I founded Ukip. It’s a national joke now and should disappear

Alan Sked in The Guardian




I founded the Anti-Federalist League in 1991 to take Britain out of what became the European Union. The party was renamed Ukip - the UK Independence party – in 1993 and was a thoroughly mainstream one. It had policies on a wide range of issues but not immigration, not then seen as being controversial. Its membership form stated it had no prejudices against foreigners or lawful minorities of any kind. All that changed after I resigned as leader in 1997 to devote myself exclusively to academic life.

Before I left, I expelled Nigel Farage and two others from the party. They had convened a public convention in Basingstoke to examine why I had not won the 1997 general election. Media representatives and others were invited but not me. I, of course, would have explained that with fewer than 200 candidates, only £40,000 in the bank, no media coverage or name recognition, and with a wealthy Referendum party as well as the major ones to fight, there was never any chance of winning an election.

In any case, the Ukip national executive committee expelled them for bringing the party into disrepute, but really for their embarrassing political naivety and stupidity – qualities that they infused into the party when, after a costly legal battle Ukip could not afford to continue, they were restored to membership. Farage, of course, never ever managed to get himself elected as an MP in 20 years, or get any other Ukip candidate (save a couple of Tory turncoats) into parliament.

Yet, despite the lack of brainpower, Ukip was saved from oblivion by two external factors. First, in 1999, the EU changed the voting system for the European parliament, allowing parties with very low votes to enter. This allowed Ukip to become the default protest party in European elections, although its MEPs did little other than collect their salaries and expenses.

This enabled the party to appear on the BBC’s Question Time but brought no political gains domestically. Farage was not interested in ideas, policies or recruiting decent candidates. Only immigration mattered to him. He himself could joyfully describe Ukip’s 2010 manifesto as “drivel, sheer drivel”. The party that year secured only 3.1% of the vote, and fewer than one million votes. It is important to remember this.

However, it was now saved by another external factor. Nick Clegg took the suicidal decision to enter a coalition with David Cameron’s Tories, agreed to triple university tuition fees and back austerity. All this caused the demise of the Lib Dems and their replacement by Ukip as the default protest party domestically. This was already clear by the 2012 local elections and in the 2015 general election, when Ukip won more than 11% of the vote. 

By then, of course, Cameron had committed himself to a referendum on EU membership, which he lost in 2016. Michael Gove and Boris Johnson secured Brexit; Farage, a toxic and divisive figure, was kept at arm’s length and success came in spite of him, not on account of him. (Only Donald Trump believed the opposite.)

Since the referendum Ukip has fallen apart. With a leave vote achieved and Farage gone, it has suffered from poor and eccentric leadership, falling poll ratings (less than 2% in the 2017 general election) and a general perception that Brexit can be left to the Tories.

The love life of its present leader has made it a national joke and the party’s MEPs and so-called front bench have deserted him. Indeed, Ukip may not be able to afford to run a new leadership election. As its founder I can only suggest that it should now dissolve itself. There may be a need for a party to hold the Tories to account over Brexit but that is not Ukip. It now lacks all political credibility and provokes laughter rather than sympathy. It is high time therefore for it to disappear.

Pioneering Britain has a rethink on privatisation

 Jonathan Ford and Gill Plimmer in The Financial Times

It was one of the most influential reports ever written by a modern British economist — and perhaps the most rushed. 

Stephen Littlechild, then a little-known academic, was commissioned by Margaret Thatcher’s government in October 1982 to design a regulatory mechanism that would prevent Britain’s soon-to-be privatised telecoms monopoly, BT, from exploiting its position and gouging the public. 

The work was urgent. The prime minister wished to push through legislation that would enable the company to be sold as soon as possible, making it a pioneer for the privatisation of public utilities that she hoped would create a new shareholding democracy in Britain. She needed the report by January 14 1983, which Prof Littlechild said gave him just “10 working weeks (allowing for Christmas!)”. 

 His formula “was invented between 5 and 7 January 1983” allowing just a single week “to write it up in a plausible way, test it against the specified criteria, [and] conclude that it was the best available option”, Prof Littlechild recalled. 

Fortunately, “RPI minus x” passed muster not only with Mrs Thatcher, but also with BT’s investment bankers, SG Warburg, which thought it vastly preferable to the profit ceiling used by US utilities. “It was politically defensible and even attractive,” recalled Prof Littlechild. It won the day. 

The Littlechild formula has gone on to serve as the template for all UK regulation of privatised utilities. In modified form, it sits at the heart of the mechanisms that still regulate prices set by electricity and water companies. 

That means it is also at the centre of the divide in British politics, which in the past two years has fractured about the merits of allowing private companies to run essential utilities that are natural monopolies. 

After a series of scandals and controversies over poor service, high prices and generous payouts to shareholders, the country that was the global frontrunner in privatisation is rethinking how to run its essential utilities. Almost three decades after they were sold off, critics — and many voters — believe that investors have run rings around the watchdogs set up by the government to regulate the industries. 

Under Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour party has come out firmly for the renationalisation of rail, water, energy and the postal service. 

At the Labour party’s annual conference in September, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, promised to bring “ownership and control of the utilities and key services into the hands of people who use and work in them”. 

Labour’s attack has exposed the fragility of public consent for private utilities. An October poll conducted by the UK’s far-from-socialist Legatum Institute showed 83 per cent of respondents favoured the nationalisation of water. For energy, the figure was only slightly lower, at 77 per cent. 

“If you look at this list, you see the public most objects to private ownership of natural monopolies — ones where there is little real possibility of injecting meaningful competition,” says Martin Blaiklock, an infrastructure expert and former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s power and energy division. 

 Prof Littlechild’s regulatory system was supposed to substitute for competition, giving consumers a fair price while also offering private owners incentives to innovate and find efficiencies. Charges were set to give operators a reasonable return on their capital assets, indexed for inflation (the retail price index) less a certain amount each year (x) to spur them to drive productivity. 

 What makes Britain’s regime different from the one for private US utilities, for instance, is that these returns are not capped. “We didn’t like the idea of an effective 100 per cent tax on efficiencies over a fixed rate of return,” recalls Prof Littlechild. “Margaret Thatcher’s economics adviser, Alan Walters, was particularly offended by the cap. He said: ‘We can’t do this. It’s socialism!’” 

Instead, every few years the watchdog estimates the costs the company is likely to face in the next regulatory period. If the company can achieve greater savings, it is permitted to keep 100 per cent of the extra it makes. 

 This sounds logical enough. It has helped to usher dozens of utilities into the private sector and support huge investment. But critics allege the system has delivered neither the discipline nor the innovation that was promised. They think regulators have been too lenient in setting the efficiency targets that are used to justify extra returns for private capital. 

Take, for instance, the water industry, which was sold off in 1989. Cathryn Ross, until recently the chief executive of Ofwat, boasted that her organisation’s efficiency demands had saved consumers £120 off bills (which currently average about £400) since privatisation. That may sound a large number, but it equates to an annual productivity improvement of just 1 per cent. It is well below even the anaemic 1.5 per cent average rate for the UK economy over the same period. 

“By giving the companies an easy ride, the regulator has ensured that customers’ bills have risen more than they should have,” says David Hall, director of the Public Services International Research Unit at Greenwich university. In the case of water, they have gone up by about 40 per cent above the rate of inflation since 1989, although the steepest increases took place in the first decade after privatisation. 

Second, regulators have paid too little attention to the way companies structure their finances. Finance costs are a key factor watchdogs weigh when setting prices. Yet they have consistently overestimated these expenses during a long period of falling interest rates. 

That, combined with a reluctance to regulate companies’ balance sheets, has resulted in an orgy of borrowing, as this allows owners to achieve “savings” that have more to do with financial engineering than effort and enterprise. Stratospheric debts — including high yielding shareholder loans — have also suppressed tax revenues. Thames Water, for instance, has paid almost no corporation tax for the past decade. 

In 1989, the water industry in England and Wales was privatised with no net debt. Yet almost three decades on, it has built up borrowings of £42bn. 

All but three of the 10 English water companies have been taken off the stock market by private equity investors — many backed by foreign sovereign wealth funds and pension schemes. In the meantime, all the industry’s post-tax profits have been carried off in the form of dividends. Shareholders’ funds have barely budged since 1989. 

A comparison with Scottish Water is instructive. The Scottish utility was not privatised in 1989, but remained in the public sector. Like its southern cousins, it has been forced into a heavy programme of investment, much of it at the behest of the EU.  

Yet unlike the English utilities, it remains relatively unleveraged. Its borrowings of £3.8bn represent just 48 per cent of the value of its regulated assets, as against the 65-80 per cent that is prevalent in England. Meanwhile, the average bill from Scottish Water was £357 last year — 10 per cent lower than the English average of £395. 

Some believe that tweaks to the regulatory regime could make the system function better. Prof Littlechild argues, for instance, that instead of keeping 100 per cent of any extra efficiency gains, these could be split with the customer. “That way there would be some community of interest,” he suggests. 

Mr Blaiklock, a longstanding critic of excessive leverage in utilities, believes the watchdog should intervene much more in companies’ financial affairs, which he thinks are unsustainable in the long term, especially if interest rates rise. “The regulator should be given stronger executive powers to intervene in extreme financial engineering initiatives and aggressive tax tactics.” 

Faced with mounting criticism, watchdogs are making changes. Ofwat is proposing to alter the payment terms for water companies so that more of their money comes from hitting performance targets. 

Critics warn that this will make an already complex system even more baroque. “You have to question whether any system this involved can be transparent, when even people with an interest in getting to the bottom find it very hard,” says Mr Hall. The intricacy of the regulatory process also troubles Prof Littlechild, who notes that it takes about three years to decide the next regulatory settlement. “When we created it, I fondly imagined the regulator sitting down with the companies shortly before the expiry of each period and just setting a price,” he says. 

 Not everyone is convinced that tweaks are sufficient. Mr Hall argues that the regulatory system is inherently dysfunctional. “There is a fundamental contradiction between the regulator’s duty to protect consumers and its overarching duty to ensure that the companies have enough money to deliver investment,” he says. 

Prof Littlechild’s original idea with BT was that the watchdog would simply hold the fort for the consumer until competition arrived like the US cavalry. Permanent regulation is vulnerable to industry capture. “The problem is that the regulator spends all its time talking to the company and its investors,” says Mr Hall. 

Ofwat, for instance, has been criticised for its focus on investors rather than customers. While the watchdog sets aside two days a year to give presentations to the City of London, there is no forum for it to meet customers. 

While regulators do have the power to strip companies of their licences, this has been invoked only once in the water sector — when the collapse of Enron in 2001 forced Ofwat temporarily to take control of its Wessex Water. 

According to Mr Blaiklock, this lack of grip explains why privatisation has failed to achieve its primary purpose — of passing the operational and financial risks for the delivery of a public service to the private sector. London’s £4.2bn “super sewer”, for instance, is financed directly from customer bills, with households rather than the company bearing the risk of a complex project. 

Few developed countries have copied the British model in selling off whole utility networks to private entities. In Europe, the model has generally been to separate asset ownership from service provision and to grant private companies the right to operate concessions. 

In recent years, doubts about the governance and customer benefits have encouraged other countries to reverse this process — especially in water — and take these concessions back into municipal ownership. A study of French water services in 2004 found that the price of privately-delivered water was 16.6 per cent higher than in places where municipalities delivered the service. 

Similar arguments buttress the Labour party’s plans to bring utilities back into public ownership. 

Its proponents stress not efficiency, which they claim is much the same in either public or private sectors, but cost and accountability. A publicly-owned utility would not have to deliver the returns demanded by the private sector. 

A study by Greenwich university claims that refinancing utility debt and equity with government bonds and scrapping dividends could save £2.3bn a year. That is equivalent to a saving of almost £100 off the average £400 water bill. Public ownership would also remove all the incentives that, Mr Hall claims, encourage bosses to favour financial management over customers. 

 “These are local amenities supplying a basic service that ought to be properly accountable to local people,” he says. 

Other structural options involve introducing more competition by separating network ownership from the services, and auctioning limited concessions. The snag is that this would be extraordinarily expensive, requiring the state both to buy out the existing owners and then retender the operations. Taxpayers could end up paying twice — first to compensate existing investors and then potentially to reward the new operators. 

Lastly, there is the possibility of placing utilities in not-for-dividend entities, akin to Welsh Water, which was restructured in 2000. Although they would remain regulated entities, companies could use retained earnings only to invest in their assets or to cut customer bills. Shareholders and executives would no longer be able to skim off all the cream. 

There may be no cheap and easy answers to the problems facing Britain’s utilities, but the status quo is unlikely to hold. “What we can now see is that the regulatory regime is not robust enough,” says Mr Blaiklock. “We need to change that.”

Is sex the answer to your relationship woes?

Amelia Hill in The Guardian







How does it make you feel when your partner is cold and distant? Or when they’re critical and prickly? Does it make you want to rip their clothes off, order in a vat of whipped cream and install a chandelier to swing from?

No? Well there’s your problem – according, at least, to Michele Weiner-Davis, the marriage-guidance counsellor whose Ted talk explaining her unconventional advice to warring couples has been viewed almost 3.5 million times online.

Her advice couldn’t be simpler: shag. Do it even if you don’t want to, do it especially if you don’t want to and, most important of all, do it frequently whether you want to or not. To make it even clearer, she’s borrowed one of the most famous advertising slogans of recent times: Just Do It. “Your partner will be grateful, happier and therefore nicer, too,” she explains from her clinic in Colorado. “It’s a win-win situation for both of you!”

Weiner-Davis’s self-confessed “zealotry” for marriage has its roots in the moment her mother blew her teenage world apart by announcing that her seemingly perfect marriage had been a sham for its 23-year duration. She was 16 at the time, and says she wasn’t the only one who didn’t recover from the bombshell: her mother never remarried and her two sons rarely speak to her.


If couples put the work in, they can fall back in love

The experience, says Weiner-Davis – who states that her greatest achievement is her own 40-year marriage – was transformative. She became a staunch believer in the fact that most divorces can be prevented; that the relief of a post-divorce life is temporary but the pain of divorce is permanent; and that if couples put enough work into staying together, they can fall back in love and live happily ever after.

Over the years, Weiner-Davis has honed her message. She’s now stripped it back to what she believes is the essence of a successful marriage. Gone is any therapeutic consideration of a couple’s history; of their emotional travails; of cause and consequence. Now she is entirely one-track minded: no matter how appalling the state of a marriage, she believes that kind, generous and frequent sex can bring it back from the teetering edge of collapse.
Her realisation was hard-won. “For decades, I was in the trenches with warring couples,” she says. “But there were times when I was not too effective. I realised that there was a pattern to the times I’d failed. There was always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch and because that was not happening, they were not investing themselves in the relationship in other ways.”

Weiner-Davis stopped focussing on the couples’ difficulties from an emotional angle and addressed them exclusively as sexual problems. that when the so-called “low-desire” partner – who is, she is at pains to emphasise, just as likely to be a man or a woman – was encouraged to have sex they didn’t particularly want, not only did they end up enjoying themselves but the high-desire partner became a much nicer person to be around.


There is always one spouse desperately hoping for more touch


“I heard the same story from my clients so often that I did some research,” she said, “and found several different sex researchers who confirmed what I was finding: that for millions of people, they have to be physically stimulated before they feel desire.”

Armed with this new theory, Weiner-Davis began encouraging her low-desire clients to be receptive to the sexual advances of their high-desire spouse, even if they weren’t feeling up for it. “I found that unless there was something a lot more complicated going on,” she insists, “there were usually substantial relationship benefits to making love with your high-desire partner.”

She rejects any suggestion that she’s advocating a sexually subservient, anti-feminist, “lie back and think of England” approach. , she says this is the embodiment of female empowerment.

“It’s not just telling women to spread their legs,” she insists. “This is not just about sex. For a high-desire spouse, sex isn’t usually about the orgasm: it’s about someone wanting to feel that their partner desires and wants them. I’m hoping that women will feel empowered that they are getting their own needs met through understanding their partner.”

No still means no, she says. “But it helps to not just say no. Instead, explain why you don’t want to make love, suggest a later date and ask whether there’s something you can do for your spouse right now instead. “But here’s the deal,” she adds: “There had better be a whole more Yes’s or Later’s than No’s because if the No’s win, it leads to the problems I have been talking about.”

Weiner-Davis points out that while it’s commonly accepted that couples should make all their important family decisions together, when it comes to sex, who ever has the lower sex drive makes a unilateral choice for them both. And, just to rub salt in the wound, she adds, the disenfranchised, high-desire one is expected to stay monogamous. No wonder, she says, they get cross.

I mention Weiner-Davis’s theory to some female friends of mine. The overriding response is: “Oh God, not another thing for my To Do list!” Weiner-Davis is quick to condemn this response. “Imagine if, when a woman said she wanted to have more intimate conversations or a date night, her husband said: “It’s just one more thing on my To Do list!” For a high-desire spouse who experiences love through touch instead of quality time, it’s exactly the same impact. I’ve had grown men crying in my office, crying about the sense of rejection they feel from their low-desire wives.”

I then regale her with the experience of a friend whose husband had started his own business which quickly went catastrophically wrong. The family finances were in peril and he couldn’t cope. His wife stepped in. Alongside her own job and while juggling the childcare, she worked late into the night for weeks to stabilise their security. During this time, she was scrupulous in not blaming her husband, either explicitly or implicitly.

With crisis narrowly averted, the stressed and sleep-deprived wife realised her husband was being snippy and sulky. When she asked what was wrong, he exclaimed: “We haven’t had sex for weeks!” Surely, I ask Weiner-Davis, this shows that not all demands for sex should be met with her Just Do It ethos.

Not at all, she says. “This woman knew his ego needed to be protected and tried to do that by not blaming him for his mistakes. But it sounds like the bigger statement for him was: ‘Am I still a man and do you still desire me?’”

But it’s the selfish, uncontrolled behaviour of a spoilt child, I insist. Weiner-Davis doesn’t disagree. “Women often say that they feel they have three children instead of two children and a husband,” she admits. “But the fact that this husband was telling his wife what he was feeling sad about is a really good sign: some people throw in the towel.

Is the deal explicit, I ask, does the low-desire one say: “OK, we’ll make love more often, but then you have to turn your iPhone off every once in a while so we can actually talk”?

Yes and no, Weiner-Davis says. “This isn’t about keeping score. Relationships are not 50:50. They’re 100:100. We have to take responsibility for doing everything that it takes to put the relationship on track – even if you’re not getting the response you want initially. That’s really hard.

“It’s about asking yourself,” she says, “when he or she speaks and acts badly, whether it’s because you have not had sex for four weeks. Is their anger actually about feeling hurt and rejected? If it is, the low-desire spouse needs to be more sexy – even though they will not want to do this. And the other one needs to ask themselves when the last time the couple spent quality time together.”

On the other hand, Weiner-Davis admits there is a limit. “I’d say that after several weeks, if nothing has changed in terms of reciprocity, then the couple do need to sit down and identify what’s missing in their relationship for each of them and what they would like to have.”

Michele Weiner-Davis’s cure for a sex-starved marriage

If you have a low sex drive try to adopt the Nike philosophy – and ‘Just Do It!’, even if you feel neutral towards having sex at that moment.

If you’re the one with a high sex drive, try to discover the way your partner wants to receive love. It’s typically through quality time, words of affirmation, thoughtful, practical acts of caring and material gifts.


If you don’t want sex at a particular moment, explain why and suggest another specific time - and ask whether you can do something else physical at that moment for your partner instead.

If you have a higher sex drive than your partner, try to empathise with them and accept they might never want wild or creative sex, but see the increased level of intercourse as a gift showing their love.


Remember there’s no daily or weekly minimum to ensure a healthy sex life. As a couple you need to work out together what works for you.

Whatever happened to cricketing common sense?

Ian Chappell in Cricinfo


I watched aghast as Hardik Pandya was needlessly run out/ in the first innings of the second Test against South Africa. I wondered: whatever happened to adhering to the basic principles of the game?

I'm not talking about coaches developing new techniques to enhance the power-hitting required in the modern game; or the tactics devised to curb the flood of runs caused by the increased boundary flow; I'm talking about simple, basic principles of the game. These principles apply in any form of the game and if ignored, they can lose you games, as Pandya's brain fade might well have done. "Always ground your bat when running between wickets": it should have been one of the first things Pandya was told by a coach.

There weren't many coaches when I was growing up, but fortunately I had a good one who didn't ignore the basics of the game. With so many coaches available these days, I'm wondering whether it's that they don't hammer home the basic principles or whether the players choose to ignore them.

Pandya's laziness, sloppiness, arrogance, call it whatever you want, it was unforgivable. Basic principles like grounding your bat, not turning blind, always balancing yourself with a slight foot turn before taking a catch in the slips - these should be adhered to. If they're ignored, it's a fair bet they'll bite you on the backside at the most inopportune time.

And no sooner was Pandya back in the pavilion ruing his needless error than in another part of the world, South African Under-19 opener Jiveshan Pillay was out, obstructing the field. This used to be out "handled the ball" but the law has been changed.

No matter what appears in the scorebook, it can easily be avoided. When I was nine years old, my father, Martin, was captaining a club side filled with young talent. An opposition youngster used his hand to stop the ball hitting his stumps and Martin appealed; the batsman was given out.

On the ride home, Martin asked me what I thought about the decision and I replied; "It's the law - you don't stop the ball with your hand when batting."

"Good," replied Martin, "I don't ever expect to see you given out that way."

In all my years of playing cricket, at every level, I never - never ever - touched the ball when I was batting. Never mind the laws of the game or the pretentious spirit-of-cricket doctrine, I didn't want the wrath of Martin coming down on my head.


"My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education"


It's like being Mankaded. If you back up properly, it won't happen. If you don't touch the ball when batting, you won't be out obstructing the field.

Recently I read an interview with former Indian, South Africa, and now Hobart Hurricanes coach Gary Kirsten. He talked about the role of the coach in cricket. "If you look at the coach or manager in other sports they play a fairly significant role," he added, "I think cricket's moving in that direction, in T20 cricket."

My concern with the proliferation of coaches at all levels is that cricketers will grow up relying on their advice at the expense of self-education. The best advice I received from my coach came at seven years of age: "It doesn't matter how good I am as coach," Mr Fuller told me. "I can't help you when you're out in the middle. The quicker you learn this game for yourself, the better off you'll be."

Which leads to another point. With the proliferation of coaches, is there too much emphasis placed on physical preparation rather than spending time on the mental side of the game?
Shane Warne once bemoaned being subjected to endless fielding drills prior to a day's play. "All I need," groaned Warne, "is to bowl a few balls in the nets, go back to the dressing room, have a shower, then enjoy a cup of tea and think about the batsmen I'll be facing today."

Pure common sense from Warne. Common sense, like basic principles, is to be ignored at your peril in the game of cricket.

Capitalism’s new crisis: after Carillion, can the private sector ever be trusted?

Will Hutton in The Guardian


It is one of the most spectacular corporate failures of recent years. Carillion’s collapse, with £2bn of debts, threatens to deprive tens of thousands of workers, directly or indirectly, of their livelihood. The company had only £29m of cash left. This broaches new levels of fecklessness and the impact will be felt across Britain.

For Carillion was not only a major construction company: it had entered the lucrative public service delivery business. The shockwaves have been felt not only on building sites but in multiple schools, hospitals and even prisons, where tens of thousands of cleaners, porters and maintenance workers have suddenly found their employer has gone bust.

The hospital and school workers on TV news, worrying about their next payslip, are a forceful reminder of how deeply privatisation has entered everyday life.

Schools are run by private academy trusts and school meals provided by companies like Carillion. Switch on the light, catch the bus, post a letter, turn on the oven, drink a glass of water, register for an apprenticeship, use a train, park the car or eat the food in the hospital canteen – it’s all provided by private companies.

The amount of activity now performed by organisations we all own and whose overriding purpose is public service is minimal. Day-to-day life now depends on private companies with private ambitions.

The intertwining of the public and private is not new: it is as old as the state. Elizabeth I’s navy was built in private shipyards; the warplanes and engines that won the second world war were built in corporate factories. There is nothing novel in contracting out or public commissioning; the debate is where to draw the line – and whether the contractors will deliver what they promise.

It was the advent of Margaret Thatcher that saw the first major redrawing of the line, with a wave of wholesale privatisations.

Private owners would necessarily perform better than any public owners because they were private, it was asserted. But that was only the beginning.

Why couldn’t the same principle be extended to the heartland areas of public provision in central and local government? Private companies, like Capita or Carillion, could accept commissions to run the functions of the state more cheaply than government could itself. The state could become no more than a commissioning and procurement agency. The public services delivery industry was born.

In the 1990s, John Major’s government flirted with going further, getting private companies to own and finance public facilities, such as hospitals and prisons. However, whatever the ideological attractions, private borrowing costs were prohibitively high.

It took New Labour’s zeal to get private borrowing off the public books, at any price, for the private finance initiative (PFI) to boom: nearly all Britain’s PFI deals – more than 700 of them – were done by New Labour. 

There is now a sense, growing with every successive scandal, that the privatisation of the everyday has gone too far – a mood captured by startling opinion poll majorities of 80% in favour of renationalising utilities. The opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, struck a chord when he said Carillion’s failure was a key moment.

Carillion’s failure is part of a wider story of corporate mishaps and debacles. The financial crisis, starting with the run on Northern Rock and culminating with Royal Bank of Scotland teetering on the point of closure, was a tipping point: banks and building societies could no longer be trusted.

Since then, a succession of illustrious British names have become embroiled in varying crises. BT, Tesco and, most recently, GKN have all suffered from multimillion-pound accounting irregularities, with the resulting fall in GKN’s share price exposing it to an opportunistic £7bn hostile takeover last week.

The public service delivery industry, of which Carillion is part, is not exempt. Serco and G4S have had to repay £180m for the overcharging of tagged prison offenders.

Learndirect – privatised and sold to the private equity arm of Lloyds Bank in 2011 and, until recently, Britain’s biggest training provider – proved to be systematically failing up to a third of its apprentices; it is being investigated by the National Audit Office.

Stagecoach and Virgin say they will walk away from their East Coast mainline contract unless the government waives up to £2bn of contract payments.

PFI, aimed at getting debt off the government’s books, turns out to be organised hugely in the private sector’s interest. The taxpayer is up to £150bn out of pocket. And now Carillion.

But is it capitalism, or capitalism British-style, that is at fault? The Conservative party, as the promoter of capitalism and the private sector, sees no differentiation – and neither does the current leadership of the Labour party, who are in receipt of a political gift.

There must be an end to privatisation’s dogma and rip-offs, runs the attack by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell: the answer is plainly nationalisation and bringing contracts back “in-house”, which, if Labour were elected, would become a statutory requirement. There will be no more indulging of the private sector with the taxpayer picking up the bill. How could Carillion continue to be awarded contracts last year, including for HS2, after issuing a series of profit warnings? Above all, says Labour, it seems to be one law for workers and another for overpaid directors.

These are telling criticisms, but they do not get under the skin of why so much has gone wrong. Britain’s nationalised industries suffered from inefficiency and persistent underinvestment. Taking activity back in-house is a strong soundbite, but no panacea.

While some public sector delivery is outstanding, notably in parts of the NHS, the general pattern is more patchy. It is for this reason that governments for decades have been contracting the private sector to deliver goods and services. Trying to extend that principle is not unreasonable if high-quality private sector partners step up to the mark: the problem is they are in such short supply. Equally, a better-designed private finance initiative could have transferred risk and debt to the private sector more equitably. Why did British companies drive such an impossibly expensive and unfair bargain? 

Some of the answers lie in the Carillion scandal. Its top directors were exceptionally well rewarded if they could keep the share price up, which meant running the company to minimise short-term costs and cap investment, with no margin for error. Carillion might have survived one mishap, but a succession inevitably bowled it over.

When the terms of directors’ pay was changed in the very small print of a remuneration report, so that extravagant short-term bonuses could still be paid even if Carillion collapsed, no shareholder noticed the change. Nor did any of the proxy voting agencies to whom many shareholders delegated their votes and decision-making rights. Indeed, when Carillion was begging the government for a short-term £150m loan at the very last, no investors were alongside them, mounting or supporting a rescue package. The main shareholder activity was to sell the shares short.

This was an ownerless company denuded of any purpose except seemingly to enrich its directors and keep its rootless multiple shareholders happy from one profit-reporting period to another. There was no mission to deliver, no drive for excellence, no pride in service. Workers were disposable notations on spreadsheets. Yet it could be different.

This malaise is at the heart of too many British companies and is what lies behind the litany of disasters and economic under-performance. One leading international investment manager, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that British companies suffer from a disproportionate number of irregularities, fines, missed profit forecasts and malpractice compared with the companies in which he invests in other countries. It is part of a wider picture in which British companies tend to under-invest and under-innovate – even while executive pay has grown at a startling rate to become, per pound of turnover, the highest in the world.

So what to do? One of the striking distinctions of the British system, as the Big Innovation Centre’s Purposeful Company Taskforce revealed in its 2016 Evidence Report (full declaration: I am the co-chair), is that British quoted companies do not have “anchor” shareholders owning a critical mass of their shares (blockholders in the jargon) – engaged owners who will support them through thick and thin. Instead, British companies have the most diffuse, disengaged and transactional shareholder base of any corporate sector in the advanced industrial world.

With so many shareholders, the voice of any single one is easy to ignore. The yardstick becomes immediate financial performance. A preoccupation with the short-term share price becomes inevitable, with shareholders linking executive pay to achieving just that.

On top of this, there is a culture, imported from the US and legitimised by the dominant free market theories of the 1970s and 80s, that the sole purpose of a company is to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.

In Professor Milton Friedman’s conception, a company can only make a lot of money if it is delivering economic and social good. But maximising shareholder value has become corporate Britain’s intellectual god.

British company law does not require companies to declare any purpose when they incorporate: indeed, the whole British ecosystem is organised to put short-term financial priorities first, and all the other things that make a company great – its people, its relationship with its customers, its capacity to innovate, its declared reason for being – in second place. Bad economics married with Britain’s unique institutions delivered what we now have: a rogue form of capitalism.Q&A
What went wrong for Carillion?Show

The task now is to repurpose that capitalism – a task with no single solution, but rather a range of initiatives that cumulatively will move the dial.

The first step is to make declaring a purpose beyond profit-making mandatory, and incorporating it in the constitution of the company – its articles of association. Another is to harden up the requirements to incorporate wider stakeholder interests into corporate decision-making. Companies should be required to put their reason for existing to a regular shareholder vote, a “say on purpose” beyond merely maximising profits.

Every effort should be made to widen company types beyond the public limited company. There should be more co-operatives and employee-owned companies – companies consecrated to delivering a public benefit first and foremost. The £7 trillion asset management industry should take its obligations as owners much more seriously: every inhibition to forming “anchor” shareholding groups should be dropped, every incentive to become more active long-term stewards encouraged.

Directors’ bonuses should be paid only after a period of between five and seven years, so that boards think long-term. Trade unions should be encouraged, their voices heard and built into company decision-making. Pension funds should be encouraged to invest in purposeful companies; up to £100bn could be earmarked. The 40,000 pension funds should also be consolidated into many fewer entities, so they have genuine clout. The under-resourced and under-powered Financial Reporting Council should become a proper business regulator.

There is a movement for change, but it is on the margins. In Britain, along with the Purposeful Company Taskforce, there is Tomorrow’s Company and Blueprint for Better Business all arguing for systemic change. Internationally, the thinktank Focusing Capital on the Long Term makes a similar argument, as does the “inclusive capitalism” movement. The TUC, under Frances O’Grady, is pushing a parallel agenda.

The best and most reflective people in the business lobby are alarmed by the growing “trust gap” and want to close it. There is intellectual support: the new economics is attempting to integrate the best of free-market, Keynesian and even Marxist traditions. Companies cannot be seen as solely profit machines, but as complex problem-solving organisations, bound together by the social glue of shared purpose, in which tensions and power battles between management and stakeholders will be inevitable. How companies are owned, purpose expressed, directors paid and stakeholder interests traded off will be of fundamental importance.

More Carillion-style disasters lie ahead as the economy slows down. The government cannot continue to ignore these failings, nor can the Labour party simply promise to nationalise everything. The debate about our capitalism can only deepen. For the ordinary Briton, the sooner it is resolved the better.

Kohli's arrogance helps his game but not the team

Ramachandra Guha in Cricinfo


Watching Virat Kohli play two exquisite square drives against Australia in March 2016, I tweeted: "There goes my boyhood hero G. R. Viswanath from my all time India XI." Those boundaries formed part of a match-winning innings of 82 in a T20 World Cup quarter-final, and they confirmed for me Kohli's cricketing greatness.

I had first been struck by how good he was when watching, at the ground, a hundred he scored in a Test in Bangalore in 2012. Against a fine New Zealand attack, Sachin Tendulkar looked utterly ordinary, whereas the man who, the previous year, had carried Tendulkar on his shoulders in tribute was totally in command. Two years later, I saw on the telly every run of his dazzling 141 in Adelaide, when, in his first Test as captain, Kohli almost carried India to a remarkable win.

The admiration had steadily accumulated. So, as he struck the miserly James Faulkner and Nathan Coulter-Nile for those two defining boundaries in that T20 match in 2016, the sentimental attachments of childhood were decisively vanquished by sporting prowess. Virender Sehwag and Sunil Gavaskar would open the batting in my fantasy XI; Rahul Dravid and Tendulkar would come next; and Kohli alone could be No. 5.

That was two years ago. Now, after the staggering series of innings he has played since - not least that magnificent 153 in India's most recent Test - I would go even further. In all formats and in all situations, Kohli might already be India's greatest ever batsman.

Their orthodoxy and classicism, which served Dravid and Gavaskar so well in the Test arena, constrained them in limited-overs cricket. Sehwag had a spectacular Test record, but his one-day career was, by his own exalted standards, rather ordinary. Tendulkar was superb, often supreme, in the first innings of a Test, but he was not entirely to be relied upon in the fourth innings, or even when batting second in the 50-overs game. Besides, being captain made Tendulkar nervous and insecure in his strokeplay. On the other hand, captaincy only reinforces Kohli's innate confidence, and of course, he is absolutely brilliant while chasing.


"No one in the entire history of the game in India has quite had Kohli's combination of cricketing greatness, personal charisma, and this extraordinary drive and ambition to win for himself and his team"

I have met Kohli only once, and am unlikely to ever meet him again. But from our single conversation, and from what I have seen of him otherwise, I would say that of all of India's great sportsmen past and present, he is the most charismatic. He is a man of a manifest intelligence (not merely cricketing) and of absolute self-assurance. Gavaskar and Dravid were as articulate as Kohli in speech, but without his charisma. Kapil and Dhoni had equally strong personalities but lacked Kohli's command of words.

I was witness to the reach and range of Kohli's dominating self in my four months in the BCCI's Committee of Administrators. The board's officials worshipped him even more than the Indian cabinet worships Narendra Modi. They deferred to him absolutely, even in matters like the Future Tours Programme or the management of the National Cricket Academy, which were not within the Indian captain's ken.

In any field in India - whether it be politics or business or academia or sport - when strength of character is combined with solidity of achievement, it leads to an individual's dominance over the institution. And the fact is that, on and off the field, Kohli is truly impressive. No one in the entire history of the game in our country has quite had his combination of cricketing greatness, personal charisma, and this extraordinary drive and ambition to win for himself and his team. The only person who came close, even remotely close, is (or was) Anil Kumble.

Kumble was, by some distance, the greatest bowler produced by India. He was a superb thinker on the game. Moreover, he was well educated, well read, and had an interest in society and politics. And he was not lacking in an awareness of his own importance, although he carried his self-belief in a Kannadiga rather than Punjabi fashion.

It may be that Kumble alone is in the Kohli league as a cricketer and character. That perhaps is why they clashed and perhaps why Kumble had to go.

But why was he replaced by someone so strikingly inferior, in character and cricketing achievement, to the team's captain? A person with no coaching experience besides? Only because, like the BCCI, the chairman of the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators surrendered his liberties and his independence when confronted by the force of Kohli's personality. As did the so-called Cricket Selection Committee. Ravi Shastri was chosen over Tom Moody (and other contenders) because Vinod Rai, Tendulkar, Sourav Gangulyand VVS Laxman were intimidated by the Indian captain into subordinating the institution to the individual. The unwisdom of that decision was masked when India played at home, against weak opposition, but it can no longer be concealed.

Had the BCCI thought more about cricket than commerce, we would not have had to go into this series against South Africa without a single practice match. Had the selectors been wiser or braver, India might not have been 2-0 down now.

Some Kohli bhakts will complain at the timing of this article, written after the Indian captain played such a stupendous innings himself. But this precisely is the time to remind ourselves of how we must not allow individual greatness to shade into institutional hubris. Kohli did all he could to keep India in the game, but the power of an individual in a team game can go only so far. Had Ajinkya Rahane played both Tests, had Bhuvneshwar Kumar played this Test, had India gone two weeks earlier to South Africa instead of playing gully cricket at home with the Sri Lankans, the result might have been quite different.

The BCCI and their cheerleaders brag about India being the centre of world cricket. This may be true in monetary terms, but decidedly not in sporting terms. From my own stint in the BCCI, I reached this melancholy conclusion: that were the game better administered in India, the Indian team would never lose a series. There are ten times as many cricket-crazy Indians as there are football-mad Brazilians. The BCCI has huge cash reserves. With this demographic and financial base, India should always and perennially have been the top team in all formats of the game. If India still lost matches and series, if India still hadn't, in 70 years of trying, won a Test series in Australia (a country with about as many people as Greater Mumbai), then surely the fault lay with how the game was mismanaged in the country.

To the corruption and cronyism that has so long bedevilled Indian cricket has recently been added a third ailment: the superstar syndrome. Kohli is a great player, a great leader, but in the absence of institutional checks and balances, his team will never achieve the greatness he and his fans desire.

When, in the 1970s, India won their first Test series in the West Indies and in England, Vijay Merchant was chairman of selectors. When much later, India began winning series regularly at home, the likes of Gundappa Viswanath and Dilip Vengsarkar were chairmen of selectors. Their cricketing achievements were as substantial as that of the existing players. They had the sense to consult the captain on team selection, but also had the stature to assert their own preferences over his when required. On the other hand, the present set of selectors have all played a handful of Tests apiece. The coach, Shastri, played more, but he was never a true great, and his deference to the captain is in any case obvious.

In Indian cricket today, the selectors, coaching staff and administrators are all pygmies before Kohli. That must change. The selectors must be cricketers of real achievement (as they once were). If not great cricketers themselves, they must at least have the desire and authority to stand up to the captain. Likewise, the coach must have the wisdom and courage to, when necessary, assert his authority over Kohli's (as when Kumble picked Kuldeep Yadav, a move that decided a Test and series in India's favour). And the administrators must schedule the calendar to maximise India's chances of doing well overseas, rather than with an eye to their egos and purses. (The decision not to have an extended tour of South Africa was partly influenced by the BCCI's animosity towards Cricket South Africa.)

Only when India consistently win Tests and series in South Africa, and only when they do likewise in Australia, can they properly consider themselves world champions in cricket. They have the team, and the leader, to do it. However, the captain's authority and arrogance, so vital and important to his personal success, must be moderated and managed if it is to translate into institutional greatness.

Kohli is still only 29. He will surely lead India in South Africa again and he has more than one tour of Australia ahead of him. Two years ago he secured a firm place in my all-time India XI. My wish, hope and desire is for Kohli to end his career with him also being the captain of my XI.

This is not a Corbynite coup, it’s a mandate for his radical agenda

Gary Younge in The Guardian

Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793,” wrote Albert Camus, referring to Louis XVI’s execution after the French revolution. “But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all.”

One of the biggest mistakes the critics of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, made from the outset – and there are many to choose from – was that his victory was about him. They refer to “Corbynites” and “Corbynistas” as though there were some undying and uncritical devotion to a man and his singular philosophy, rather than broad support for an agenda and a trajectory. If they could get rid of the king, went the logic, they would reinherit the kingdom. With a new leader normal service could resume. Labour could resuscitate its programme of milquetoast managerialism, whereby it was indifferent to its members, ambivalent about austerity at home, and hawkish about wars abroad.

This week’s resounding victory of a slate of leftwing candidates to Labour’s national executive committee, the party’s ruling body, has put that assumption to rest for the moment. There is now a reliable majority on the NEC who back both democratising the party, to give members more control, and pursuing policies against austerity and war and for wealth redistribution.


Corbyn has been accused of tightening his grip on the party so that he may purge critics and promote cronies. The logic is perverse


That this should have happened in the week of Carillion’s collapse has a certain symmetry. Carillion took billions in public funds for public projects, paid its executives and shareholders handsomely, and has now left taxpayers to pick up the pieces in a system of private finance initiatives introduced by Conservatives but championed and vastly expanded by New Labour.

It was anger at this kind of rank unfairness, the inequalities it both illustrated and imposed after the economic crash, that explains not just Corbyn’s victory but the rise of the hard left across Europe and in the US.

The contradictions inherent in Corbyn’s rise are finally ironing themselves out. In 2015 he won not the leadership but the title of leader. Unlike Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, his ascent was not the product of a movement that could sustain his challenge from the margins; instead he emerged from a wider, inchoate sense of frustration and alienation that propelled him to the top within the mainstream. Without the consent of MPs he lacked the authority that would endow that title with power and meaning in parliament. Outside parliament he lacked the kind of organised support that could buttress his position against this hostility. This left him embattled, isolated and, to some extent, ineffective, since his primary task was not to exercise leadership but to cling on to it.

'I'm JC': Jeremy Corbyn on ageing, infighting and his Tory 'friends'



Last year’s general election changed all that. Labour’s gains, with its highest vote-share since 2001 leaving the Tories without a majority, proved that there was a broad electoral constituency for his redistributive, anti-austerity agenda. In so doing it showed that the membership was far more in touch with the needs and aspirations of the electorate than the parliamentarians.

Now, with the shadow cabinet no longer in open revolt, the parliamentary party quiescent, if not onside, and the party machine no longer obstructive, at almost every tier the party has either come around or made its peace with him. Meanwhile, outside parliament, Momentum – the leftwing caucus within the party that supports Corbyn’s agenda – has become more organised and less fractious, providing a more coherent plank of support beyond Westminster. Finally, Corbyn can do what he was elected to do – lead on the agenda he has laid out.

Leftwing control of the NEC was one of the last pieces to fall into place. Since the three candidates who won this week were backed by Momentum, and one – Jon Lansman – is its founder, this latest shift will inevitably provoke some bedwetting.

Those who have got everything wrong about Labour over the past two years will, of course, get this wrong too. We must once again brace ourselves for rhetorical hyperbole. Corbyn has been accused of tightening his grip on the party so that he may purge critics and promote cronies. The logic is perverse. The Stalinists, in the minds of his most feverish critics, are the ones who keep winning internal elections hands down; the democrats are those who launched a coup against the popular choice.

Jeremy Corbyn speaks to NHS staff at Park South community centre in Swindon. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

The obsession, among parliamentarians and their courtiers, is that this latest development will lead to a wave of deselections (or purges) in which MPs hostile to this new orientation will be forced out. There is some irony in the notion that those who tried to depose an elected leader with a huge mandate might bristle at the prospect of being removed by an election.

For now, that fear seems unfounded. While Momentum certainly believes MPs should be more accountable to their local parties, there is little evidence that this is a strategic priority (which doesn’t mean some local chapters might not pursue it). Corbyn’s team is not keen either, believing the pain rarely justifies the gain.

This is a relief. Another election could be upon us at any moment. The party does not need more trauma. Moreover, the gains are likely to be minimal. Corbyn is not king; his word is not law. The moment has tipped in his favour, not swung to him completely. And while the party may have made its peace with him, Momentum still sits outside its comfort zone. According to the website Labourlist, of the 24 key marginals to be contested so far, Momentum candidates have won in just five, while a further six have gone to candidates from the “wider Labour left”. The rest have been taken by “trade unionists, longstanding local campaigners and former [candidates]”.

Momentum’s focus is instead on funding organisers to transform the party into a social movement by connecting it with local campaigns – be they over caretakers’ pay, or cuts to schools and hospitals. For those whose understanding of politics and power is limited to elections and parliament, this will seem at best a waste of time. But anything that engages members, be they new or longstanding, in activities that make Labour more dynamic and receptive to the outside world should be welcomed.

This would fulfil one of three central challenges for Momentum in the foreseeable future. The second is to deploy all its resources – digital, human, organisational – to help Labour win at the next election. The third is to establish some independence from the Labour leadership, so that it can continue to advocate for a left agenda, should the party come to power. However confused the left might be about where power resides, the right understands that a range of vested interests, from big business to hot money, can force parliament’s hand and thwart the popular will.

Like most radical governments, Labour will have to negotiate between the powers that be and the forces that made them possible. Corbyn is not king. It was pressure from below that made him possible. It will be pressure from below that keeps him viable.