State or private? Painful school choice that still fuels inequality in Britain

Will Hutton in The Guardian

 

Locals and Harrow boys meet outside Lord’s at the 1937 Eton v Harrow cricket match. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Getty Images
 

I remember vividly one harrowing night at the end of the school summer term 23 years ago. My nine-year-old daughter was inconsolable. All her friends were leaving her very good state school to be placed by their parents in various private schools in the Oxford area. She cried at her loss. My wife cried. Her younger sister cried, because her sister and mother were crying. The house was drenched in tears. We were living the continuing divisive disaster that is the British education system, the most socially engineered to advantage privilege in the world.

At the playground swings a few days earlier, I had overheard a group of mothers explaining to one another why they were going private. The state schools weren’t challenging enough for exceptional children like their own and the comprehensive was only just recovering from a reorganisation. They just weren’t prepared to take the risk. Best of all, their daughters could continue their friendships and mix with other children like them.

I remember thinking that the local comprehensive didn’t deserve such criticism; it got an exceptional proportion of its students to university. But it was part of the national conversation that there was little good in state education, dominated, as it was, by trade unions, trendy teaching methods, an ideology that all should have prizes and a general lack of commitment to excellence. Two years later, Chris Woodhead was appointed chief inspector of schools. The language and attitudes of those mothers at the swings suddenly became the lingua franca of the man charged with improving our schools.

His death last week was the trigger for another outpouring of brave-Chris-the-man-who-said-it-like-it-should-be-said pieces, admiring his honesty in declaring that there were 15,000 teachers who should be sacked, his excoriation of soft teaching methods and praise of his insistence that kids needed to acquire both skills and knowledge for knowledge’s sake. His target was the “blob”, the educational establishment identified by former education secretary Michael Gove, who defend “collectivist” public education and the mediocrity of the status quo. The consensus was that we need yet more of that energy now to mount the ongoing fight against the liberal/left blob still defending the indefensible.

Except there has been a quiet revolution taking place in our state schools, especially primary schools, which would be hard to imagine if the blob really was as effective in sustaining mediocrity as its critics say. The inconvenient truth is that the state school system is in the round good and improving. Sir Michael Wilshaw, who enraged so many educationalists by insisting when he took the job as chief inspector of schools that he would tolerate no excuses for failure, now declares that after 7,000 school inspections over the last year, 82% of primary schools and 71% of secondary schools are good or outstanding.

Governance is better; leadership is better; incentives are better; teachers are better motivated; trade unions support higher standards; academies are working; even initiatives such as Teach First are making a measurable difference. Indeed, a recent Sutton Trust report found that there are now 11,000 ex-Oxbridge teachers in the state sector, having doubled since 2003. Young men and women, as I know from my college in Oxford, want to make a difference to society rather than teach the already privileged. In some parts of the country, there has been something of a revolution. London now outperforms the rest of the country in GCSE and A-level results, a legacy of the last Labour government melding a Woodheadian commitment to academic rigour with more collectivist money and encouraging and rewarding better leadership. A generation of education reform has worked.

Yet I have no doubt that there are groups of middle-class mothers at playgrounds still shaking their heads at the well-publicised problems of the state system – despite its improvement. They need state schools to be crap to justify what would otherwise be an obvious attempt to advantage their own children over others and embrace the social apartheid of private education. The centre-right press ensures that every failing is magnified, every success under-reported. Wilshaw, complain centre-right commentators, has gone rogue. Doesn’t he know that state school teachers are unionised second-raters who don’t understand the importance of literacy and numeracy and who put up with disruptive classes? Ofsted should be abolished and the state school system dismantled into a system of free schools removed from all forms of suffocating public influence. Indeed, with the government pledged to create another 500 on top of 400 already created, the free school movement is well entrenched.

Which, as it grows, will become a disaster. The derided blob has always had one aim: to offer the best education for all. It probably did over-emphasise comprehensiveness over excellence in the 1970s and 80s, but those days are long gone. Today’s left/right blend of commitment to universality, less bad funding, rigour and leadership has worked. The danger is that the government is going to kill that alchemy and by rolling back universality, publicness and, crucially, the funding so crucial to recent success, further worsen the dreadful inequalities besetting education and wider society. But from their point of view, who cares? The casualties of this process don’t vote Tory anyway. Their constituency is the opters-out, private and public; 48% of Tory MPs are privately educated.

Opting out is the process that fuels inequality, still the hallmark of our education system. The Sutton Trust found that despite the recent improvement, children from the richer fifth of neighbourhoods are nine times more likely to go to a good university than the fifth from the poorest. Inequality defines life chances. Part of the explanation is private schools: part that socioeconomic background is crucial to family stability; and part that free schools and academies are disproportionately represented in richer areas. If we want a society in which the mass flourishes, then fragmenting our system into one built on autonomy, opting out and individualism – cementing inequalities – is precisely the wrong direction of travel.

Anthony Seldon, outgoing headmaster of Wellington College, complains of the narcissism of so many parents – videoing, rather than watching, school plays and rarely turning up for parents’ evenings. But that is where the values of libertarian conservatism leads. Looking back, my wife and I felt that parents like us should stand by the universal system; our daughter did well and many of her friends at the time, whose parents believed in their exceptionalism, have had unhappy lives. It would have been so much better if those children had been allowed to stick together in a system that spelled out their togetherness while teaching them with rigour. The English tragedy is that we will never get there.

The work of a great teacher is for life

Michael Henderson in The Telegraph

Teachers, as John Osborne observed, are underpaid as child-minders, and overpaid as educators. DH Lawrence, who, like many writers, was a teacher, knew even more keenly the difficulty of imparting knowledge both to young people who are not particularly interested and to those who are. Education is a significant feature of his twinned novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love.

The wisest teachers understand that the best work they do may not be apparent for many years – decades, even. From the sunlit meadows of middle age, it is possible to recall those who taught us in our youth, and recognise the debt we owe them. But it would be a very precocious teenager who could say as much.

Getting good grades is important, but it is not the only important thing, and ultimately it is not the most important thing. Our lives are shaped by other forces, and so it is only with the passing of the years that we acknowledge the value of those teachers who opened doors, though we did not at the time recognise their many acts of kindness.

Last month, our school held a memorial service for an English teacher who opened doors aplenty, not least in the summer months when he captained a cricket team, the Vagabonds, that wandered around the villages of Derbyshire. Michael Charlesworth was a liberal, tolerant man who knew that our language was our greatest gift. He was also a superb director of plays, and a bit of a mummer himself.

Although he retired a quarter of a century ago, the chapel was full of people who had travelled from far and wide to celebrate his life. There were proper hymns, well sung, and Shakespeare made his customary appearance before Sir Christopher Frayling, one of Mike’s old boys, presented an address on behalf of us all. Then we recessed to the organ voluntary – the theme tune from Match of the Day!

Most people, one hopes, had a teacher like that. A Mr Chips figure – appropriate in this case, as the great Robert Donat film of 1939 was shot at our school. The horrible modern word is “inspirational” but if your life has been touched in some way, you feel it in your blood.

Sir Chris Woodhead, who died this week, admired Lawrence. He, too, understood the difficulties of “drawing out” (from the Latin verb “educare”), but he spent most of his life trying to do just that, first in the classroom and then as head of Ofsted. That he had to put up with years of abuse from bigoted, incompetent teachers was a tribute of sorts. He told them what they needed to hear but feared to be told.

^{Christopher Woodhead visiting Davenant Foundation School in Essex in 1998}

If anybody required a reminder of just how ghastly some of these teachers were – and are – the evidence could be found on websites after Woodhead passed away. “May you rot in hell,” screamed one delightful scribbler. Consider those words, and imagine, if you can, the person who wrote them: an adult with responsibility for educating children.

Belatedly, there is recognition, even from his opponents, that Woodhead was on to something. Just as many teachers, the ones not brainwashed by the “holistic problematised pedagogies” that Woodhead liked to mock, realise that Michael Gove’s reforms are beginning to bear fruit.

Although, like every generation before, today’s pupils may have to wait years to find out how and why.

The real benefit cheats are the employers who are milking the system

In the last year, Tesco has cost the Treasury £364m in pay-rate supplements. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty


Deborah Orr in The Guardian


I really don’t know why the government is making such heavy weather of cutting £12bn off the benefits bill. That sum, and much more, could be cut at the stroke of a pen – though it would mean that the government would have to put its money where its mouth is and make it a legal requirement for employers to pay the living wage. If a company really can’t afford to, then it’s the company that should be applying for supplements, not the people who work for it.

Cameron wants to curb in-work benefits. No wonder: just £8bn on benefits goes to the unemployed, while an estimated £76bn, according to James Ferguson of Money Week, goes to people who are working. The government says this shouldn’t be happening. Cameron insists employers should be paying wages people can live on – which, funnily enough, is the sort of thing unions say, although they no longer have any power to make it happen.

It’s what Labour says, too, now the party is out of power. When it was in power, it avoided confrontation with employers offering poverty wages, and with the unions, by kindly offering to make up the difference between the minimum wage and a living wage via the benefits system.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. The Tories excoriate Labour because Labour accepted the Conservative idea that employers should be freed from the burden of social responsibility. Labour spent a lot of money on protecting employers from such irksome duties. The Conservatives still don’t want to impose such irksome duties, but don’t want to stump up for the hefty bill that ensues from failing to do so either.

Just one of the woeful consequences of Labour’s drive to support employers by supplementing employees is that it makes the figures look like the Department of Work and Pensions is showering taxpayers’ money on the feckless, when it is actually showering taxpayers’ money on businesses. Employing someone has come to be seen as such a noble pursuit that businesses are paid to do it. Businesses don’t, of course, complain that this interferes with the free market. Money spent supplementing wages should be coming from the Business and Enterprise budget, with companies vetted to assess whether they are justified in offering pay below the living wage. Those who are can be offered loans to cover the difference, repayable in much the same manner as student tuition fees. They are hiring staff to grow their own businesses, after all. Such entrepreneurial risk-taking is seen as admirable. But when the taxpayer is taking on so much of the cost, and the benefit-receiving employee is getting so much of the blame, there’s really only sheer nerve and hypocrisy left to be admired.

Businesses, of course, would hate having to admit that they expect the state to prop up their poverty wages. They despise “red tape”, after all. Although that doesn’t stop them employing individuals who must submit themselves and their families to miles of red tape and minute government scrutiny because their wages aren’t enough to live on.

Work in the retail sector is notoriously badly paid, so it should be no surprise that around £11bn in in-work benefit is paid each year to people working in retail. Employees at Next receive more money in pay-rate supplements than the company pays in tax (about £2,087 per low-paid worker). In the last year, Tesco has cost the Treasury £364m in pay-rate supplements. Cameron talks about dysfunctional merry-go-rounds of tax and spend. But the culprits aren’t ordinary people scraping by. The culprits are employers milking the system.

The in-work benefits system also encourages businesses to employ lots of people part-time, rather than fewer people full-time. A couple has to work 24 hours a week to qualify for in-work benefits, and a single person 16 hours. The more part-time people you employ, the more the government is supplementing your payroll, and the easier it is to get competent staff on the cheap.

Much of the reduction in unemployment seen over the last couple of years is because people are taking part-time work when they would prefer full-time work. The government may trumpet the decline in unemployment. But its complaints about the cost of in-work benefits are an acknowledgement that the Department of Work and Pensions is paying out a lot of cash to make that happen.

A system that minimises costs while maximising profits is bound to result in a mismatch between what people earn and what it costs them to live. This tendency can be seen most clearly in the housing market. In 2009-10,according to House of Commons figures, 478,000 people with jobs claimed housing benefit, at a cost of £2.2bn. By 2014-15, it was 962,000 and £4.6bn, and it’s set to continue rising if things don’t change. What things?

It’s endlessly said by everybody that the social housing supply has to increase. But no one seems willing to take their valuable piece of land and render it much less valuable by building social housing on it, when they could keep it as an asset or sell it to private developers instead. Private landlords are the obvious beneficiaries.

But again it’s the person claiming the housing benefit that is seen as the problem, not the person who wants the “market rate” when the market isn’t paying it. Again, the person making the profit gets the benefit, rather than the person who doesn’t have enough income to put a roof over his head. Just as it’s time to restrict state benefits paid to employers via employees, it’s time to restrict benefits paid to landlords via tenants.

The Conservatives, I’m afraid, seem to do nothing at all in government except complain that Labour spent too much money on mitigating the effects of the previous Conservative government’s policies. Employers are allowed to set wages and landlords allowed to set rents without regard to the amount of money people have to live on. The least the state can do is be honest about the amount of state money that is spent on defending the right to make profits, instead of blaming the hapless citizens from whom the profit is wrung.

Dutch city of Utrecht to experiment with a universal, unconditional income

Louis Dore in The Independent

The Dutch city of Utrecht will start an experiment which hopes to determine whether society works effectively with universal, unconditional income introduced.

The city has paired up with the local university to establish whether the concept of 'basic income' can work in real life, and plans to begin the experiment at the end of the summer holidays.

Basic income is a universal, unconditional form of payment to individuals, which covers their living costs. The concept is to allow people to choose to work more flexible hours in a less regimented society, allowing more time for care, volunteering and study.

The Netherlands as a country is no stranger to less traditional work environments - it has the highest proportion of part time workers in the EU, 46.1 per cent. However, Utrecht's experiment with welfare is expected to be the first of its kind in the country.

Alderman for Work and Income Victor Everhardt told DeStad Utrecht: "One group will have compensation and consideration for an allowance, another group with a basic income without rules and of course a control group which adhere to the current rules."

"Our data shows that less than 1.5 percent abuse the welfare, but, before we get into all kinds of principled debate about whether we should or should not enter, we need to first examine if basic income even really works.

"What happens if someone gets a monthly amount without rules and controls? Will someone sitting passively at home or do people develop themselves and provide a meaningful contribution to our society?"

The city is also planning to talk to other municipalities about setting up similar experiments, including Nijmegen, Wageningen, Tilburg and Groningen, awaiting permission from The Hague in order to do so. 

Peter Moores: 'The portrayal of me as a coach is wrong'

George Dobell - Cricinfo

"Frustration" is a word that crops up often in Peter Moores' sentences at present.

He is "frustrated" that he cannot finish the job he started in rebuilding the England team. He is frustrated that he will never lead England through an Ashes series. He is "frustrated" that history appears to have repeated itself. And he is, in his words, "doubly frustrated" that his portrayal in the media differs so markedly from reality.

That portrayal stems, in part, from a radio interview conducted by the BBC moments after England's World Cup exit. In it, Moores was alleged to have said that England would need to check the "data" before coming to any conclusions about the reasons for their failure.

It came to be a defining moment in his downfall. It has been used to illustrate his perceived faults: an obsession with stats and a propensity to overanalyse. England's talented young players, it was said, were stifled by such a policy.

But it never happened. As was reported by ESPNcricinfo, Moores actually said "later" in that BBC interview. But his words were misheard - an honest and understandable mistake as there was a minor microphone malfunction during the interview - and while the BBC subsequently apologised to him (at first verbally and then in writing), the error was public and the apology was private. The damage, in terms of public perception, was done.

The image of Moores as stats-driven has little basis in reality. So frustrated was Nathan Leamon, England's analyst at the World Cup, by the lack of use of his statistics that it was briefly feared he may go home. Meanwhile Paul Farbrace, Moores' faithful deputy and the man who has recently been portrayed as a liberator of the England team, has said repeatedly that the Sri Lanka team he coached to success in the 2014 World T20 used such data far more.



"I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride" © Getty Images





While it is true Moores used the word "data" during an excellent eight-minute interview on Sky (he said "we'll have to analyse the data") it was in response to several detailed questions and after an initial answer that started: "Now is not the time to be analysing."

It is Moores' frustration - that word again - at such a characterisation that has prompted him to talk now. While he remained silent the first time he was sacked as England coach, declining lucrative invitations to give his side of the story, this time he has decided to speak in an attempt to correct at least a few of the misconceptions about his period as coach. He was not paid and the only item he would not discuss is how he was sacked.

While Moores will not be drawn on it - he is simply not the sort to be dragged into mudslinging - ESPNcricinfo understands that he learned of his fate after his wife read about it on Twitter and phoned him. Whatever you think of him or Paul Downton (who learned of his fate a similar way), they deserved better than that. The ECB, to its credit, apologised in private and public.

He does not comment, though. He hardly ever does. When he was sacked as England coach at the start of 2009, he said nothing. When England went to No. 1 in the Test rankings in 2011, largely with players he had selected, he said nothing. When Kevin Pietersen's book came out, he said nothing. And each day he woke up and read another column from an ex-player - usually an ex-player he had dropped during his first spell as England coach - rubbishing his methods and caricaturing his personality, he said nothing.

"I have to accept my time as England coach has gone," Moores says. "It's pretty hard to accept. But it's done. The umpire's finger is up. I have to look at where I go next.

"But I am frustrated. The portrayal of me as a coach in the media is just wrong. If people said 'I don't rate you as a coach' then fine. But when it's not what you are, it's really frustrating.

"I don't know how to change that. I've not spent my life trying to be really good with the media; I've spent it trying to make players better. I still passionately want to do that.

"I have an official letter from the BBC. It's a tough one, I didn't say it. I know what I am as a coach. I've done it for a long time. I've been in the game for 33 years and I've coached for 17. I know the game. And what I've learned is, my job is to simplify the game for players and free them up to go and play.

"We moved away from stats and data. Coaching doesn't work like that at all. You watch a lot to say a little. It's not a numbers game. We kept it simple. We tried to give the players responsibility to lead themselves.

"There is a big support staff with England. And they're all valuable. You need the security staff, the physio and the doctor. But there are times when you just want the 11 players and two coaches to watch the game and talk about it together. We were creating that environment. We were getting there."

The "we were getting there" phrase is another recurring theme. Moores felt his England side were on the right track. While he accepts the World Cup was wretched, there was evidence in Test cricket, that they were making progress. At the time he was sacked, England - a side containing half-a-dozen young or inexperienced players - had won four and lost one of their last six Tests.

Against relatively modest opposition that is perhaps decent rather than exceptional. But Moores did inherit an England side that had just been beaten 5-0 in the Ashes and was clearly in a transitional phase. It was always going to take time.

"In Test terms, we felt we had turned a corner," Moores says. "We were getting there. Would I have been sacked had we won in Barbados? You'll have to ask the people who made the decision. I was aware that things were building but I wasn't expecting it.

"The frustration is not being able to carry something through. When I took the job, I knew we would go through this period of trial. And transition is difficult. You will lose sometimes.

"The evolution, of a team, of a player, is that you're going to be inconsistent. You're going to lose. But in Tests we were moving and moving quite fast. You could see it happening. Young players were developing fast. And you know there is a timeframe for that.

"I'm also confident in my ability to evolve teams to become very good teams. And, given time, I've always gone on to be successful. And you're not trying to be successful for a short time, but for a long time.

"So to not have time to finish the job with England... I thought we were getting there. I was genuinely excited when we got back from the Caribbean."

Moores denies any mixed emotions at watching England's improved showing against New Zealand. But it has not gone unnoticed that, just as he built the side that Andy Flower went on to lead to such success (Flower, it should be noted, was always the first to praise Moores' contribution), he will spend the next few years seeing some of those he selected this time flourish in international cricket.

It was, after all, Moores that replaced the new-ball pair of Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard with James Anderson and Stuart Broad. He installed Graeme Swann as first-choice spinner and Matt Prior as wicketkeeper. He laid many of the foundations on which Flower built.

This time, his commitment to Jos Buttler, Moeen Ali, Gary Ballance (originally selected by Flower), Joe Root (who had been dropped by the time Moores took over) and others could have similar long-term benefits.



Moores brought new faces into the England side during both spells in charge © AFP





"I didn't go into the job to get the credit," he says. "But yes, history probably has repeated itself a bit. I'd love it if England won the Ashes. I'm an England fan.

"I've probably debuted more players than most England coaches. You hope when you introduce players that they'll carry on in the long term. I think we picked some good players who will become good England players over time. They'll go through ups and down.

"I know I left a united group of people - players and coaches - with a clear vision of where we were going and working towards it. I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride."

It seems he was rated in his second spell as England coach, in part, by the mistakes he made in his first. Famously described as "the woodpecker" by Kevin Pietersen - an image that suggests a man forever tapping away at players and, as a result, preventing them from relaxing - Moores admits he made some mistakes the first time around.

"I don't think there was any truth in the woodpecker thing, no," he says now. "But I do think the version of me as a coach now to the version that first coached England is a better version.

"I evolved quite a lot as a coach, as a player would. It's no different. This time I knew what I was going into. You understand the real challenges for players, as you've been there before.

"I've reflected on that first time. We needed to change. And I look back and think, yes, in my enthusiasm, I pushed too hard. You should allow that to happen. I wanted them to be fitter and, yes, you can push too hard.

"So I knew when I came in this time, there had been mistakes made. I wanted to allow captains to evolve themselves and create a place where the players felt supported.

"Part of the skill of a coach is to disappear. You're in the room but it's as if you aren't. You're not making anyone nervous. Because if you need 40 to win in four overs, nobody wants a coach who is twitchy.

"Look, I've made loads of mistakes as a coach. But you make fewer as you learn. That side of my coaching, I know, I've got better."

England's performance - or lack of it - at the World Cup does not reflect well on anyone, though. While they went into the event talking an aggressive game, they played pretty timid cricket, with Moores' selections - Ian Bell as opener and Gary Ballance at No. 3 - contrasting starkly with the approach in the recent ODI series against New Zealand.

So does he accept that either the selections were flawed or he was unable to coax the best out of the players?

"In terms of selection, we got to the final of the tri-series with Ian Bell playing very well. I think he made two centuries and we made 300 against Australia. And Moeen was playing with freedom.

"We moved James Taylor down the order as we felt he was a good finisher and brought Gary in as he has a very good record in limited-overs cricket. He's a very good player. Ravi Bopara was struggling a bit and not really getting a bowl. It all felt natural at the time and we tried to stay consistent in selection.

"As to getting it out of them... great players don't always play great cricket. It didn't happen for them. Senior players didn't grab the game by the scruff of neck. But you learn from failure and the reaction of those players who went through it is encouraging.

"But yes, I felt hollow at the end of the tournament."

The one thing Moores will not ever do is blame the players. Never, in public or private, does he seek to do so. In fact, it is notable that, on or off the record, he does not criticise anyone. Not Andrew Strauss, not Kevin Pietersen (about whom he says, "he's a funny mix. There are things I admire") and not Colin Graves, who was in Barbados at the time of Moores' last Test but didn't find the time to tell his coach he was about to be sacked. His only gripe, really, is with his public image as a stats-driven, robotic coach and the interview that may have cemented that reputation.

It is notable, too, that several of the players have made their support of Moores public. Joe Root, who called him "brilliant" and praised him as knowing "how to get the best out of me", crediting Moores for his "drastic improvement", was the most vocal but also far from atypical. Whoever Strauss consulted before making his decision, it certainly was not the England Test squad. Many of them remain in touch with him. "Once your coach, always your coach," Moores says with a smile. "They know they can call me.

"Joe's words were appreciated. It was brave of him to say that at that time."

And yet, after two sackings and some treatment that can only be described as shoddy, Moores says he would still work for the ECB again. While he has not yet been approached for a role at Loughborough - an organisation that is about to have a radical overhaul - it remains highly probable that he will be. His eye for young talent, his record as a developer of that talent, and his ability to impart knowledge to other coaches, remain assets.

"Yes, I'd work for the ECB again," he says. "A role at Loughborough would be exciting. I love coaching and that would be working with the best players and coaches. Yes, it appeals.

"Professional sport can be cruel. Or maybe ruthless is a better word. You know that when you go into it. You are immersed in it."

His fault, as much as it is one, was his inability to play the media or political game. His failure to understand that style is as important as substance when it comes to selling yourself to the public. His failure to understand the dark side of the organisation that had employed him.

While a perception that he was closely aligned to an unattractive ECB regime - the regime of Downton and Giles Clarke that talked of people being "outside cricket" - no doubt hurt him, his main fault may well have been simply being a decent man in an increasingly indecent world. A man who thought that, if he worked hard, planned for the future and forged a strong relationship, it would be enough.

And that's the lasting impression of Moores. For whatever you think of his coaching - his international record is modest; his county and development record excellent - as a man, he has a dignity that is rare in professional sport.

A sense of perspective, too. After England lost to India at Lord's last summer, Moores was asked if he was at "rock bottom". His reply - "who knows what rock bottom is, but it isn't losing a cricket match" - sums him up better than anything else he said in his period at the helm. Even after his second sacking, he found a positive. "If feels as if I've got my wife and kids back," he said.

Following this interview, he went to see his son, Tom, a hard-hitting wicketkeeper-batsman, play for Nottinghamshire seconds against Warwickshire. The sacking has hurt, but he will cope. "A glass of wine helps," he says.

"I don't put this on," he says as the interview draws to a close. "I don't know if it's from my mum or what. But I am a calm person who can see the value of looking at people in their best light. It was such a slanging match last time. There were so many opinions. And so much of it was wrong. I didn't want to get involved. It's all so easy to do that. I'm not going down that route.

"I've been offered book deals, but it's not who I am. And if I did one, I would want it to be things I've learned and stories to help people get the best out of themselves and others. I have to be true to what I am. There's not a lot of mileage in negativity, you know.

"Of course it's been tough. This is the first summer for 33 years I've not been involved in the game in a professional way. But I'm a coach. It's what I do. I love England and I love cricket. The game doesn't owe me anything. It's been great fun working in it. And the hunger... it's just starting to come back."

Greece is a sideshow. The eurozone has failed, and Germans are its victims too

'This is what the noble European project is turning into: a grim march to the bottom. This isn’t about creating a deeper democracy, but deeper markets.' Photograph: Matt Kenyon

 Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Nearly every discussion of the Greek fiasco is based on a morality play. Call it Naughty Greece versus Noble Europe. Those troublesome Greeks never belonged in the euro, runs this story. Once inside, they got themselves into a big fat mess – and now it’s up to Europe to sort it all out.

Eurozone creditors raise hopes of Greek bailout deal

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Those are the basics all Wise Folk agree on. Then those on the right go on to say feckless Greece must either accept Europe’s deal or get out of the single currency. Or if more liberal, they hem and haw, cough and splutter, before calling for Europe to show a little more charity to its southern basketcase. Whatever their solution, the Wise Folk agree on the problem: it’s not Brussels that’s at fault, it’s Athens. Oh, those turbulent Greeks! That’s the attitude you smell when the IMF’s Christine Lagarde decries the Syriza government for not being “adult” enough. That’s what licenses the German press to portray Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, as needing “psychiatric help”.

There’s just one problem with this story: like most morality tales, it shatters upon contact with hard reality. Athens is merely the worst outbreak of a much bigger disease within the euro project. Because the single currency isn’t working for ordinary Europeans, from the Ruhr valley to Rome.

On saying this, I don’t close my eyes to the endemic corruption and tax-dodging in Greece (nor indeed, does the outsiders’ movement Syriza, which came to power campaigning against just these vices). Nor am I about to don Farage-ist chalkstripes. My charge is much simpler: the euro project is not only failing to deliver on the promises of its originators, it’s doing the exact opposite – by eroding the living standards of ordinary Europeans. And as we’ll see, that’s true even for those living in the continent’s number one economy, Germany.

First, let’s remind ourselves of the noble pledges made for the euro project. Let’s play the grainy footage of Germany’s Helmut Schmidt and France’s Giscard d’Estaing, as they lay the foundations for Europe’s grand unifier. Most of all, let’s remind ourselves of what the true believers felt. Take this from Oskar Lafontaine, Germany’s minister of finance, on the very eve of the launch of the euro. He talked of “the vision of a united Europe, to be reached through the gradual convergence of living standards, the deepening of democracy, and the flowering of a truly European culture”.

 We could quote a thousand other such stanzas of euro-poetry, but that single line from Lafontaine shows how far the single-currency project has fallen. Instead of raising living standards across Europe, monetary union is pushing them downwards. Rather than deepening democracy, it is undermining it. As for “a truly European culture”, when German journalists accuse Greek ministers of “psychosis”, that mythic agora of nations is a long way off.

Of all these three charges, the first is most important – because it explains how the entire union is being undermined. To see what’s happened to the living standards of ordinary Europeans, turn to some extraordinary research published this year by Heiner Flassbeck, former chief economist at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and Costas Lapavitsas, an economics professor at Soas University of London turned Syriza MP.

In Against the Troika, the German and the Greek publish one chart that explodes the idea that the euro has raised living standards. What they look at is unit labour costs – how much you need to pay staff to make one unit of output: a widget, say, or a bit of software. And they map labour costs across the eurozone from 1999 to 2013. What they find is that German workers have barely seen wages rise for the 14-year stretch. In the short life of the euro, working Germans have fared worse than the French, Austrians, Italians and many across southern Europe.

Yes, we’re talking about the same Germany: the mightiest economy on the continent, the one even David Cameron regards with envy. Yet the people working there and making the country more prosperous have seen barely any reward for their efforts. And this is the model for a continent.

Perhaps you have an image of Deutschland as being a nation of highly skilled, highly rewarded workers in gleaming factories. That workforce and its unions still exist – but it’s shrinking fast. What’s replacing it, according to Germany’s leading expert on inequality, Gerhard Bosch, are crap jobs. The low-wage workforce has shot up and is now almost at US levels, he reckons.

Don’t blame this on the euro, but on the slow decline of German unions, and the trend of business towards outsourcing to cheaper eastern Europe. What the single currency has done is make Germany’s low-wage problems the ruin of an entire continent.

Workers in France, Italy, Spain and the rest of the eurozone are now being undercut by the epic wage freeze going on in the giant country in the middle. Flassbeck and Lapavitsas describe this as Germany’s “beggar thy neighbour” policy – “but only after beggaring its own people”.

In the last century, the other countries in the eurozone could have become more competitive by devaluing their national currencies – just as the UK has done since the banking meltdown. But now they’re all part of the same club, the only post-crash solution has been to pay workers less.

That is expressly what the European commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF are telling Greece: make workers redundant, pay those still in a job much less, and slash pensions for the elderly. But it’s not just in Greece. Nearly every meeting of the Wise Folk in Brussels and Strasbourg comes up with the same communique for “reform” of the labour market and social-security entitlements across the continent: a not-so-coded call for attacking ordinary people’s living standards.

This is what the noble European project is turning into: a grim march to the bottom. This isn’t about creating a deeper democracy, but deeper markets – and the two are increasingly incompatible. Germany’s Angela Merkel has shown no compunction about meddling in the democratic affairs of other European countries – tacitly warning Greeks against voting for Syriza for instance, or forcing the Spanish socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to rip up the spending commitments that had won him an election.

The diplomatic beatings administered to Syriza since it came to power this year can only be seen as Europe trying to set an example to any Spanish voters who might be tempted to support its sister movement Podemos. Go too far left, runs the message, and you’ll get the same treatment.

Whatever the founding ideals of the eurozone, they don’t match up to the grim reality in 2015. This is Thatcher’s revolution, or Reagan’s – but now on a continental scale. And as then, it is accompanied by the idea that There Is No Alternative either to running an economy, or even to which kind of government voters get to choose.

The fact that this entire show is being brought in by agreeable-looking Wise Folk often claiming to be social democratic doesn’t render the project any nicer or gentler. It just lends the entire thing a nasty tang of hypocrisy.

On the English Cricket Board and insider journalists

What the papers say

by Maxie Allen  in The Full Toss • June 19, 2015

Over at our friends Being Outside Cricket, there have been some interesting discussions about the nature of the mainstream cricket press, its relationship with the cricketing public and its attitude to those of us ‘below the line’. You can read the pieces here and here.

At the risk of committing plagiarism, I thought I’d take the liberty of penning a few thoughts of my own. What follows is inspired by, not a response to, the thoughts of Lord Canis Lupus and The Leg Glance. I thank them for that inspiration, not to mention their wisdom and insight.

The misadventures of the cricket media are hardly new territory in our tier of the crickosphere. Many of the key points may already be very familiar to you, echoing hundreds of your own comments on both blogs during the last eighteen months. But we’ve not touched on the theme here on TFT for some time, and it’s worth updating our perspectives in the context of the here-and-now – the new mood of optimism and concord subtly washing over English cricket.

I believe there are three misconceptions about the nature of the cricket press. Firstly, I doubt all the principal correspondents have total editorial control over their copy. The editor is in charge of the paper, and beneath him or her is the sports editor. It’s they whom the correspondent is trying to satisfy, not only the reader. The bosses may ask for a particular editorial line, or at least a tone – upbeat, angry, patriotic, kick them while they’re down.

The space allocated for their reports will fluctuate according to the news agenda, with copy truncated by the sub-editors overnight if need be. If Jose Mourinho gets sacked by Chelsea, there will be less room for nuances about the third ODI. The words below the correspondent’s name will not always entirely be written by them.

That said, the more senior the hack, the more sovereignty they have. Mikes Selvey and Atherton, or Scyld Berry, are less likely to have their copy reworked than a junior reporter.

Secondly, the mainstream press do not write specifically for people like us, who read and write cricket blogs and follow the minutiae of every story. They aim at readers with a passing-to-serious interest in cricket, who have little spare time and probably read only a single paper. A city trader on the Tube. A van driver on his lunch-break.

This means complex stories get simplified – as happens in all branches of news. It also explains why journalists often put a postive spin on events, to the disgust of bloggerati sceptics. In their eyes, punters follow cricket for fun, as an escape from the drudgery of work. So hacks write about good news, and feats of derring-do, with an appeal to patriotism. They suspect too few readers are interested in the Byzantine plot-twists of ECB politics.

Thirdly, newspapers and websites (but not the BBC) are under no obligations to anyone. They are private publications, unsubject to statutory regulation which mandates fairness, balance, and specific editorial standards. If you don’t like a newspaper, so the logic goes, you don’t have to read it.

And we can’t always regard the cricket press as a uniform entity. Its exponents occupy a fairly broad spectrum, possessing a range of attitudes and approaches. Some have been more sympathetic than others to the laments of those below-the-line. A few have listened to, absorbed, and reflected our (often disparate) views.

All of this may sound like excuse-making. But there are a multitude of hefty ‘but’s. On the whole, the response of the established cricket media to the turmoil triggered on 4th February 2014 has fallen so far short of adequacy that no caveats amount to exoneration.

Newspapers and mainstream websites, along with broadcasters, enjoy many privileges. The ECB award them the status of ‘accredited’ media. This means their correspondents are appointed as the public’s eyes and ears, and receive seats in the press box, as well as interview access to players and staff, and off-the-record conversations with officials. Neither bloggers not readers are afforded such accreditation.

With privileges come responsibilities – chiefly, the duty to hold authority to account. You can’t have one without the other, especially when many papers regard themselves as ‘newspapers of record’. The inky press generally exudes a sense of entitlement and officialdom. “Because we’re the Daily X, we should be able to do y and find out z”. Once again, that right brings a responsibility.

With the Pietersen affair, the cricket media signally failed to hold the ECB to account. The ECB lied, and covered up their lies. It was as clear a case as you could imagine of misconduct and moral corruption by a public body. Yet this was barely explored and never properly investigated. Even material in the public domain was poorly studied. The ‘due diligence’ dossier passed by largely unremarked. Pietersen’s book was skim-read for lurid slurs while his serious accusations of ECB bullying and hypocrisy were ignored.

When vocal members of the public complained about this dereliction of duty, some pressmen replied by saying, ‘well we asked them, but they wouldn’t say’. This was a ridiculous excuse. In other spheres of news, the silence of authorities during a scandal becomes a story in itself. Front pages scream for answers. Newspapers ratchet up the pressure by cajoling third parties to provoke a response.

There were plenty of options available to the cricket press, had they been more tenacious and inquisitive. They could  have highlighted the blatant contradictions in the ECB’s own testimony. They might have striven for a whistle-blower. They should have piled pressure on the DCMS, Sport England (who give the ECB funding), and England sponsors Waitrose and Investec, to demand answers.

Unless I’ve missed something, none of this happened. Some journalists tried. A few tried hard. But no one tried hard enough. Too many approached the saga with all the forensic analysis of the lazy-thinking, cliche-reliant golf club bar-bore. They couldn’t see past Pietersen’s bad-egginess to the real story, and misconceived the saga as a debate about Pietersen the man, instead of what it was, a powder-keg of ECB malpractice and mendacity.

The recent explosion of the FIFA scandal provides an instructive parallel. While there is no suggestion the ECB or its officials have engaged in financial corruption or bribery, the misconduct of each organisation has common strands.

Both the Pietersen affair, and the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, gave off an overpowering miasma of fishiness. In each case a bizarre decision was taken but never convincingly explained. Attempts at scrutiny were met with bluster, evasion, and arrogance. What had actually happened was not what was officially presented.

The British press, rightly sensing the truth, refused to let FIFA off the hook. Uncowed by Sepp Blatter’s snarls, they plugged away tenaciously, month after month, even after the original story faded from the agenda. The Sunday Times led the charge, their detective work uncovering a web of brown envelopes emanating from Qatari-FA linked magnates. The hacks kept up the pressure, and eventually the levee broke. Look where we are now.

When Blatter appeared at press conferences and argued black was white, the hacks tore him to pieces. By contrast, what happened in cricket? In April 2014, when Paul Downton emerged from hiding at the Moores press conference, and met questions about Pietersen with a risible stew of lies and obfuscation, the cricket correspondent of The Independent famously gave us this. 

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Stephen Brenkley @stephenbrenkley

It took 10 minutes for Pietersen issue to be raised at Moores' press conference. Downton handled it with aplomb, as did Moores.

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If the likes of Brenkley or Mike Selvey had covered the FIFA story, we’d have probably read something like this:

It is time to cease asking such impertinent questions of Mr Blatter, a good man who has suffered much unwarranted personal abuse.

The FIFA scandal demonstrates more than simply what can be achieved by tireless journalistic inquisitiveness. It proves that tales about corrupt sports administrators can be major box office and appeal to passing readers. And it shows the merit of pressmen fighting for their stories. There must have been times during the FIFA investigation when editors lost confidence and threatened to pull the plug and save resources.

But back to Pietersen. Not all journalists failed to ‘get it’. But too many did. And no one closed the deal. Why?

It wasn’t because readerships lost interest in Pietersen, judging by the sheer quantity of copy written about him. In some instances, editorial diktats, from above, could provide partial explanation. But surely no editor would have turned down a juicy story about skulduggery in the corridors of Lord’s if offered up a scoop on a plate.

The real reasons are several and over-lapping. Some pressmen were lazy, others too gormless to realise what all the fuss was about. A few were deterred by fear of losing access to the inner circle. But many were simply out of their depth. It’s one thing to write about batting technique or line and length. It’s quite another to cut through a dense thicket of political intrigue and obfuscation. A previous career as a professional cricketer does not in itself an investigative journalist make.

A number of hacks were guilty of blatant bias, which took various forms. They had a personal dislike of Pietersen. They were friends or former team-mates of Paul Downton, Andy Flower, Graham Gooch or James Whitaker. Correspondents were often reporting on the conduct of people they’d known personally for years. Within this incestuous bubble, objectivity was impossible. Broadcast interviews were suffused with matiness. It was the equivalent of Alastair Campbell hosting Newsnight.

Just as influential was a subtler and less conscious form of bias. Many former players now inhabiting the press box are cut from the same cultural cloth as the ex-pros who became administrators: workmanlike county stalwarts who never amounted to much at international level. Even if they didn’t realise it, those correspondents were always likely to empathise with the likes of Downton and Whitaker, see things from their point of view, and fail to probe.

By the same token, they were unlikely to view the story either from the readers’ perspective, or Kevin Pietersen’s. Pietersen, with his vast success, huge wealth, brazen ambition, and buccaneering flamboyance, became everything they never were. Unable to relate to him, the ex-pros naturally viewed the ECB’s position as plausible, inhibiting their curiosity. And it wasn’t only about empathy. It’s easy to sense in their copy their feelings of distaste for Pietersen’s brash and unclubbable angularity. But it went further. They resented him for his success – a success which held up a light to their own mediocrity. It’s not going too far to suggest that in several cases their journalism was corrupted by envy.

In the main, the press allied to the establishment, a total inversion of their proper role. They sympathised with authority instead of putting it under the microscope. This response stemmed from an inherent emotional alignment, between media and ECB administrators, for reasons more profound than the limited emotional imaginations of ex-professionals.

Journalists, players, ex-players, ECB apparatchiks, and mandarins, together form the Cricketing Class. All these people have far more in common with each other than with any of the spectating public. They inhabit the same biosphere, sharing press boxes, hotel lobbies, bars and airport lounges around the world. They mutually provide each other with parameters and reference points of conduct, acceptance and vindication.

The incestuousness of the cricket circuit explains much of the Pietersen failure, but also plenty more. Many, especially the ex-players, have little experience of professional life beyond cricket. Insulated within this cosy cocoon, a tranche of the cricket press long since lost touch with the people they’re writing for – members of the public who follow cricket as a pastime.

When was the last time any of them paid their own money to attend an England match? Mike Atherton, say, probably hasn’t since he was a teenager. How many of them queue up for a soggy £7.50 burger, when they can rely on the courtesy sponsors’ lunch, while watching every ball of play from the best seats in the house, not only for free, but paid to be there.

This being the nature of their working lives, for years or decades on end, it requires conscious effort to see things from a punter’s point of view. This is no more than a journalist’s duty, but few achieve it.

So they often fail to share the public’s healthy scepticism of the motives of those in charge, exemplified by their constant talk of “good men”, “working hard”, in “difficult jobs”. They lose track of vital consumer issues central to the supporters’ experience, from ticket prices to free-to-air television coverage. Mainstream mediacrats can’t imagine a world where you must pay £80 for a ticket, or £400 a year for a TV subscription, from limited means, just to watch the game in the first place.

I suspect this also explains why virtually no-one in the press box understood, and barely discussed, the impact of the ECB’s “outside cricket” jibe. When push came to shove, the hacks also regarded themselves as “inside”, treasuring their insider status and mounting the barricades against the revolt of the great unwashed.

This explains their defensive hostility towards readers who dared complain about their misconceived analyses and flawed reporting. Rattled by the impudence of outsiders questioning their judgment, a few openly insulted their own audience, in what must be a British media first. Several of Mike Selvey’s Tweets became infamous

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mike selvey @selvecricket

Social media was a good way to pass on information. But the trolls, idiots and know-nothings make it unpleasant. So I'm out of here. Sorry.

mike selvey @selvecricket

Often hard for journos to remember they are read by many many more people online than few bilious inadequates who dominate comment section.

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Selvey’s generation had failed to grasp the reality of twenty-first century media interactivity. In return for their custom, today’s consumers expect an equity share and a seat at the discussion table. They – we – visit mainstream websites to participate as much as to read. Cricket followers trust their own knowledge and judgement. They expect to hold the work of professional correspondents – who have chosen to put their heads above the parapet – up to scrutiny. And they can publish views themselves, via blogs or Twitter. You no longer need a job on Fleet Street to enter the public domain.

Every other branch of journalism realised this years ago. In cricket, though, few accepted the new deal and most were slow to realise how radically the interface has changed. Grandees raged against the dying of the light, firing arrows from their ivory towers towards the peasants storming the drawbridge. Their rhetoric of entitlement spookily echoed the ECB’s ‘outside cricket’ press release, with its bleats of “uninformed…unwarranted and unpleasant criticism”, which “attacked without justification” their “rationale…and integrity”. These patrician correspondents expected deference by virtue of their position alone, and met irreverence or opposition with pompous sanctimony and sour self-importance.

Others, however, were happy to engage with the public in a generous, constructive and cordial manner, on terms more – but never fully – equal. There lingered a loose sense of masonic, closed-shop sniffiness, which implied a belief that a human being is elevated to the rank of Approved Commentator on Cricket only through an elite process of divine selection.

In reality, cricket punditry is not akin to medicine or law, in which only hard-won professional qualifications confer authority. You can be right about English cricket even if you don’t have a badge on your lapel. This is ordained by the internal logic of the profession itself. If cricketers with no journalistic training can waltz into Fleet Street jobs, and journalists with no professional cricket experience can write about foot movement and bowling actions, why can’t any lifelong cricket follower have something equally useful to say?

The division between writer and writee was akin to clergy and laity. The common man could not be trusted to read the Bible in English because he was too simple to understand the word of God. Emblematic of a common press attitude were responses you could characterise as follows:

If you knew what I knew you would think the same. But I’m not going to tell you what I know. Why should I? In your position, you take my word for it. I am right because of who I am. You are wrong because you are on the outside. You are ignorant and uninformed, unlike me.

Such ripostes were usually fortified by reference to “sources”. In other words, the hack trumped a rebuke by claiming an insider had imparted to him an earth-shattering revelation, without ever saying exactly what. But what if that source was, without the hapless correspondent realising, telling them a load of complete bollocks? During the Pietersen nuclear winter, plenty of “sources” with agenda had every reason to spin a yard to their advantage. Because the press identified neither the sources nor the content, nothing could be scrutinised for its true worth. In the final reduction, anonymous vagaries were passed off as empirical evidence.

This story was not just about Pietersen, by any stretch. The competency of Paul Downton. The merits of Peter Moores. The legitimacy of Alastair Cook. Free-to-air television. Time and again, the agglomerate press circled their wagons of legitimacy and insisted they were right, whatever the evidence to the contrary. They branded as rabid freaks anyone foolish enough to reject their authority and disagree.

The more they lost touch, the more stubborn they became. And when opportunities arose to prove their good judgement, they gleefully taunted their own readers with boasts of one-upmanship. Desperate straws were clutched at. While thousands of sober, thoughtful critics, on BTL boards and Twitter, were dismissed as a baying, irrelevant, mob, a few hundred paying Ageas Bowl spectators who applauded an Alastair Cook innings were seized upon as representatives of the nation’s soul.

This wave of condescension and antipathy, directed by writers, and some broadcasters, at their own audiences, is unique in the history of British media. When bums start leaving seats, every other branch of journalism and entertainment responds by updating their product and raising their game. If X Factor viewers complain or switch off, Simon Cowell replaces the judges and refreshes the format. In cricket, if you don’t like what they do, they tell you to fuck off.

During the last few weeks, everyday life has calmed down. England’s exciting ODI performances, an opiate for the masses, have soothed the sceptic-hack relationship, at least for the time being. Victories are very difficult to disagree about, and the side’s upturn in fortunes since the removal of Cook and Moores has provided an (unacknowledged) vindication for the legions of BTLers who’d argued the duo’s inadequacy all along. Test cricket is another matter, though, and should Cook fail in the Ashes, trouble will flare up again.

In each of English cricket’s three estates – the administrators, the press, and the public – there is a decreasing appetite for conflict and strife, although this must not distract us from the vivid scrutiny the ECB’s conduct still demands. Contrary to what many journalists probably think, readers desire a positive relationship with the mainstream press. After all, we largely rely on them to provide our news from the front. They have access to people and events which we don’t. And ex-players will offer technical and experiential insights we may not spot with the naked eye.

But the relationship can only work if it’s bi-directional. In return for the vitals provided by journalists and pundits, we bring crowd-sourcing: millions of independent minds, views, and critical faculties, borne of millions of lifetimes spent watching cricket, playing cricket, and thinking about cricket. It’s a win-win. And to lay the first stone of this new Jerusalem, I suggest a little job-swap. A random punter should be granted a week in the press box, with all the trimmings. And during the same test, a Fleet Street correspondent should buy their own tickets and watch every ball from the stands, in the crowd. A change of scenery is good for the soul.