Cricket - Is home advantage two extra players?

Tom Fordyce in The BBC


One of the wonders of England's 3-1 Ashes triumphthis summer is that it emerged from such carnage: that ghastly 5-0 Pomnishambles in the preceding series 18 months ago, the second whitewash Australia had inflicted in three Ashes series down under.

That itself followed a 3-0 win for England the summer before, part of a run that has seen them win four consecutive Ashes series at home for the first time since the 19th century.

To think Home and Away used to be so popular. Ashes cricket, supposedly the fiercest contest the sport can offer, is in danger of becoming dangerously predictable.

Playing at home? You'll probably win. Playing away? Good luck.

In the 14 years since Australia last won in England, only one of the eight Ashes series has been won by the touring side.

Recent Ashes series results
England's home form	Australia's home form
2015: England lead 3-1	2013-14: Australia won 5-0
2013: England won 3-0	2010-11: England won 3-1
2009: England won 2-1	2006-07: Australia won 5-0
2005: England won 2-1	2002-03: Australia won 4-1
2001: Australia won 4-1	1998-99: Australia won 3-1

It is a significant twist in the longest running rivalry in international cricket. In the 14 years and seven series before that, more than half were won by the away team.

The long-term numbers back up that dramatic trend. Prior to 2002, according to Test Match Special statistician Andrew Samson, 117 Ashes Tests were won by the home team, 98 by the away team. That's a win/loss ratio, in games that saw a result, of 1.19.

Since 2002, 25 Ashes Tests have been won by the hosts and seven by the visitors. That's a win/loss ratio of 3.57.

A little of that reflects the decreasing number of draws as Test cricket has speeded up. Before 2002, draws accounted for 29% of Ashes contests; since then, only 18%.

Much more it reflects more serious concerns: the inability of players, particularly batsmen, to adapt their game to the different conditions overseas; the lack of time and opportunity today's short tours give them to even try; the increasing temptation to win an advantage before a ball has even been bowled by producing pitches designed to favour your own skills rather than an even contest.

"For me it is quite simple," says Graeme Swann, part of the only Ashes team in those 14 years to win an away series. "In England the wickets are getting slower so the batsmen are not being exposed to fast bouncy wickets. When they go to Australia it is a culture shock. They can't deal with these guys with raw pace on fast, bouncy wickets.

"Then, when you come to England and the ball still swings, even the visiting batsmen that play county cricket don't face the highly skilled swing bowling they do in Tests. Batsmen don't like the ball moving laterally through the air. It is bad enough when it is jagging about off the pitch.

"The Aussies come here and nick everything. We go there and get bumped out. That is it in a nutshell."

Modern tours, designed to maximise revenue rather than ease players in, are shorter than ever before. Test series rattle past with back-to-back matches rather than pausing for other contests to allow players to refine and practise technique.

This summer, Australia began with just two three-day matches, both against weakened Kent and Essex sides. Once the Tests began, a mere fortnight after their arrival, they then had only one more three-day match before the series was decided at Trent Bridge.

England in home Test series
Opponent	Dates	Result
Australia	July-August 2015	Won (lead 3-1)
New Zealand	May-June 2015	Drew 1-1
India	July-August 2014	Won 3-1
Sri Lanka	June 2014	Lost 1-0
Australia	July-August 2013	Won 3-0
New Zealand	May 2013	Won 2-0

In that tour match against Derbyshire only five players who would make the team for the next Test at Edgbaston were picked, because the others - after back-to-back Tests in Cardiff and at Lord's, and with back-to-back Tests to come in Birmingham and Nottingham - needed rest and recovery.

In England's hammering in 2013-14 there was even less respite. There was only one other tour match once the Test series had started, a meaningless two-day tourist trip to Alice Springs to play a scratch side that included a 16-year-old, on a pitch that bore no resemblance to the ones where Mitchell Johnson and Ryan Harris were rattling them out in the Tests.

These are tours barely recognisable to the recent past. In the summer of 1989, when Australia won the Ashes in England to begin a run of 16 years without a series defeat on English soil, they played five three-day county games before the series began and another nine interspersed between the six Tests.

How much easier to pass an exam when you attend that many tutorials first.

England in away Test series
Opponent	Dates	Result
West Indies	April-May 2013	Drew 1-1
Australia	November 2013-January 2014	Lost 5-0
New Zealand	March 2013	Drew 0-0
India	November-December 2012	Won 2-1
Sri Lanka	March-April 2012	Drew 1-1
Pakistan (in UAE)	January-February 2012	Lost 3-0

Neither was that an unusually long tour. Australia's next Ashes tour in 1993 saw them arrive in May and leave in September. The first ball of the Test series was bowled on 3 June, and the last two and a half months later on 23 August.

The entire 2015 Test series can, even if The Oval Test bucks the summer's pattern and goes the full five days, last no more than seven weeks from start to scheduled final day. There are five Tests in this series rather than the six of 1989 and 1993. Yet this time the tourists rocked up in late June and will play their last day of first-class cricket with at least a week of August still to go.

It is less a learning process than a frantic cramming. And that's if you actually want to adapt techniques.

On this tour, Australia's batsmen have continued to play attacking shots even as conditions at Edgbaston and Trent Bridge demanded something entirely different. Neither is this a one-off. They were hammered 4-0 in spin-friendly conditions in India in 2013, and then 2-0 by Pakistan on dead wickets in UAE in 2014.


And they are not alone in failing to understand how to adapt for different surfaces. In the 13 Tests England have played on the hard, bouncy tracks of the Waca in Perth, they have lost nine and won one.

"It's not easy playing away but it's something we have to get better at," Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland admitted after the defeat at Trent Bridge at the weekend. "We want to be the best cricket team in the world and to do that we have to be better at playing away."

Because this is not just an Ashes issue. Test cricket across the world has the same problem.

The increasing advantage of playing at home
1980s: 87 home wins, 56 away, 122 draws, one tie, home win/loss ratio 1.55
1990s: 142 home wins, 80 away, 124 draws, ratio 1.77
2000s: 215 home wins, 134 away, 114 draws, ratio 1.6
2010s: 110 home wins, 61 away, 58 draws, ratio 1.8
Since start of 2013: 60 home wins, 22 away wins, 25 draws, ratio 2.72

As the table indicates, Test cricket is becoming weighted in favour of home sides like never before.

"It is like when Australia play in India and vice-versa - that's very one-sided too," says former Australia fast bowler Glenn McGrath. "Batsmen learn to play in their own conditions and struggle to adapt.

"In Australia the wickets used to have their own character so you had to adapt. Now every wicket is the same, so the batsmen get used to playing on one type of wicket and aren't challenged by another type."

Sydney is no longer a spinner's paradise. The MCG uses drop-in pitches. Adelaide is increasingly primarily an Aussie Rules venue. The Gabba at Brisbane is flatter than ever before.

"As soon as they face another wicket they can't adapt," says McGrath. "But that is the difference between a good and great player: being able to adapt."

It is changing the dynamic within individual series too.

Eighty-three Test series have been completed since the start of this decade. Just over 50% (42 series) have ended in a whitewash, where one side has won every single match.

In the decade from 1990 to 2000, only 12% of series ended in a whitewashes; in the 1980s, 7%.

This partly reflects the rise of the two-Test series. It is also a serious concern for the game.

England's next series comes against Pakistan in the UAE. On their last trip there in the winter of 2011/12 they were whitewashed 3-0, having that summer themselves whitewashed India 4-0.

Test cricket is about cut and thrust. It is at its best when each side, with their own idiosyncrasies, comes together on a surface that offers both the prospect of reward for application and accuracy.

When there is cut but no thrust, when the outcome feels inevitable, it is a weaker contest and a weaker sport. Who wants to watch a procession?

 

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Prostitution row: A 'male sex deficit' - what about us horny women?

Rebecca Reid in The Telegraph

The Institute for Economic Affairs has released a new paper this week from the sociologist Dr Catherin Hakim.

Hakim is a controversial figure, best known for her theory of ‘erotic capital’ - the combination of beauty, social skills, good dress sense, physical fitness, liveliness, sex appeal and sexual competence with which women should apparently barter their way through life.

A Katie Hopkins of the academic world, if you will.

No surprise, then, that her latest paper has already caused widespread controversy.

Hakim postulates that prostitution should be fully legalised – to many a perfectly reasonable stance on the debate. But it’s her reasoning that makes the suggestion painfully offensive.

Disinterested in the potential social, economic and health benefits of legalising sex work, Hakim suggests that prostitution should be legalised, because the empowerment of women has created what she terms a “male sex deficit.”

In short because men need sex and modern women aren’t providing it.

What selfish creatures we’ve become. All that working and voting and striving for equality? Well apparently it’s led to an international blue-balls crisis that only legalised prostitution can cure.

• Legalise prostitution because 21st Century men need more sex says think-tank

Dr Catherine Hakim says prostitution should be legalised because of the "make sex deficit"  Photo: DAVID BEBBER

The pros and cons of legalised prostitution is an important and necessary debate.

Unfortunately Hakim has overshadowed that conversation by missing the point so spectacularly that one has to wonder if she did it on purpose.

Her theory hinges upon two beliefs.

First, that male libido outstrips female libido two to one; second that the availability of sex has decreased proportionately as women have become more empowered, because women have less cause to trade sex for gain. Offended yet?

According to Hakim, women (especially women over the age of thirty) don’t really like sex at all.

She writes: “Male demand for sexual entertainments and activity greatly outstrips female sexual interest, even in liberal cultures - this gives women an edge, although many are still unaware of it.”

Ah, the tired trope of the sexually disinterested woman. Sigh.

Hakim’s theory entirely ignores the fact that women experience desire and sexuality just as strongly as men. In fact, she’s wrong to compare the two. Male and female libidos do not have to be expressed the same way in order to be equal.

Her primary example of the disparity between our sex drives is strip clubs.

Well, she might be accurate in saying men more frequently attend strip clubs, but just because women don’t tend to enjoy stuffing fivers in thongs as a group activity, it doesn’t mean we don’t get horny.

The sex toy market (which has a predominately female customer base) tells a different story about female desire. In 2012, it was valued at £250 million in the UK, and $5.5 billion (£3.5bn) worldwide. Not to mention the 100 million copies of “mummy porn” Fifty Shades of Grey that have been sold.

Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey

Just because female libido is different from male doesn’t mean it’s non-existent.

Hakim believes that as women become more empowered, and therefore more financially independent, they are likely to withdraw sexual availability further. She writes that the “male sex deficit” is likely to grow in the 21st century, as women become increasingly economically independent and withdraw from “sexual markets and relationships that they perceive to offer unfair bargains”.

Which tells you everything you need to know about her attitude towards sex.

No wonder she wants to legalise prostitution. She seems to think every sexually active woman already is one.

But it’s not just women who should be angered by Hakim’s writing. Her representation of men is just as offensive.

“All the available evidence points in the direction of prostitution and erotic entertainments having no noxious psychological or social effects, and they may even help to reduce sexual crime rates”, she writes.

Here, she is hiding behind the illusion of being sex positive. She would like you to think of her as someone who understands male desire better than other women. But this is a woman who once likened male fidelity to being a “caged animal”.

She tacks a reasonable statement about a lack of evidence that prostitution is harmful, on to one that suggests prostitution would reduce the frequently of rape.

What Hakim is actually doing is reducing men to nothing better than animals. Sex mad beasts, unable to control themselves. She’s saying that male desire isn’t desire at all; it’s an untameable impulse that dominates rational thought.

How unbelievably patronising.

  Photo: PA

By suggesting that access to the services of prostitutes would stop rape, Hakim is, however unintentionally, condoning rape as an act.

The message of that statement is that sex is something men need, and that rape is driven by necessity, rather than want. This theory portrays rape like stealing food when you’re starving: a necessary evil.

Perpetuating these myths isn’t just offensive, it’s dangerous. Women have been told for centuries that they don’t like sex, and that their sexuality only exists for someone else’s gratification.

Feminism has seen women take ownership of their sexuality and move towards an equality of gratification. How can Dr Catherine Hakim, in good conscience, promote the concept that a woman who enjoys sex is the exception, rather than the norm?

Worse still is the underlying message that rape is a consequence of sexual frustration. There are no mitigating factors and there are no excuses. Hakim’s suggestion that providing access to sex for money would reduce sexual abuse is no different from suggesting that providing child porn would decrease offenses of paedophilia.

When exploring the reasons that rape happens, the buck stops with the rapist. Just like short skirts, drinking too much or walking home alone, the “male sex deficit” doesn’t cause or entice rape.

Rapists cause rape. Much more than being offensive, it’s frankly terrifying that a supposedly educated and academic woman would try to attribute it to anything else.

The end of Wahhabism? Saudi Arabia may go broke soon

Ambrose Evans Pritchard in The Telegraph

If the oil futures market is correct, Saudi Arabia will start running into trouble within two years. It will be in existential crisis by the end of the decade.

The contract price of US crude oil for delivery in December 2020 is currently $62.05, implying a drastic change in the economic landscape for the Middle East and the petro-rentier states.

The Saudis took a huge gamble last November when they stopped supporting prices and opted instead to flood the market and drive out rivals, boosting their own output to 10.6m barrels a day (b/d) into the teeth of the downturn.

Bank of America says OPEC is now "effectively dissolved". The cartel might as well shut down its offices in Vienna to save money.

If the aim was to choke the US shale industry, the Saudis have misjudged badly, just as they misjudged the growing shale threat at every stage for eight years. "It is becoming apparent that non-OPEC producers are not as responsive to low oil prices as had been thought, at least in the short-run," said the Saudi central bank in its latest stability report.

"The main impact has been to cut back on developmental drilling of new oil wells, rather than slowing the flow of oil from existing wells. This requires more patience," it said.

One Saudi expert was blunter. "The policy hasn't worked and it will never work," he said.

By causing the oil price to crash, the Saudis and their Gulf allies have certainly killed off prospects for a raft of high-cost ventures in the Russian Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, and the Canadian tar sands.

Consultants Wood Mackenzie say the major oil and gas companies have shelved 46 large projects, deferring $200bn of investments.

The problem for the Saudis is that US shale frackers are not high-cost. They are mostly mid-cost, and as I reported from the CERAWeek energy forum in Houston, experts at IHS think shale companies may be able to shave those costs by 45pc this year - and not only by switching tactically to high-yielding wells.

Advanced pad drilling techniques allow frackers to launch five or ten wells in different directions from the same site. Smart drill-bits with computer chips can seek out cracks in the rock. New dissolvable plugs promise to save $300,000 a well. "We've driven down drilling costs by 50pc, and we can see another 30pc ahead," said John Hess, head of the Hess Corporation.

It was the same story from Scott Sheffield, head of Pioneer Natural Resources. "We have just drilled an 18,000 ft well in 16 days in the Permian Basin. Last year it took 30 days," he said.

The North American rig-count has dropped to 664 from 1,608 in October but output still rose to a 43-year high of 9.6m b/d June. It has only just begun to roll over. "The freight train of North American tight oil has kept on coming," said Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon Mobil.

He said the resilience of the sister industry of shale gas should be a cautionary warning to those reading too much into the rig-count. Gas prices have collapsed from $8 to $2.78 since 2009, and the number of gas rigs has dropped 1,200 to 209. Yet output has risen by 30pc over that period.

Until now, shale drillers have been cushioned by hedging contracts. The stress test will come over coming months as these expire. But even if scores of over-leveraged wild-catters go bankrupt as funding dries up, it will not do OPEC any good.

The wells will still be there. The technology and infrastructure will still there. Stronger companies will mop up on the cheap, taking over the operations. Once oil climbs back to $60 or even $55 - since the threshold keeps falling - they will crank up production almost instantly.

OPEC now faces a permanent headwind. Each rise in price will be capped by a surge in US output. The only constraint is the scale of US reserves that can be extracted at mid-cost, and these may be bigger than originally supposed, not to mention the parallel possibilities in Argentina and Australia, or the possibility for "clean fracking" in China as plasma pulse technology cuts water needs.

Mr Sheffield said the Permian Basin in Texas could alone produce 5-6m b/d in the long-term, more than Saudi Arabia's giant Ghawar field, the biggest in the world.

Saudi Arabia is effectively beached. It relies on oil for 90pc of its budget revenues. There is no other industry to speak of, a full fifty years after the oil bonanza began.

Citizens pay no tax on income, interest, or stock dividends. Subsidized petrol costs twelve cents a litre at the pump. Electricity is given away for 1.3 cents a kilowatt-hour. Spending on patronage exploded after the Arab Spring as the kingdom sought to smother dissent.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the budget deficit will reach 20pc of GDP this year, or roughly $140bn. The 'fiscal break-even price' is $106.

Far from retrenching, King Salman is spraying money around, giving away $32bn in a coronation bonus for all workers and pensioners.

He has launched a costly war against the Houthis in Yemen and is engaged in a massive military build-up - entirely reliant on imported weapons - that will propel Saudi Arabia to fifth place in the world defence ranking.

The Saudi royal family is leading the Sunni cause against a resurgent Iran, battling for dominance in a bitter struggle between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East. "Right now, the Saudis have only one thing on their mind and that is the Iranians. They have a very serious problem. Iranian proxies are running Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon," said Jim Woolsey, the former head of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

Money began to leak out of Saudi Arabia after the Arab Spring, with net capital outflows reaching 8pc of GDP annually even before the oil price crash. The country has since been burning through its foreign reserves at a vertiginous pace.

The reserves peaked at $737bn in August of 2014. They dropped to $672 in May. At current prices they are falling by at least $12bn a month.

Khalid Alsweilem, a former official at the Saudi central bank and now at Harvard University, said the fiscal deficit must be covered almost dollar for dollar by drawing down reserves.

The Saudi buffer is not particularly large given the country fixed exchange system. Kuwait, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi all have three times greater reserves per capita. "We are much more vulnerable. That is why we are the fourth rated sovereign in the Gulf at AA-. We cannot afford to lose our cushion over the next two years," he said.

Standard & Poor's lowered its outlook to "negative" in February. "We view Saudi Arabia's economy as undiversified and vulnerable to a steep and sustained decline in oil prices," it said.

Mr Alsweilem wrote in a Harvard report that Saudi Arabia would have an extra trillion of assets by now if it had adopted the Norwegian model of a sovereign wealth fund to recyle the money instead of treating it as a piggy bank for the finance ministry. The report has caused storm in Riyadh.

"We were lucky before because the oil price recovered in time. But we can't count on that again," he said.

OPEC have left matters too late, though perhaps there is little they could have done to combat the advances of American technology.

In hindsight, it was a strategic error to hold prices so high, for so long, allowing shale frackers - and the solar industry - to come of age. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

The Saudis are now trapped. Even if they could do a deal with Russia and orchestrate a cut in output to boost prices - far from clear - they might merely gain a few more years of high income at the cost of bringing forward more shale production later on.

Yet on the current course their reserves may be down to $200bn by the end of 2018. The markets will react long before this, seeing the writing on the wall. Capital flight will accelerate.

The government can slash investment spending for a while - as it did in the mid-1980s - but in the end it must face draconian austerity. It cannot afford to prop up Egypt and maintain an exorbitant political patronage machine across the Sunni world.

Social spending is the glue that holds together a medieval Wahhabi regime at a time of fermenting unrest among the Shia minority of the Eastern Province, pin-prick terrorist attacks from ISIS, and blowback from the invasion of Yemen.

Diplomatic spending is what underpins the Saudi sphere of influence caught in a Middle East version of Europe's Thirty Year War, and still reeling from the after-shocks of a crushed democratic revolt.

We may yet find that the US oil industry has greater staying power than the rickety political edifice behind OPEC.

What is TTIP and why should we be angry about it?

 

Anti-TTIP graffiti in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters


Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian

 “Sometimes,” says a character in David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King, “what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment.” It is worth bearing that in mind as we consider TTIP, the most boring thing we’re supposed to get angry about since – ooh … was it PFI schemes that nobbled hospitals, eviscerated schools and left Britain £222bn in debt? Or was it the asymmetrical constitutional ramifications inherent in the West Lothian question? Or George Osborne’s incomprehensible pension changes involving auto-enrolment annuities, tax wrappers, pots and draw-downs? Christine Lagarde’s last press conference about the Greek debt crisis? Maybe it was your last mobile phone bill.

Add up the boredom you experienced on each of those occasions, multiply the result by the international coefficient of tedium (which, as you know, is 27.5) and that’s how bored the international trade deal known as TTIP will make you.

The Guardian’s expert on obfuscation by bureaucratese and acronym, Steven Poole, recently argued that TTIP could be a conspiracy to pull some very thick wool over our eyes. We live in an age when we’re so accustomed to being entertained that we haven’t the temperament to do the difficult work of penetrating the wool of boring. So we’re going to take that wool, roll it into a ball and leave it for the cat to play with. No, don’t look at the cat. Look at me. Focus.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Ignacio Garcia Bercero (left), the EU chief negotiator for TTIP, and his US counterpart Dan Mullaney. Photograph: Thierry Charlier/AFP/Getty Images

So, what is TTIP?

Remember when acronyms starting with two TTs were lovely things such as TTFN (ta-ta for now)? TTIP isn’t like that. It stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Last month, the European parliament voted to allow the European commission to continue negotiations with the United States to create the world’s largest free-trade zone, which is what TTIP is all about.

Conservative trade spokesman Emma McClarkin said: “I welcome the fact that, following weeks of parliamentary ping-pong and attempts by socialist and protectionist MEPs to derail the process, we finally have a clear backing for TTIP.” Right, stop thinking how much fun parliamentary ping-pong sounds, particularly if a cat joins in.

What McClarkin is looking forward to is greater regulatory harmonisation and a consequent boost for business, some of it, incredibly, British. Today, for instance, the US and EU have different regulations testing the safety of cars, drugs and soft furnishings. That imposes costs on transatlantic exporters of cars, drugs and soft furnishings – especially, you would think, on exporters of upholstery for drug dealers’ cars. One possible consequence of harmonisation could be a boost for British car exports. Imagine: one day Americans will be driving trim little Nissans made in Sunderland rather than ludicrous Hummers concocted in the bowels of hell.

There are other projected benefits. US ambassador to the EU Anthony L Gardner argues that TTIP is, if you’ll pardon the expression, geopolitically pertinent, and that it would “provide an economic equivalent to Nato” that would settle “the rules of world trade before others do it for us”. Think about it this way: right now, Vladimir Putin can, if he chooses, strip to the waist for a photo op in which he turns off the gas pipe from Russia to Europe. That’s not good enough. Instead of being dependent on nasty Russian gas and oil, then, as a result of TTIP, the EU might become dependent on lovely American and Canadian gas and oil. That’s one reason behind the EU’s call for a dedicated chapter in TTIP on energy and raw materials. Instead of Russia isolating the EU, the EU could isolate Russia. Sweet.

We have been invited to pronounce TTIP “tea tip”. Don’t these knuckleheads have any sense of history? The world’s most famous tea tip was in Boston in 1773, and that resulted in the marvellous era of transatlantic cooperation known as the American War of Independence.

TTIP is not to be confused with TPP, which is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving 12 countries including the US, Australia and Brunei, and which, like TTIP, is still under negotiation.

There is also, incidentally, something called Ceta, which stands for Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. It is like TTIP but for Canada and Europe and, so far as I understand it, means that Europeans will soon be bathing in maple syrup while reading Margaret Atwood novels. Which is probably nicer than it sounds. Ceta is due to be ratified by the European parliament later this year but the document is currently undergoing a process of what is called “legal scrubbing”, which sounds like the sort of thing Americans do to their chickens, but in fact is another species of the kind of gobbledegook rampant in modern life and means minimising the document’s exposure to legal action.

But that’s not all. There is also Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was established in 1994 and, proponents of TTIP think, demonstrates the kind of inspiring benefits and harmonisation of standards that might result if TTIP comes into force. Think of it this way. Just as, thanks to Nafta, for the past 21 years Americans have been saying “aboot” and forming their own mariachi bands, Mounties have been wearing sombreros and Mexicans putting maple syrup on their quesadillas, so in the future, thanks to TTIP, Americans might drink coffee from cups the size of thimbles, while Europeans might wear 10-gallon hats even though, on average, we’ve only got six-gallon-sized heads and so would look ridiculous.

But seriously. How is TTIP going to affect me?

TTIP will hit Europeans like you in the pocket, critics argue, so you need to pay attention. While the European commission estimates that, by 2027, TTIP could boost the size of the EU economy by £94bn or 0.5% of GDP, an economic study by Jeronim Capaldo of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University argues that the commission’s econometric modelling is jejune and that, in fact, TTIP will clobber Europeans. Capaldo predicts 600,000 European job losses as a result of TTIP, a net fall in EU exports, declining GDPs for EU member states and a fall in Europeans’ personal income.

Why people are so angry about TTIP?

Because Americans are, with all due respect, disgusting slobs always chasing a fast buck and thus very different from us fragrant Europeans who are, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. One worry is that the main goal of TTIP is to remove EU regulations that stop its citizens being poisoned, killed or subject to rampant pollution so that more profits can be made by corporations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Do you have concerns about TTIP?


For instance, critics argue that if TTIP involves, as the EU hopes, a commitment that would guarantee automatic licences for all future US crude oil and gas exports to Europe, that would result in a boom in US fracking to keep Europeans powered with shale gas, not to mention greater exploitation of oil from Canadian tar sands. Such developments, argue critics, would undermine not just the EU’s fuel quality directive but ruin what is left of the planet worth ruining.

Consider one aspect of TTIP that is giving European critics the particular pip. It involves another acronym, so steel yourselves. That acronym is ISDS, which stands for “investor-state dispute settlement”. This procedure would allow companies to sue foreign governments over claims of unfair treatment and to be entitled to compensation. Similar provisions in other treaties have allowed, for example, tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris to sue Uruguay and Australia for enacting anti-smoking legislation, and a Swedish energy company to take legal action against Germany for phasing out nuclear power.

  An American chicken farm … US food is subject to different regulations. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Critics say ISDS provisions undermine the power of national governments to act in the interests of their citizens. According to John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, leaked documents show that medical and health services, social services, education, post, finance, telecommunications, transport, energy, water, environmental and cultural services are all on the table in TTIP, meaning that American corporations may have full access to them.

That is why there is a big banner outside the US embassy in Berlin that says (try saying this in the whiniest German voice you can muster): “Demokratie ist keine Handelsware,” which means democracy is not for trading.. Of course there is. It is also why there is some unacceptably unfunny graffiti in Malmö that depicts Barack Obama grinning oleaginously as a wooden horse marked TTIP is dragged into Europe.

In the UK, there are fears that ISDS could threaten the NHS because it might allow private firms running hospital services to sue the government if it chose to return the services to the public sector. The French government has already negotiated its film industry’s exemption from these provisions, so why can’t the NHS be, critics ask?

But the idea that ISDS is subverting democracy in favour of wicked corporations is a conspiracy theory, argues the European Policy Information Center, which – unforgivably – is already spelling “centre” the American way. Epicenter (as this group is acronymically known) is made up of groups, such as the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, that are in favour of TTIP. It argues that we shouldn’t worry about ISDS provisions. Why? Because the clause is a time-honoured means whereby corporations protect their investments, and does not undermine EU or member states’ right to pursue legitimate public policy objectives.

Or consider food regulations. While the EU has an impressively alliterative “farm to fork” strategy, for instance, regulating each link in the food chain, Americans pump their cattle and pigs with growth-promoting hormones banned in the EU. As a result, most US beef can’t be sold in the EU.

Worse, Americans use 82 pesticides banned in the EU. They wash their chicken in chlorinated water to kill bacteria. Ninety per cent of their soya, cotton and corn is genetically modified, while the EU allows member states to ban GM production. France, for instance, has banned GM, and Gauloises-smoking, beret-wearing toughs now patrol French fields to ensure that the excrescence of GM never sullies la belle France again.

So how could we possibly abandon these glorious European standards? The spectre of what lavishly moustachioed French farmer/anti-globalisation activist José Bové calls la malbouffe Americaine (rubbish American food) lurks behind the fears of this trading alliance. “Yeah?” retort Americans. “So how come you dumbass Europeans got mired in a horse-meat scandal in 2013 if your food regulations are so darn tootin’?” Which, you have to admit, is a good comeback.

Or consider data privacy rights. Don’t Americans realise that us Europeans don’t care to be snooped on by the NSA or have Google peer 24/7 into our very souls? MEPs are worried that TTIP might undermine EU data protection laws, and that’s why they have called for an “unambiguous, horizontal, self-standing provision” in it to guarantee citizens’ right to privacy.

Can something be horizontal and self-standing at the same time, you ask? It seems, I concede, unlikely.

A nurse holds a bag of saline solution … There are fears that trade deals could threaten the NHS. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures

Who is angry about TTIP?

Groups as disparate as War on Want and Ukip are united in anger about TTIP, though for different reasons. The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Conservative party are united in not being angry. The Labour party is – surprise! – conflicted.

Let’s consider Labour first. Labour MEP Jude Kirton-Darling, while arguing that ISDS is a “para-judicial and opaque system of private arbitration [that] allows companies to sue governments at great cost to the taxpayer”, also says that TTIP “could present us with a unique chance to regulate globalisation and to promote EU standards”, as well as “providing a much-needed boost to local economies, support to SMEs and new and exciting jobs and training opportunities”.

As for Ukip, Farage and his chums oppose TTIP because they think it’s a smokescreen. It’s not about trade, stupid, it’s about promoting “the political pretensions of a wannabe European superstate” and “setting up a parallel system that undermines national courts and national legal systems”, as the party’s international trade spokesman William Dartmouth MEP said in the European parliament last month.

After the vote went against Ukip’s stance last week, Dartmouth said that the only way citizens can defeat TTIP now is to vote to leave the European Union. But that’s Ukip’s answer to everything.

As for War on Want, its views are more typical of the pressure groups, unions, charities, NGOs and environmentalists that oppose TTIP. There are, for example, 480 such groups affiliated to the Berlin-based Stop TTIP campaign, whose supporting organisations include trade unions like the NUT, NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and, my personal favourite, the Pirate Parties of Greece, Germany, Slovenia and the Netherlands, which have no leaders but a splendid flag. The campaign has a 2.3 million-signature petition calling on the EU to “stop these sinister trade deals”, by which it means both TTIP and CETA.

One of War On Want’s major concerns is that TTIP is being negotiated in secret. And with good cause: what nobody seems to have pointed out yet is that if TTIP negotiations do continue, as expected, until next year at the earliest, often in secret with (I suspect) all sorts of complicated car switcheroos, dead letter drops and tooled-up security johnnies in shades talking furtively into their wrists, the costs of negotiations might outweigh any supposed benefits of what they’re negotiating about.

But are TTIP negotiations being conducted in secret? Giacomo Lev Mannheimer of Istituto Bruno Leoni argues that is another conspiracy theory. And, indeed, he points to the dismal truth that there are lots and lots and lots of TTIP-related documents about its benefits, impact on public services, food and agriculture rules. Mannheimer makes a good point, though critics argue that the real meat of negotiations takes place elsewhere and ordinary European citizens don’t get a say in them.

What Mannheimer doesn’t consider is the more disturbing truth that there is an inverse relationship between the number of funny videos on YouTube and the user traffic on European commission websites relating to TTIP.

Indeed, if TTIP is about liberalising the parameters of boring, there are some of us who are prepared to fight back. And when I say “fight back”, I mean kick back on a sofa watching kittens get tickled.

Experts devise formula to crack Agatha Christie's murder mysteries

Victoria Ward in The Telegraph

Her whodunit murder mysteries have confounded millions of armchair detectives, leading them through a literary maze of twists and turns before a super sleuth finally unmasks the culprit.

But scientists who have studied some of Agatha Christie’s best-selling crime novels claim that that they can be solved with a simple formula, based on the language she uses, the murder weapon, the setting and even the type of vehicle being driven.

A panel of experts analysed 26 of the author’s most famous books, including Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, concluding that certain plot structures could help the reader identify the killer some time before he or she is dramatically revealed.

The panel, led by Dr Dominique Jeannerod, senior research fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queens University, found that the culprit was always introduced within the first half of the book, and was likely to be emotionally involved with the victim, most being spouses or blood relatives.

• Agatha Christie's Devon

They said that if there were several land vehicles in the story, the killer was likely to be female. Similarly, a prevalence of nautical vehicles suggests they are more likely to be male.

If the victim is strangled, the perpetrator is more likely to be male and if the setting is a country house, there is a 75 per cent chance they will be female.

Christie’s language tends to be more negative when concerned with female killers, who are normally discovered due to a domestic item, they said.

By comparison, men are normally caught using information or logic.

The panel, which also included Dr James Bernthal from the University of Exeter and data analyst Brett Jacob, found that if Hercule Poirot, the eccentric Belgiun detective, took charge of the investigation, and the cause of death was stabbing, the killer will be mentioned more frequently at the beginning of the book.

If Miss Marple is the detective, and the motive for the murder is money or an affair, the killer will be mentioned more in the later stages of the novel than the beginning.

The experts also found that Christie's novels tended to include a “main clue” which is revealed approximately half way through the text and is usually “highlighted as it appears in the text”, so the reader is likely to remember it and will not feel cheated by its later revelation as a clue.

 They said a key feature of the author’s writing style was simplicity, using middle-range language and repetition.

The panel also found that the structure of a Christie novel could be reduced to a list of key events: the body will be found early on, a closed group of will be presented to the reader, the detective will then be introduced and a series of red herrings will follow and finally, after it is solved, the story will be wrapped up quickly and efficiently, leaving the reader satisfied.

The research was commissioned by UKTV channel Drama to mark the 125th anniversary of her birth.

Adrian Wills, general manager for Drama said "Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, so the television adaptations of her books are hugely popular.

"Given her on-going popularity, we wanted to know her formula for success, especially since the whodunit is such a classic of the crime drama genre.

"We hope that her legions of dedicated fans will revisit their favourite whodunits with a better understanding of how to crack the ultimate code."