Tim Wigmore in Cricinfo
They are still called the golden team. In 1953, Hungary came to Wembley and eviscerated England 6-3 in the "Match of the Century". A year later, in the 1954 World Cup, Hungary defeated West Germany 8-3 and Brazil 4-2. In a run of 50 games, until the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, they won 42 and lost only one - to West Germany in the 1954 World Cup final.
Yet Euro 2016 was Hungary's first appearance in a major tournament for 30 years. While Hungary's decline is sad, it has been no impediment to football's growth. The most successful sport in the world allows teams to rise and, yes, fall based on merit. So do other sports that are expanding, like basketball, rugby and even baseball.
Cricket, though, takes a very different view. This is the context of the opposition to two divisions: the sport has never been run on merit. The very concept of full membership reflects a sport that has prioritised status above on-field results. That can be seen in how each of the ten Test nations retains permanent votes in the ICC board (while the three votes shared by the 95 Associates and Affiliates are effectively worthless), and how even after recent steps to increase funding for top Associates, Zimbabwe still receive about three times as much ICC revenue as Afghanistan and Ireland.
In all previous World Cups, all Full Members have received automatic qualification as a membership privilege. That will change in 2019, but only while the tournament is contracted to ten teams. And even now cricket refuses to embrace the concept of World Cup qualification being based on a fair and equal process, as has long been the norm in other major sports. Afghanistan and Ireland have a chance to qualify automatically through the ODI rankings table, but this is only a theoretical chance: Afghanistan haven't played a single ODI against a top-nine team since the last World Cup.
The idea of Test status has historically been the most egregious illustration of cricket's contempt for meritocracy. The acquisition and retention of status has always been based on politicking as much as cricket: when Pakistan gained independence, the country had to wait five years to gain full membership. Sri Lanka could have been elevated to Test status years before 1982. And when Bangladesh finally gained Test status in 2000 - their own attempts to win Test status upon independence, 29 years earlier, had failed - they had lost five of the six ODIs they had played against Kenya, whose own application was rejected, in the three years leading up to then. When a member of the Kenyan board later made this point to an ICC official, the response was instructive: "You do not have 100 million people."
So when Sri Lanka Cricket's president Thilanga Sumathipala said, "If someone wants to come up - they can come up, that's no problem", he should really know better. Even the much-vaunted Test Challenge demands that a new team win their first ever series, something no country has ever done, and makes no mention of making the 11th Test side a Full Member too. When opponents of two divisions in Tests speak of how "the smaller countries will lose out" if divisions are introduced, it is clear they are thinking only of Full Members, and not the 95 Associates and Affiliates.
The very administrators charged with maintaining fair play on the pitch - by being vigilant against match-fixing and ball-tampering - often seem determined to avoid it off the field, by preventing emerging countries getting a fair opportunity to rise.
This aversion to merit belittles cricket. It has acted as a roadblock to new teams emerging: Ben Amafrio, executive general manager at Cricket Australia, said recently that cricket has only gained one competitive new team - Sri Lanka - in the last 40 years. In growing the sport, cricket has been dwarfed not merely by football but baseball, basketball and rugby too. This means that many wondrous talents, from Steve Tikolo to Mohammad Shahzad and Hamid Hassan, have rarely had the chance to show the best of themselves. Worse, it has meant that countless other talents have been lost to mainstream international cricket before they have ever had the chance. Names like Muralitharan, Jayasuriya, Aravinda de Silva and Sangakkara would not resonate in the same way had they been unfortunate enough to play in the pre-1982 generation of Sri Lankan cricket, when they could do nothing to gain Test status.
Rejecting meritocracy also damages the standard of cricket - not just because of the talent that does not get to play with the elite but because it allows existing Full Members to get away with an underperforming team without real consequence. This was the point made by New Zealand Cricket chief executive David White recently, when he said that two divisions would "make people look at their high-performance programmes and their systems, so the product of Test cricket will improve as well". It is a lesson that other sports long ago learned.
Meritocracy does not tolerate the stasis and misgovernance that has characterised boards in Sri Lanka, West Indies, Zimbabwe and beyond for far too long. Former Zimbabwe coach Dav Whatmore recently pointed out that ZC are "getting US$ 8-9 million a year and they've got a debt of almost $20m".
Such ICC funding would have gone much further had it been allocated to countries on the basis of merit, not status. And not only have Full Members received far more ICC money, they have also been free of scrutiny in how they spend it. The ICC has long mandated that all Associates and Affiliates submit their financial statements every year, to show where every cent of their ICC funding is going, yet only this year ensured that Full Members do the same.
Where competition has been genuinely embraced, it has led to huge improvements in the quality of the game. That much was recognised by Tim Anderson, the ICC's former head of global development, who said that at Associate and women's level, "the long-standing, merit-based event structures… have all provided building blocks for these improved performances, as has a funding model designed to incentivise and reward performance, not status", in an email to ICC members earlier this year. The contrast with the Full Members' attitude to meritocracy at the top of the men's game did not need to be spelled out.
Like the Hungarian football team and the West Indies cricket team, international teams decline. But while football and other sports allow other rising teams to take their place - and fallen giants to rise again - cricket does not. As sad as the decline of West Indies is, is it any sadder than the best players from Afghanistan, say, being denied the opportunity to play Test cricket because of the misfortune of their nationality?
Across all sports, fans and broadcasters value meritocracy, which gives games context and consequences for victory and defeat. It is this knowledge - and the reality of stagnating TV rights for all bilateral cricket, while those for domestic T20 leagues are soaring - that is now driving the ICC's attempts to introduce two divisions, and a 13-team ODI league. Without embracing the principles of merit, "cricket will lose fans and revenues, threatening its position in the marketplace," warns Simon Chadwick, a sports business expert.
So ingrained is cricket's conservatism that the notion of meritocracy in international cricket is now seen as something radical. In essence, though, it is an insurance policy to safeguard international cricket's future: both its number of competitive teams and its financial viability. Japan's victories over New Zealand and France in the Olympic rugby sevens were the latest reminder of how other sports are aggressively expanding, and in the process weaning themselves off a dangerous over-dependence upon a few countries. Yet cricket essentially retains its traditional colonial footprint, and its economics are still unhealthily reliant upon a coterie of nations - and above all India.
This means that if international cricket becomes even a little less lucrative in Australia, England and India - even if only through the rising appeal of domestic T20 leagues - the entire economy of the international game will suffer. Never mind the cricketing arguments for meritocracy; on a business level, that is poor risk management. The risk to international cricket's future lies not in meritocracy but in rejecting it.
Tuesday 16 August 2016
Monday 15 August 2016
Ever-lower interest rates have failed. It’s time to raise them
Mary Dejevsky in The Guardian
When the Bank of England reduced the base rate to a record low this month, there was one, tiny consolation for savers. The governor, Mark Carney – almost the only individual to have emerged from the Brexit shambles unscathed – said he was “not a fan” of negative interest rates. He thus seemed to rule out the nightmare – for anyone even just in the black – that we would have to pay the banks for keeping our money, rather than the other way round.
Carney’s effective rejection of negative rates – as already introduced in Japan and Sweden – was welcome. But it does little to help UK savers, who are recommended, in that infuriating phrase, to “shop around” for higher rates. Shop around if you like, but I was recently informed by two banks that rates were being reduced below 0.5%, and short of entrusting your cash to an emerging market, real options are few.
If the next thing is overt, as opposed to covert – charging for current accounts – then we will be in negative territory in fact if not in name. Then what? Despite everything I was brought up to believe, stashing cash under the mattress suddenly looks like sage planning.
The catastrophic fall in returns to savers over the past few years is, of course, a long-term consequence of the financial crisis; but a grievously neglected one. Each time rates have been reduced, the loudest voice has been that of creditors and their advocates. The supposed rationale is that low rates will get us all spending so as to get the economy growing again.
For those acclimatised to living not just with mortgages at absurdly low levels, but with overdrafts and credit-card debt as well – the benefits are evident. The cost of servicing that debt is reduced, and repay-day is again postponed. Small matter that the credit bonanza of the early 2000s was a direct cause of the financial crisis, and that we are also being urged to save for our retirement: ever-cheaper credit remains the economic growth hormone of choice.
For those of us told from childhood not to live beyond our means, who have also done our best to save for retirement, the potential effects are dire. Whenever I hear any mention of a new round of quantitative easing or a cut in interest rates, another dark cloud appears on my financial horizon – and not mine alone. We were led to expect a return on our savings that would supplement our pensions; a half of 1% even on a goodly sum will not do that.
Those now contemplating retirement on private sector, non-final salary, non-index-linked pensions – the majority – will see the rewards for their prudence not just trimmed, but slashed.
With interest rates low, investment funds look attractive
All the talk of intergenerational strife and the “plight of the millennials” omits the betrayal and impoverishment of savers, who are mostly older and have no means of increasing their income. What use is cheap credit to them? You don’t get a 1% tracker mortgage on care home fees.
The focus on house prices as the evil of evils for the young is also misleading. Low interest rates have helped push up housing costs in areas of high demand by making mammoth mortgages affordable. Saving for a deposit is the problem, and low interest rates don’t help.
There are signs, though, that the doctrine of ever-lower interest rates may be starting to run out of road. In the Financial Times last week a fund manager dared to challenge the orthodoxy that low interest rates necessarily stimulate demand. In the same paper, a reader argued that lower rates made him sit on his savings rather than spend. I suspect it has the same effect on others.
There are surely compelling reasons for a rethink. Reducing the cost of borrowing has not, in fact, led to a consumer boom, nor even to more modest growth. Without a perceptible rise in their incomes, it would seem that most people err on the side of caution. Either that, or their credit, however cheap, is maxed out.
We savers, meanwhile, are hanging on to what we have, for fear of even worse returns, and perhaps higher inflation, to come. Nor are negative rates likely to change this. The Japanese have not gone out to spend, even though this might seem a logical response; the result has rather been less money in banks and more, it is assumed, under beds.
So if ultra-low interest rates are not stimulating growth, and if they are simultaneously undermining messages about sound money and saving for retirement, how about trying the opposite? A rise in rates, perhaps?
The very idea would, of course, be greeted by warnings about mortgage defaults, repossessions, and hitting the poor disproportionately. But low rates tend not to benefit those on the brink; and an initially modest rise would offer a salutary reminder that borrowing has a cost. It could also exert downward pressure on house prices.
More immediately, it could encourage those of us in the black to indulge in a spot of so-called discretionary spending. In all, we could be reaching a point where the pluses of a rate increase outweigh the minuses. For savers, that point can’t come soon enough.
When the Bank of England reduced the base rate to a record low this month, there was one, tiny consolation for savers. The governor, Mark Carney – almost the only individual to have emerged from the Brexit shambles unscathed – said he was “not a fan” of negative interest rates. He thus seemed to rule out the nightmare – for anyone even just in the black – that we would have to pay the banks for keeping our money, rather than the other way round.
Carney’s effective rejection of negative rates – as already introduced in Japan and Sweden – was welcome. But it does little to help UK savers, who are recommended, in that infuriating phrase, to “shop around” for higher rates. Shop around if you like, but I was recently informed by two banks that rates were being reduced below 0.5%, and short of entrusting your cash to an emerging market, real options are few.
If the next thing is overt, as opposed to covert – charging for current accounts – then we will be in negative territory in fact if not in name. Then what? Despite everything I was brought up to believe, stashing cash under the mattress suddenly looks like sage planning.
The catastrophic fall in returns to savers over the past few years is, of course, a long-term consequence of the financial crisis; but a grievously neglected one. Each time rates have been reduced, the loudest voice has been that of creditors and their advocates. The supposed rationale is that low rates will get us all spending so as to get the economy growing again.
For those acclimatised to living not just with mortgages at absurdly low levels, but with overdrafts and credit-card debt as well – the benefits are evident. The cost of servicing that debt is reduced, and repay-day is again postponed. Small matter that the credit bonanza of the early 2000s was a direct cause of the financial crisis, and that we are also being urged to save for our retirement: ever-cheaper credit remains the economic growth hormone of choice.
For those of us told from childhood not to live beyond our means, who have also done our best to save for retirement, the potential effects are dire. Whenever I hear any mention of a new round of quantitative easing or a cut in interest rates, another dark cloud appears on my financial horizon – and not mine alone. We were led to expect a return on our savings that would supplement our pensions; a half of 1% even on a goodly sum will not do that.
Those now contemplating retirement on private sector, non-final salary, non-index-linked pensions – the majority – will see the rewards for their prudence not just trimmed, but slashed.
With interest rates low, investment funds look attractive
All the talk of intergenerational strife and the “plight of the millennials” omits the betrayal and impoverishment of savers, who are mostly older and have no means of increasing their income. What use is cheap credit to them? You don’t get a 1% tracker mortgage on care home fees.
The focus on house prices as the evil of evils for the young is also misleading. Low interest rates have helped push up housing costs in areas of high demand by making mammoth mortgages affordable. Saving for a deposit is the problem, and low interest rates don’t help.
There are signs, though, that the doctrine of ever-lower interest rates may be starting to run out of road. In the Financial Times last week a fund manager dared to challenge the orthodoxy that low interest rates necessarily stimulate demand. In the same paper, a reader argued that lower rates made him sit on his savings rather than spend. I suspect it has the same effect on others.
There are surely compelling reasons for a rethink. Reducing the cost of borrowing has not, in fact, led to a consumer boom, nor even to more modest growth. Without a perceptible rise in their incomes, it would seem that most people err on the side of caution. Either that, or their credit, however cheap, is maxed out.
We savers, meanwhile, are hanging on to what we have, for fear of even worse returns, and perhaps higher inflation, to come. Nor are negative rates likely to change this. The Japanese have not gone out to spend, even though this might seem a logical response; the result has rather been less money in banks and more, it is assumed, under beds.
So if ultra-low interest rates are not stimulating growth, and if they are simultaneously undermining messages about sound money and saving for retirement, how about trying the opposite? A rise in rates, perhaps?
The very idea would, of course, be greeted by warnings about mortgage defaults, repossessions, and hitting the poor disproportionately. But low rates tend not to benefit those on the brink; and an initially modest rise would offer a salutary reminder that borrowing has a cost. It could also exert downward pressure on house prices.
More immediately, it could encourage those of us in the black to indulge in a spot of so-called discretionary spending. In all, we could be reaching a point where the pluses of a rate increase outweigh the minuses. For savers, that point can’t come soon enough.
Schoolmates used to ask me about Indian trains. I can now confirm British ones are worse
Nish Kumar in The Guardian
Virgin Trains East Coast staff to strike in row over jobs
It’s interesting how far we have moved on in our attitude to renationalisation. In the 1980s and 1990s, we consistently elected governments that essentially based their economic policies on the boardgame Monopoly, where public services were flogged off to the highest bidder. We were in thrall to Rich Uncle Pennybags, the moustachioed, monocle-wearing mascot we now call Mr Monopoly. (This is clearly a terrible name, by the way. It’s like me changing my name to Grandpa Nishy Mouthjoker.)
But there has been a change in public opinion, if not in government policy. A 2015 poll revealed nearly 60% of us support public ownership of the railways. Last year, the East Coast service was reprivatised. The government had taken over the running of the line after the collapse of the previous private ownership and, in public control, it had become profitable to the Treasury and reported positive customer satisfaction. It is now run by Virgin Trains and, on Friday morning, staff announced strike action over two weekends in August. This means that I can’t get back to London from the Edinburgh Fringe. Once again, comedians are punished. Truly we are the most oppressed people in society.
Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face. In France, a near fully publicly owned rail system managed to give its passengers fares far lower than the UK for almost exactly the same amount of public rail subsidy between 1996 and 2010. Furthermore, the French government has invested profits in private rail companies, which then invest in companies that run British trains. Including – surprise! – Southern. As we haemorrhage money, we are lining the pockets of Riche Oncle Sacs d’Argent.
Nationalisation might seem like the preserve of old-fashioned, duffel-coat-wearing, Red-Flag-singing socialists, but it also appears to be economically efficient. Labour adoped renationalisation as a policy at its 2015 autumn conference, and Jeremy Corbyn is trying to make this a key platform in his plans to be the next prime minister. Corbyn might be on to a winner here. Time will tell. Anyway, I had better head off – I’ve got to start booking some train tickets for October 2025.
Protesters against Southern Rail in London last month: a 2015 poll revealed nearly 60% of the public supports public ownership of the railways. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images
Last week Southern Rail staff went on strike, leaving thousands of commuters facing a slightly improved service. Southern’s non-stop calamities this summer have added support to the idea of renationalisation. This debate is something I watched with great interest. I’m a standup comedian who can’t drive. I have never learned. I don’t trust my hand-eye coordination. You’re looking at someone who once dropped a cricket ball on to his own head during a routine catching practice; I don’t think it’s a great idea to have me in control of a high-speed metal death robot.
So I rely on the train system in this country. And I can tell you from firsthand experience that our train system is a mess. Carriages are full of unhappy travellers packed together like sardines, who have inexplicably paid for the privilege of being incarcerated. Periodically, everyone has to flee for cover, either by lying across the laps of the passengers lucky enough to have a seat, or by climbing into the luggage racks on the ceiling to allow the optimistically named “buffet” cart to pass through just in case anyone wants to spend £50 on a packet of crisps or a single fruit pastille.
And it’s not cheap, either. Train fares have increased way out step with inflation, meaning the percentage of our salaries we spend on train fares is now six times higher than many of our European counterparts – and that’s if you plan ahead. If you want to travel from London to Manchester, and have not booked a ticket, be prepared to sell a kidney or stay at home. Frequent train travellers have to plan ahead, booking months in advance to avoid massive fares. But there is still the risk that you will turn up on the day and the train will have lost its seat reservations for no apparent reason, and you will end up wedged between the door and the bathroom. Other than a music festival, a train is the only thing you might have to buy a ticket for and still end up spending an hour standing next to a toilet.
I feel sorry for the commuters affected by the Southern Rail chaos, especially because I hail from Croydon and have experienced that mayhem firsthand. As if being from Croydon wasn’t bad enough. When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages. v
I was once ejected from a Southern train for sitting in first class when the train was full. I informed the guard that, as the section was empty and I would have happily moved for people with first-class tickets, I didn’t see what the problem was. He said: “It’s far more serious than that – you have to keep that area clear in case people in wheelchairs get on.” I apologised and said: “I didn’t realise people in wheelchairs were allowed in that section.”
He replied: “Yeah – only if they have a first-class ticket. Otherwise we kick them off as well.”
Last week Southern Rail staff went on strike, leaving thousands of commuters facing a slightly improved service. Southern’s non-stop calamities this summer have added support to the idea of renationalisation. This debate is something I watched with great interest. I’m a standup comedian who can’t drive. I have never learned. I don’t trust my hand-eye coordination. You’re looking at someone who once dropped a cricket ball on to his own head during a routine catching practice; I don’t think it’s a great idea to have me in control of a high-speed metal death robot.
So I rely on the train system in this country. And I can tell you from firsthand experience that our train system is a mess. Carriages are full of unhappy travellers packed together like sardines, who have inexplicably paid for the privilege of being incarcerated. Periodically, everyone has to flee for cover, either by lying across the laps of the passengers lucky enough to have a seat, or by climbing into the luggage racks on the ceiling to allow the optimistically named “buffet” cart to pass through just in case anyone wants to spend £50 on a packet of crisps or a single fruit pastille.
And it’s not cheap, either. Train fares have increased way out step with inflation, meaning the percentage of our salaries we spend on train fares is now six times higher than many of our European counterparts – and that’s if you plan ahead. If you want to travel from London to Manchester, and have not booked a ticket, be prepared to sell a kidney or stay at home. Frequent train travellers have to plan ahead, booking months in advance to avoid massive fares. But there is still the risk that you will turn up on the day and the train will have lost its seat reservations for no apparent reason, and you will end up wedged between the door and the bathroom. Other than a music festival, a train is the only thing you might have to buy a ticket for and still end up spending an hour standing next to a toilet.
I feel sorry for the commuters affected by the Southern Rail chaos, especially because I hail from Croydon and have experienced that mayhem firsthand. As if being from Croydon wasn’t bad enough. When I was growing up, and periodically going to India to visit my grandmother, my classmates would often ask me about the trains. There was an exotic fascination with people sitting on top of the carriages. v
I was once ejected from a Southern train for sitting in first class when the train was full. I informed the guard that, as the section was empty and I would have happily moved for people with first-class tickets, I didn’t see what the problem was. He said: “It’s far more serious than that – you have to keep that area clear in case people in wheelchairs get on.” I apologised and said: “I didn’t realise people in wheelchairs were allowed in that section.”
He replied: “Yeah – only if they have a first-class ticket. Otherwise we kick them off as well.”
Virgin Trains East Coast staff to strike in row over jobs
It’s interesting how far we have moved on in our attitude to renationalisation. In the 1980s and 1990s, we consistently elected governments that essentially based their economic policies on the boardgame Monopoly, where public services were flogged off to the highest bidder. We were in thrall to Rich Uncle Pennybags, the moustachioed, monocle-wearing mascot we now call Mr Monopoly. (This is clearly a terrible name, by the way. It’s like me changing my name to Grandpa Nishy Mouthjoker.)
But there has been a change in public opinion, if not in government policy. A 2015 poll revealed nearly 60% of us support public ownership of the railways. Last year, the East Coast service was reprivatised. The government had taken over the running of the line after the collapse of the previous private ownership and, in public control, it had become profitable to the Treasury and reported positive customer satisfaction. It is now run by Virgin Trains and, on Friday morning, staff announced strike action over two weekends in August. This means that I can’t get back to London from the Edinburgh Fringe. Once again, comedians are punished. Truly we are the most oppressed people in society.
Frustration with the trains is inevitable, given the daily difficulties commuters face. In France, a near fully publicly owned rail system managed to give its passengers fares far lower than the UK for almost exactly the same amount of public rail subsidy between 1996 and 2010. Furthermore, the French government has invested profits in private rail companies, which then invest in companies that run British trains. Including – surprise! – Southern. As we haemorrhage money, we are lining the pockets of Riche Oncle Sacs d’Argent.
Nationalisation might seem like the preserve of old-fashioned, duffel-coat-wearing, Red-Flag-singing socialists, but it also appears to be economically efficient. Labour adoped renationalisation as a policy at its 2015 autumn conference, and Jeremy Corbyn is trying to make this a key platform in his plans to be the next prime minister. Corbyn might be on to a winner here. Time will tell. Anyway, I had better head off – I’ve got to start booking some train tickets for October 2025.
Sunday 14 August 2016
From Donald Trump to the Brexit campaign, outrageous untruths are almost a matter of course. How did we reach the point where ‘falsehood flies’?
Steven Poole in The Guardian
Champion of ‘free speech’: Donald Trump at a campaign rally last week. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Not so long ago it was “soundbites” that were thought to be corrupting political debate by reducing complex ideas to slogans. The 1988 US presidential election was called the “soundbite election” by some commentators, the most famous example being George HW Bush’s promise: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” (Two years later Bush agreed to a bipartisan budget that did increase taxes.) It was a mysteriously brilliant piece of verbal engineering. Why would you have to read Bush’s lips when you could hear what he was saying on the TV? But the surprising image and arresting rhythm made it stick.
Soundbites and slogans (“Take Back Control”) still work. Trump, too, has a conventional campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again”. (Great how, exactly? By doing what? Don’t ask.) But he gets most publicity for his antic, apparently off-the-cuff remarks that rhetorically perform an absence of rhetoric. His real genius might be read as a satirical absolutism about the first amendment. If speech is genuinely free, there should be no consequences to speech whatsoever. And, to the mystification of the commenting class, this is what Trump repeatedly finds to be the case.
After the media furore surrounding Trump’s claim that Obama founded Isis, he tweeted: “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?” Thus he rows back from any outrageous claim dreamed up by a brain that works like a cleverly programmed internet meme-generator. “I don’t know,” he says, all innocence, “that’s what some people are saying.” (No one was before he did.) Yet the idea Obama is the founder of Isis will stick in at least some voters’ minds come polling day, as will the imaginary Mexican wall (though they will probably have forgotten its “big beautiful door”) – just as the “£350m a week for the NHS” promise did for many Leave voters.
Trump is not a perversion of the tradition of political campaigning; he is the logical culmination of it. It doesn’t matter what you say, if it helps you get elected. Trump is not a liar, exactly, but a bullshitter. According to the canonical definition by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, a liar still cares about the truth because he wants to conceal it from you. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care what is true at all.
Trump is merely the most energetic current exploiter of a fact that modern politicians have long known: the media is broken, and you can mercilessly exploit its flaws to your own benefit. (That, after all, is what “spin doctors” are for.) If you repeat a lie often enough, then that claim becomes the story, and it’s what most people remember. And a structural confusion between “impartiality” and “balance” undermines the mission to inform of institutions such as the BBC. To be impartial would be to point out untruths wherever they come from. But to be “balanced” is to have a three-way between a presenter and two economists on opposite sides of some question. Never mind that one economist represents the views of 95% of the profession and the other is an ideologically blinkered outlier: the structure of the interview itself implies to the audience that the arguments are evenly divided.
In the age of social media, moreover, dubious political claims are packed into atomised fragments and attract thousands of enthusiastic retweets, while the people who help to redistribute them are unlikely ever to see a rebuttal that comes later or in someone else’s timeline. We’ve all moved on.
Social media is less a conversation than it is a virtually distributed riot of “happy firing” (a term for the celebratory shooting of assault rifles into the sky). That lies can go viral more quickly than the truth is another old observation. In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” But what is certain is that Twitter and Facebook now help it fly faster and further than ever before.
Nigel Farage proved the power of powerful slogans and images during the EU referendum campaign. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Because attention is the currency of social media, public figures are incentivised to use outrage to vie for visibility, which further coarsens the public discourse – as when the American shock-journo Ann Coulter lately defended Trump by calling him a “victim of media rape” who is being blamed for “wearing a short skirt”. Any such outburst these days, along with the wave of overt post-Brexit racism in Britain, may be defended as a healthy refusal to kowtow to “political correctness”, a term that originally denoted the careful use of language so as not to needlessly upset people, and now just means common decency.
What, then, is to be done? The modern bullshitting demagogue succeeds because he says arresting and often amusing things that cut through the anomie of those who feel left behind by politics as usual. Exquisitely reasoned liberal conversation is exactly what turns those voters off. Lately it has been notable that Hillary Clinton, not previously considered the wittiest person in US politics, has used an impressive array of scripted zingers to put down her opponent. What the bullshitters do so well is define the rules of the game, so perhaps their opponents will have to play it at least to this extent, while trying to keep the moral high ground by still caring about what is true and what isn’t.
It’s not an edifying thought, but if the insurgent right is to have its Trumps and its Farages, maybe the centre and the left need their own versions too.
A Vote Leave battle bus, rebranded outside parliament in London by Greenpeace last month. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
Donald Trump announced last week that Barack Obama was the “founder of Isis” and its “most valuable player”. Earlier he had hinted that gun activists might want to assassinate Hillary Clinton to prevent her appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. In Britain, meanwhile, calls for the moderation of violent political language after the death of Jo Cox have not resulted in much reduction of the gleeful talk of “stabbings” and “traitors”, and did not discourage Nigel Farage from exulting that the Brexit vote had been won “without a shot being fired”. In what some call an era of “post-truth politics”, public discourse seems more abusive and angry, and further from the ideal of reasoned conversation about social goods, than ever before. Is our political language broken?
Well, people have been complaining about the corruption of political language since political language existed. Confucius warned that a ruler should use the correct names for things, or social catastrophe would result. Orwell lamented that political language in his time was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And the era of the “war on terror” gave rise to a whole new constellation of what I call Unspeak: carefully engineered phrases designed to smuggle in a biased point of view and shut down thought and argument – like “war on terror” itself.
Nor is flat-out lying in politics anything new. There is a marvellous 18th-century pamphlet usually attributed to John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope and founder of the Scriblerus club. It describes a yet-to-be-written book, The Art of Political Lying, in which the author will show “that the People have a Right to private Truth from their Neighbours ... but that they have no Right at all to Political Truth”.
The coinage “post-truth politics”, indeed, implies that there was once a golden age of politics in which its elevated practitioners spoke nothing but perfect truth. The sun never dawned on such a day. But perhaps what feels new to us now is the shamelessness of the lying, and the barefaced repeating of a lie repeatedly debunked. Arbuthnot cautioned that the same lie should not be “obstinately insisted upon”, but he did not live to see this strategy work so brilliantly during the EU referendum, with the Leave campaign’s claim that we sent £350m a week to the EU.
Shameless, too, was the haste with which this lie, having done its work, was disowned on the morning of the referendum result. It was a “mistake”, muttered Nigel Farage, before carefully lowering his snout back into the EU trough that continues to pay his MEP’s salary. This rather called to mind Paul Wolfowitz’s candid admission that the issue of Saddam’s alleged WMD was chosen as the justification for the Iraq war “for bureaucratic reasons”. The surprise, perhaps, is that you can show how the magic trick works, and people still believe it next time.
Donald Trump announced last week that Barack Obama was the “founder of Isis” and its “most valuable player”. Earlier he had hinted that gun activists might want to assassinate Hillary Clinton to prevent her appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. In Britain, meanwhile, calls for the moderation of violent political language after the death of Jo Cox have not resulted in much reduction of the gleeful talk of “stabbings” and “traitors”, and did not discourage Nigel Farage from exulting that the Brexit vote had been won “without a shot being fired”. In what some call an era of “post-truth politics”, public discourse seems more abusive and angry, and further from the ideal of reasoned conversation about social goods, than ever before. Is our political language broken?
Well, people have been complaining about the corruption of political language since political language existed. Confucius warned that a ruler should use the correct names for things, or social catastrophe would result. Orwell lamented that political language in his time was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And the era of the “war on terror” gave rise to a whole new constellation of what I call Unspeak: carefully engineered phrases designed to smuggle in a biased point of view and shut down thought and argument – like “war on terror” itself.
Nor is flat-out lying in politics anything new. There is a marvellous 18th-century pamphlet usually attributed to John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope and founder of the Scriblerus club. It describes a yet-to-be-written book, The Art of Political Lying, in which the author will show “that the People have a Right to private Truth from their Neighbours ... but that they have no Right at all to Political Truth”.
The coinage “post-truth politics”, indeed, implies that there was once a golden age of politics in which its elevated practitioners spoke nothing but perfect truth. The sun never dawned on such a day. But perhaps what feels new to us now is the shamelessness of the lying, and the barefaced repeating of a lie repeatedly debunked. Arbuthnot cautioned that the same lie should not be “obstinately insisted upon”, but he did not live to see this strategy work so brilliantly during the EU referendum, with the Leave campaign’s claim that we sent £350m a week to the EU.
Shameless, too, was the haste with which this lie, having done its work, was disowned on the morning of the referendum result. It was a “mistake”, muttered Nigel Farage, before carefully lowering his snout back into the EU trough that continues to pay his MEP’s salary. This rather called to mind Paul Wolfowitz’s candid admission that the issue of Saddam’s alleged WMD was chosen as the justification for the Iraq war “for bureaucratic reasons”. The surprise, perhaps, is that you can show how the magic trick works, and people still believe it next time.
Champion of ‘free speech’: Donald Trump at a campaign rally last week. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Not so long ago it was “soundbites” that were thought to be corrupting political debate by reducing complex ideas to slogans. The 1988 US presidential election was called the “soundbite election” by some commentators, the most famous example being George HW Bush’s promise: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” (Two years later Bush agreed to a bipartisan budget that did increase taxes.) It was a mysteriously brilliant piece of verbal engineering. Why would you have to read Bush’s lips when you could hear what he was saying on the TV? But the surprising image and arresting rhythm made it stick.
Soundbites and slogans (“Take Back Control”) still work. Trump, too, has a conventional campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again”. (Great how, exactly? By doing what? Don’t ask.) But he gets most publicity for his antic, apparently off-the-cuff remarks that rhetorically perform an absence of rhetoric. His real genius might be read as a satirical absolutism about the first amendment. If speech is genuinely free, there should be no consequences to speech whatsoever. And, to the mystification of the commenting class, this is what Trump repeatedly finds to be the case.
After the media furore surrounding Trump’s claim that Obama founded Isis, he tweeted: “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?” Thus he rows back from any outrageous claim dreamed up by a brain that works like a cleverly programmed internet meme-generator. “I don’t know,” he says, all innocence, “that’s what some people are saying.” (No one was before he did.) Yet the idea Obama is the founder of Isis will stick in at least some voters’ minds come polling day, as will the imaginary Mexican wall (though they will probably have forgotten its “big beautiful door”) – just as the “£350m a week for the NHS” promise did for many Leave voters.
Trump is not a perversion of the tradition of political campaigning; he is the logical culmination of it. It doesn’t matter what you say, if it helps you get elected. Trump is not a liar, exactly, but a bullshitter. According to the canonical definition by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, a liar still cares about the truth because he wants to conceal it from you. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care what is true at all.
Trump is merely the most energetic current exploiter of a fact that modern politicians have long known: the media is broken, and you can mercilessly exploit its flaws to your own benefit. (That, after all, is what “spin doctors” are for.) If you repeat a lie often enough, then that claim becomes the story, and it’s what most people remember. And a structural confusion between “impartiality” and “balance” undermines the mission to inform of institutions such as the BBC. To be impartial would be to point out untruths wherever they come from. But to be “balanced” is to have a three-way between a presenter and two economists on opposite sides of some question. Never mind that one economist represents the views of 95% of the profession and the other is an ideologically blinkered outlier: the structure of the interview itself implies to the audience that the arguments are evenly divided.
In the age of social media, moreover, dubious political claims are packed into atomised fragments and attract thousands of enthusiastic retweets, while the people who help to redistribute them are unlikely ever to see a rebuttal that comes later or in someone else’s timeline. We’ve all moved on.
Social media is less a conversation than it is a virtually distributed riot of “happy firing” (a term for the celebratory shooting of assault rifles into the sky). That lies can go viral more quickly than the truth is another old observation. In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” But what is certain is that Twitter and Facebook now help it fly faster and further than ever before.
Nigel Farage proved the power of powerful slogans and images during the EU referendum campaign. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Because attention is the currency of social media, public figures are incentivised to use outrage to vie for visibility, which further coarsens the public discourse – as when the American shock-journo Ann Coulter lately defended Trump by calling him a “victim of media rape” who is being blamed for “wearing a short skirt”. Any such outburst these days, along with the wave of overt post-Brexit racism in Britain, may be defended as a healthy refusal to kowtow to “political correctness”, a term that originally denoted the careful use of language so as not to needlessly upset people, and now just means common decency.
What, then, is to be done? The modern bullshitting demagogue succeeds because he says arresting and often amusing things that cut through the anomie of those who feel left behind by politics as usual. Exquisitely reasoned liberal conversation is exactly what turns those voters off. Lately it has been notable that Hillary Clinton, not previously considered the wittiest person in US politics, has used an impressive array of scripted zingers to put down her opponent. What the bullshitters do so well is define the rules of the game, so perhaps their opponents will have to play it at least to this extent, while trying to keep the moral high ground by still caring about what is true and what isn’t.
It’s not an edifying thought, but if the insurgent right is to have its Trumps and its Farages, maybe the centre and the left need their own versions too.
Saturday 13 August 2016
BCCI, Katju and Cricket in India
Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu
The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s decision last week to appoint a former Supreme Court judge, Justice Markandey Katju, to “interact with the Justice Lodha Committee” and to “advise and guide” the BCCI on its affairs is, at best, an effort at prevarication, and, at worst, a subversion of the Supreme Court’s authority. Exacerbating the tension, following his appointment, Justice Katju, rather indecorously given his stature as a retired judge, on August 6 released what he termed as a “first report,” with “more reports to follow,” in which he declared the Supreme Court’s judgment appointing the Lodha Committee as illegal and unconstitutional.
It is one thing to critique the court’s judgment as an outsider; for instance, it is plausible to argue, even if incorrectly, that the court ought to have exercised greater restraint in interfering with the board’s affairs. But to do as Justice Katju has, to advise a party to openly disregard the Supreme Court’s verdict, presents a dangerous proposition, one that is far more threatening than any act of judicial overreach. What’s more, in any event, given the peculiar facts and circumstances surrounding the BCCI’s structure, Justice Katju’s assertion that the court has exceeded its brief also fails to pass muster. If anything, these developments exemplify precisely why the Supreme Court’s intervention in this case was justified.
Why we play sport
To understand why the Supreme Court thought it fit to appoint the committee presided by the former Chief Justice of India, R.M. Lodha, to inquire into, and to recommend changes, to the BCCI’s organisation, we must confront a few fundamental questions. Too often, amid the chaotic world of modern sport, we tend to lose track of why we play sport, why we watch games, why we revel in them, and why we invest so much of our emotions into seemingly pointless pursuits. We must first ask ourselves, therefore, what the abiding purpose of cricket is. What do we want from it? Is the sport meant for pure entertainment? Can it be commercially exploited by a band of the elite owing no responsibility to the public? Or do we want the sport to represent a higher, more virtuous purpose? If so, how are we to achieve these ends?
To take any sport seriously, and to ask such questions, seems to represent, in some ways, an incongruity in terms. In fact, many commentators considered the adjudication of the dispute concerning the BCCI and allegations of spot-fixing as a waste of the Supreme Court’s precious time. The public, they warned, was according more importance to cricket than it really deserved. But the danger, contrary to such counsel, is not that we are taking sport too seriously. It is that we are not taking sport seriously enough.
As the American academic, Jan Boxill, has argued, sport serves to establish a moral function for society. It is “an unalienated activity which is required for self-development, self-expression, and self-respect”; or, put differently, it is morally important because it is “the art of the people,” one that ought to be included in what Marx termed as the “realm of freedom”. In India, where cricket plays such a pervasive role, the sport would therefore have to necessarily be seen as a primary cultural good, one which, to borrow from another American, the philosopher John Rawls, is critical to the fulfilment of a person’s conception of a good life. In that sense, access to cricket has to be considered as an end in and of itself, and as not in any manner subservient to some other veiled purpose, especially entertainment or business. In his marvellous epic, Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James argued that cricket allows us a grasp of a more complete human existence, where social justice is a legitimate aim. To seize ownership of the game we must, therefore, hold cricket’s administrators answerable to standards of public law, a check that would help in bringing about within cricket’s province a more equal distribution of resources.
When it sat in judgment over the various shenanigans of the BCCI and its management of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the Supreme Court recognised some of these values inherent in cricket. For years, ever since its inception, the BCCI had functioned as its own master, as a sovereign whose diktats were decisive and unquestionable. As this dominion began to extend beyond India into a global clout, the inability to hold the board publicly accountable became graver still. Governments came and went, but legislative intervention has never been on the horizon.
A private society?
Until the Supreme Court intervened last year, every time the courts were approached, judges too vacillated, as the board bandied about its customary defence, one that Justice Katju has also invoked in his report: that the board is merely a private society, to which conventional standards of public law are simply inapplicable. Indeed, the BCCI, which was originally formed in 1928 as an unregistered association of persons, is now enrolled as a private body, under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act of 1975. Today, more than 30 members, including public sector undertakings such as the Railways and the Services, subscribe to the board’s Memorandum of Association, which includes, among its objects, the promotion and control of the game of cricket in India, the encouragement of the formation of State and regional cricket associations, and, most significantly, the selection of the Indian national cricket team.
At first blush, the BCCI’s argument might appear to make sense. Traditionally, private societies are responsible only to their members, and it is for these clubs to determine for themselves what best represent the interest of their associates. Therefore, for any of the board’s decisions to stand the law’s scruples, all that is required is the concurrence of its members, which is to be secured through a procedure that the memorandum provides. When people outside the BCCI’s membership enter into independent relationships with the board — such as employment contracts or purchase of TV rights — those relationships would also, according to the board, remain purely in the realm of private law.
Yet, before the Supreme Court intervened last year, the BCCI, emboldened by this status as a supposed private body, consistently diluted the underlying values in cricket, viewing these as somehow inferior to the board’s grand project of commercially exploiting the sport. When, for instance, incidents of conflicts of interest within the board have been questioned, the board’s arguments proceeded on these lines: if the BCCI’s members are satisfied that a person who owned an IPL team could also contest and hold office as the board’s president, the courts, including the Supreme Court, simply lacked the authority to judicially review such decisions.
But in its judgment, delivered on January 22, 2015, which resonated amongst cricket fans around the world, the Supreme Court rebuffed these arguments. Not only did it haul up the BCCI and question the body’s standards of governance but it also explicitly ruled that the board was amenable to public scrutiny. “Such is the passion for this game in this country that cricketers are seen as icons by youngsters, middle aged and the old alike,” wrote Justice T.S. Thakur (now Chief Justice of India) on behalf of the court. “Any organisation or entity that has such pervasive control over the game and its affairs and such powers as can make dreams end up in smoke or come true cannot be said to be undertaking any private activity.”
A clear purpose
Or in other words, what the court was really telling us is this: that cricket is a basic good, the access to which is critical to the fulfilment of a good life. When the court appointed the Lodha Committee, its intention, therefore, was to create a structure through which the sport can be made more accessible and more equal. The committee’s report, which was released on January 4, 2016, seeks to do just this. It recommends, among other things, that each Indian State would only be entitled to a single vote within the BCCI, a mandate that is likely to damage a coterie of power held by Maharashtra and Gujarat that have three associations each. What’s more, it directs the establishment of an apex council of nine members, overseen by a reputable chief executive officer, comprising three independent persons, with two from a newly constituted “players’ association”, and at least one woman, to conduct the day-to-day administration of the sport in the country; the institution of lucid norms within the BCCI’s constitution to regulate conflicts of interest, including the reduction in involvement from politicians; and, most critically, a more reasonable division, if not a complete separation, between the BCCI and the IPL.
The argument today, made in Justice Katju’s report, is that any change to the BCCI’s structure must come either from within or through legislative intervention. But neither of these, as history tells us, is conceivable. In bringing about a change in the board’s structure through the Lodha Committee’s recommendations, the Supreme Court isn’t making law. It is merely making accountable a body that enjoys a virtually state-sanctioned monopoly, which allows it to alter the fundamental nature of a property that it holds in trust for the public. It is astounding that the board would object to these recommendations, for all they do is establish a basic framework for good governance.
In the final analysis, we must ask ourselves this: do we want to see cricket as constituting an end by itself, as a sport that is both ethically and morally significant? If the answer to this question is yes, we must not only cause the BCCI to embrace the Lodha Committee’s recommendations but also push towards an even more revolutionary process of reform; one through which the game can eventually be brought closer to the common Indian public, where the sport’s ownership is reclaimed from those who have tarnished it beyond recognition.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s decision last week to appoint a former Supreme Court judge, Justice Markandey Katju, to “interact with the Justice Lodha Committee” and to “advise and guide” the BCCI on its affairs is, at best, an effort at prevarication, and, at worst, a subversion of the Supreme Court’s authority. Exacerbating the tension, following his appointment, Justice Katju, rather indecorously given his stature as a retired judge, on August 6 released what he termed as a “first report,” with “more reports to follow,” in which he declared the Supreme Court’s judgment appointing the Lodha Committee as illegal and unconstitutional.
It is one thing to critique the court’s judgment as an outsider; for instance, it is plausible to argue, even if incorrectly, that the court ought to have exercised greater restraint in interfering with the board’s affairs. But to do as Justice Katju has, to advise a party to openly disregard the Supreme Court’s verdict, presents a dangerous proposition, one that is far more threatening than any act of judicial overreach. What’s more, in any event, given the peculiar facts and circumstances surrounding the BCCI’s structure, Justice Katju’s assertion that the court has exceeded its brief also fails to pass muster. If anything, these developments exemplify precisely why the Supreme Court’s intervention in this case was justified.
Why we play sport
To understand why the Supreme Court thought it fit to appoint the committee presided by the former Chief Justice of India, R.M. Lodha, to inquire into, and to recommend changes, to the BCCI’s organisation, we must confront a few fundamental questions. Too often, amid the chaotic world of modern sport, we tend to lose track of why we play sport, why we watch games, why we revel in them, and why we invest so much of our emotions into seemingly pointless pursuits. We must first ask ourselves, therefore, what the abiding purpose of cricket is. What do we want from it? Is the sport meant for pure entertainment? Can it be commercially exploited by a band of the elite owing no responsibility to the public? Or do we want the sport to represent a higher, more virtuous purpose? If so, how are we to achieve these ends?
To take any sport seriously, and to ask such questions, seems to represent, in some ways, an incongruity in terms. In fact, many commentators considered the adjudication of the dispute concerning the BCCI and allegations of spot-fixing as a waste of the Supreme Court’s precious time. The public, they warned, was according more importance to cricket than it really deserved. But the danger, contrary to such counsel, is not that we are taking sport too seriously. It is that we are not taking sport seriously enough.
As the American academic, Jan Boxill, has argued, sport serves to establish a moral function for society. It is “an unalienated activity which is required for self-development, self-expression, and self-respect”; or, put differently, it is morally important because it is “the art of the people,” one that ought to be included in what Marx termed as the “realm of freedom”. In India, where cricket plays such a pervasive role, the sport would therefore have to necessarily be seen as a primary cultural good, one which, to borrow from another American, the philosopher John Rawls, is critical to the fulfilment of a person’s conception of a good life. In that sense, access to cricket has to be considered as an end in and of itself, and as not in any manner subservient to some other veiled purpose, especially entertainment or business. In his marvellous epic, Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James argued that cricket allows us a grasp of a more complete human existence, where social justice is a legitimate aim. To seize ownership of the game we must, therefore, hold cricket’s administrators answerable to standards of public law, a check that would help in bringing about within cricket’s province a more equal distribution of resources.
When it sat in judgment over the various shenanigans of the BCCI and its management of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the Supreme Court recognised some of these values inherent in cricket. For years, ever since its inception, the BCCI had functioned as its own master, as a sovereign whose diktats were decisive and unquestionable. As this dominion began to extend beyond India into a global clout, the inability to hold the board publicly accountable became graver still. Governments came and went, but legislative intervention has never been on the horizon.
A private society?
Until the Supreme Court intervened last year, every time the courts were approached, judges too vacillated, as the board bandied about its customary defence, one that Justice Katju has also invoked in his report: that the board is merely a private society, to which conventional standards of public law are simply inapplicable. Indeed, the BCCI, which was originally formed in 1928 as an unregistered association of persons, is now enrolled as a private body, under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act of 1975. Today, more than 30 members, including public sector undertakings such as the Railways and the Services, subscribe to the board’s Memorandum of Association, which includes, among its objects, the promotion and control of the game of cricket in India, the encouragement of the formation of State and regional cricket associations, and, most significantly, the selection of the Indian national cricket team.
At first blush, the BCCI’s argument might appear to make sense. Traditionally, private societies are responsible only to their members, and it is for these clubs to determine for themselves what best represent the interest of their associates. Therefore, for any of the board’s decisions to stand the law’s scruples, all that is required is the concurrence of its members, which is to be secured through a procedure that the memorandum provides. When people outside the BCCI’s membership enter into independent relationships with the board — such as employment contracts or purchase of TV rights — those relationships would also, according to the board, remain purely in the realm of private law.
Yet, before the Supreme Court intervened last year, the BCCI, emboldened by this status as a supposed private body, consistently diluted the underlying values in cricket, viewing these as somehow inferior to the board’s grand project of commercially exploiting the sport. When, for instance, incidents of conflicts of interest within the board have been questioned, the board’s arguments proceeded on these lines: if the BCCI’s members are satisfied that a person who owned an IPL team could also contest and hold office as the board’s president, the courts, including the Supreme Court, simply lacked the authority to judicially review such decisions.
But in its judgment, delivered on January 22, 2015, which resonated amongst cricket fans around the world, the Supreme Court rebuffed these arguments. Not only did it haul up the BCCI and question the body’s standards of governance but it also explicitly ruled that the board was amenable to public scrutiny. “Such is the passion for this game in this country that cricketers are seen as icons by youngsters, middle aged and the old alike,” wrote Justice T.S. Thakur (now Chief Justice of India) on behalf of the court. “Any organisation or entity that has such pervasive control over the game and its affairs and such powers as can make dreams end up in smoke or come true cannot be said to be undertaking any private activity.”
A clear purpose
Or in other words, what the court was really telling us is this: that cricket is a basic good, the access to which is critical to the fulfilment of a good life. When the court appointed the Lodha Committee, its intention, therefore, was to create a structure through which the sport can be made more accessible and more equal. The committee’s report, which was released on January 4, 2016, seeks to do just this. It recommends, among other things, that each Indian State would only be entitled to a single vote within the BCCI, a mandate that is likely to damage a coterie of power held by Maharashtra and Gujarat that have three associations each. What’s more, it directs the establishment of an apex council of nine members, overseen by a reputable chief executive officer, comprising three independent persons, with two from a newly constituted “players’ association”, and at least one woman, to conduct the day-to-day administration of the sport in the country; the institution of lucid norms within the BCCI’s constitution to regulate conflicts of interest, including the reduction in involvement from politicians; and, most critically, a more reasonable division, if not a complete separation, between the BCCI and the IPL.
The argument today, made in Justice Katju’s report, is that any change to the BCCI’s structure must come either from within or through legislative intervention. But neither of these, as history tells us, is conceivable. In bringing about a change in the board’s structure through the Lodha Committee’s recommendations, the Supreme Court isn’t making law. It is merely making accountable a body that enjoys a virtually state-sanctioned monopoly, which allows it to alter the fundamental nature of a property that it holds in trust for the public. It is astounding that the board would object to these recommendations, for all they do is establish a basic framework for good governance.
In the final analysis, we must ask ourselves this: do we want to see cricket as constituting an end by itself, as a sport that is both ethically and morally significant? If the answer to this question is yes, we must not only cause the BCCI to embrace the Lodha Committee’s recommendations but also push towards an even more revolutionary process of reform; one through which the game can eventually be brought closer to the common Indian public, where the sport’s ownership is reclaimed from those who have tarnished it beyond recognition.
Poor little rich kids – the perils of inheriting vast wealth
Emine Saner in The Guardian
It is reported that when the 6th Duke of Westminster, who died this week, realised at the age of 15 that he was heir to his family’s immense fortune, he dreaded it – the responsibility, the knowledge that he hadn’t earned it, the isolation it would bring him. He would have prepared his son for the eventuality of becoming duke, although neither would have wanted to think it would happen as early as it did. On Tuesday, Gerald Grosvenor died suddenly at the age of 64; his son Hugh, now the 7th Duke of Westminster, is just 25 and inherits the family’s £9.3bn fortune.
Aside from the trauma of losing a parent – having money does not ease the pain of bereavement – the 25-year-old finds himself in both an enviable, and unenviable, position. On the one hand, he becomes one of the richest men in the world; on the other, money didn’t bring happiness to his father, who appeared to find his title and wealth a burden. “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up,” he said once. “I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me.”
The Duke of Westminster
It is, however, very difficult to feel sorry for the rich, which is, in itself, a problem for many of them. “They know that others have no sympathy for them, and no understanding of the situation they’re in,” says Thayer Willis, author of Navigating the Dark Side of Wealth: A Life Guide for Inheritors, who runs a counselling business helping the rich deal with the psychological challenges of wealth. “They know not to go around whining and expecting people to feel sorry for them.”
But there are serious challenges that come from inheriting vast fortunes, she says, particularly at a young age. Willis knows many of them herself – she was born into the family that started the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a timber company worth billions. “I stumbled through my 20s and made a lot of mistakes,” she says.
“For all of us, our 20s and 30s are the ‘building years’, when we’re meant to get out in the world, figure out who we are, what we like to do, who we like, who we like to date,” she says. “Having a tremendous amount of financial wealth come into your life at that point really messes with motivation. All of a sudden the question becomes: ‘What do I need to do to manage this wealth?’ instead of: ‘How do I identify and clarify who I really am?’ People’s motivation to be around you becomes questionable. Are they attracted to me or to this wealth?” These are “definitely first-world problems, but it certainly messes with the psychological development of that young adult”. In her 30s, Willis settled down, trained as a psychotherapist and became a wealth counsellor.
If it’s so awful – an obvious question – why not give the money away? “Some people think of that, usually to the horror of the family. Older family members understand what this money can do in terms of providing a resource for any kind of emergency, or starting a business, or philanthropy.”
For inheritors of wealth going back generations, there is a sense, as Grosvenor said, that they are mere custodians and the money isn’t theirs to give away or lose. “I’ve seen some quite young heirs who really understand the dynastic vision of a family from a pretty early age,” says Julian Washington, head of intermediary relationship management at RBC Wealth Management. “They don’t want to be the weak link in the chain when the family story is told. In my experience, when you deal with old-money families, if you want to call them that, they tend to be pretty good at educating their next generation, because typically they’ve been doing it for centuries.” And when someone – a male member of the family, thanks to outrageous primogeniture – comes to inherit, “more often than not they’re in a pretty good place because they come to it with all that tradition and they understand the nature of the shoes they’re stepping into”.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg have decided to give away 99% of their fortune – but their daughter, Max, could still inherit $450m. Photograph: AP
Plenty of members of the super-rich have already decided not to burden their children with vast, unearned fortunes in the first place – it is enough that they have had expensive educations and all the opportunities of a privileged start in life. Warren Buffett’s famous take on inheritance is to leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing”. It has been reported, though not confirmed, that Bill Gates plans to leave his children a meagre $10m (£7.7m) each from his $76bn fortune. Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg have pledged to give away 99% of their $45bn pile(although it’s all relative – this still leaves them, and their daughter, with $450m). Not quite on the same financial scale, Nigella Lawson has said she isn’t planning to leave her children anything: “It ruins people not having to earn money.”
Sam Roddick, the daughter of the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, didn’t know that her mother, who died in 2007, had planned to give away her entire £51m fortune. “We found out when it was published in a Daily Mail article,” she laughs. It wasn’t entirely a surprise – her parents were socialists, rather than socialites, and their business was famous for its fair-trade principles. And it wasn’t personal. Cutting one’s child out of your will can, to some, seem like “a deep act of abandonment. I never had that abandonment because I had a healthy relationship with her. I know other people who haven’t been given money and it has been a huge act of aggression.”
Duke's £9bn inheritance prompts call for tax overhaul
Roddick was also unusual among the children of the rich in that she hadn’t grown up surrounded by wealth. She was largely brought up by her working-class grandmother, “and working-class values – you work hard, you earn your keep and you contribute to society. Entitled people from inherited wealth are all about other people being in service to them.”
She has observed the very wealthy people she has met over the years. “They are isolated from normal society,” she says. With the extremely wealthy, “relationships become transactional, and that is something that is extraordinarily emotionally damaging. A lot of very wealthy people are not accountable to their community, they’re not accountable to the people they love, they show their power and control through transaction and they are unhappy, from what I can tell. The people I know who are very wealthy and are happy are all contributing something to society.” Until we sort out the rules that allow vast fortunes held in trusts, as the Grosvenor estate is, to avoid hefty death duties and be passed down the generations, it’s something for the new Duke of Westminster and his future male heirs to bear in mind.
It is reported that when the 6th Duke of Westminster, who died this week, realised at the age of 15 that he was heir to his family’s immense fortune, he dreaded it – the responsibility, the knowledge that he hadn’t earned it, the isolation it would bring him. He would have prepared his son for the eventuality of becoming duke, although neither would have wanted to think it would happen as early as it did. On Tuesday, Gerald Grosvenor died suddenly at the age of 64; his son Hugh, now the 7th Duke of Westminster, is just 25 and inherits the family’s £9.3bn fortune.
Aside from the trauma of losing a parent – having money does not ease the pain of bereavement – the 25-year-old finds himself in both an enviable, and unenviable, position. On the one hand, he becomes one of the richest men in the world; on the other, money didn’t bring happiness to his father, who appeared to find his title and wealth a burden. “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up,” he said once. “I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me.”
The Duke of Westminster
It is, however, very difficult to feel sorry for the rich, which is, in itself, a problem for many of them. “They know that others have no sympathy for them, and no understanding of the situation they’re in,” says Thayer Willis, author of Navigating the Dark Side of Wealth: A Life Guide for Inheritors, who runs a counselling business helping the rich deal with the psychological challenges of wealth. “They know not to go around whining and expecting people to feel sorry for them.”
But there are serious challenges that come from inheriting vast fortunes, she says, particularly at a young age. Willis knows many of them herself – she was born into the family that started the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a timber company worth billions. “I stumbled through my 20s and made a lot of mistakes,” she says.
“For all of us, our 20s and 30s are the ‘building years’, when we’re meant to get out in the world, figure out who we are, what we like to do, who we like, who we like to date,” she says. “Having a tremendous amount of financial wealth come into your life at that point really messes with motivation. All of a sudden the question becomes: ‘What do I need to do to manage this wealth?’ instead of: ‘How do I identify and clarify who I really am?’ People’s motivation to be around you becomes questionable. Are they attracted to me or to this wealth?” These are “definitely first-world problems, but it certainly messes with the psychological development of that young adult”. In her 30s, Willis settled down, trained as a psychotherapist and became a wealth counsellor.
If it’s so awful – an obvious question – why not give the money away? “Some people think of that, usually to the horror of the family. Older family members understand what this money can do in terms of providing a resource for any kind of emergency, or starting a business, or philanthropy.”
For inheritors of wealth going back generations, there is a sense, as Grosvenor said, that they are mere custodians and the money isn’t theirs to give away or lose. “I’ve seen some quite young heirs who really understand the dynastic vision of a family from a pretty early age,” says Julian Washington, head of intermediary relationship management at RBC Wealth Management. “They don’t want to be the weak link in the chain when the family story is told. In my experience, when you deal with old-money families, if you want to call them that, they tend to be pretty good at educating their next generation, because typically they’ve been doing it for centuries.” And when someone – a male member of the family, thanks to outrageous primogeniture – comes to inherit, “more often than not they’re in a pretty good place because they come to it with all that tradition and they understand the nature of the shoes they’re stepping into”.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg have decided to give away 99% of their fortune – but their daughter, Max, could still inherit $450m. Photograph: AP
Plenty of members of the super-rich have already decided not to burden their children with vast, unearned fortunes in the first place – it is enough that they have had expensive educations and all the opportunities of a privileged start in life. Warren Buffett’s famous take on inheritance is to leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing”. It has been reported, though not confirmed, that Bill Gates plans to leave his children a meagre $10m (£7.7m) each from his $76bn fortune. Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg have pledged to give away 99% of their $45bn pile(although it’s all relative – this still leaves them, and their daughter, with $450m). Not quite on the same financial scale, Nigella Lawson has said she isn’t planning to leave her children anything: “It ruins people not having to earn money.”
Sam Roddick, the daughter of the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, didn’t know that her mother, who died in 2007, had planned to give away her entire £51m fortune. “We found out when it was published in a Daily Mail article,” she laughs. It wasn’t entirely a surprise – her parents were socialists, rather than socialites, and their business was famous for its fair-trade principles. And it wasn’t personal. Cutting one’s child out of your will can, to some, seem like “a deep act of abandonment. I never had that abandonment because I had a healthy relationship with her. I know other people who haven’t been given money and it has been a huge act of aggression.”
Duke's £9bn inheritance prompts call for tax overhaul
Roddick was also unusual among the children of the rich in that she hadn’t grown up surrounded by wealth. She was largely brought up by her working-class grandmother, “and working-class values – you work hard, you earn your keep and you contribute to society. Entitled people from inherited wealth are all about other people being in service to them.”
She has observed the very wealthy people she has met over the years. “They are isolated from normal society,” she says. With the extremely wealthy, “relationships become transactional, and that is something that is extraordinarily emotionally damaging. A lot of very wealthy people are not accountable to their community, they’re not accountable to the people they love, they show their power and control through transaction and they are unhappy, from what I can tell. The people I know who are very wealthy and are happy are all contributing something to society.” Until we sort out the rules that allow vast fortunes held in trusts, as the Grosvenor estate is, to avoid hefty death duties and be passed down the generations, it’s something for the new Duke of Westminster and his future male heirs to bear in mind.
Friday 12 August 2016
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