I Intend To Escape ......................And Come Back

Acceptable and Unacceptable Glories

This morning BBC Radio 4's Start the Week was a discussion centering on the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, and his new work.

What I found remarkable about this was less Al Aswany, or even the panel discussion, but the issues redolent in Tom Sutcliffe's introduction. Sutcliffe stated:

"The greatness of Islamic societies in the past has led Muslims of all kinds to dream about and plan for equally glorious Islamic societies in the future. How can they get past the disappointing compromised and sometimes violent present though? Must an Islamic state necessarily be at odds with modern secular democracy? And can an open pluralistic society come to a working accommodation with a monotheistic faith?"

There is plenty of food for thought here. For Islamists, the gap between theory and reality in Muslim majority societies, and especially in countries which declare themselves Islamic, poses an almost insurmountable challenge. Thus far, the easiest response has been to call for ever more of whatever interpretation of Islam is to hand - hence in part the Islamification of Pakistan under Zia, and later the development of both Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. To my mind it also helps explain the prevalence of conspiracy theories in both Muslim communities here and in Muslim majority nations - if life is not ideal, it cannot be due to the beliefs on which life is predicated, but the wiles of those opposed to the faith. Equally, the extent to which a pluralistic society can accommodate Islam is one of the issues of our age - certainly since the Rushdie affair.

But as so often with the BBC, Sutcliffe accidentally tells us as much about his world, as he does anything else. Just read that first line again:

"The greatness of Islamic societies in the past has led Muslims of all kinds to dream about and plan for equally glorious Islamic societies in the future".

I am not sure many Radio 4 listeners felt uncomfortable hearing those words. Substitute the word British, for Islamic and Muslims, and then see how it reads. You could equally do that with the words German, American or French, to similar effect.

"The greatness of British societies in the past has led Britons of all kinds to dream about and plan for equally glorious British societies in the future".

But Sutcliffe, and I suspect many Radio 4 listeners, would feel distinctly uncomfortable if a politician were talking of the glories of Britain's past forming the basis to establish a glorious future. The liberal aversion to Donald Trump talking about the United States in such terms, is marked.

Why then is liberal opinion tolerant of such a vision for Islamic societies?

Significantly, references to glorious Islamic societies of the future tend not to predominate in the discourse of contemporary British Muslim representative organisations. You can certainly find it though in recent decades - old Islamic Foundation pamphlets are a good source for it - and it is certainly present in the current rhetoric of the Islamic State. For now though, we tend to hear much more from the Muslim Council of Britain about pluralism, democracy and accommodation.

Am I the only person who considers that deep down in Tom Sutcliffe's words is a recognition, by his focus on 'glorious Islamic societies in the future' that we don't really buy all this talk of accommodation and pluralism, but, as with many others, he is much too polite to say so?

The Hot Water Bottles Which Can't Take........Water

I am now the proud owner of a Micro-Pro 'hot water bottle with designer cover' - pictured below in all its glory.

There is just one, small snag. According to the label, it seems you can't put any water in it. The 'Care Instructions' state:

"Do not fill using water from the domestic hot water system as this can considerably shorten the life of the hot water bottle".

What exactly are you supposed to put in, Evian? How can they not be filled using domestic water? Inexperienced as I am such matters, filling a hot water bottle has normally involved tap, kettle, bottle.

The whole thing smacks of built-in obsolescence, where goods are designed to last a short period of time, so you have to buy a new one in 12 months time.

On such deliberate ephemera is our society built........

Back at Work Today?

No I am not.

My children's school has decided to take today and tomorrow as an INSET day. Conveniently (for them) they also closed for the Christmas break half a day early, at 1330 on Friday 18th December. That gave my wife and I the choice of taking an unpaid afternoon off work to collect and look after the children, or paying a childminder to do it. Thousands of other parents have that same choice.

I have no idea who schools are run for in England and Wales - the teachers, or the children. Let no one say it is for the parents.

A Cultural Start to 2016

A Happy New Year to all readers of this blog.

Let us start the year as we mean to go on, with some proper culture. This is The Ethiopians, and Last Train to Skaville.

 

Human Rights Tied In Knots

How terrified some have become of causing offence. So terrified that it even precludes the development of a rational argument.

I have been reading the book "Double Jeopardy: Police Abuse of Women in Pakistan" by Dorothy Q Thomas. This was jointly published in 1992 by Women's Rights Project and Asia Watch, divisions of Human Rights Watch. I apologise for using a somewhat obscure title to make a broader political point, but even if the book itself is hard to pick-up now, the text is available online here.

Following the introduction of Islamic law in 1979 by General Zia, the number of women in prison in Pakistan increased from a mere 70 (!) to over 2000. HRW wants to address this, but its own fear and equivocation of articulating what it ostensibly advocates - universal human rights - prevents it from doing so:

"The Hudood Ordinances criminalize, among other things, adultery, fornication and rape, and prescribe punishments for these offenses that include stoning to death, public flogging and amputation. Human Rights Watch has no opposition to Islamic law per se and does not object to laws founded on religion, provided that human rights are respected and the principle of equality before the law is upheld. However, the Hudood laws, as written and applied, clearly conflict with these rights and principles. Not only do they prescribe punishments that are cruel and inhuman under international law, but they clearly discriminate on the basis of gender."

It is worth noting, this is a 'human rights' organisation writing 23 years ago. After an additional two decades of agitation from religious organisations and apologists, and migration from Muslim majority countries to the west, the fence sitting and obsessive desire to avoid causing offence is considerably worse.

Looking at the Human Rights Watch website today, the main article on its home page is a call to illicit financial donations before 2015 closes. Its financial appeal is accompanied by this mission statement:

"Human Rights Watch is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world. We stand with victims and activists to prevent discrimination, to uphold political freedom, to protect people from inhumane conduct in wartime, and to bring offenders to justice."

If so, HRW needs to grow a pair and develop some critique of religiously based legal systems. Sharia seems as good a place as any to start. Until it does, why should anyone donate money to those practising such determined obfuscation?

"We're Not Political, We're Only Doing Our Jobs"

Following their role in the 1984-5 miners strike, demonstrators took to mocking police officers with the sarcastic song "We're not political, we're only doing our jobs" whenever a group of uniformed police officers appeared anywhere in significant numbers.

In 2015, it seems little has changed. Flicking through the current issue of the Docklands and East London Advertiser, there is a small report on a demonstration held outside East London Mosque on 11 December, following Friday prayers. Its purpose was to condemn US Presidential challenger Donald Trump, who responded to the San Bernadino terrorist attack by calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the United States.

An important centre for the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (who are accused of massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Bangladesh Independence War of 1971) East London Mosque can certainly rally political leaders to its doorstep - local Labour Mayor John Biggs joined the protest. Among the others, the Advertiser reports:

"The protesters included United East End umbrella organisation of anti-racist groups, trades unions, faith leaders and Met Police Det Sgt Phil Langworthy".

According to the Met Police website, Det Sgt Langworthy is part of the police's Senior Leadership Team in Tower Hamlets, where he is in command of Criminal Investigation. And it seems, going to political demonstrations outside mosques?

Altogether now "We're not political, we're only doing our jobs".

Still Debating The ANZAC Withdrawal From Gallipoli?

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the withdrawal of Australian and New Zealand troops from the coast of Ottoman Turkey on 19-20 December 1915. British troops were to follow suit on 8-9 January 1916.

As a resource on WW1, and certainly in terms of suggestions for further reading, I have found the Independent/the i's "A History of the Great War in 100 Moments" - easily the best series I have seen in a British newspaper in years. I have the book version, and the small section on Gallipoli - number 27, pp.80-83, is evocatively written by Kathy Marks. The sheer numbers killed still shakes you - 80,000 defending Turks, 44,000 Allied forces, including 9000 Australians. All in a little over six months. The debacle perhaps feels less distant in terms of time than other WW1 battles when you read that the last veteran died in 2002 (when I was 33) or that the failings of the Allied military were exposed by journalist Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert.

Gallipoli became central to concepts of identity for an Australia emerging from being a British colony, and Marks explains how Australian war correspondent Charles Bean situated Gallipoli in terms of its demonstration of key aspects of Australian character - courage, sacrifice, irreverence and 'mateship'. In the modern era however, such concepts could not be allowed to pass without criticism. Marks observes:

"In a 2010 book, What’s Wrong with Anzac?, the historian Marilyn Lake called it “white Australia’s creation myth”, while another academic, Martin Ball, has written that the myth “suppresses parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with. Anzac is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent. The convict stain is wiped clean. Post-war immigration is yet to broaden the cultural identity of the population."

I wonder if those quotes tell us more about the approach and world view of the academics concerned, than they illustrate about contemporary, or past Australia. How strange it would have seemed to the men who fought at Gallipoli, and their families, that they were part of a 'white creation myth' or that they would have to wait for post war immigration before their cultural identity would be 'broadened'.

If men are from Mars, some academics truly are from Venus.

The Dangers of Relying on Faith Leaders

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary has today issued a report on the importance of knowledge in tackling honour crimes, female genital mutilation and forced marriage.

What is significant in the report is that it indicates some thirty years worth of policies and approaches towards minority communities in Britain may be flawed. Top-down multi-culturalism rather depends on the big white chief speaking to a big brown (or black) chief. Yet this is precisely what may need to be avoided in combating the types of crimes listed above.

"Overall, we found that the need to speak with the right people to build intelligence, and the risk to victims of speaking with the wrong people, was not always well understood by police officers and staff. The right people are not necessarily faith and community leaders, who may sometimes be the very
people promoting or supporting harmful practices in the name of honour."

The full pdf of the report is here. This is the HMIC press release on the report itself. Finally there is a broader University of Bristol report on these issues, by Marianne Hester et al, here.

The EU Still Has Its Boot on Greece's Throat

Tucked away behind stories of floods, jihadist attacks and Christmas shopping, it is easy to forget the financial crisis in Greece continues, merely in quieter form.

The Greek Parliament has just passed its budget for 2016, described thus by Madhumita Murgia:

"The terms include privatising 50bn Euros of Greek assets to help repay its debts, slashing pensions, and the handing over of a veto power on domestic laws to Brussels. The 2016 budget, the first by the Tsipras-led government, includes 5.7bn Euros of public spending cuts, with 1.8bn Euros coming from pensions, and 500m Euros from defence. It also includes tax increases of just over 2bn Euros".

It is hard to see how Greece can ever recover financially to that backdrop, although in a way writing of 'Greece' is a misnomer. If Brussels has the power of veto on all domestic laws, what is the point of Greece, the Greek parliament or for that matter Syrizia and Mr Tsipras?

Islamism: The Need to Talk About 'It'

The Algerian feminist Karima Bennoune has written of the importance of talking about 'it'. That when we talk about Islamic fundamentalism, that is what we need to talk about.

So often debate and discussion rapidly moves away - backwards to the invasion of Iraq, or sideways into talk of 'Islamophobia,' Donald Trump or the government's Prevent strategy. A core response by some to the Paris attacks by Islamic State was not to talk about 'it,' but to complain that victims of the group's attacks in Lebanon the day before did not receive the same publicity as those in France. What could be a debate about 'it' instead becomes one where the core focus is the perceived racism of the western press.

I characterise this as the 'pivot' response. Those who are uncomfortable with accepting Islamist actors may be bad news, or do bad things, quickly move onto discussing the issues they are comfortable with. This is frequently seen in some responses to particular terrorist attacks - a one sentence or one paragraph condemnation of the bombing or massacre, then a much lengthier dissemination on what the author concerned really wants to discuss. Here's examples from the Stop the War Coalition after 7/7, (scroll down in the link) and more recently the Australian National Imams Council (pdf here) - merely two of many.

This month I have a short letter 'Brush Strokes' in the Winter 2015 New Humanist, critiquing this tendency. We do have to talk about 'it'. If there is a problem, you need to analyse the problem, not solely focus on deficiencies in the responses to 'it'. Whether those responses are correct, flawed or indifferent, the problem itself is the primary issue. Below is the text of my letter:

It was great to receive the New Humanist and read its clear, unequivocal support for the Bangladeshi bloggers targeted by religious extremists. What is disappointing is the unsigned piece on David Cameron’s Birmingham speech (“Age of Extremes”, Autumn 2015). This says nothing of the Islamic extremism which has been an issue in the UK since calls for Salman Rushdie’s murder.

The author complains of Cameron’s “tendency to tar all Muslims with the same brush”, thus switching debate away from problems of ideology and belief, to actual or perceived discrimination. Here, New Humanist risks unintentionally feeding into Islamist narratives, where the problem is never Islam or Islamism, but how everybody else responds to it. If only the Prime Minister said nothing, if only the Daily Mail could adopt the discourse of the Guardian. Everything would be alright, wouldn’t it?

Dr Paul Stott, via email

En Memoire

Following the armed attacks by Islamic State in Paris, a twitter feed, En Memoire, has been set up dedicated to the victims.

It contains a picture and a brief pen portrait of all those who did not survive. You can view it in English here.

One of the problems with the Internet is its immediate and ephemeral nature. It is to be hoped that this twitter account can be archived permanently.

Salma Yaqoob, Labour and De-Selecting MPs

Speaking to people on the left in recent weeks, there is certainly some appetite among Corbynistas to de-select right wing Labour MPs, who it is feared will never by loyal to Jeremy Corbyn as leader. For Corbyn to develop and implement a clear programme, then put it to the electorate in 2020, such people have to go.

But who will they be replaced by? An interesting example of who is waiting in the wings comes from Birmingham, where there are reports the former Respect party leader Salma Yaqoob is being lined up for a Labour seat. The incumbent at Birmingham Hall Green, Roger Godsiff, is having none of it. Although Godsiff fought off Yaqoob when she stood for Respect in 2010, she was a strong second on that occasion. The demographic changes in the constituency since surely suggest that if he were de-selected, and stood against Yaqoob as an independent or for any of the other parties, he would lose. Birmingham Hall Green Constituency Labour Party could have a very big decision to take.

Interestingly this story broke whilst Yaqoob was out of the country, addressing the annual conference of the Australian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Australian Islamic Mission. Among the speakers was a fellow Brit in the shape of Anas al-Tikriti, who runs the Cordoba Foundation, the Muslim Brotherhood's think tank in the UK. Al-Tikriti is a fixture at the Ikhwan's Finsbury Park Mosque, where the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn holds constituency surgeries.

I am sure that Ms Yaqoob and Dr Al-Tikriti had much to discuss. But not at the Islamic Mission's lunch - that was, of course, segregated.

On Joint Enterprise Prosecutions For Political Activists

Owen Jones has a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free about the 'joint enterprise' prosecution of Dr Lisa McKenzie. She was charged after someone else, at a Class War housing protest she had helped organise, put a sticker on a window.

I think Jones' opposition to this is well-intentioned, but he does not get at some of the nuances I believe lie behind these types of police action. Part of the motivation behind prosecutions like this is to tie up important activists. To put them on the defensive, and to then divert other protesters away from what they are protesting about (in this case housing and gentrification) and into self-serving, lengthy 'defence' campaigns. This has been going on for decades - when I interviewed Anandi Ramumurthy about her research into the Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) she cited the defence campaign for the Bradford 12 as a factor in the decline of the AYMs generally.

If legal proceedings, trials and bail restrictions can be drawn out long enough, the entire protest can run dry, not through being bettered by reasoned argument or even brute force, but via legal shenanigans and the exhaustion that occurs when a small number of protesters go up against the weight of the state. It is a very British way of disrupting protest movements.

As a former member many years ago, I think Class War are correct that there is a major housing crisis, but wrong on the solutions (the first, and most obvious of which, is to control immigration) however the scale of the housing problem is getting so big, that police and Crown Prosecution Service tricks will not make this crisis go away. At least not yet.

More From the Blair Memo

Tucked away in the March 2002 memo from Colin Powell to George W Bush, discussing Tony Blair, was a small line which speaks volumes for New Labour.

Colin Powell writes

"We do not expect Blair to dwell on the steel decision".

The Mail on Sunday explains this brief comment:

"Loyal Blair would spare Bush's blushes by not making a public fuss about a US decision on import tariffs which had devastated Britain's steel industry."

So much for our industrial base, and so much for the steel workers who had voted Labour. Looking through Alastair Campbell's diary for the period April 5-7 2002, when he and Blair were in Crawford, Texas with President Bush, I see no reference to the steel industry. Campbell has since developed the nerve to complain that Germany supports its steel industry, and Cameron is declining to do so for ideological reasons

German govt has helped steel industry without breaking State aid laws. This government/ ideological Business Sec don't want to #redcar

— Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret) September 28, 2015

The Colin Powell memo suggests new Labour had the chance to act itself, but did not want to make a fuss.

In Tony Blair's memoir, A Journey, the index section relating to George Bush has an enormous amount about various summits, Iraq, the embarrassment of the 'Yo Blair' incident, even sections on an HIV programme and Bush's reservations about climate change. On industrial relations between Britain and America, there is a big fat zilch.

Which may explain why we barely have a steel industry today.

Our New Weapon Against Islamic State? Marketing Gobbledygook

This evening's Evening Standard has a bizarre one page feature on Sven Hughes, a former military psy-ops expert, who now runs a marketing and PR firm called Verbalisation.

Verbilisation has had some degree of profile due to its work with the anti-extremism think tank Quilliam. Here we hit the first problem. Given the degree of paranoia about and hatred for Qulliam from many Muslim representative groups, any PR company worth its salt would tell Quilliam to steer clear of Verbalisation, a company which Chris Blackwell's Standard piece claims is 'staffed largely by 'ex-military personnel'.

The second problem with Verbalisation is that someone seems to have decided the best weapon against IS is management gobbledygook. Check this out from Sven Hughes:

"the marketing industry has become quite lazy. Verbalisation is a step towards solving that. We have very rigorous methodology for decoding called RAID or Rapid Audience Insight Diagnostic. It's a 24-parameter, psychological profiling technique which enables us to not only understand what our audience is saying but what they're actually thinking, believing and what will effect their behaviour change."

I am not an automatic basher of Quilliam (unlike some academics) but I do hope they are not paying too much for this bizarre management and PR speak. And if this is the type of thought that is driving 'counter-radicalisation' policies in this country, it does not bode well.

One to Watch: Bilal Abdul Kareem

Bilal Abdul Kareem is an American Salafi Muslim who has developed a niche for himself as a journalist and film maker conducting interviews in the Middle East.

British viewers may have first come across his work when the footage he obtained of a British jihadi in the Katiba al Muhajireen group in Syria, Ibrahim al Mazwagi, was broadcast by Channel 4 news. Depending on which source you read, al Mazwagi was either the first or second Brit to be killed in the Syrian civil war. As well as running his own website, Kareem's work appears on like minded sites, such as that of Islam 21C in this country.

What makes Kareem important is less what he says or does, than his access. This extends to the highest levels within al-Qaeda. Uncomfortably for campaigners who supported him in the UK, since his departure to Jordan Abu Qatada has returned to his role as sage and theologian for al-Qaeda, an organisation somewhat rattled by the rise of ISIS and its 2014 declaration of a caliphate. Who did Qatada turn to, to publicise his views that the actions of ISIS were theologically and theoretically flawed? Bilal Abdul Kareem, in a three part interview published earlier this year.

Now, Kareem appears to have played a central role in the events involving Shukee Begum from Manchester, and her husband Jamal al-Harith. A former Guantanamo Bay inmate who received £1 million compensation from taxpayers, al-Harith subsequently left the north west of England for the Islamic State, where, Shukee Begum later joined him. There she made the shocking discovery that she was in a war zone, and (clearly well advised in terms of PR for her potential return to the UK) found that life in the caliphate was 'not her cup of tea'. Not only did Kareem obtain her interview, but he reportedly played a role in getting her out of the custody of a group of fighters opposed to ISIS, facilitating her release along with the Al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra.

She is now reportedly in what Kareem describes as "the liberated areas of northern Syria" - it is not clear where precisely he is referring to here. However, given his track record, Kareem is more likely to be referring to territory held by the al-Nusra Front. What an interesting address book he must have.....

The Spell Cast by the Hijab

The air of liberal desperation over Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain is reminiscent of the fuss when a fan was spotted in a hijab at the Bradford City v Aston Villa league cup semi final in 2013. The normally composed journalist Jim White declared that this sight was the 'key to the future of the game'.

As with that case, and the better known international furore over Malala Yousafzai, Nadiya Hussain's spell is cast solely by the hijab, and liberal dreams of a progressive, integrated Islam. Without it, she serves no purpose in terms of political utility. If she took it off, for liberal elites the effect would be the same as the clock striking midnight in the story of Cinderella. Can anyone imagine Angelina Jolie visiting Malala if she started wearing jeans and a baseball cap whilst chasing boys in Birmingham?

A more inclusive Britain? Only providing Nadiya Hussain remains in her designated role can liberal Britons keep convincing themselves that everything is going to be alright. That you can have more and more religious sections of our cities, and at the same time have a high degree of personal freedom, social cohesion and integration. The desperation with which some launch themselves at Bradford fan Amina Qureshi, Malala Yousafzai and now Nadiya Hussain are signs of weakness, not strength, of hope over experience. It is not Britain that liberal elites are trying to convince - it is themselves.

Edward Snowden Joins Twitter

For those who use social media sites, the former NSA contractor turned whistle blower Edward Snowden appears to have opened a twitter account.

Within four hours of his first tweet earlier today, he had 488,000 followers, but was following just one account himself - the US National Security Agency. When I did a twitter search under the single word 'Snowden' the first account which came up, was not that of Edward Snowden, but the account of the NSA. Big brother works in mysterious ways.....

Death of a Gentleman Reviewed

Having been left all dressed up with nowhere to go last week when the Corby Cube's showing of Death of a Gentleman was cancelled, I am delighted to report that the excellent Errol Flynn playhouse in Northampton stepped in to offer me a complimentary ticket for their showing. This review comes courtesy of their generosity.

Death of a Gentleman opens, deliberately, in as cliched a manner as possible, with the sound of bird song and the sight of cricket on the village green. The opening words stress, correctly, that cricket is about values, and those being interviewed throughout the film articulate the association of the game with integrity and a moral code for living. In English we deploy terms such as 'that's not cricket' for a reason - that they betray our unease or anger at behaviour that is improper or unprincipled. I disagree with the film makers that cricket is a unique sport in this respect - I think you will find the same approach within several martial arts, certainly in Muay Thai and Judo - but in the context of the cricket playing nations, to play cricket means to associate with core values.

Although a total of seven people appear to have been behind Death of a Gentleman, the two we see on camera are cricket journalists Sam Collins (English) and Jarrod Kimber (Australian). They quickly explain both their love of the game and its size - whilst a long way behind football in terms of global adherence, cricket is the second biggest sport in the world. If that surprises you, just remember that cricket is the summer sport in the British Isles, the national sport in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the national sport in the second most populous country in the world - India.

The film's narrative begins in 2011, with the realisation that test cricket, described by Ian Chappell as the peak of the game, is questioned and imperiled as never before. These concerns are not necessarily new - Death of a Gentleman does not engage with the long term concerns that one day cricket is or will undermine longer forms of the game, a debate within English cricket that is at least forty years old. Instead its focus is on the latest variation, 20/20, and in particular the Indian Premier League, portrayed here as being as much about Bollywood as sport.

For all the glitz, razzmatazz and dancing girls of the IPL, cricketers still enter the game wishing to play test cricket at the highest level. The story of Ed Cowan, an Australian opener, given his cap at the MCG in 2011, is cleverly used to demonstrate the emotive appeal of ambition. No schoolboy grows up in Australia dreaming of playing for a franchise in Chennai - they still want to earn a baggy green cap, a point emphasised by the obvious pride shown by Ed Cowan's father in several short interview clips.

This is very much a film of interviews holding together a central narrative, and for me a core component of that narrative is provided by Gideon Haigh, who asks a fundamental question of cricket in the era of 20/20 - does cricket make money in order to exist, or does it exist to make money. In this, we return to the association between cricket and values, and as the film develops it becomes increasingly obvious that in the era of 20/20 cricket exists to make money. The bigger question perhaps is where that money goes, as seven test playing nations are virtually bankrupt, whilst three - Australia, England and India, make money. How can this be?

Any film needs a villain, and as Simon Heffer illustrates in his review of Death of a Gentleman, here we have Giles Clarke, formerly Chairman and now President of the English Cricket Board (ECB). Awarded the CBE for services to cricket in 2012, Clarke is one of those men who always seems to be pictured with his nose slightly raised in the air, like a deer nervously sniffing for the presence of any predator. In terms of power though, cricket is dominated not from its historical base at Lords and the MCC, but from India. It is the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) which controls the International Cricket Council, and Indian money which matters. An all too brief interview with the former Indian all-rounder Ravi Shastri in effect declares 'we are the masters now'.

If power can corrupt, absolute power can corrupt absolutely. The 2012 report by Lord Woolf into governance in cricket established a sport characterised by a lack of any financial transparency, a potentially deadly failing given the predominance of gambling in the Indian sub-continent and the power of bookmakers. In this part of the world, some two billion pounds can be bet on major matches. However for English cricket it is not match-fixing that brought its most shameful hour, but the ECB's association with Sir Allen Stanford, an American financier who had bought up large parts of Antigua, and introduced 'winner takes all' 20/20. Collins and Kimber resist the temptation to dwell on some of the less salubrious aspects of Stanford's fifteen minutes of fame, and instead use the issue to attack Giles Clarke's jugular. Here Clarke is at his most belligerent, combining detachment and aggression in his response, insisting that he does not talk about Stanford but equally that it is all history. But not of course for those ripped off by the now plain Allen Stanford, serving a 110 year jail sentence for fraud.

The demise of Stanford meant that in financial terms, the IPL developed a monopoly. Here the film's second bad guy emerges in the ponderous persona of Indian concrete magnate N Srinivasan, the President of the BCCI. The sections of the film devoted to the internal politics of cricket in India are perhaps the least appealing to English viewers, but they matter, as the ultimate ICC agreement, to keep TV revenues primarily among the three biggest earning nations - Australia, England and India, shapes all else in the game. The 2019 Cricket World Cup will accordingly be limited to just 10 teams, rather than the previous 14. Given the development of the game in recent years in countries as diverse as Ireland and Afghanistan, this is nonsense. International development, the centre of any sports health, is retarding, something Gideon Haigh correctly castigates as bizarre. Although a majority of ICC members wish to see cricket as an Olympic sport (which would release government funding for the game in China, and other nations) the ICC will not countenance this.

With Srinivasan installed as head of the ICC, despite accusations of his family being associated with match fixing in India, the future prospects for Test cricket, as opposed to the faster, looser and more profitable brand of 20/20 appear grim. When Collins and Kimber manage to get themselves into an ICC press conference in (appropriately) Dubai, a picture of CLR James briefly appears as part of the ICC backdrop on the wall. A Trinidadian born Marxist who spent much of his life in the US and England, James wrote one of the most important cricket books, Beyond A Boundary. One wonders what James would make of an IPL fixture between Sunrisers Hyderabad and and the Chennai Superkings. We probably have a pretty good idea though of what he would make of men like Giles Clarke or N Srinivasan - those who live to make money, rather than making money to live, and to uphold the values of the game.

If Death of a Gentleman ends on a positive note it is by returning to Ed Cowan, and the values of those playing the sport for that sense of individual, team or national pride. Nothing about that tendency remaining however, guarantees its survival. Collins and Kimber ask us to visit the website Change Cricket, and to resist the games drift. The interviews in the film though with IPL players such as Kevin Pietersen (the first post-national, post-modern cricketer?) and Chris Gayle remind us that when it comes down to a choice between domestic and test cricket, or the IPL, the big bucks of the IPL will always turn heads. We should not necessarily be pessimistic, but we do need to be realistic. Cricket is not in good health, and the Death of a Gentleman illustrates that all too well.

There are screenings of the film scheduled across the country for the remainder of September and going into October. Some cricket venues, most noticeably Lords, have declined to show the movie, for fear of upsetting the ECB. That makes it all the more important to get out there and see it, before hopefully it becomes available on DVD.

What Solzhenitsyn Tells Us About Crimea and the Ukraine

Of of all the Russian writers in the last fifty years, few can have been as well read in Britain as Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His critiques of the Soviet system, which brought the Nobel Prize in 1970, must surely mean hardly anyone in Britain's political elite will not have read him.

And yet for all those copies of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, few seem to have grasped how Solzhenistyn viewed post-Soviet Russia. Perhaps the primary source for this is his 1990 'Rebuilding Russia'. Whilst there is much to say about that book, I pick below some of the sections on Ukraine and Crimea.

Solzhenitsyn appears to have been happy to allow nearly all of the Soviet republics to pursue independence, but considered there to be special ties between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Of the Ukraine, he declares:

"To separate off the Ukraine today would mean to cut across the lives of millions of individuals and families: the two populations are thoroughly intermingled; there are entire regions where Russians predominate; many individuals would be hard put to choose between the two nationalities; many others are of mixed origin, and there are plenty of mixed marriages (marriages which have indeed never been viewed as "mixed"). There is not even a hint of intolerance between Russians and Ukrainians on the level of the ordinary people" (p.20).

The point is also made that historically Donbass and Crimea had always been part of Russia (p.19).

And yet less than twenty five years later the British government seems to have been surprised when Putin refused to accept the overthrow of Ukraine's democratically elected (and pro-Russian) leader, Viktor Yanukovych, and the Ukraine's attempted turn towards the EU and NATO. This provoked the secession of Crimea. Indeed Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond was still complaining about the Crimean referendum a year later.

Perhaps British politicians need to read more. There is also a more general failing among western hawks on Russia - Edward Lucas and Anne Applebaum are perhaps the two most prominent - to take a rounded approach. They are quite happy to take the bits that they like from Solzhenitsyn - the anti-Soviet elements in his writing - but turn up their nose at the sections which advocate Russian as opposed to 'western' interests. Such cheery-picking does them little credit, and does little to inform others on events in eastern Europe.