Abracadabra! Britain’s political elite has fooled us all again

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Magicians call it misdirection: directing the attention of a crowd elsewhere so as to distract from the trick happening right in front of it. A bump on the shoulder, a blur of handwaving and – wham! – your wallet’s taken leave of your hip pocket.

Since the crash, British politics has been one epic act of misdirection. Lay off those bankers who shoved the country into penury! Just focus on stripping disabled people of their benefits. Never mind the millionaire bosses squeezing your pay! Spit instead at the minimum-wage migrant cleaners apparently making us poorer. So ingrained is the ritual that when a minister strides into view urging the need for “a grown-up debate”, we brace ourselves for another round of Blame the Victim. The only question is who gets sacrificed next: some ethnic minority, this family on low pay, that middle-aged dad who can’t get a job.

Here is how political misdirection works in real time. Yesterday, Unite’s Len McCluskey came under a barrage of criticism for suggesting that Labour live up to its name and support “ordinary working people”. Evil paymaster! Meanwhile, on the front page of this paper, digger firm JCB called on David Cameron to prepare to take Britain out of the EU – and this was just a company having its say.

JCB boss says EU exit could lift burden of bureaucracy on UK businesses

 

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I hold no brief for McCluskey – but he is the democratically elected head of a trade union simply seeking to influence the party part-funded by his members. Perhaps this comes as news to some on Fleet Street, but the debate over Labour’s future is not the chew-toy solely of newspaper columnists. Moreover, Unite’s donations to Her Majesty’s Opposition are a matter of easily checkable record. Not so the money poured into Tory coffers by JCB, either as a business or from its owners, the Bamford family. To learn that, we must rely upon forensic researchers such as Stuart Wilks-Heeg at Liverpool University. He calculated this morning that, between 2001-14, the Bamfords and JCB had together given the Conservatives at least £6.7m. One arm of JCB also donated £600,000 last year to Tory campaigns in key marginals, including the all-important battleground of Nuneaton.

So a company that funded David Cameron all the way into Downing Street, and whose chairman was recently made a lord, seeks to influence the government on one of the most fundamental issues in British politics, something that affects all of us – and this is business as usual. Yet a workers’ elected representative adding his voice to the din of an internal party argument somehow represents the biggest political landgrab since a bloke with a goatee popped in to the Winter Palace.

Expect more of this misdirection over the next few weeks. Labour has scheduled the entire summer for its leadership campaign, which could equal months of an entire party sounding like an indecisive satnav: Veer right! Keep left! Meanwhile, in just over a month, George Osborne will lay out an emergency budget to deal with the enormous £90bn deficit that he inherited from himself. Using the traditional lexicon of political hocus-pocus – “hard choices” – he will begin making some of the extra £12bn of welfare cuts the Tories pledged at the last election.

Every feat of misdirection is always intended to distract the audience from a sleight of hand. The same goes in politics – only here it’s aimed at taking our minds off the fact that all this jiggery-pokery is actually making us worse off. Let me show you what I mean, using figures calculated for the Guardian by academics at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (Cresc), using official data. When Thatcher moved into No 10, 28% of all working age households took more from the state in cash benefits, in health and education and all the rest of it than they paid back in taxes. In other words, more than one in four employers in Britain were failing to pay their staff’s way.

The next round of cuts will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face

More than three decades later, through Major and Blair and Brown and Cameron, that proportion has kept on rising. Now 38% of working-age households rely on taxpayers to pay their way. Think about all those tax credits for low-paid work, those exemptions for people earning too little even to be taxed. We have more people in work than ever before – and more households than ever before relying on the state to keep them afloat.

There’s nothing wrong with these people. These are the hard-working families politicians like talking about – the strivers, the squeezed middle, the alarm-clock Britain. But there’s a lot wrong with their employers – because they now rely on taxpayers to top up poverty pay, even while insisting on cuts in corporation tax and grants for investment. Come 8 July, it won’t be those businesses that the chancellor tells to change their ways – it’ll be the people they employ who will see more money taken out of their weekly budget by the cuts. Because the one thing we know about the next round of cuts is that they will hit the working poor all over again, like a hammer to the face.

This is what politics looks like in Britain nowadays, once the newspapers have their japes and the politicians leave the TV studios: it is about justifying an extractive business class that wants to lean on taxpayers to pay their way, even while lecturing the rest of us about welfare dependency. And it doesn’t change all that much whether the Tories or Labour are in Downing Street. The Cresc team looked at who reaped the rewards from growth over the past three decades. Under Thatcher and Major, the top 10% of all working-age households took 29p in every £1 of income growth. Under Blair and Brown, their share actually went up, to 30p in each £1. Cresc found that New Labour bumped up the share of the poorest economically active households from 0.5% to 1.5%. Taxes and benefits evened that up a bit – the same taxes and benefits that are now deemed unaffordable. So much for trickle down.

This is what all the misdirection has been about: taking our minds off the fact that Britain is a soft touch for businesses that want taxpayers to pay their way, and politicians who count on the middle classes to feel richer, not through their wage packets, but by their house prices, their no-frills flights, their luxury buys from Lidl. What a trick has been pulled on Britain by its political and business elite: never have so many people had their pockets picked at the same time.

Why I choose to have less choice

Shopping around is the mantra of the modern era. But who really benefits from our befuddlement?

Tim Lott in The Guardian

Once, when I was suffering a fit of depression, I walked into a supermarket to buy a packet of washing powder. Confronted by a shelf full of different possibilities, I stood there for 15 minutes staring at them, then walked out without buying any washing powder at all.

I still feel echoes of that sensation of helplessness. If I just want to buy one item but discover that if I buy three of the items I will save myself half the item price, I find myself assailed by choice paralysis.

The only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose

Oliver Burkeman

 

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I hate making consumer choices at the best of times, because I have this uncomfortable suspicion that big companies are trying to gull me out of as much money as possible, using sophisticated techniques designed by people who are smarter than I am.

For instance, when I buy an insurance product, how can I decide whether I should just buy the cheapest, or the best? The best is the one most likely to pay out without penalty or fuss, but that information is much harder to find out than factors such as cost, extent of cover, etc. It’s complicated. So I often try not to make choices – by just putting my payments for insurance with my usual insurers on direct debit, for example, which means I don’t have to think about shopping around.

This issue of choice and complexity lies at the heart of the experience of being modern. It penetrates commerce, politics and our personal lives. It may even be connected to the fact that there are higher levels of depression in society than ever before.

This idea was suggested by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. Choice oppresses us. Why? Because there are too many choices and they are often too complex for us to be confident that we are making the right one.

When you might have 200 potential choices to make of a particular style of camera, it is difficult to feel sure you have chosen the right one – even if you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make a rational decision. Or you may see the same model two weeks after you’ve bought it being sold more cheaply. When there was less choice and fewer types of camera, this kind of experience was rare. Our capacity for hindsight has become a means of punishing ourselves.

Complexity is not entirely accidental. Late capitalism solves the dilemma of competition (for the producer) through complexity. To try to choose a mortgage, or a pension, or a computer, requires a tremendous amount of application, so we become relatively easy to gull. Whether it is a power company or a loan company, we struggle to understand tariffs, terms and the small print. Exhausted, we just take a stab and hope for the best, or we succumb to inertia; choose what we have always chosen. Consumers are thrown back on simple cues that are advantageous to the producers, such as brand recognition.

Accept complexity – which means accepting that you can never be sure you made the right choice

Complexity also impacts on politics. Once it was pretty clear who to vote for – your class position, on the whole, made it a simple matter of self-interest for most voters. Now we have become closer to what is ironically the democratic ideal – ie choice-making actors – voting is more of a challenge than it once was. Do you really have a good enough grasp of economic theory to judge whether it is best to spend or save in a recession? Do you understand the complexities of private provision in the NHS enough to rule it out? Do you know enough about international affairs to support a reduction in defence spending, or a retreat from the EU? Most people don’t – so, again, they make snap judgments based on loyalty and sentiment.

This problem of choice and complexity is ubiquitous. It applies in medicine. If I am ill and asked to make a choice about treatment, I would often rather leave the choice to the doctor, if only because if the wrong choice is made, I am not going to feel nearly so bad about it. I had a prostate cancer scare recently, and I just wanted to be told what to do – not decide whether, say, I should choose an operation that would guarantee impotency in order to stave off a 5% chance of cancer. The burden of choice was too big.

In the field of education a similar dilemma applies. Once your child went to the local primary or secondary. Now you have to decide from a bewildering number of types of school. In the personal realm, once, you stayed married for life. Now, if you are in an unhappy marriage you have to decide whether to stay or not. These may be all positive developments, but they come at a cost – the potential for regret.

So how should one react to complexity? Schwartz suggests we should limit choice, not extend it. If you are shopping for food, go to supermarkets that are priced simply with a limited range, such as Aldi and Lidl. Recognise and accept complexity – which means accepting that you can never be sure that you’ve made the right choice.

Above all, don’t fall for the old trope of only wanting “the best”. Schwartz calls such people “maximisers” – people who are never happy, because they have expectations that can never be met, since in a world of complexity and unlimited choice there is always a better option. Be a “satisficer” instead – people who are happy to say “that’s good enough”, or “it’ll do”.

This may not work in politics – saying the Conservatives “will do” when you wanted the Green party is not very satisfactory – but as a consumer, and in life generally, it’s a pretty good formula. It’ll do, anyway.

Failures in Maths Teaching

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

Our generals say India’s spy agency RAW is up to its nasty tricks again. No evidence provided but, okay, we’ll buy the story for now. There are two good reasons. First, it’s safer not to question the wisdom of generals. Second, they speak from deep experience, having long played the spy-versus-spy game across borders.

So let’s provisionally assume that India’s spies have engineered the odd bomb blast here and there, and send occasional gifts to the BLF or other militant Baloch movements.

But RAW’s alleged antics are pinpricks compared to the massive and irreversible brain damage that Pakistan’s schools, colleges, and universities inflict upon their students.

Imagine that some devilish enemy has perfected a super weapon that destroys reasoning power and makes a population stupid. One measure, though not the only one, of judging the lethality of this hypothetical weapon would be lower math scores.

No such scores are actually available, but for over 40 years my colleagues and I have helplessly watched student math abilities shrivel.

Only the wealthy customers of elite private schools and universities, tethered as they are to standards of the external world, have escaped wholesale dumbing down. As for the ordinary 99pc, with the rare exception of super-bright students here or there, some form of mental polio is turning most into math duffers.

Does being poor at math really matter? After all there are plenty of intelligent people everywhere, even brilliant ones, who hate math and therefore are bad at it. But this is only because they had dull and uninspiring teachers who never taught them that math is a beautiful exercise of reason, one step at a time. Once on track, you quickly realise that math is the most magnificent, surprising, and powerful of all human achievements.

The success of the human species over other forms of life on planet Earth depends squarely on mathematics. Without math the pyramids could not have been built, navigation would be impossible, electricity could not have been discovered and put to use, factories and industries would not exist, computers and space exploration would be unimaginable, etc.

Here’s how bad our situation is: in a recent math class, I had rather typical 18-20 year-olds from non-elite schools. They had studied geometry but their teachers had not exposed them to the notion of proof — the step-by-step process in which one starts with a proposition, carefully constructs arguments, and then triumphantly arrives at the conclusion.

Instead, they were taught math as a hodgepodge of recipes. A few they remembered, the rest were forgotten.

I nearly wept to see that barely three to four students out of 60 could prove the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. None could prove that similar triangles have proportional sides. Quite a few had difficulty with fractions, some did not know how to take the square root of four or nine or unless armed with a calculator, and translating even simple real-life situations (like compound interest) into equations was difficult. Twelve-year-old kids in Japan or Europe would have done better.

Their teachers are still worse. Earlier I had the misfortune of teaching math courses to college math teachers. In their late 30s or early 40s, most were staid and stable family men who had come to university, expecting to get a higher degree and hence a higher pay grade.

But for all their years of teaching math, they were blanks. Diluting my nominally ‘advanced math’ course to a beginning level course did not help. My conscience could not allow a single teacher to pass.

Could the use of English — a difficult language for all except ‘O’ and ‘A’ level students — reasonably explain this dreadful situation? I am sympathetic to this point of view and therefore use Urdu exclusively in my physics and math lectures, both in distance learning modules and in real-time teaching (except when a university’s regulations require that I teach in English). But this barely solves 10-20pc of the problem.

So then is the math curriculum at fault? It certainly can be improved but almost the same topics in math and science are listed in Pakistani curricula as would expectedly be covered by a similar cohort internationally. In fact, primary school children in Pakistan are expected to carry a bigger burden than overseas kids.

The impediment to learning proper math is just one — wrong learning goals, wrong attitudes. Mathematics does not require labs, computers, or fancy gadgetry. But it does demand mental capacity and concentration. Nothing is true in math unless established by argumentation based upon a rigorous chain of logic, with each link firmly attached to the preceding one. The teacher who cannot correctly solve a math problem by following the defined logic will suffer loss of face before his students.

Contrast this with the madressah model wherein truth is defined by the teacher and prescribed books. The teacher’s job is to convey the book contents, and the student’s job is to appropriately absorb and memorise. There are no problems to be solved, nor is challenging suppositions or checking logical consistency either encouraged or even tolerated.

Limited to religious learning, such learning attitudes are perfectly fine. But their absorption into secular parts of the education system is disastrous. The hafiz-i-science or hafiz-i-math, which are copiously produced, carry exactly zero worth.

Giving logic a back seat has led to more than diminished math or science skills. The ordinary Pakistani person’s ability to reason out problems of daily life has also diminished. There is an increased national susceptibility to conspiracy theories, decreased ability to tell friend from foe, and more frequent resort to violence rather than argumentation. The quality of Pakistan’s television channels reflects today’s quality of thought.

For too long education reform advocates have been barking up the wrong tree. A bigger education budget, better pay for teachers, more schools and universities, or changing instructional languages will not improve learning outcomes. As long as teachers and students remain shackled to the madressah mindset, they will remain mentally stunted. 

The real challenge lies in figuring out how to set their minds free.

A matter of Life and Trust

by thelegglance

Like so many others, the activities of the last couple of days have left me in despair about cricket in England.  That the ECB can invoke a question of trust in their carefully rehearsed PR speak was roundly met with hollow laughs amongst professionals, amateurs and supporters alike.  So much of the focus has been on Kevin Pietersen for obvious reasons, yet the ECB will be perversely pleased by that, because it avoids the wider questions and the wider problems.

That Pietersen has been treated dreadfully is a given even amongst those who are not remotely his fans – and let’s nail this particular straw man argument right here, there are a tiny number of people who are proper, out and out Pietersen fans.  Most of the others are England fans who may or may not think the side would be better with him in it, but believe a team should be selected from its best players, and who know a stitch up when they see one.

There is no doubt at all that Graves told him it was a clean slate, not just from his public pronouncements, but in two phone calls.  Pietersen responded to that by giving up his IPL contract to come and play county cricket.   He did what was asked of him.  Pietersen might be wealthy, but making someone give up a contract worth hundreds of thousands is not a small matter.  There have been some comments that Graves is just one person and that no guarantees were given.  This is sophistry of the highest order.  That one person is the incoming chairman of the ECB, and Pietersen trusted what he said.  More than that, if he has gone out on a limb then there was plenty of opportunity for the likes of Tom Harrison to talk to him and tell him that was not ECB policy.  He didn’t do so.

Let’s call this what it is – a lie.  They lied to him, an action of both commission and omission.  Pietersen might be a controversial figure, but he did not and does not deserve that.  At no point yesterday has there been so much as a hint of an apology for that.  That is outrageous behaviour.  Whataboutery concerning Pietersen is not the issue at hand here – it wasn’t him that kept banging on about trust.  The ECB are the organisation comprised of people that promptly leaked the outcome of Pietersen’s meeting with Strauss and Harrison minutes after it happened, the organisation on whose watch the coach Peter Moores found out he was being sacked via the media before they’d bothered to tell him (leaks or otherwise is irrelevant to this – it’s what happened), who backed Alastair Cook vocally two days before sacking him as ODI captain, who allowed a private memo from the England captain in 2009 to leak to the press.  What Pietersen has or has not done over the years does not for a single second justify any of this.  To talk about trust is a sick joke.

Nasser Hussain tried to make the point that trust has to go both ways, and Strauss’s response that he isn’t blaming anyone for the breakdown of it simply isn’t good enough.  He can refuse to talk about where Pietersen is at fault, that’s his prerogative, but he cannot avoid the complicity of the ECB, the organisation he works for.  Tom Harrison apologised to Peter Moores for how he found out about his sacking.  An apology to Kevin Pietersen for being led up the garden path is the very minimum that is needed.

It’s not going to happen of course.  The arrogance of the ECB knows no limits.  Over a year later they still haven’t addressed the realities of the “Outside Cricket” jibe and the utter contempt that signified for those who buy tickets and play the game.  And here is the fundamental question of trust as it really is, not as the ECB would like it to be.  There is none for the ECB.  The way Pietersen has been treated – and indeed the way Moores was treated – are indicative of an organisation that considers human beings to be commodities and nothing more.  Losing the trust of individuals barely scratches at the surface of the problem, because despite the ECB’s apparent belief, the public are not stupid.  They can see how this translates into a wider lack of interest or concern for anyone that doesn’t fit into their narrow field of vision.

The media response has been  fairly predictable in the way it has gone down the usual lines.  What the ones who loathe Pietersen fail to understand is that it is not about that, it is entirely within their rights to despise him and not want him anywhere near the England team while at the same time recognising that the ECB have behaved poorly.  The inability of some of them to see things through anything other than a Pietersen prism is the reason they attract such contempt.  If Pietersen is a side show to the wider issue, then deal with the wider issue.  Being an apologist for awful ECB conduct is not journalism, it is cheerleading.  Let’s put it a different way, if it was someone other than Pietersen who was the central player in the drama, would there be such fawning coverage of the ECB itself? This goes to the crux of the matter, because if not, then it means that they need to ask themselves about the job they are doing – their loathing of Pietersen is blinding them to what are far more important questions.

It is abundantly clear Pietersen is not coming back.  So given that, it raises a whole series more questions about where we go from here.

The first thing that Strauss and Harrison talked about was the plan for 2019.  In itself, this is hardly surprising – all new arrivals give themselves a nebulous target some time in the distant future, usually when they’re fairly certain the near term is going to be catastrophic and don’t want to be blamed for it.  But there are a couple of things about that.  By focusing so relentlessly on it, they invite ridicule that it’s tantamount to a Soviet Five Year Plan that was simply replaced by another Five Year Plan when the previous one went wrong.  In one day cricket, England cleared the decks for the World Cup, moved the Ashes with spectacular – in one sense anyway – results.  Yet now they are telling us not to worry, there’s another new plan coming along, and this one will be a belter.

Ah, but we should trust them we are told.  Why?  For what reason should we trust these people who have made a monumental mess of everything they have touched.  Trust needs to be earned, as  Strauss himself banged on about with that terrified look in his eye, but he apparently again didn’t grasp that the horrible masses don’t believe him.

It’s nothing more than a permanent offer of jam tomorrow.  That can work for a bit, yet they drew much greater attention to it by self-evidently rejecting a player who might be of value in the here and now.  Anyone over the age of about 15 can remember rotten England teams, but it’s been a fair while since having a weakened side was specific policy.

The Ashes this summer are not sold out.  It’s not disastrously so, but it’s not brilliant either.  Next summer we have Sri Lanka (again – though doubtless they’ll compensate for that by not playing them again until about 2030) and Pakistan.  If ticket sales are struggling for this year, what on earth is going to be like next year?  The blasé talk about what happens in four years time is surely not a deliberate writing off of the near term, but once again it does give the impression of it, which is exceptionally clumsy, even if not intended.  Those who have bought tickets are perfectly entitled to ask what the point of going is if the current team is not the focus.  It can’t especially cheer up the players either.

Buried in the detail was the sacking of Ian Bell as vice captain and Stuart Broad as T20 captain. Poor Bell.  He seems to be the favoured whipping boy, there’s no question that he has been briefed against – when Cook’s position came under scrutiny for captaincy (not exactly a rare event) there were a slew of articles talking about how badly Bell had done in team building events to make it clear he wasn’t a viable alternative.  This is a minor matter in relative terms, but once again a player suffers in certain media quarters when the status quo is under threat.  Broad’s removal as T20 captain is less surprising in itself, but replacing him with Eoin Morgan perhaps is, given his recent troubles.  Broad might wonder quite how he has been booted while the Test captain is so strongly backed.

As for Cook himself, although at first sight it seems he’s been thoroughly backed, in reality he’s already been given notice on his captaincy.  The appointment of Root as his second in command is the first time the ECB have deliberately chosen someone who they feel (the “they” is important here) can take over.  The ECB are plainly not optimistic about this summer, and Cook now appears to be in place as a firebreak for when it all goes horribly wrong.  Not remotely the first time they’ve used this tactic, and whatever the opinions on Cook, it seems quite likely he is the next sacrificial lamb.  What that does suggest though, is that the Ashes themselves are not regarded as the priority.  It may also just be dawning on Cook that if he doesn’t win this summer, he’s probably out (it is the ECB of course.  So they could decide to grant him life tenure – funny how we don’t trust them…), and therefore if Vaughan is right and Cook said he would resign if Pietersen was recalled, then he’s signed his own death warrant by refusing to include a player who might give them a better chance, and thus him a better chance of keeping the captaincy.

And then we come to the question of the coach.  The sacking of Moores was nothing other than a panic response.  That he shouldn’t have been appointed in the first place doesn’t alter the truth that Moores had a point when he complained he hadn’t been given enough time.  Although you could equally argue he’d had far too much time given the results were pretty dire, if you are going to appoint a coach with a brief to build a new team, and then sack him a year later when the said new team doesn’t do too well then you’ve sold him a pup.

Both Strauss and Harrison responded to questions about Jason Gillespie by saying that he is certainly one of those they will want to talk to.  In ECB speak, this is tantamount to openly saying he hasn’t got a prayer, because the front runner never seems to get the job with them.

The Pietersen affair has rightly re-opened the question as to what sort of coach will take on a role where certain players are denied to them through policy.  It may well be the case that Gillespie wouldn’t want Pietersen anywhere near the team, but there has to be significant risk that he will feel having that principle enforced at a level above him will be considered an interference in his ability to do his job.  There remains the feeling that the lack of high profile coaches applying last time was directly related to interference in team selection.  And here’s the rub – if by their actions against Pietersen they have limited their ability to obtain the best coach, that is a far wider impact than a single player, and a direct failure on the part of the ECB to do their job.   This has already happened with the choice of Director, Cricket (I wonder how much it cost to have the consultants decide on that format?) where Vaughan hinted, and Stewart openly stated, that they would want to select from all players.  Repeating this with the coach is an abrogation of their responsibilities to English cricket to play the best team, with the best support staff, to give them the best chance of winning.

The ECB have tried to pretend the Pietersen omnishambles is a discrete issue.  It isn’t, it pervades everything they are doing and everything they have done.  The consequences of it are ongoing and extremely deep.  If high quality coaches are uninterested in the England job because of how they’ve dealt with Pietersen, that is appalling mismanagement not of a single player, but of the entire England structure.

The question must be posed, what is the ECB actually for?  If it is a governing body of cricket domestically, then their lack of interest in the game below the exalted professional level is a savage indictment of them not doing their job in any way.  Participation levels have dropped, viewing figures for England on Sky are now lower than they are for darts.  There are huge swathes of supporters disaffected and disillusioned.  Ed Smith’s ridiculous attempt to claim that all those NOT using social media are silently delighted with the ECB merely reinforces the cosy image of those Inside Cricket, talking amongst themselves.  They don’t see the anger, and are taken aback by it, because they don’t understand why.  The ECB hierarchy see the world through the prism of their own experiences, while the media have absolutely no idea whatever about the supporters and their world.  When did any of the journalists last queue for 90 minutes to get a beer?  When did they last find themselves squeezed into a tiny seat with inadequate legroom?  When did they discover that lunchtime is a terrible time to try and get some food at a Test?

They have no idea about any of this, because it’s not part of their world.  The reaction to the Pietersen debacle is one of puzzlement as much as anything else – the confusion of people for whom the masses might as well be speaking a different language.  There is simply no doubt the ECB have succeeded in keeping the bulk of the cricket press onside, while at the same time driving a huge wedge between them and the wider cricketing public.  Bloggers, commenters and tweeters might not be representative of the wider public (although they might well be too), but they are extremely important for one reason alone – they tend to be the kind who care sufficiently to consider buying tickets.   How many bilious inadequates not attending does it take to become noticeable?  One for you to work out Ed.

It’s a matter of trust we are told.  There is none.  And the worst part of it is, they don’t even realise why it is, or what they’ve done wrong.  That’s why there are some English cricket fans actively hoping for Australia to hammer England this summer.  Think about that.  That’s the ECB legacy.  Well done chaps.