Germany, demanding Nazi war reparations, and toying with the Russian card at the very moment when Mrs Merkel is locked in make-or-break talks on Ukraine with Vladimir Putin.
Mr Varoufakis is trying to limit the damage, praising Mrs Merkel as the "most astute politician" in Europe, and Mr Schauble as the "only European politician with intellectual substance" - a wounding formulation for the others. He has called on Germany to cast off self-doubt and assume its roll as Europe's benevolent hegemon, almost as if he were evoking the glory days of the Holy Roman Empire when pious German emperors stood as guarantors for Christendom.
This is the only pitch that will work. Angela Merkel has risen above her narrow East German outlook and her fiscal platitudes of the early crisis to emerge as the soul-searching Godmother of Europe and the last credible defender of its unity. But even Mrs Merkel can be pushed too far.
Tuesday 10 February 2015
Cricket, Poker, Luck and Skill
Chris Bradshaw in Wisden India
About the only thing that the Rio Casino in Las Vegas has in common with Lord’s is that it attracts a disproportionate number of men with a liking for bright red trousers. Superficially, there’s little in common between the home of the World Series of Poker and cricket’s traditional headquarters. Dig a little deeper though and there is a surprising amount that cricketers, and especially captains, can learn from their poker-playing counterparts.
Richie Benaud famously said: “Captaincy is 90 per cent luck, only 10 per cent skill – but don’t try it without the 10 per cent.” Despite being more of a horse-racing man than a card sharp (Benaud restricts himself to wagers on things that cannot speak), his adage sounds remarkably similar to something written by Doyle Brunson, one of the greatest poker players who has ever lived.
In his best-selling 1978 strategy book Super System: A Course In Power Poker, the two-time World Series of Poker Main Event winner wrote: “Poker is more art than science, that’s what makes it so difficult to master. Knowing what to do – the science – is about 10 per cent of the game. Knowing how to do it – the art – is the other 90 per cent.” Not identical to Benaud’s line but near enough to warrant a closer look.
Poker players loosely fit into two main playing styles. Tight players proceed cautiously and wait for the best hands. Loose players will play with any two cards. Taken to its extreme, a super-tight player would only play a pair of aces while a hyper-loose player would try his luck with anything, even 7-2 off suit, the worst starting hand in Texas hold ’em. Allied to the tight and loose tendencies are levels of aggression. Aggressive players are always on the front foot, looking to attack, while passive players tend to fear losing rather than trying to win.
In the long run, both tight and loose aggressive poker players can be successful. It’s possible, but much harder, for tight passive types to make much money. Loose passive players might as well set fire to their bankroll.
Those tendencies are often clearly visible on the cricket pitch. A tight captain will wait until he has a ridiculous lead before setting a declaration while a looser leader would dangle a carrot. Andrew Strauss was a prime example of a tight, aggressive captain. The commentary box moaners may not have liked his seemingly defensive fields but by employing a sweeper early in the innings – rather than having an extra slip, say – Strauss preferred to retain control rather than speculate. When and only when, the game was in his team’s favour would Strauss go on the attack.
Brendon McCullum, on the other hand, is much more akin to the loose aggressive poker player and willing to have a gamble. If he sets an attacking field and the ball flies through the vacant cover region to the boundary, so what? An unorthodox bowling change may mean conceding a few runs but it might also pick up a wicket. If the rewards are big enough, he’ll follow that hunch even if the results are costly if he’s proved wrong.
The flip side of that aggressive stance can be seen in any number of delayed England declarations and botched run chases. Take the home side’s 2001 capitulation to Pakistan at Old Trafford. Alec Stewart’s side went from tight aggressive to tight passive with disastrous results. With the score at 174 for one and needing another 196 runs from 45 overs for a famous victory, England lost a wicket then shut up shop. Instead of going for the win, they tried not to lose. One session and eight wickets later, Waqar Younis and co had tied the series.
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The stereotype of the poker player as a fast-talking, cigar-chomping, road gambler is an outdated one. You’re far more likely to see a softly spoken Scandinavian wearing headphones and a hoodie in a top tournament these days rather than a Stetson-wearing Texan. Technology has transformed poker and the statistically-minded are in the ascendancy.
Virtually every professional poker player now uses a database to log every raise, every bet size, every fold, every call, every unexpected all-in move and just about everything else that happens at the online tables. Crunching the numbers to identify opposition weaknesses and their own technical deficiencies has become a crucial weapon for even semi-serious players of the game.
Cricket’s own statistical revolution has mirrored the one undergone by poker. Every delivery is tracked by an analyst, every shot monitored by a specialist coach and every potential technical frailty probed by the team’s brain trust. The captains in the Sky commentary box (what is the collective noun for a group of England captains? A disappointment? A grumble?) may say that a third man should be in place. The figures in black and white suggest otherwise.
Of course it’s all well and good for a team to have a plethora of stats at their disposal, but if they don’t know how to use them it can cause more confusion than clarity. Despite enjoying some recent success, England have been accused of producing teams full of cricketing automatons, unable to think on their feet or adapt in the face of changing circumstances. If the plan discussed in the dressing-room isn’t working, England’s C-3POs have often seemed too rigid to do anything about it. “The stats said we should bounce them out. We’ll carry on bouncing them, even though the ball is disappearing to the boundary twice an over.”
A good captain, like a good poker player, will use the stats but won’t be a slave to them. He will still trust his feel for the game to assess the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent.
The concept of pot odds is also one that is easily transferable to cricket. A poker player may have to pay to chase his straight or flush draw but if the odds are right, it becomes a mathematically correct move to make. It’s a risk, but in the long run the rewards justify taking that chance. Similarly, a bowler might dish up three half volleys, knowing that they’ll likely be despatched through an extra-cover region deliberately left vacant. The fourth delivery, a fraction shorter and a touch wider, gets nicked and is pouched by the slip fielder who could have been patrolling the covers. The bowler may have given up a few extra runs but has been rewarded with a wicket. A good poker player knows when to take a gamble as if he hits his outs, he’ll make a big profit. A cricket captain should be able to do the same.
“Play aggressively, it’s the winning way,” Brunson writes. Being aggressive isn’t a call to suddenly awaken your inner Merv and start mouthing off at the competition. It simply means taking control and dictating terms. “Timid players don’t win in high-stakes poker.” They rarely win at cricket either.
It sounds obvious but the great captains, like the best poker players, are always thinking one move ahead of their opponent. A successful poker player will recognise when to adapt as the conditions of the game alter. The arrival of a deep-stacked, ultra-loose player can completely change the dynamics of a table, just as a big-hitting tail-ender can totally change the momentum in cricket. An intuitive captain will know when to attack and when to hang back and wait for a more profitable opportunity. “Changing gears is one of the most important parts of playing poker. It means shifting from loose to tight play and vice versa,” writes Brunson.
Andrew Strauss was a prime example of a tight, aggressive captain – who would wait until he has a ridiculous lead before setting a declaration. © Getty Images
The same is true of players going on a hot streak and winning a number of pots in quick succession. “Your momentum is clear to all players. On occasions like this you’re going to make correct decisions and your opponents may make errors because they are psychologically affected by your rush.” Brunson could be writing about any captain whose side has inflicted a crippling batting collapse on the opposition.
To succeed, “you’ll need to get inside your opponent’s head,” writes Brunson. In the modern game, there has been no better exponent of this than Shane Warne (just ask poor Daryl Cullinan). Being able to turn a leg-break a yard was famously Warne’s greatest asset. His mastery of the dark arts of mental disintegration helped shape the aura that accompanied him wherever he played though, especially against England. Before every series there was talk of a new mystery delivery. The zooter, the clipper, whatever you want to call it. The new phantom ball rarely appeared but the seed had been planted, the trap set, the bluff laid. And Warne was ready to collect.
Of course a cricket skipper can utilise the team members he has at his disposal while a poker player rides solo. For Steve Waugh, having Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath in his side was like being dealt aces every hand. Aces make you a favourite, but they do get cracked if they’re not handled properly. Poker players are dealt duff hands most of the time. The best players get the best out of what they’ve been given.
Even though he’s now in his eighties, Brunson still manages to play in some of the biggest cash games around, with thousands of dollars at stake. Successful “old-school” players have welcomed the way the game has changed and adapted accordingly (you won’t hear a Truemanesque “I don’t know what’s going off out there” from Brunson). Like cricketing tactics, poker techniques have evolved over time. If Brunson played the same way now as he did when he won his first world title in 1976 he’d be eaten alive by the twentysomething maths geeks. The basic philosophies outlined in Super System still hold true though. The precise tactics may have changed but the instincts that served him so well at the start of his career continue to do so today.
The poker world these days is peppered with current and former sporting greats. Footballers Tony Cascarino and Teddy Sheringham have earned six-figure paydays on the tournament circuit. Rafa Nadal and Boris Becker act as ambassadors for a major online poker site. Given the storm surrounding match-rigging and spot-fixing, it’s probably understandable that most cricketers have steered clear. The obvious exception is Shane Warne, who regularly clears a couple of weeks from his commentary schedule to play at the World Series of Poker.
In a brief stint as captain of Australia’s one-day side Warne enjoyed great success, winning 10 out of 11 matches. The same formula brought IPL glory to the Rajasthan Royals and promotion and one-day success to Hampshire.
Ian Chappell once wrote that the leg-spinner who most resembled Warne was the feisty Australian Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly, a man who openly hated batsmen. “He thought they were trying to take the food out of his mouth and consequently he was ultra-aggressive in his efforts to rid himself of the competition,” wrote Chappell. “Warne had a similar thought process and he was constantly plotting the batsman’s downfall.” Sounds like ideal card-room strategy. It’s no wonder Warne’s now a pretty good poker player.
Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy is usually the first book off the shelf for budding skippers. Potential leaders could do worse than making Super System their second.
With penalties so weak, tax evasion is worth the risk
Polly Toynbee in The Guardian
At last night’s Black and White ball to raise funds for the Conservatives, more than 500 phenomenally rich donors gathered in London’s Grosvenor House hotel – last year’s guests were worth £22bn. Paying £15,000 for dinner was peanuts compared to sums this assembly of plutocrats will donate to the party – no wonder there’s been a news lockdown. Are these the people who really run the country, buying an election to ensure government by their people, for their people? That’s for voters to consider in May: Cameron’s government has certainly been kind to its funders.
But there could hardly be a worse day for the ball as the Guardian, Le Monde, BBC Panorama and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed a whistleblower’s details of some of the wealthy account-holders – including tax dodgers – with HSBC in Switzerland.
It has taken our reporting team several months to sort the mountainous information revealed about these Swiss accounts. This investigation has proved in some ways more difficult and risky than taking on the secret world in our WikiLeaks revelations, or even than the Snowden files. The might of the US and UK state, the fury of governments and secret services, are nowhere near as dangerous to a newspaper as the threats we have received from a string of top law firms trying to prevent revelation of their clients’ secret Swiss accounts.
Over the past four weeks we have been dealing with long and threatening lawyers’ letters from some of those we are naming. They accuse us of “false, misleading, sloppy journalism” and “defamation”, with threats under the Data Protection Act and warnings of injunctions: “You may be in no doubt that legal actions will swiftly follow”, and the like. Carter-Ruck, Schillings, Withers, Hill Dickinson – and many others – pile in to try to frighten us off. The danger is that we can be right 99 out of 100 times, with more revelations still to come – but one error can kill you. The new defamation law should be better than the old libel laws, but its impact has yet to be tested in court.
For nearly five years the government has stayed silent about these HSBC Swiss account-holders. How grateful the world of Tory donors must be to see this embarrassment handled with gentlemanly delicacy. No naming, shaming – or, God forbid, prosecutions. Instead, privately some but by no means all that’s owing has been repaid by UK cheats – so far £135m.
Tax evasion is a risk well worth taking with such trivial penalties: in some cases all HMRC demands is the tax owed, plus interest, plus 10% – not confiscation. The total collected is far less than the French and Spanish have reclaimed, though the UK has many more account-holders. Among them are famous names, entrepreneurs and aristocratic families – alongside dictators and drug dealers. HMRC has treated them with the same discretion as HSBC did when they handed over bricks of money to “respectable” people. Compare all this to the slightest infringement of benefit rules over minuscule sums.
Tax cheats are forever one step ahead. That’s why George Osborne carefully introduced a General Anti-Avoidance Rule – which expensive lawyers can get round – not a General Anti-Avoidance Principle, which would strike at the spirit of avoidance. The US, Belgian, French and Argentinian governments have instigated criminal proceedings against HSBC – it’s no surprise that our government has not.
One embarrassment would be any development implicating Stephen Green, former HSBC top man, appointed by David Cameron as minister of state for trade and investment in September 2010, despite the authorities already having the dynamite details of HSBC’s tax-avoiding connivance. Few experts think HSBC exceptionally venal; it’s just the one that got caught – again. Only regulation can stop them – shame doesn’t work. HSBC was obscured in the public mind by its chairman’s piety as an ordained priest.
Lord Green was chief executive from 2003 to 2006, until he took over the chair. Pursued down the street by Panorama, he had nothing to say. But in the past he has written much about ethical banking in two books reconciling God and Mammon. However, under his custodianship Mammon seems to have got the upper hand. His report is among papers for discussion on restructuring the Church of England at the synod this week. His effort to bring business culture into the church is not well timed, with its management-speak aim of turning the clergy into a “talent pool” of future business-type executives. The Dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, Professor Martyn Percy, is not alone in choking into his chalice at receiving “a summons urging early booking for an MBA-style programme”. Green is one of the high net-worth evangelicals of Holy Trinity Brompton, favoured by many wealthy holy-rollers. Their creed has always been that God rewards wealth: to him that hath, more shall be given – tax-free.
Labour is lucky this global story blew up in a week already dominated by a tax avoidance row: it was a Tory blunder to put up the Monaco-dwelling head of Boots to call Labour a “catastrophe”, when his company pays a fraction of the UK tax it did before switching its base to Switzerland. Timing is important here: the HSBC revelations haven’t emerged on Labour’s watch. Both Eds have frequently – and rightly – apologised for Labour’s feeble regulation of banks pre-crash, while always reminding Cameron and Osborne that they called loudly for less banking “red tape” in those days.
Ed Miliband warns the many tax havens under the British crown that he will clamp down – not before time. He now needs to show his determination by setting up an office of tax responsibility, where he should install Margaret Hodge to chase up her public accounts committee tax investigations.
In power Labour shied away, afraid of offending business. Not this time. It’s worth recalling that Tony Blair in 1997 had no FTSE 100 supporters: they and the CBI warned of the dire consequences of a national minimum wage. They called his £5bn windfall tax on utilities “Stalinist”. For Labour, only the assumption of power brings business converts – seekers after preferments, contracts and influence. Those who assume otherwise delude themselves.
It's time to tackle the myths in education
Tom Bennett in The Telegraph
Are you a visual learner or a kinaesthetic learner? Perhaps you are an auditory learner? Maybe you learn best when implementing a combination of these 'learning styles'.
Over the past 40 years, the 'learning style' theory has garnered support from professionals across the education community and has become a much-used teaching tool across the UK.
But does the longevity of 'learning styles' and its persistent presence in the classroom actually mean it has any educational value at all? The simple answer is, no one can be sure; because no one has categorically proved the theory one way or the other.
Tom Bennett, teacher, author and Director of researchED, says there are many such theories that fill classrooms across Britain that have little grounding in scientific research. According to Bennett, it's time teachers learnt to raise a "sceptical eyebrow".
“We have had all kinds of rubbish thrown at us over the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. “We’ve been told that kids only learn properly in groups. We’ve had people claiming that children learn using brain gym, people saying that kids only learn if you appeal to their learning style. There’s not a scrap of research that substantiates this, and, unfortunately, it is indicative of the really, really dysfunctional state of social science research that exists today.”
One of the main problems in resolving this issue is the fact that educational theory, unlike the actual sciences, is very difficult to test. How do you find out if the assertion that ‘children learn best in groups’ is actually correct? How do you test the effectiveness of 'homework', when homework can consist of anything from essays to artwork?
A new fund, launched last year by the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), is seeking to answer some of these questions. Six university-led projects have been funded to research how neuroscience can help pupils learn more effectively in the classroom.
While Bennett welcomes the work of the EEF, he says teachers need to be weary of who is leading research projects.
“You hear people say that children must have iPads in order to be 21st century learners, but when you look at the research that tries to substantiate this claim, it’s normally written by iPad manufacturers and technology zealots, and that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s research," he says. "Children don’t have the time to waste on that rubbish, especially poor children.”
Bennett isn’t the only one to voice these concerns. According to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), trillions of dollars are spent on education policies around the world, but just one in 10 are actually evaluated.
Commenting on the research, Andreas Schleicher, OECD director of education and skills, said: "If we want to improve educational outcomes we need to have a much more systematic and evidence-based approach.”
Speaking at the Education World Forum in London, Schleicher added: "We need to make education a lot more of a science."
It seems an obvious statement, but, clearly, not one that has been put into practice over the years. With many initiatives left unsubstantiated.
Bennett has been a vocal critic of such educational practices and founded researchED as a way to counter the myths in education and improve research literacy within the education community.
“There are two main things I am calling for here,” he says. “One is that I want to highlight to teachers the rubbish that is out there, so that when someone comes along and says, ‘you should do this to help children learn’ teachers can raise a sceptical eyebrow and say ‘what’s the evidence behind that?’, ‘why should I spend six extra hours a week doing this?’, ‘why should my school spend half a million pounds doing it?’
“These are really important questions; both for ministers looking at education policy, and for team leaders within a school environment.
“The second thing is I would like teachers to engage more with driving good research. At the moment, a lot of research is very distant from the classroom, it’s done by people who don’t understand children, it’s done by people who have never taught. I want teachers to engage more with good research and drive future research.”
One of Bennett’s goals with researchED is to give teachers the opportunity and courage to question research, to be sceptical about practices and to look at the provenance of research before wholly accepting assertions as fact.
The organisation has proved hugely successful since its launch in 2013, growing from an initial conference in Dulwich College, to launches in New York and Sydney this year.
It has also led to Bennett being nominated for the inaugural $1 million Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize, the largest prize of its kind given to one exceptional teacher in recognition of their contribution to education.
Along with Richard Spencer, a teacher at Middlesbrough College in Billingham, County Durham, Bennett is the only nomination from the UK.
“It’s very strange,” he says. “I certainly don’t feel like one of the top two teachers in the country. There are probably better teachers in my school.
“I like this award, not only because I’ve been nominated, but because it’s a celebration of teachers and raises their status nationally and internationally. All the people on the list – and I’m very honoured to be on the shortlist – have done lots of things outside of the classroom to try and make things better for teaching in general.”
“From my point of view, and to return to my main argument, I want teachers to be a lot more sceptical of what they read, because often the evidence is far less conclusive than people would like to have you believe.
“Really good science tells you when you’re wrong. I’m not saying that people don’t have learning styles, because there is no evidence that we don’t. But as Richard Dawkins highlighted, ‘you can’t prove a negative’”
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