the guardian 07.11.2012

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Barack Obama makes a call in the last hours of campaigning in the race for the White House Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

America’s verdict on Obama

Ewen MacAskill Washington

Long queues formed across the United States from early morning yesterday as tens of millions of Americans lined up to deliver their verdict on Barack Obama’s presidency, four years that have left the country more polarised than it has been for decades.

While the 2008 vote was historic in putting an African-American into the White House, the 2012 race has had more impact, deepening the divide in the US to a level not seen since the battles over civil rights and the Vietnam war in the 1960s.

Final estimates show the election was the most expensive in US history, with Barack Obama having raised close to $1bn and Mitt Romney more than $800m. When fi gures for spending by supporters, mainly the super-political action committees, are thrown in, the total is well over $2bn.

The campaign almost throughout has been a referendum on Barack Obama. Both he and Republican challenger Mitt Romney repeatedly said this election would set the direction of the country for a generation, with consequences for the economy, healthcare and immigration as well as foreign policy.

Romney broke with convention to con-tinue campaigning into election day, vot-ing early in the morning near his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, before heading for Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama, taking a more relaxed view of the day, visited campaign volunteers in his hometown Chicago before playing a game of basketball with friends and staff in a sta-dium in Chicago that can seat 1,000 people but was booked for the exclusive use of the president on this occasion.

One of Obama’s advisers, Robert Gibbs, denied that Obama’s decision to avoid the campaign trail yesterday reflected complacency. Some Democrats argued that when Romney decided to continue on campaigning, Obama should have fol-lowed suit.

Obama did give about a dozen inter-

views for television and radio stations, mainly with those from the swing states. In one of his interviews, with the syndi-cated Steve Harvey Morning Show, Obama said: “I feel optimistic, but only cautiously optimistic.”

At the volunteer centre, Obama said: “The great thing about these campaigns is after all the TV ads and all the fundraising and all the debates and all the electioneer-ing, it comes down to this one day.”

In a gracious gesture, he congratulated Romney on a “spirited” and “hard-fought” campaign. But he indicated he expected still to be president today. “We feel confi -dent we’ve got the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out.”

Vice-president Joe Biden continued on the campaign trail, stopping in Ohio. Both teams have made more visits to the state than any other, seeing Ohio as holding the key to the White House. While Romney was waiting on board his campaign plane on the airport at Cleveland for his run-ning mate, Paul Ryan, Biden’s plane also landed. Ohio has chosen the winner of the last 12 presidential elections, and no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying it.

There were sporadic reports of prob-lems over polling-machine break-downs, election fraud and issues with voter IDs. Florida, as has become usual, was the scene for some of the most chaotic elec-tion scenes, with queues two hours long. There were also reports of misleading recorded calls suggesting the vote would be today rather than yesterday. But the long lines were in predominantly Repub-lican districts in Florida as well as Demo-cratic-leaning ones.

There were long queues too in Virginia,

Continued on page 2 ≥

Continued on page 15 ≥

I’m a Conservative – and they got me out of there Hélène Mulholland Political reporter

The Conservative party has suspended Nadine Dorries after it emerged she is to take time off from parliament to be a con-testant in ITV’s jungle-based reality show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here .

The decision by the MP for Mid Bed-fordshire to become the fi rst serving MP to take part in the show, which features famous faces performing in stunts that in the past have included being smothered in insects and eating a kangaroo’s penis , could keep her from parliamentary and constituency business for a month .

Colleagues reacted with surprise and the MP faced a barrage of criticism. By

early yesterday evening, the Conservative party had confi rmed that the chief whip, Sir George Young, had withdrawn the party whip from Dorries, who did not ask him for permission to take part in the show. Her constituency chairman also said he had been unaware of her involvement in the show.

A party spokesperson said: “George Young … will have an urgent meeting with

her when she gets back. The concern is that she will not be doing parliamentary or con-stituency business in the meantime.”

Labour branded the Tory MP “shame-less” over her decision to appear on the show. Dorries, who is paid £65,738 a year as an MP, will be paid up to a maximum of £40,000 for taking part in the show, which runs daily from Sunday.

Dorries, who has fl own to Australia to prepare for the show – which is set in an outdoor studio in the Queensland jungle – tried to justify the decision by saying the programme would act as a platform to reach the public and raise awareness about issues such as a reduction in the abortion limit from 24 weeks to 20 .

She told the Sun: “I’m doing the show because 16 million people watch it. If

people are watching I’m A Celebrity, that is where MPs should be going. I’m not going in there to upset people, but I have opinions.”

Pressed on her fellow Tory’s forth-coming appearance on the programme, the home secretary, Theresa May, said: “Frankly, I think an MP’s job is in their constituency and in the House of Commons.”

Labour accused the prime minister, who is on an offi cial visit to the Middle East, of showing weak leadership earlier in the day when he refused to be drawn into the fray. He said: “Nadine Dorries can speak for herself on this issue.”

Dorries has repeatedly clashed with the

Nadine Dorries said the reality show would be a platform for her to publicise her cam-paign to reduce the abortion limit

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• President hails ‘spirited’ Romney campaign • $2bn election most expensive in history

• At the polls: Oliver Burkeman on the voters’ verdict Page 2 ≥

• Gary Younge on anticipation and nerves in Obama’s Chicago Page 3 ≥

• From the snow of New Hampshire to superstorm Sandy, Jonathan Freedland traces the most expensive campaign ever Page 4 ≥

• Picture special: the best images of the day Pages 6-7 ≥

On guardian.co.uk

Up-to-the-minute news, analysis and results, plus the full story of a historic night told by our unrivalled team of US correspondents

Inside ≥


* * *2 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

America’s verdict on Obama← continued from page 1

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Close of polling might just be the beginning of hostilities Legal challenges in Ohio as irregularities reported

Complaints and confusion in Florida and New Jersey

Oliver Burkeman New York

On Staten Island, amid the wreckage of their homes, people voted in tents, illuminated in the early-morning darkness by power from portable generators. In Brooklyn, they queued for hours outside polling stations – as they had queued, just a day or two earlier, outside petrol stations. In Florida, voters reported discovering that their assigned voting locations didn’t exist, while in the make-or-break state of Ohio, the inevitable legal challenges had already begun.

But despite some extraordinary obsta-cles, by no means all of them attributable to superstorm Sandy, Americans voted in their tens of millions yesterday, as the focus of the most expensive presidential campaign in history turned abruptly local, and the tallying of the knife-edge race threatened to stretch far into the night.

Even by the standards of election days past, yesterday seemed peculiarly suff used with anxiety – the culmination of an exhausting battle in which Demo-crats and Republicans had often seemed not merely to hold diff erent beliefs, but to inhabit diff erent realities.

For all the sense of denouement , though, more than 31 million Americans had already voted – including roughly half of those deemed likely to vote in the toss-up state of Florida – and there were

ominous predictions that the contest might be far from over. Thousands of law-yers were scrutinising the voting processes across the country – the Obama campaign reportedly had 2,500 in Ohio alone – while activists from the rightwing organisation True The Vote, which opposes voter fraud but which critics charge with voter sup-pression, were barred from some polling stations there.

Ohio’s secretary of state, Jon Husted, found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit claiming that last-minute changes made to voting software might permit ballots to be manipulated.

The atmosphere grew more fervid by mid-morning, with the emergence of a YouTube video showing a voting touchscreen in Pennsylvania apparently recording a vote for Romney after the user pressed Obama’s name. A Philadel-phia judge ordered election workers to cover a vast mural of Obama that adorned a school being used as a polling place. The Republican party in Michigan claimed one of its poll-watchers had been threatened with a gun. And irregularities aside, the automatic-recount laws in several swing states meant close results might see the race stagger on, zombie-like, for weeks.

Among supporters of the president, the elation of election day 2008, by which time an Obama victory seemed all but certain, was replaced by a nervous determination. Some Floridians had waited an astonish-ing seven hours to cast an early vote last week. Yesterday, at the C Blythe Andrews Jr Library in a drizzly Tampa, Larry du Pree, who wore a large, glitzy watch bear-ing a picture of Obama, said: “In our com-munity we kind of take this election per-sonally. Being African American, for me to vote for Mitt Romney is like a chicken

voting for Colonel Sanders.” Changes to Florida election law, such as limiting the number of days of early voting, amounted to “voter suppression”, he said. “They want to take us back to the slavery days.”

Voting was obstructed for a differ-ent reason in the north-east, where last week’s storm left thousands in evacua-tion shelters or staying with friends far from home. New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, signed a last-minute executive order allowing New Yorkers to vote for national and state-level races at any poll-ing station. In New Jersey, the governor, Chris Christie, allowed voting by email and fax – but at least one county clerk was reduced to using Facebook to tell voters they could use his personal Hotmail address instead.

In Midland Beach, on largely Repub-lican Staten Island, a 33-year-old police offi cer, Gabriel Rivera, just seemed glad to be alive to vote, even if in a makeshift tent. His home had been fl ooded and his family evacuated to New Jersey, said Rivera, who declined to reveal his presidential prefer-ence. But “property can be replaced”, he said. “Loved ones cannot.”

Of all the cliches incessantly parroted by pundits over recent months, the most clearly accurate, judging from the com-ments of swing-state voters yesterday, was that economic matters would deter-mine the president’s fate.

“Romney. The economy,” one small-town schoolteacher from Iowa, Carleen Coppock, responded without hesitation when asked who she had voted for and why. As a female registered independ-ent, and an Iowan who voted for Obama in 2008, Coppock is as close to a demo-graphic nightmare for the president as it was possible to get.

“It’s the children thing, mainly,” she said. “I have a daughter about to go to college, and I want her to have a job when she comes out.”

She had started drifting towards the Republican over the summer, she said, and then the fi rst debate had settled her mind. “That about did it,” she said. “I started leaning Romney.”

Everywhere, Americans seemed deter-mined to vote, no matter the obstacles, but the fi rst prize surely went to Galicia Malone, a pregnant 21-year-old from Chi-cago, who cast the fi rst vote of her life while her contractions were fi ve minutes apart, then drove herself to hospital. Meanwhile, the Detroit News reported that an elderly Michigan man appeared to die while fi lling out his ballot; having been revived with CPR, he asked: “Did I vote yet?”

As America’s news networks geared up for a long night, there was far less sign than in previous years of partisan commenta-tors willing to concede, in the closing hours, that their side might have lost: the nasty, toxic campaign would be fought to the bitter end. And so it was refreshing to fi nd, among the divided electorate, vot-ers like Daniel Taylor, 56, and Philip Neu-hring, 52, friends on opposite sides of the political divide, creating an oasis of civility and perspective over morning coff ee in a restaurant in Jeff erson County, Colorado.

“I don’t think business people should be in government running it for profi t,” said Taylor, a lawyer. Neuhring, an insur-ance analyst, said he backed Romney because “he has business experience whereas Obama has just theory and col-lege experience”.

“Both sides have some merit,” Taylor conceded. “Very true,” Neuhring agreed. Then he added, with a smile: “Though of course, my side is right.”

A few Americans seemed even more blissfully at peace despite the hostilities unfolding around them. At one point yesterday, Obama stopped at a fi eld offi ce in Chicago to make get-out-the-vote calls to voters in Wisconsin. One woman he reached appeared not to know who he was. “This is Barack Obama,” he had to explain, twice. “You know. The president.”

Looking two months ahead from that moment, though, Obama would have been forced to concede that even he couldn’t tell you what the president’s name would be.

Leader comment, page 32 ≥

US election

super-political action committees, are thrown in, the total is well over $2bn.

The campaign almost throughout has been a referendum on Obama. Both he and Romney repeatedly said this election would set the direction of the country for a generation, with consequences for the economy, healthcare and immigration as well as foreign policy.

Romney broke with convention to con-tinue campaigning into election day, vot-ing early in the morning near his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, before heading to Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Obama, taking a more relaxed view of the day, visited campaign volunteers in his hometown of Chicago before playing a game of basketball with friends and staff in a stadium in Chicago that can seat 1,000 people but was booked for the exclusive use of the president on this occasion.

One of Obama’s advisers, Robert Gibbs, denied that Obama’s decision to avoid the campaign trail yesterday reflected

★Voters’ voices★★★★★

Reporting teamAlex Hotz in New York, Chris McGreal in Florida, Ed Pilkington in Ohio, Paul Harris in Iowa and Rory Carrollin Colorado

“I came from a communist country, I don’t want America to become one. That’s Obama’s attitude. Take away from the rich. Why he want to do that? Rich people give us jobs. It’s just like in Hungary: fi rst they take away from the rich, then they come after you.”George Mittermann, 82, Greenville, Ohio

“I can’t vote for a platform that sees women as second-class citizens … Obama has fought for us and kept unemployment levels down, whereas Romney would ban abortions and that would lead to twice as many deaths as women would keep having them.”Christie Marie, 34, Cheviot, Ohio

“ I have been so anxious about being able to vote ... It’s such a relief . This is the happiest vote I ever cast .”Annette DeBona, 73, New Jersey, an area hit hard by superstorm Sandy

“ We take this election personally. Being African-American, for me to vote for Mitt Romney is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders.”Larry du Pree, Tampa, Florida

“If Romney wins, I’ll be bummed out but that’s OK, you can’t win them all.”Lisa Burkheimer, 44, Lakewood, Colorado

“If going to the bank or the grocery store was this easy, I’d do it every day.”Issac Holmes, 52, Las Vegas

Section:GDN BE PaGe:3 Edition Date:121107 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/11/2012 22:07 cYanmaGentaYellowblack

*The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 3

Gary Younge Chicago

Election day in Chicago four years ago felt like Christmas Eve. The polls so favoured Barack Obama by that stage that, in his heavily Democratic hometown, it seemed as though the gifts were already wrapped and all that remained was delivery – a collective suspense that time alone would eventually satisfy. His victory seemed simultaneously inevitable and unbelievable. People couldn’t wait because they wanted to see it happen.

Yesterday felt like just one more damp day in November, with a sprinkling of anxiety that Christmas, this year, could be cancelled.

They know they can elect a black president; the question was could they reelect him. Their complacency was so dented after his fi rst debate perform-ance that their confi dence could never bounce back quite so convincingly as his poll numbers did. Few would even contemplate defeat; few were com-pletely confi dent of victory. People couldn’t wait because they wanted it to be over.

Thanks to Obama’s cosmopolitan

Bravado and fear in president’s hometown

• It was a day in which backs of heads became the focus of elite journalism. For nothing much happens once polls open: people have either voted or are queuing to do so – and so many of the world’s fi nest newshounds were reduced to recording said queues ( spe-cifi cally, the backs of the queuers’ nog-gins). Item A: Jamie Dupree, seasoned Washington correspondent , who spent much of the morning collating images of scalps . Item B: the New Yorker, which ran a rolling blog of voters’ pho-tos of other voters’ behinds. Rarely has the dandruff of ordinary Americans been so well documented.

• T here was space for fl ashes of serious reportage. For instance: thanks to his bag-carrier Garrett Jackson, who was recording his master’s big day via Twit-ter, we learn ed not only what Mitt Rom-ney had for breakfast – peanut butter and honey toast – but what he did once he got down from the table. Starting as he hoped to fi nish , Romney cleared out the trash . Quite literally. Romney – or as David Lynch , below right, recently renamed him , “R-Money” – was snapped shovelling kitchen detritus (full disclosure: a plastic receptacle rammed with what looked like teabags and half a boiled egg) into a black bin-liner. Whether or not it was collected is, how-ever, open for question. Last month his binman Richard Hayes released a video decry-ing R-Money’s notorious rejec-tion of the 47%. “You know, he doesn’t reali se, you know, that the service we provide, you know – if it wasn’t for us, you know, there’d

be a big health issue. You know, us not picking up trash,” quoth Hayes, whose hour may just have come.

• And what of the comforter-in-chief? Well, what with all the trash talk, El Presidente was struggling to get his voice recognised. Again, literally. At a Democrat hideout in Illinois, Obama started showing off for the cameras, calling a supporter to thank her for her hard work. “Hello, it’s Barack Obama,” said Barack Obama, before apparently being asked to hold. He looked up: “I don’t think she knows it’s me yet.”

• Rightly so, perhaps. For today was not just about the president. Also listed on ballot papers were candidates for state elections and referenda on serious local issues. Take Los Angeles, where

voters deliberated over an anti-Aids law that would force porn

actors to wear prophylactics . Known to locals as Measure B, and to your diarist as the “Rubber Referendum”, the ballot has incensed certain sections of the adult indus-

try. Not least Tera Patrick , pictured left, and Ron Jeremy

– “porn legends” – who recently released a video slamming the

Condom Covenant. “A mandatory condom law will NOT make our work-place any safer,” argued Patrick , “but it will drive our $20bn industry and 10,000 jobs out of LA county.”

• Sport, it seems, is a great unifi er. In Chicago, the president was knuckling down to a game of basketball with his staff ers. It’s an election tradition for Obama, apparently. “We made the mis-take of not playing basketball once,” said Robert Gibbs, Obama’s former press secretary. “We won’t make that mistake again.” Dancing will have to wait, however. Asked whether he could mimic the moves in Gangnam Style , a YouTube hit, the commander-in-chief – nay, dancer-in-chief – said that he prob-ably could , just not tonight : “Maybe [I’ll] do it privately for Michelle . ”

Patrick Kingsley’selection night diary

in Billings, Montana. More than 31 million Americans had already voted before yesterday Photo: Jae C Hong/AP

Big news, small screenLive US election results and commentary on your mobile device m.guardian.co.uk ≥

upbringing – which took him from Hawaii to Indonesia and back – there are many places he can call home. But he claims Chicago and Chicago claims him. When he’s back in town the traffi c clogs with pride.

At Yours in the Grove, a shop that sells Obama T-shirts and hats round the corner from the president’s local polling station, the owner thought those who were disappointed in Obama’s perform-ance needed to put his record into per-spective. “You have to remember that he did not create this situation,” she said. “He’s just trying to deal with it in the best manner . So I think he deserves another chance.”

The further south you go in the city, the more confi dent people g ot. In the playground at my son’s school in the northern neighbourhood of Edgewater, many parents (almost all Democrats) were nervous. “It’s just too close,” said one mum. “I have a really bad feeling about it.” But down on the mostly Afri-can American southside, Melvyn , who owns the President’s Lounge bar, could not have been more bullish.

“He’s got it,” he said. “He knows it. Romney knows it. We just have to watch it play out.”

Chicago

‘It’s just too close. I have a really bad feeling about it’


*4 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

US election

Gaff es and a storm called Sandy: where the race was won and lost

Schmidt said: “The Republican primary resembled a reality-TV show. All these guys might as well have been living in a tree house with Simon Cowell.”

And yet each of those candidates enjoyed a moment in the sun, a surge in support that made them – rather than Romney – the frontrunner. It was as if Republicans were desperate to fi nd someone else to nominate. Accordingly, former senator Rick Santorum and the former House speaker Newt Gingrich won enough states between them to ensure the primary race dragged on .

That long, bruising primary battle cost Romney dear, and not just fi nancially ( it forced him to spend money defeating his fellow Republicans rather than saving it for the fi ght against Obama). The greater cost was political.

It exposed the future Republican nominee to sustained attack from his own side. The notion of Romney as a ruthless plutocrat, coldly laying off American workers, did not come from the Democrat attack machine. Romney was not seen as embodying the 1% because of the Occupy movement.

At the outset it looked easy for Obama. Then came that debate. Jonathan Freedland looks back

at a tight, absorbing contest

In the fi rst debate, Americans saw a president looking exhausted, listless and disengaged

Rather, that portrait was drawn by Gingrich, who aired an extended commercial, “When Mitt Romney came to Town”, that tore apart Romney’s tenure at the helm of the private equity fi rm Bain & Co. It depicted him as a corporate raider, willing to shutter factories and shatter working lives if it made him richer. That critique lingered all year, eagerly picked up and advanced by the Democrats. But it originated with the Republicans.

Still, the damage of the primaries went deeper. To push aside Santorum, Bachmann and the others, Romney was obliged to adopt positions that would endear him to the Republican faithful – but which stored up trouble for later. So Romney reversed his previous support for abortion rights and gun control, called on undocumented migrants to “self-deport” and rebranded himself from a Massachusetts moderate, who as governor had passed healthcare reform,

538

$632,177,423

$931.471m

$172

$3.3bn

1,014,484

33

179

$5m

131

$11m

Electoral college votes. The total stays the same, but population changes mean states have gained or lost votes

since 2008. Republican Texas has gone up by four, for instance, while Democrat New York has gone down by two

Amount raised by Barack Obama’s campaign by mid-October this year

Amount spent by Barack Obama and his supporters on his campaign, according to

opensecret.org

Average donation by each of Barack Obama’s supporters to his campaign

Amount spent on advertising during the campaign – up from $2.5bn in 2008

Number of general election TV ads by both campaign teams and outside

backers by late October , according to Kantar Media/CMAG

US senate seats being contested; 435 members of the House of

Representatives are up for election

Diff erent ballot measures are being voted on by Americans in 39 states, in addition to voting for president; eight

of these propose borrowing money through government bonds, which

could be worth up to $3.9bn (£2.44bn)

Cost of preparations for the presidential debate held at Lynn University in Boca

Raton, Florida. Other debates cost host universities between $1.65m and $4.5m

Number of fi eld offi ces the Obama campaign has up

and running in Ohio

Spen d on Spanish-language ads this campaign - eight times more than the

previous general election. 10% of eligible voters are Hispanic

1968Republican win

Richard Nixon

55.9%

1964Democratic win

Lyndon Johnson

90.3%

1960Democratic win

John F Kennedy

56.4%

1956Republican win

Dwight Eisenhower

86.1%

1952Republican win

Dwight Eisenhower

83.2%

1948Democratic win

Harry Truman

57.1%

1944Democratic win

Franklin Roosevelt

81.4%

1940Democratic win

Franklin Roosevelt

84.6%

1936Democratic win

Franklin Roosevelt

98.5%

1932Democratic win

Popular vote: 57.41%

Electoral vote

Popular vote: 60.80% Popular vote: 54.74% Popular vote: 53.39% Popular vote: 49.55% Popular vote: 55.18% Popular vote: 57.37% Popular vote: 49.72% Popular vote: 61.05% Popular vote: 43.42%

Franklin Roosevelt

88.9%Electoral college versus popular vote

The 2012 campaign began before the campaign of 2008 had fi nished. In February of that year, while Barack Obama was still locked in an epic struggle for the

Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney summoned his closest allies to a Boston offi ce to work out why his eff ort to be the Republicans’ standard-bearer of 2008 had failed so badly. He handed out a memo he had written about himself, detailing his strengths and weaknesses, assessing his own defeated candidacy as if it were one of the businesses he once assessed as a hotshot management consultant. This was no mere exercise in navel-gazing. Romney was determined to learn the lessons of defeat in 2008 to win in 2012.

Thus began a long march that ended yesterday . The visible miles came last winter, when Romney trudged through the pig farms of Iowa and the snows of New Hampshire in his search for the Republican nomination. But that followed an invisible primary, an endless round of closed-door fundraisers to fi ll up a war-chest he hoped would scare off the most fearsome potential rivals.

Whether money was the explanation or not, Romney was indeed rewarded by the decision of several big-beast Republicans not to challenge him for the nomination. The New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and others, including Sarah Palin, skipped the race, leaving the path open for Romney.

When ambitious politicians duck a presidential contest, that’s usually because they suspect the incumbent will be too hard to dislodge. In the summer of 2011, that looked like the smart decision. For Obama had just done what George W Bush had failed to do: he had removed – killed – Osama bin Laden. Many Republicans concluded that, given the US economy was bound to at least slightly improve by November 2012, the scalp of Bin Laden made the president tough to beat.

The course for Romney ran anything but smooth. Instead of warming to the former Massachusetts governor as the obvious choice – a successful businessman who looked like Hollywood’s idea of a president – Republican primary voters seemed ready to fall in love with almost anyone but him. The rivals included outlandish characters who seemed absurd to outsiders: pizza magnate Herman Cain, evolution-denying congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, Texas governor Rick Perry, who could not remember which three government departments he planned to shut down. Former McCain campaign manager Steve


* The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 5

into the “severe conservative” who now promised to repeal “Obamacare ”.

Those reverses left him doubly wounded. For one thing, he could now be slammed as a serial fl ip-fl opper, just another politician who believed in nothing and would say whatever it took to be elected. For another, he had been boxed into positions bound to alienate core blocs of the electorate that had long been tough for Republicans to reach – the young, Latinos and suburban women among them.

Sure enough, through the summer months he was on the receiving end of an air assault from Obama, in the form of saturation TV ads in key states, which portrayed Romney as part boardroom vulture, part unprincipled phoney. Obama, who had faced no primary challenge of his own, had the money to do it – defi ning Romney before he had a chance to defi ne himself.

Yet Romney could not just blame Obama. Much of his trouble was of his own making. He helped colour in the cartoon of himself as an out-of-touch one percenter when he boasted that his wife had “a couple of Cadillacs” or when

Romney, by contrast, was spirited and energetic. Above all, he came across as a human being rather than the caricature of Obama propaganda: all he had to do was not seem like a rapacious capitalist bloodsucker and, in an instant, he had broken the core message of the Obama campaign. The immediate bounce that Romney enjoyed in the polls suggested that a small chunk of the electorate, disenchanted with the president, had been waiting to see if the Republican was a plausible replacement. In Denver Romney crossed that threshold.

That change revealed what had always been the structural reality of this race. By rights, it should always have been close. Here was an incumbent president who had struggled to lift his approval rating above 50%, who had seen the number of Americans saying the US was on the “wrong track” become a majority and, most crucially, had watched as the unemployment rate had remained stuck at 8% for almost his entire presidency, shifting below that fi gure only a matter of weeks ago. The last president to be re-elected with a jobless percentage that high was Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, in what were rather diff erent circumstances.

So the election should never have been a cakewalk for Obama. That it had seemed that way, until Denver, attested to the deeply fl awed candidacy of Romney. By raising his game at that fi rst debate, he restored politics to something like normal service.

Obama conceded that he had messed up, joked that he had been napping in the fi rst encounter and sharpened up for the next two, where he remained clear, focused and unafraid to confront his opponent: in Denver he had failed even to mention Romney’s 47% remark. Now he made it his closing argument.

But October was a tough month for the president. He was hobbled by accusations that he had bungled or even deceived the public over the September killing of four US diplomats in Benghazi, an issue unlikely to go away. Still the end of the month brought some unlikely and helpful allies.

The fi rst was a former nemesis, Bill Clinton, who in 2008 had dismissed Obama’s presidential bid as a “fairytale”. In the campaign’s closing days, Obama let the man they call the big dog run – as the country’s most beloved Democrat grew hoarse making the case for his successor. Obama didn’t just exploit Clinton’s ability to connect to the white, male blue-collar Americans who remain beyond the current president’s reach – he all but ran on Clinton’s record, arguing that “We know my plan works because we’ve tried it,” referring to Clinton’s success in the 1990s.

The second ally was a genuine surprise. Some pollsters doubt that Superstorm Sandy really made a big diff erence for Obama, noting that Romney’s surge, “Mittmentum”, had already stalled before the weather changed. But few deny that Obama benefi ted from the chance to be seen doing the job of president, while Romney was sidelined, and profi ted especially from the bearhug he received from the Republicans’ rising star, Chris Christie. His gushing praise for Obama, and refusal to campaign at Romney’s side in Pennsylvania, was precious validation for the president – and it came at just the right time.

And so the two men duelled to the very last, Romney making two campaign convention-breaking stops on election day itself. The campaign had fi nished, but the politics is anything but over.

That it had seemed like a cakewalk for Obama attested to Romney’s deeply fl awed candidacy

177,199,652

$389,088,268

$1.02bn

$617

73,000

347

13

5

4

40

21

Americans registered to vote . The total is down 5% on 2008’s 187m

Raised by Mitt Romney’s campaign over the same period

Amount spent by Mitt Romney and his supporters on his campaign

Average donation by each Mitt Romney supporter to his campaign

Campaign ads shown in swing state Nevada in the fi nal weeks of the campaign, at a rate of 10,000 a week

days it would take to watch one million 30-second commercials

State or territorial governor elections take place too – as well as numerous state offi cials and local mayors

States – Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Montana and Wyoming – see votes to “prohibit forced participation in health care systems” or “Obamacare”. Florida and Montana also have proposals which would introduce new restrictions on abortion

number of points Romney rose in the polls following the fi rst debate – a “dramatic” bump

Number of fi eld offi ces the Romney campaign has in Ohio

Record number of percentage points Obama has lagged behind Romney among white voters, according to a Washington Post/ABC News tracking poll. Obama has 80% of non-white voters; Romney about 18%

his tax returns – showing that he paid a meagre 14% – had to be dragged out of him. In July, he botched an overseas tour meant to boost his credentials as a potential world leader by off ending America’s most easily pleased ally, Britain, when he suggested the London Olympics could be a fl op and by travelling to Jerusalem to off er his view that cultural inferiority might be the cause of Palestinian suff ering .

What should have been a moment to relaunch his candidacy and make Americans look at him anew – his party convention in Tampa in August – also had little eff ect. His speech was overshadowed by a moment of Dadaist theatre, as Clint Eastwood harangued an empty chair standing in for an imaginary Obama. Romney was on his way to becoming a joke fi gure.

In September, he went from being ridiculed to being hated. A leaked video showed him addressing fellow millionaires at a fundraising event in May, where an unplugged Romney candidly wrote off 47% of the electorate as parasites, non-taxpaying dependents who would never vote Republican because they would not “take responsibility for their own lives ”. Even many on his own side believed it was an act of self-destruction so complete that no candidate could possibly survive it.

But Romney had one more chance. The fi rst TV debate in Denver in October was, for many Americans, the fi rst time they had paid close attention to the election. What they saw was an incumbent who looked exhausted, listless and disengaged. With his head down, his answers sluggish, it seemed he either was too tired to be president or no longer really wanted the job.

2004Republican win

George W Bush

53.2%

2008Democratic win

Barack Obama

67.8%

1996Democratic win

Bill Clinton

70.4%

1992Democratic win

Bill Clinton

68. 8%

1988Republican win

George Bush Senior

79.2%

1984Republican win

Ronald Reagan

97.6%

1980Republican win

Ronald Reagan

90.9%

1976Democratic win

Jimmy Carter

55.2%

1972Republican win

Richard Nixon

96.7%

Popular vote: 60.67% Popular vote: 50.08% Popular vote: 50.75% Popular vote: 58.77% Popular vote: 53.37% Popular vote: 43.01% Popular vote: 49.23% Popular vote: 47.87% Popular vote: 50.73% Popular vote: 52.87%

2000Republican win

George W Bush

50.4%

TEXT: SIMON ROGERS, AMANDA MICHEL, NADJA POPOVICH. SOURCES: GUARDIAN ANALYSIS, PBS, KANTAR MEDIA, AP, FEC, HUFFINGTON POST, ABC NEWS7 DENVER. PHOTOGRAPHS: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA

Jan 2012 Mar May Jul Sep Nov

The long game Romney v Obama

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

Real Clear Politics poll average

Difference

0

2

4

6

8

Obama (D) 48.8%

Romney (R) 48.1%

Results on the goState-by-state US election results in our iPhone and Android apps and on m.guardian.co.uk ≥



NewsUS election

Children from Kingdom Kinds child development centre march past a polling station during a get-out-the-vote eff ort in Washington DC Photograph: Brendon Hoff man/Getty

The 10 registered voters in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, wait to vote. The village split 5-5 for each candidate

≥ News Up to the minute news and reaction on the result of one of the closest and hardest fought White House races in history

≥ Live blog Follow all the fallout from last night’s election result as America wakes up with Richard Adams’ unrivalled live blog, featuring reports from Guardian journalists across the US

≥ All the results Interactive graphics detailing the full results of the presidential, senate, house and governor elections

≥ Comment and analysis What the result means from among others Ana Marie Cox, Michael Cohen, Glenn Greenwald and Martin Kettle

≥ The world reacts A round-up of how the rest of the world views the result from the Guardian’s unrivalled team of foreign correspondents

≥ Animation America: Elect! Watch the action-packed journey to US election day including last night’s result told in animated graphic novel form

≥ Video and pictures Video of the victory and concession speeches from the two candidates, and view key images

Derrick Banks leaves the polling station in Chicago yesterday morning

Jaime Lea and her two children cast a vote in Nevada, one of the swing states

Actor Sarah Jessica Parker declares her allegiance

★★★★★★★★★★The 2012 election on guardian.co.uk

★★★★★



News In pictures America votesImages that sum up the world’s biggest electionwith our live picture blog guardian.co.uk ≥

Voters walk past the signs outside a polling station in Manchester, New Hampshire

Barack Obama makes some last-minute campaign calls from his Chicago HQ

Election workers try to start an optical scanning machine in a tent in Staten Island. The original polling site, a school, was damaged by Hurricane Sandy

Obama supporters in a get-out-the-vote operation on the south side of Chicago yesterday morning Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan in Richmond Heights, Ohio in New York yesterday


* * *The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 9

National

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Theresa May announced several new inquiries into child abuse yes-terday , including an inquiry into an earlier inquiry on the same topic. It had better be a good inquiry because if

it isn’t someone will demand an inquiry into that inquiry, and before you know it, half of the country will be serving on inquiries into the other half.

The Commons was in sombre mood. MPs were warned by the home secre-tary that they should not think of using parliamentary privilege to utter any of the various names of possible abusers that are swirling around pubs, bars, and the internet . It would prejudice any future trial, she said, so denying justice to their victims.

Not even the most publicity-hungry MP would want to be accused of get-ting a paedophile off , so members with previous (I name no names either, but John Hemming knows who he is) did as they were told.

MPs vied to produce the most fero-cious condemnation of child molesters. They love saying something with which all right-thinking people agree. May said it was a “hateful, abhorrent and disgusting crime” and then, covering a wider fi eld, said that Britain as a whole had “an appalling and shameful record of how we deal with children in care, across a range of issues”.

Labour MPs were fazed by the number of inquiries. A single, over arch-ing inquiry was suggested by May’s shadow, Yvette Cooper. (Intriguing sidelight: not only do we now have a female home secretary and shadow home secretary, but both are being described by what the late Alan Wat-kins called “the Great Mentioner” as future leaders of their parties.)

Keith Vaz, the great Vaz of Vaz, chair-man of the home aff airs committee, called for a single super-inquiry. Basi-cally Labour wants a hyper-inquiry into every paedophile and every single victim going back to – well, into the distant past.

Up sprang Tom Watson, one of the heroes of the phone-hacking saga and the man whose question to David Cam-eron last month re opened this particu-lar can of squirming horrors.

A series of independent inquiries created the building blocks of a cover-up, he said. Separate inquiries into Jimmy Savile and the Welsh care home would continue to protect the despica-ble paedophiles who had already been protected by the establishment for years.

Then he threw in a “paedophile cabinet minister” – something he men-tioned on Monday but which was new to the House and, I suspect, to most of the pub gossips and tweeters.

He fi nished with: “Can she live with what she has announced – the next stage of a cover-up?” One or two people said “shame!” at this, but they muttered

rather than shouted, since Watson has a fearsome track record of being right and not letting go of the bone.

Soon afterwards there was a brief debate on Denis MacShane, who has already quit. It was non-contentious, until Labour’s Michael Connarty wanted to know how it was that David Laws had purloined £60,000 and was back in the cabinet, whereas Denis MacShane …

It was a very good point, so the Speaker shut him up.

Simon Hoggart’s sketchInquiring minds cry cover-up

Guardian Books PodcastInterviews, audioguides, reviews and features from the books team guardian.co.uk/books

David Leigh

Discrepancies have been identified between the testimony given to the Water-house inquiry into an alleged paedophile ring in north Wales during the 1970s and 1980s , and last week’s TV claims about a living Conservative politician that have led to a new inquiry being announced .

The senior Tory alleged to have sexu-ally abused young men was said to be dead when the report was published in 2000, but the ex-politician is still alive today. A second, supposedly corroborative, wit-ness was considered by Waterhouse to be talking about a diff erent individual.

And the report raised the possibility that the Tory named by a former resident of Bryn Estyn children’s home had been confused with a family member . A relative of the Tory lives in the same area .

Steve Messham, who gave an interview to BBC Newsnight on Friday, was “Witness B” when he testifi ed to Waterhouse , while the alleged Tory abuser was “X”.

Waterhouse accepted that Messham had been repeatedly abused but con-cluded that Messham’s evidence on “Mr X” was inconclusive. He said: “He has been described also as manipulative and there are many matters on which he is particu-larly vulnerable in cross-examination.

“X has the surname of a well known and large non-Welsh family and he is said to be dead now.”

Waterhouse recorded: “ B alleged that he was buggered by X on four or fi ve occa-sions ... [he] was, however, very reserved about these allegations when he gave oral evidence ... He said, for example, that he knew the Christian name of X but that he was unwilling to disclose it. ”

Waterhouse said a 2nd witness, “C”, failed to corroborate the identity of X: “ I t

is clear that he was referring to a diff erent person from the man of whom B spoke.”

Waterhouse concluded: “It is obvious on this evidence that we cannot be satis-fi ed that any member of the X family was involved in paedophile activity”.

However, the claims by both witnesses were repeated in last Friday’s Newsnight . Angus Stickler, the reporter who has investigated the story for more than 20 years, said yesterday : “Steve has always maintained the same story and has named the same person.” He said it was only Waterhouse’s opinion that the two wit-nesses were describing diff erent individu-als : “My view is that these are allegations that weren’t investigated by Waterhouse .”

He said they needed to be investigated “in the light of the new public mood” after the Jimmy Savile revelations.

Richard Scorer, Messham ’s solicitor at the Waterhouse inquiry, said th at inquiry had been constrained by its terms of refer-ence. “The inquiry was set up to examine the abuse of children in the care system … It meant it couldn’t and it didn’t look beyond the care system . ”

He said: “What I think was really required once the report came out was for the police to follow up potential lines of inquiry that had been identifi ed particu-larly about wider paedophile networks.

“The problem at that stage is that by the time the inquiry was set up there was a complete break down in trust between many victims and North Wales police .”

Original inquiry incorrectly said Tory accused of assaults had died

Handling of Welsh children’s home abuse allegations to be reviewed

Steven MorrisJuliette JowitPatrick Butler

Victims of abuse at children’s homes in north Wales have given a cautious wel-come to the government’s announce-ment of two new reviews of the way their complaints were dealt with by police and subsequently during an inquiry into the scandal.

The incoming director general of the new National Crime Agency, Keith Bristow, will head a team looking at how police investigated allegations of child abuse in the 1970s and 1980s, amid claims that they failed to take complaints seriously.

A high court judge, Mrs Justice Julia Wendy Macur, will examine the scope and conduct of the previous Waterhouse inquiry into the abuse. One of the main issues will be why 28 alleged abusers, including a very infl uential ally of Lady Thatcher, were identified during the inquiry but their names protected.

The man who triggered the inquir-ies, Steve Messham, who claims he was abused by a senior Tory fi gure while he was a resident of one of the homes, said: “I certainly have confi dence that they’re taking us seriously.”

But he added: “I haven’t got confi dence that it’s going to be done properly yet, I’ve got to be convinced of that. After all’s said and done, when the [Waterhouse] inquiry was announced, that was a Tory govern-ment. We’re back to a Tory government. Let’s just see how it goes.”

Speaking after a meeting with the Welsh secretary David Jones, Messham said: “We discussed what went on in the past, what was covered up, what shouldn’t have been covered up and what we’re going to do in the future.” Asked about how he felt that the politician he claimed had abused him had not been named, he said: “I think once he’s been arrested and interviewed and charged, then he will be named.”

A second former resident of one of the homes, who was not abused, told Chan-nel 4 News he recalls seeing Peter Morri-son – Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary

private secretary – at the care home fi ve times. Morrison, who died in 1995, has previously been publicly linked to abuse at the care home — though he is not the Tory that Messham alleges abused him.

A third victim of the abuse, Keith Gre-gory, now a councillor in Wrexham, also said he was pleased that the scandal would be looked at again. “But the prob-lem is it’s police investigating police and a judge investigating a judge. Will it be any diff erent or do they all stick together?”

The Tory politician rumoured to be at the centre of the abuse allegations, who lives overseas, was visited by the Guardian yesterday but he declined to speak, stat-ing through an intermediary that he was unwell, and resting.

It emerged last night that the children’s commissioner for Wales, Keith Towler, has been approached by a number of other people wishing to talk about abuse at the homes. Solicitors and local councillors are also receiving complaints from people who say they were abused at the homes .

Earlier, in the House of Commons, the home secretary, Theresa May, said the government was treating the allegations with the “utmost seriousness”. Announc-ing details of the police inquiry, May said Bristow would head a team which would include officers from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency and the Child

Exploitation and Online Protection cen-tre. It would act as the single point of con-tact for fresh referrals relating to historic abuse. An initial report was expected by April. She said the government had been “absolutely clear” that “if there are people who should be pursued for prosecution, that then takes place”.

May indicated that the government was still considering a wider public inquiry into all the issues, not just taking in allegations in north Wales but in other cases such as revelations about Jimmy Savile, and the treatment of victims of the sex ring prey-ing on children in care in Rochdale.

May addressed the fact that MPs could use parliamentary privilege, without fear of prosecution for defamation, to name one or more of the public fi gures alleged on the internet to be involved in the abuse in north Wales. She warned they risked any future trial if they named names.

No individuals were identifi ed. But the Labour MP Susan Jones said if any mem-ber of the House of Lords was found to be involved in child abuse they should be “stripped of their peerage”.

Meanwhile, the Commons education committee said the child protection sys-tem should be overhauled to ensure vul-nerable teenagers were taken seriously when they reported allegations of abuse.

The committee said events in Rochdale, where girls were sexually exploited and allegations about Jimmy Savile typifi ed how safeguarding services too often failed to properly investigate reports made by teenagers. Its chairman, Conservative MP Graham Stuart, urged the government to review safeguarding for teenagers. “They are let down too often, frequently ignored or not listened to, can be pushed out of care too young and insuffi ciently prepared and supported ,” he said.

Eileen Fairweather, page 30 ≥Leader comment, page 32 ≥

Steve Messham talks to reporters after meeting the Welsh secretary yesterday

Victims say police did not take 80s claims seriously

May indicates new public inquiry could be held

‘Steve has always maintained the same story and has named the same person’



National

Education

GCSE grades row gets urgent court hearing

Health

Rat’s night at theatre disrupts hospital ops

Health

Fewer dying from heart disease and strokes

Health

Poor receiving worst GP care, study shows

Human rights

Bus driver sacked for being in BNP wins case

A high court judge has ordered an urgent hearing of a legal challenge over the summer’s GCSE English contro-versy mounted by an alliance of pupils, schools and councils .

Almost 400 individual cases are involved in the bid for a judicial review. Mr Justice Cranston decided there should be an open court hearing after privately considering the merits of the application for permission to seek a review. A two-day court hearing is expected to be fi xed for the near future.

The alliance recently announced it had served court documents on Eng-land’s exams regulator Ofqual, as well as the AQA and Edexcel awarding bodies. The documents set out their case for a regrading of GCSE English papers taken by pupils this summer.

The alliance is challenging a decision by the exam boards to raise the bound-ary needed to get a grade C between January and June, as well as what they claim was a failure by Ofqual to address the situation. It claims that as a result of the decisions an estimated 10,000 pupils who took their English GCSE exam in June missed out on a C grade.

The alliance includes 167 pupils, as well as 150 schools, 42 councils a nd six professional bodies. Ofqual responded to a pre-action letter sent by the alli-ance, vowing to “rigorously defend” its decisions over the exam results.

Ofqual’s initial inquiry into the controversy , published in August, con-cluded January’s GCSE English assess-ments were “graded generously” but the June boundaries were properly set and candidates’ work properly graded. PA

Dozens of surgical procedures had to be postponed after a rat was found in a hospital operating theatre. King’s Mill hospital in Mansfi eld, Nottinghamshire, said it took immediate action after the rodent was discovered in a decommis-sioned operating theatre in the early hours of Monday last week. About 40 operations were rescheduled while the theatre area was cleansed and pest con-trollers were called in .

Karen Tomlinson, director of opera-tions at the hospital, said: “We were extremely shocked to learn that there was evidence of a rodent having entered a decommissioned operating theatre during the night, at a time when the department was not in use. As soon as we became aware of this fact the follow-ing morning, we immediately took steps to thoroughly clean and sterilise the entire theatre area and called in external pest control experts to completely eradi-cate the problem.

“While this work was under way, all surgical procedures were halted for one day and just over 40 patients had their operations rearranged. We have apologised to any patients aff ected for the inconvenience caused. I would like to reassure any concerned patient or relative that this was a minor, one-off incident that occurred over a week ago. We took immediate and comprehensive action to rectify matters and to restore services with the minimum of disrup-tion. We are fully operational again. There is no cause for concern.” PA

The number of deaths from heart disease, strokes and other circulatory diseases is falling in England and Wales as medical advances and healthier lifestyles take eff ect. Mortality rates in these areas are down by nearly half in a decade, the Offi ce for National Statistics (ONS) said yesterday .

Although coronary artery disease is the biggest single killer – roughly one in six men and one in nine women – cancers as a group now account for most deaths, 30% across both sexes .

Deaths from respiratory disease have fallen too, but dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, is responsible for a rising proportion, one in 10 among women and one in 20 among men.

Decades of campaigning for people to stop smoking and other public health measures appear to be having an eff ect .

Death rates from can cer in the UK are improving slowly but are still worse than in other parts of Europe. The ONS says there were 484,367 deaths from all causes registered in the two countries last year, a fall of 1.8% on the previous year, and the third year running with fewer than 500,000 deaths. Using mor-tality rates adjusted for comparison with other EU countries , the ONS says deaths from strokes and heart disease have fallen 44% in men and women, and from cancers 14% in men and 10% in women . James Meikle and Denis Campbell

The sacking of a bus driver for being a member of the far-right BNP was a breach of his human rights, the Euro-pean court of human rights has ruled.

The decision by judges in Strasbourg follows a long legal battle by Arthur Redfearn, 56, who was sacked in 2004 from his job in Bradford, West Yorkshire, driving mainly Asian adults and children with disabilities.

The court ruled the actions of Serco breached Article 11 – the freedom of

assembly and association – because he was sacked only because of his membership of a political party. The seven judges reached their decision on a 4-3 majority.

The court said it was “struck by the fact that he had been summarily dismissed following complaints about problems which had never actually occurred, without any appar-ent consideration being given to the possibility of transferring him to a non-customer facing role”.

It added: “In fact, prior to his political affi liation becoming public knowledge, neither service users nor colleagues had complained about Mr Redfearn, who was considered a ‘fi rst-class employee’.”

It said the right to freedom of associa-tion “must apply not only to people or associations whose views are favourably received or regarded as inoff ensive, but also to those whose views off end, shock or disturb”.

The judgment also criticised the fact Redfearn could not bring a case of unfair dismissal against Serco in 2004 because UK law said he had not worked long enough for the fi rm.

The driver was forced to claim race discrimination , which was dismissed by an employment tribunal . PA

Londoners and people in deprived areas receive the lowest-quality care by G Ps, according to research that has prompted fresh concern about postcode lotteries in NHS care.

A study by the King’s Fund health think tank found that family doctors’ surgeries in London and England’s poor-est areas operate in the least patient-friendly ways and their patients experi-ence the smallest improvements in their condition. A bout half the weakest-per-forming practices (40%-60%) are in Lon-don and about 40% in the poorest areas, based on how they look after patients with conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart dis-ease, the researchers found.

Their analysis of NHS performance data at more than 8,000 surgeries reveals stark geographical inequalities in the quality of primary care. The conclu-sions came from examining which prac-tices fared best and worst in delivering good healthcare under the NHS’s quality outcomes framework and patient satis-faction ratings. “With some exceptions, the high-performing practices are pre-dominantly located outside London and in more affl uent areas , ” the study says. Denis Campbell


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National

Sellafi eld audit shows safety costs spiralling

Rajeev Syal and Fiona Harvey

The projected cost of safely storing radio-active material at Britain’s largest nuclear site in Sellafi eld has increased by more than £900m in 10 months, the National Audit Office says in a report released today .

Plans to replace the ageing nuclear waste facilities in Cumbria have suff ered severe delays, auditors said. Twelve out of 14 of the major projects launched last year to build facilities to store material safely are over budget, they have concluded.

The findings have been described as “dire” by MPs. It is the fi rst offi cial audit of the Cumbrian site since a consortium of private companies was brought in to oversee safety in 2008.

Margaret Hodge, who chairs parlia-ment’s public accounts committee, urged the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to “get a grip” on the spiralling costs. “My concern is that unless the authority holds Sellafield Limited [the company responsible for the site] to a clear and rig-orously benchmarked plan, timetables will continue to slip and costs spiral.

“It is totally unacceptable to allow today’s poor management to shift the burden and expense of Sellafi eld to future generations of taxpayers ,” she said.

In 2008, the authority appointed a consortium of private sector companies – URS, AMEC and Areva – as a parent body of the site to bring in outside expertise. The authority plans to clear up the site over the next 108 years.

Progress in 12 of the 14 buildings and equipment projects considered “critical” for reducing risk, and costing from £21m to £1.3bn, failed to achieve what they were supposed to and had not provided good value for money, auditors said.

A long-term plan to clean up the site was agreed last year after an earlier one stalled because it was “unrealistic”.

Sellafi eld stores enough high and inter-mediate level radioactive waste to fi ll 27 Olympic-sized swimming pools. For more than 50 years operators failed to plan how to dispose of the radioactive waste and some of the older facilities have “deterio-rated so much that their contents pose sig-nifi cant risks to people and the environ-ment”, the report said. The highest risks are posed by ponds and silos built during the 1950s and 1960s to store fuel for early reprocessing operations and radioactive waste, according to the report.

About 240 of Sellafi eld’s 1,400 buildings are nuclear facilities and so far, 55 buildings on the site have been decommissioned.

The management of the authority and Sellafi eld have often been criticised for being a closed group of insiders insuffi -ciently transparent to outside scrutiny. Critics say this has led to poor decision-making .

Next year, a major industry shake-up could occur as the authority will have to make a decision on whether to review or renegotiate the Sellafi eld safety contract.

A spokesman for the authority said that the report has provided a useful external check on their progress. “The NAO has rec-ognised the progress made by the NDA in developing a plan to tackle this hazardous legacy,” he said.

A spokesman for Sellafi eld Ltd said: “We have already taken steps to strengthen our approach, both in terms of how we manage projects as a whole and how we develop better, more benefi cial, relation-ships with the supply chain.”

Maev Kennedy

The “marvellous geology” of the white cliffs of Dover has been celebrated by the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy in a poem published for the fi rst time by the Guardian . The poem was commissioned by the National Trust to mark the success of a public appeal to buy one of the last stretches of the famous landmark that was still in private ownership.

Duff y describes the towering chalk cliff s as “a glittering breastplate”, and refer-ences literary antecedents such as the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who describes the “dreadful trade” of the samphire pick-ers clinging to the cliff face, and Matthew Arnold, who wrote of “the eternal note of sadness” sounded by the waves and shin-gle in Dover Beach .

The National Trust appeal raised £1.2m

in just 133 days after more than 16,000 donations from organisations and indi-viduals. The target was reached before the December deadline, with a large donation from the Dover harbour board .

Julian Baggini was appointed the cliff s’ fi rst philosopher-in-residence last sum-mer as part of the appeal. The success is a parting triumph for the trust’s director, Dame Fiona Reynolds, who leaves her post this week after 11 years to become the fi rst female master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

The trust now owns more than 7km of the coast between the South Foreland lighthouse and the visitor centre on Lang-don Cliff s. The appeal was supported by celebrities including Dame Judi Dench, the singer Joss Stone, and Dame Vera Lynn, whose 1941 recording of (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliff s of Dover became her greatest hit.

Laureate’s tribute to coast’s ‘glittering breastplate ’A National Trust appeal raised £1.2m to buy one of the last stretches of the cliff s held in private hands Photo: David Caulkin/AP

Plans for storage of ageing radioactive waste delayed

‘Critical’ projects £900m over budget in 10 months

Worth their salt, England’s white cliff s; a glittering breastplate Caesar saw from his ship; the sea’s gift to the land, where samphire-pickers hung from their long ropes, gathering, under a gull-glad sky, in Shakespeare’s mind’s eye; astonishing in Arnold’s glimmering verse; marvellous geology, geography; to time, deference; war, defence; fi rst view or last of here, home, in painting, poem, play, in song; something fair and strong implied in chalk, what we might wish ourselves.© Carol Ann Duff y 2012

White cliff s



Politics

Britain to launch talks with armed Syrian opposition groups

Nicholas Watt Amman

Britain is to break new ground in its response to the crisis in Syria by opening talks with armed opposition groups, as ministers acknowledge that militants are increasingly setting the agenda.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, will announce the move today at a confer-ence in Doha. David Cameron will give his blessing when he visits Syrian refugees at a camp in Jordan on the fi nal day of his Middle East and Gulf tour . More than 360,000 Syrian refugees are registered in neighbouring countries, 110,000 in Jordan.

The prime minister earlier signalled Britain’s growing concerns at the “appall-ing slaughter” in Syria when he declared he would be prepared to allow President Bashar al-Assad to be given safe passage to a third country.

The move was criticised by human rights groups, who warned that it might increase the violence. Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, tweeted: “PM Cameron, be careful: off ering immu-nity gives Assad licence to kill as many as needed, leaving only if he loses power.”

Cameron, who will announce an extra £14m in humanitarian aid for Syrian refu-gees , has sanctioned a change of tack in contacts with opposition groups amid fears a prolonged confl ict will fuel extrem-ism. “The longer this goes on, the more that it can promote and drive extremism

and we’ll see instability in the region as well,” Cameron told al-Arabiya television in an interview released as he arrived in Saudi Arabia for a short visit yesterday .

Offi cials talking to opposition groups, led by Britain’s special representative John Wilks, are not in contact with extremists seeking to exploit the conflict in Syria. Wilks is only talking to groups that would play a key role in the transition to a new government before joining a new admin-istration in Damascus. One source said: “This is not a ratcheting-up and it is cer-tainly not a precursor to arming anyone. This is reinforcing an existing dialogue.”

Cameron has authorised discussions with militants after Wilks advised there was fl uidity between political and mili-tary opposition leaders . The source said:

“They tend not to have the distinction we have between the prime minister and the chief of the defence staff .”

Hague will make clear today , when he announces the contacts at a conference in Doha hosted by the Qatari government, that Britain will tell the armed opposi-tion groups they must respect human rights and co-operate with aid agencies to improve access for humanitarian aid.

Offi cials are playing down parallels with the Libyan confl ict, when Britain provided “non-lethal” military equipment, such as communications equipment, to the oppo-sition groups. “We eff ectively provided the air force,” one source said.

Help for the Libyan opposition was

authorised by Dominic Grieve, the attor-ney general, using the UN security council resolution. This permitted military force to protect the civilian population from Muammar Gaddafi ’s forces. It is under-stood Grieve has not had to authorise the contacts with armed Syrian groups. No security council resolution has been agreed on Syria because Russia and China oppose any such move.

Cameron – who will announce that a third of the extra £14m in aid will be spent feeding 23,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey – made clear that Britain needs to intensify its response to the crisis in Syria. He told al-Arabiya: “We must ask ourselves what more can we do? How can we help the opposition?”

Asked whether Britain would help arm the rebels, he said: “We are not currently planning that. We are a government under international law and we obey the law.”

More than 30,000 people have been killed in Syria since the confl ict started 19 months ago. More than a million have been displaced internally and 2.5 million are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The extra £14m will take Britain’s con-tribution to the Syrian crisis to £53.5m. This makes Britain the second largest national donor after the US.

The prime minister’s remarks were released as he arrived in Jeddah . Saudi Arabia supports the Syrian opposition.

The Foreign Office played down his pronouncement that Britain might agree to allowing Assad safe passage . “We have been clear that Assad should face justice and that it is for the Syrian people, includ-ing the opposition, to decide the details of a transition including the options for Assad. The longer the killing goes on, the fewer options Assad will have.”

Seumas Milne, page 30 ≥

Dan Sabbagh

Downing Street’s decision to restrict the number of reporters travelling with David Cameron as he tries to sell arms to the Middle East this week has prompted a series of complaints from Westminster journalists, including the BBC political editor , Nick Robinson .

N o 10 granted access to Frank Gardner, the BBC security correspondent, who travelled with Cameron to the United Arab Emirates, prompting speculation that the prime minister’s team are trying to secure better coverage by offering individual journalists scoops on trips abroad.

Westminster correspondents are rou-

tinely invited to travel on the prime min-ister’s plane whenever the head of govern-ment goes abroad on offi cial business – but were surprised to be told in the run up to the Middle East visit that it would not be possible to join him and that there would be little or no access for reporters prepared to travel independently.

Cameron arrived in Saudi Arabia yester-day , as he sought to advance arms deals and repair political relationships . Lobby journalists who were contemplating fol-lowing him over from the U A E concluded they may struggle to clear immigration by the time his meetings were completed.

Much of the lobby community is reluc-tant to criticise N o 10 in public, but Rob-inson told the Guardian that he believed

Downing Street had gone too far, adding : “ For years N o 10 has dream ed of stopping journalists travelling on prime ministerial trips. It is important that they remain just that – dreams.”

Other s say these eff orts are symptomatic of short -term political considerations, where an under -pressure N o 10 is strug-gling amid claims of policy drift and is reel-ing from its failure to close down stories such as the Andrew Mitchell “plebgate” row. But the sensitive nature of the trip to Dubai and Riyadh, whose regimes are not used to explicit media criticism, also provides a cover for greater restraint.

Coincidentally, on this trip, Cameron has had to be active on unrelated domes-tic issues. On Monday he announc ed an inquiry into whether a previous investiga-tion into allegations of the sexual abuse of children in care homes in north Wales “properly did its job”.

With an allegation that a senior Thatcher-era politician may have been involved in the abuse, the PM may have welcomed the opportunity to stay in touch with a wider section of the media.

But Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former director of communications, said this was a diffi cult situation “where there is a bit of right on both sides”. He said if the clampdown on the Gulf trip was “a rare case” in which using pooled coverage was more appropriate it could be justifi ed, but added: “If it is part of a broader strategy to limit numbers and cut the media out of access on trips, Nick and others might be more justifi ed in their concerns.”

Close observers also believe Cameron has become impatient about devoting a signifi cant proportion of his time giving interviews whil e abroad, when so much of the resulting coverage is critical of him and unrelated to the trip itself .

No 10 sources indicated that it was not possible to hire a plane large enough to accommodate the media on the Gulf trip and because of the logistics of the visit , in particular its short duration and the number fl ights involved.

Cameron willing to agree safe exit for president

Fears UK statement gives Assad ‘licence to kill’

Amount of extra aid David Cameron announced for Syria yesterday – taking Britain’s contribution to £53.5m

Media restrictions

Westminster journalists complain of snub

British governments historically do not have known midway points, but courtesy of fi xed-term parliaments, today marks the day when Brit-ain’s fi rst postwar coali-tion government reaches

ripe middle age.With the next election set for 7 May

2015, and Cameron being made prime minister by the Queen on 11 May 2010, 911 days in offi ce marks the halfway point, (even if others using diff erent start dates might quibble).

Middle age is a moment for regrets, pride in achievement and nervous testing of the muscles for signs of irre-versible decay. There is also that nagging worry that decisions made in haste in youth will return to haunt.

No 10 said nothing would be done to mark the moment: the grind of govern-ment would continue, and a midterm review, billed as “a coalition 2.0 reboot”, has been put back until January, partly refl ecting the need to give that review a decent interval from the bad news expected in the autumn statement on 5 December.

The fi rst striking fact about the coali-tion has been its very survival in such perilous economic times. Repeated and much exaggerated reports of the coalition’s imminent death have been made in the last two and a half years, including the latest over an obscure row concerning the date on which a constituency boundary review would come into force.

Some ministers continue to say that if independent observers watched a departmental ministerial meeting, they would be hard pressed to distinguish the Tory from Liberal Democrat. The everyday business of government is as much administrative as a collision of

Coalition has defi ed the doomsayers, but faces diffi cult middle age

As the coalition government reaches its halfway point, Patrick Wintour assesses how well this leap of faith has gone and sets out the possible pitfalls ahead

Midterm analysis

Lucy CavendishThe Brooks-Cameron texts give a glimpse of the sexualised shiresguardian.co.uk/comment isfree

£14m


*

The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 15

ideas. According to Robert Hazell, direc-tor of University College London’s con-stitution unit: “Offi cials say relations at the top of the pyramid remain harmoni-ous. Gordon Brown was a great hoarder of information and sprung surprises, sometimes big ones. A working coalition means none of that happens.”

Unlikely allies have also emerged. Vince Cable, the business secretary, and David Willetts, his higher education minister, for instance enjoy and respect one another’s intellect.

Some ministers have not rubbed along as well. Lynne Featherstone and Theresa May at the Home Offi ce, for instance, was an unhappy coupling. Sometimes the dispute has been political rather than personal. A rare intra-ministerial war has broken out in the energy department over windfarms requiring, No 10 to arbitrate. But neither team, around Clegg or Cameron, seri-ously contemplates an early election.

The second striking fact has been the coalition’s energy. Two-party government has not meant the kind of gridlock that dominates partisan Washington. Tory MPs have blocked few laws. The 2010-12 session, according to the Institute for Government, was one of the busiest of the past 15 years with 42 government bills passed into law. This fi gure is smaller than the session immediately after the Labour election victory of 1997, the last time that a new government with a reforming agenda took offi ce. The 1997/98 session saw 62 bills passed, but arguably the coali-tion legislation has been on a grander scale sweeping through every domestic department, often with uneven results.

In its own terms, the education department has probably been the most successful, and unsurprisingly was highlighted by David Cameron in his age of aspiration conference speech.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has assembled a handpicked team to drive reform relentlessly and take on what he calls “the blob” – the education establishment.

Similarly, Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, arrived in offi ce with a mission, the introduction of a universal credit that merges tax and benefi t and has overcome the institu-tional resistance of the Treasury.

George Osborne has exacted a heavy price for his co-operation – billions in cuts, with another £10bn yet to be sanctioned by the Liberal Democrats. Some of the announced cuts, such as the bedroom tax and benefi t cap do not come into force until April next year. Their impact could be severe, as would a botched introduction of Universal Credit.

The stand-out political disaster has been the health reforms. Clegg remarked ruefully a year ago he had learned a lesson – do not propose a solu-tion until you have convinced the public there is a problem. His former director of strategy, Richard Reeves, was even more blunt in his vivid assessment for the thinktank Demos, describing the then health secretary Andrew Lansley “as like a doctor operating without warning on a patient unaware they were sick, leaving his scalpel in their belly and then blaming them”.

The new health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, is gently removing the scalpel and trying to shift the debate to issues such as dementia, vital areas where the politi-cal divide is less raw.

But Clegg himself can hardly give himself high marks in his area of direct responsibility. The AV referendum, Lords reform, political funding represent a trilogy of failure, sometimes Clegg’s fault, sometimes Cameron’s. In related constitutional fi elds such as

open courts, the draft communications bill and even relations with Europe, more pain awaits the coalition. In the second half of the parliament Clegg hopes to revive reform through a disper-sion of economic, as much as political power.

But all this is dwarfed by fate of the economy, and the wisdom of “Plan A”. The half-term report card on growth is stark, made no easier by Lord Heseltine’s damning verdict last week that he could not yet detect a growth strategy. The economy has grown by 0.6% in two and a half years, instead of the 6% growth projected by the Offi ce for Budget Responsibility . Moreover the defi cit has only been cut by a quarter; the same amount the outgoing Labour government promised to achieve.

The Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, insists the government would have cut as it did in 2010, even if it knew then what it knows now about the rest of the economy.

But the fi ght at the 2015 election will be about the metrics of success, including whether it was commodity prices, depressed European markets, or fi scal consolidation that blew the economy off course. For what it’s worth the National Institute of Economic and Social Research this week predicted UK growth of 1.1% in 2013 and 1.7% in 2014, meaning the economy would not have returned to pre-recession level until the end of 2014.

The bigger test will be how the two parties co-exist in the second half of the parliament. With every passing day the instinct on both sides will be to avoid bold compromise, and instead to reassure their base by asserting distinctiveness

In short, in middle age the business of government by coalition is going to get tougher.

5m

4m

3m

2m

1m

0

SOURCE: IFS

Children living below the poverty line*

94 96 98 00 02 04 06 08 10

*60% median household income

2011

3.6m

2020 target

0m

SOURCE: DECC

Renewable energy consumption as a % of capped gross final energy consumption

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

2020

current

trend

2020

target

1.82.4

3.0 3.23.8

9.2

15.0

0.5%

0.4%

0.3%

0.2%

0.1%

0.0%

SOURCE: DFID

UK Official Development Assistance, as a % of GNI

96 98 00 02 04 06 08 10

2011

0.56%

SOURCE: OBR

Structural deficit (public sector net borrowing), % of GDP

2009/

2010 10/11 11/12 12/13 13/14 14/15 15/16 16/17

8.9

7.06.4

4.0 4.1

2.9

1.90.7

Estimates

£20k

£15k

£10k

£5k

£0

SOURCE: ONS, *SAVE THE STUDENT

Average student debt at the point of entering repayment

00 02 04 06 08 10 12 15

2012

£17,140

2015*

£26,000

The score at half-timeChild poverty

Budget defi cit

Overseas aid

Student debt

Renewable energy

Honoured guestDavid Cameron being presented with the King Abdullah Decoration One by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on the second day of his bridge-building trip to the Gulf and the Middle East yesterday Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Tories suspend Dorries over ‘Celebrity’ jaunt← continued from page 1

prime minister, most recently describing Cameron and George Osborne as “two arrogant posh boys” with “no passion to want to understand the lives of others”.

Speaking before the whip was sus-pended from Dorries, the Labour MP Steve McCabe said: “It is shameless that a Conservative MP thinks it is right to spend time boosting her own profi le on a reality TV show in Australia instead of fi ghting for jobs and growth in Britain. David Cam-eron is so weak he cannot even stop his backbenchers appearing on TV when they should be standing up for their constitu-ents. He should get a grip.”

There was similar controversy in 2006, when George Galloway, then MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, appeared on Celebrity Big Brother.

Dorries will be absent for votes in the Commons and could miss Osborne’s autumn statement on the economy on 5 December if she survives on the show long enough.

Her constituency chairman, Paul Duckett, said he was “surprised” to hear Dorries was taking part and would consider “further action” depending on views within the local association. Duckett met his deputy chair on Tuesday to discuss the matter .

“Normally she would tell me and nor-mally we would know because she is a very diligent MP, which is why it came as a bit of a surprise from the media that she is going off to do a TV programme . ”

The former Tory MP Louise Mensch, who gave up her Corby seat in August to live with her husband in America, was among those who took to Twitter to criti-cise Dorries’s decision.

“Nothing sadder than a politician, or ex-politician, on any of those shows ,” she said. “Just imagining the scene in the whips’ offi ce if I said I wanted to skip par-liament for weeks to go on a celebrity TV show.”

She added: “Nadine pretending that a serious issue like abortion rights is why she did this is the lowest of the low. Inde-fensible stuff .”

Other figures tipped to take part in this year’s show, hosted by Ant and Dec, include the Birds of a Feather act or Linda Robson and the former Coronation Street star Helen Flanagan, who played Rosie Webster.

The former world darts champion Eric Bristow is also said to be taking part. ITV declined to comment on Dorries ahead of the offi cial announcement of the show’s lineup .



Rodney case offi cer shot two men dead in 1980s

Vikram Dodd

The veteran fi rearms offi cer who shot and killed Azelle Rodney in April 2005 yester-day denied that he was “trigger happy” after it emerged he had shot two men dead in the 1980s and injured two others while on duty.

Amid angry scenes at an inquiry into the death of Rodney the offi cer, known only as E7, said claims a gun had been planted in Rodney’s car were outrageous. But he accepted that forensic evidence contradicted a key part of his justifi cation for fi ring shots at a man he killed.

Rodney was struck by six bullets, fi red by E7, after a car he was travelling in was forced by police to stop in Edgware, north London. Officers had intelligence that Rodney was part of a gang on its way, pos-sibly armed with automatic weapons, to attack and rip off a rival drugs gang. Weap-ons were recovered from the vehicle.

Offi cers in unmarked cars followed the Volkswagen Golf Rodney, 24, and two oth-ers were in, before deciding to force it to stop . E7 was in a car that pulled up along-side the VW Golf with Mr Rodney sat in the back seat. E7 said Rodney’s movements and body language, including ducking down and coming back up again, left him convinced he had to open fi re.

He told the inquiry he believed Rodney had ducked down to grab a weapon . The offi cer said he could not wait or shout a warning because the weapon he feared the suspect may have could fi re 18 shots in a second: “In half a second he could have nine rounds in the air.”

E7’s fi rst shot to strike Rodney, in the arm, was not fatal. He said he continued to fi re, as the suspect remained upright and there was no obvious sign the shot had had any eff ect . But under question-ing from Leslie Thomas for Rodney’s fam-

ily, E7 accepted forensic evidence that the suspect was falling when shot again. Video of the shooting shows E7 fi ring eight shots in just over a second. Two missed, one almost hitting another offi cer.

E7 said he accepted he had to justify in law every shot he fi red. Pressed on why he continued to fi re, E7 said the suspect posed a threat because he was still upright.

Thomas said forensic evidence showed the shot had been fi red at a downwards angle, meaning E7’s account was not cor-rect: “He could not have been upright when you fi red shot number two.”

E7 said his “perception” was that Rod-ney was upright and added: “I am pre-pared to accept, in the light of the foren-sics, he was falling into my shots.” That second shot to strike the suspect was in the back, the third and fourth to the right ear region. The fi nal two shots were to the top of Rodney’s head.

E7 denied fi ring indiscriminately. In an interview with the Independent Police

Complaints Commission he refused to answer 149 questions, but denied at the inquiry believing he was above the law.

E7 described as “outrageous” and “insulting” claims that E7’s colleagues had planted a gun when it turned out the offi cers belief that Rodney had been hold-ing a gun was mistaken.

Thomas said: “We say that the gun that was found subsequently on the back seat of the car was put there, removed from one of the bags in the car, it was not next to Mr Rodney.”

The inquiry heard that E7 had over two decades’ experience as a fi rearms expert , but he had been recommended for disci-plinary action once for leaving his vehicle while on duty . In the 1980s he had shot two men dead in an operation and had wounded two other suspects.

The hearing continues.

Policeman denies claim he was ‘trigger happy’

Suspect hit by six bullets in just over a second

Williams hit ‘not relevant’ to Radio 1 audience Lisa O’Carroll

BBC Radio 1 has moved to reinforce its youth credentials by refusing to put Rob-bie Will iams’s No 1 single Candy on its playlist, with breakfast DJ Nick Grimshaw saying the 38-year-old was too old for his audience and ‘not relevant’.

The former Take That star was born in February 1974, the same month as Chris Moyles, who Grimshaw, 28, replaced on the Radio 1 breakfast show in September.

“I don’t know if he’s ‘now’ for a Radio 1 audience. I’ve never listened to a Robbie Williams song, but I really like him,” said Grimshaw. “To 13- and 14-year-olds, he’s

not relevant – they’ve got One Direction. I liked Take That when I was little, but I’m not little anymore.”

However, Magic 105.4 breakfast pre-senter Neil Fox reckoned it was a sign of how out of touch Radio 1 is with its listeners. He tweeted yesterday: “Brain-less @grimmers @R1Breakfast claims @robbiewilliams is too old & irrelevant for today’s teenagers! Some advice.. Stop being a total nob ”.

Williams’s latest single, his 14th UK No 1, sold more than 130,000 copies last week to reach the top spot in the offi cial chart on Sunday. Radio 1’s decision not to give Candy much airplay is part of a strate-gic repositioning for the station, which is

seeking to focus more tightly on its target audience of 15- to 29-year-olds, following criticism from the BBC Trust that its lis-teners were too old.

A spokesman for Radio 1 said Candy was not banned but was not on the A -list of highly rotated tracks, adding that Grimshaw had played it on his breakfast show on Monday.

“Each track is considered for the playlist based on its musical merit and whether it is right for our target audience, with decisions made on a case-by-case basis.

It is not a question of an artist’s age but whether they are appropriate for our target audience of 15- to 29-year-olds,” the spokesman said.

Brain drain fears over rise in emigration Alan TravisHome aff airs editor

An increasing middle-class “brain drain” of British professionals moving abroad to live and work is raising concerns about future skills shortages in the UK, Home Offi ce research has found.

The study of emigration from Brit-ain reveals that an estimated 4.7 million UK-born people now live abroad, with Australia consistently the most popular destination over the past 20 years.

The research also discloses that, con-trary to popular wisdom, fewer people emigrate from Britain at times of rising unemployment, as they fi nd it harder to sell-up and fund their move abroad. This is in sharp contrast to the era of the “£10 Pom” 50 years ago when 80,000 impover-ished British migrants a year used to sign up for an assisted passage to Australia.

The study found that those moving abroad are overwhelmingly (93%) of working age and that the popular image of Brits retiring to the Spanish Costas is in decline. Only 4,000 people of retirement age moved abroad in 2010, down from a peak of 22,000 in 2006.

The fall refl ects the end of the house price bubble in Britain, during which home owners could sell up and live more cheaply abroad . The largest numbers of British pensioners living abroad are not in

Spain but Australia, Canada and the US , refl ecting the large British communities who settled in those countries years ago.

The Offi ce for National Statistics says emigration from Britain rose sharply over the past decade, from 363,000 a year to a peak of 427,000 in 2008 . Since then it has fallen back to 350,000 a year. Long-term migrants are defi ned as those who move abroad for at least 12 months.

British emigrants account for 149,000 (43%) of the 350,000 who left Britain to live abroad during 2011. The remain-ing 57% were made up of almost equal numbers of European Union and non-EU citizens returning home after living and

working in Britain. Citizens of other EU countries are far more likely to return home after living in Britain than those from the rest of the world. Migrants from the Indian sub-continent and the Carib-bean Commonwealth countries are more likely to settle in Britain than those who arrive from Australia, New Zealand or America.

The Home Offi ce study says a large and increasing proportion of British citizens moving abroad are those from the profes-sional or managerial occupations, and that this has implications for the future avail-ability of skills in Britain.

This group made up just over a third (37%) of British emigrants in 1991 but reached nearly half (48%) in 2010 after a steady year-on-year rise until the global recession of 2008. Most moved abroad to a defi nite job rather than simply speculative looking for work.

The most recent estimate by the World Bank shows that in 2011 there were 4.7 mil-lion British citizens living abroad, repre-senting 7% of the total UK population and the eighth highest of any country in terms of absolute numbers. In percentage terms, countries such as Portugal (21%) and Ire-land (16%) have much higher proportions of their population living abroad.

The largest British communities around the world are in Australia (1.2 million), the US (701,000), Canada (675,000) and Spain (411,000).

In numbers

93%The proportion of those moving abroad who are of working age, as fewer retirees are heading to sunnier climes

427,000The peak rate of emigration from the UK in 2008 . Since then it has fallen to 350,000 a year, according to the ONS

Azelle Rodney died in April 2005 after the car he was travelling in was stopped by police in Edgware, north London



National

Mark BrownArts correspondent

An extensive archive of letters, book drafts, audio tapes and photographs relat-ing to the fi lm director Andrei Tarkovsky is to appear at auction in London.

Sotheby’s has announced it is to sell an archive of one of the most revered fi gures in cinema, a man whom Ingmar Bergman called “the greatest … the one who invented a new language of fi lm.”

Tarkovsky’s fi lms, always intellectu-ally stimulating and usually long and slow-moving, routinely come top or very high in fi lm lists. The Guardian named his 205-minute Andrei Rublev as the best arthouse fi lm of all time , and the BFI’s once -a-decade greatest fi lm poll put three Tarkovsky titles in the top 30 – Mirror at 19, Andrei Rublev at 26 and Stalker at 29. Mirror came ninth in a parallel BFI list decided by 358 directors.

Sotheby’s head of books and manu-scripts, Stephen Roe, said the archive gave fascinating insights into Tarko-vsky’s approach to cinema. “It is prob-ably the only papers relating to Tarko-vsky that are ever likely to come on the market in the near future,” he said.

The archive is being sold by Olga Surkova, who was Tarkovsky’s pupil, amanuensis and friend as well as co-author of the book Sculpting in Time, in which the director sets out his theories

on cinema. The archive covers his life as well as his work. One of the most poignant items is a draft of a letter he wrote to President Leonid Brezhnev in which he argues that he be allowed to work in the Soviet Union and calls for his fi lms – banned by the authorities – to be released.

“For three and a half years the fi lm has been kept away from the screen … Andrei Rublev was not and could not have been used for any kind of anti-Soviet propaganda … I do not have any opportunity to exercise my creative ideas ,” he wrote.

The situation was having a profound impact on Tarkovsky. “If I do not have any work, I cannot make a living,

though I have a wife and a child. I do not feel comfortable talking about that, but my situation has been unchanged for so long that I cannot keep silence any longer.” The letter had little eff ect and in 1984 he vowed to never again return to the Soviet Union. He died of lung cancer in Paris in 1986 at the age of 54 .

Also in the sale are notebooks with shot-by-shot analysis of his fi lms; printed scripts for fi lms, containing signifi cant diff erences to the fi nal versions; and a collection of 32 audio tapes and 13 Mini Dis cs from his fi nal years on which he talks about his fi lms and cinema.

There are photo albums of Tarkovsky

and his family on holiday in places such as the Grand Canyon and Stonehenge , a s well as pictures of the director with other Russian luminaries such as the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.

Tarkovsky made seven feature fi lms , including Solaris, Nostalghia , and The Sacrifi ce . Steven Soderbergh, who remade Solaris with George Clooney in

the lead role, once said : “ T he fact that he had such an impact

with only seven features I think is a testament to his genius.”

The archive will be sold by Sotheby’s on 28 Novem-

ber and has an estimate of £80,000-£100,000.

Letters of revered Russian fi lm-maker up for sale

Surge of sewage hits cleanliness of UK beaches Damian Carrington

The UK’s beaches were the dirtiest in a decade in 2012, with two in five failing national standards for pollution , fi gures released yesterday by the government show.

The surge in sewage, farm and city waste being flushed into the sea is the result of very wet weather, according to the Environment Agency.

“It is shocking: the results are the worst in a decade,” said Hugo Tagholm, execu-tive director of Surfers Against Sewage . “The UK’s overburdened sewerage system is bursting at the seams, resulting in all too frequent raw sewage and storm water dis-charges nationwide.”

Tagholm called the existing standards , set in 1976, “out of date” and noted that new tougher European rules on beach hygiene are due to come into force from 2015.

The environment minister, Richard Benyon, said: “While the majority of England’s bathing waters continue to be of a good quality, I am disappointed that a number have fallen short of the tighter standard. Water companies are now plan-ning their next round of investment and I am determined that improving bathing-water quality should be a key focus of these plans.”

Figures from the Department for Envi-ronment, Food and Rural Aff airs (Defra) show the number of beaches failing basic cleanliness standards more than doubled in 2012 to 35 compared with 2011, includ-ing World Heritage site Kimmeridge Bay in the south, Bude Summerleaze and Budleigh Salterton in the south-west and Saltburn in the north-east .

Tagholm said that even on beaches that pass the basic standard, bathers can still be presented with a one in seven chance of contracting gastro enteritis.

Stimulating cinemaClockwise from left: stills from Solaris, Stalker and Nostalghia, by the director Andrei Tarkovsky (bottom) Photographs: BFI


*

International18 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

International editor: Charlie EnglishTelephone: 020 3353 3577 Fax: 020 3353 3195Email: [email protected] our coverage on Twitter: guardianworld

Photo evidence suggests police planted weapons next to dead Marikana miners

Images point to offi cial cover-up, says lawyer

Media reports allege execution-style shootings

said the evidence presented at the com-mission indicated an attempt to alter the crime scene.

“The evidence clearly showed there is at least a strong prima facie case that there has been an attempt to defeat the ends of justice,” he said.

Bizos, who defended Nelson Mandela during the Rivonia trial half a century ago, called for high-ranking offi cials to be brought before the commission to explain whether they granted colleagues permis-sion to move traditional weapons from where they had been found.

Ishmael Semenya, a police representa-tive, said the national police commis-sioner Riah Phiyega had launched an investigation two weeks previously, after receiving evidence that one of the crime scenes had been tampered with.

But Bizos said Phiyega’s investigation was not to be trusted because of her pub-lic statements shortly after the massacre. Phiyega was quoted as saying: “Safety of the public is not negotiable. Don’t be sorry about what happened.”

Video evidence shown to the inquiry on Monday also indicated that some of the slain miners may have been handcuff ed. Family members at the hearing wept as they saw two lifeless bodies with their hands tied behind their back.

A sked if he had seen whether any of the dead miners’ hands were bound, Mohlaki said :. “If I am looking at the video, there is a person handcuff ed possibly, but on the day I did not observe that .”

In one of the videos, police can be heard joking and laughing next to the dead bodies scattered amid dust and blood.

In August, television footage of police opening fi re on the miners caused shock around the world. And in subsequent weeks, the journalist Greg Marinovich produced a series of reports for the Daily Maverick website pointing to evidence that some of the miners had died at a second site, having probably been killed in cold blood. Autopsy reports allegedly show that several of the dead had bullet wounds in the back.

On Monday Dali Mpofu, a lawyer rep-

resenting about 270 injured and arrested miners, told the inquiry: “Evidence is going to be led to the eff ect that the peo-ple at scene two were hiding away when they were shot.”

Mpofu said one of the bodies recovered from the scene, known as Body C , stood out from the rest because it was “riddled” with 12 bullet wounds; all the other bodies had single bullet wounds.

The massacre of 34 workers was the bloodiest security incident since the end of apartheid, in 1994. The inquiry has heard that at least 900 bullets were fi red that day. It followed 10 fatalities, includ-ing those of two police offi cers who were hacked to death.

In the immediate aftermath, the authorities sought to portray the miners as responsible for the violence. About 270 of the striking miners were arrested and charged with murder, though the charges were later dropped.

The strike ended in September after a 22% pay rise was agreed with the mine’s owners, the platinum group Lonmin.

The inquiry began last month and is expected to continue for four months . It has been plagued by complaints that family members were unable to attend and allegations that police have arrested and tortured witnesses . Mpofu told the commission last week: “One person [said] he was beaten up until he soiled himself , a nother lost the hearing in his right ear .”

James Nichol, a lawyer representing the families of the dead miners, said of the photo anomaly: “ There are only two possible conclusions: a cover-up and a systematic planting of evidence.”

David SmithJohannesburg

Police in South Africa have been accused of planting weapons on the bodies of dead miners as part of an offi cial cover-up of the Marikana massacre , in August.

Damning photographic evidence was presented to an independent commis-sion of inquiry examining the deaths of 46 people during nearly six weeks of violent strikes at the Lonmin-owned mine.

The revelation follows a series of media reports alleging that on the worst day of bloodshed, when 34 striking miners were killed, some were subjected to execution-style shootings .

Photographs taken by police on the night of 16 August showed more weapons by the bodies than photos taken immedi-ately after the massacre, the commission was told. The crime scene expert Captain Apollo Mohlaki, who took the night pic-tures, admitted the discrepancy.

In one picture, a dead man is seen lying on rocky ground near the mine; a second picture, taken later that day, is identical except that a yellow-handled machete is now lying under the man’s right hand.

George Bizos, a veteran human rights lawyer representing the mine workers,

Since August more than 80,000 South African miners have downed tools and 46 people have died in violence around the strikes Photograph: Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters

The Farlam commission into the Marikana mine killings continues to reveal shocking information about what happened at Small Koppie on 16 August.

It is clear from the records that senior police offi cers were at Marikana most of the day – they must have seen the scene before weapons were placed next to and on top of miners’ bodies.

During the nine-day gathering to plan the submission to the commis-sion, these same offi cers would have watched before-and-after footage. There would have been frank discus-sions about what happened that day. Did they not ask, “Hey, this is wrong, you are subverting the justice we are sworn to uphold?” Seems not. It appears the nine days were spent plan-ning a strategy to extricate the police from culpability .

The commission heard the police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, two weeks ago became aware the crime scene might have been tampered with and opened an investigation.

Then there is the Independent Police Investigative Directorate (IPID), wh ich is there to monitor the police. Its investigation included taking state-ments from wounded and arrested miners , as well as from police offi cers whose weapons fi red the fatal bullets .

The IPID has access to all the evi-dence . It must have been aware of how police were trying to cover up the crime scene. Why weren’t those offi cers, or their superiors, suspended while the investigations continued?

As far as we are aware, there is no reason for justice to be put on hold while the commission is in progress. The police and prosecutors have not been sitting on their hands, if the wave of arrests and court appearances of miners is anything to go by. Yet the I PID has done nothing ( or at least nothing we can see). What we see is that police are a law unto themselves. That they – and their political bosses – are above South Africa’s constitution.

The message is clear: our govern-ment will back the police above a citizen’s rights . Police will quell any popular movement by the underclass that threatens the interests of the political or business elite. The police are acting with impunity. Their politi-cal masters are acting with impunity. In the South Africa of 2012, if you are poor and without political clout, you are on your own.Greg Marinovich is a Pulitzer prize- winning photographer who has investi-gated the Marikana killings . This article was written for Daily Maverick, part of the Guardian Africa Network

Analysis Police and state are clear: ‘We’re above the law’

Greg Marinovich

A picture taken after the massacre and a second photograph later the same day


*

InternationalThe Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 19

Oksana Grytsenko Voloka

The former Soviet Union was known for monotowns : settlements dominated by a single industry such as making car tyres, cement or agricultural equipment.

For many it was the road to ruin as market forces buried the centrally planned economy after 1991. But one Ukrainian village has emerged as per-haps its country’s richest as a result of a single niche product: wedding dresses.

Voloka is the post-Soviet capital of nuptials. Every third building is a wedding shop, and buyers come from the other side of the world, attracted by the high quality and low prices of the garments. “Recently one American came to us, choosing dresses for the boutique which he plans to open in the US,” says Kateryna Yeremitsa in her home which is illumi-nated by a fairytale scene of magical frocks embroi-dered with crystals.

Voloka’s wedding tradition goes back to the 1980s, when Brandusha Popovych earned local repute for the fi rst communion dresses she handstitched. Later she switched to wedding dresses. Neigh-bours cottoned

on to the cottage industry and the busi-ness sustained them through the 1990s economic collapse . Now every Monday morning, a succession of full buses carry young women from the nearby city, Chernivtsi, to jobs at the sewing work-shops. They can earn the equivalent of about €400 (£320) a month .

Dresses are distributed at the 35-hectare Kalynivsky bazaar in Chernivtsi, one of Ukraine’s largest markets. Villagers, most of whom live in plush villas, became so wealthy they even paid for a new road to get their wares to market. Gradually the local industry spread throughout the region.

At one of the stalls Olena Karcha shows off her wares, which she off ers for only €40-€120 a dress. “Bolero is all the rage this year,” she said, showing synthetic fur creations. Karcha person-ally sews and decorates the dresses at a small home workshop , but in autumn, the main wedding time in Ukraine, all the family including children participate in dress production.

Her usual customers are brides from Ukraine, Romania and Moldova as well as wholesalers,

who ship dresses for resale in Hungary, Slovakia, and sometimes in western Europe and former Soviet Union countries. “Germans like restrained dresses, while the Italians prefer the catchy staff , just like the

Ukrainians,” Karcha said. “Kazakhs and Uzbeks choose

the covered attires but with lots of stones.” At another stall, Tetiana Kolesnichenko said her customers were mainly from Baltic countries. She showed white bonnets and silk

gloves especially loved by Catholics. Her prices are higher , from €120 to €400 a dress. Kolesnichenko started her busi-ness 16 years ago by reselling dresses from Syria but later decided to sew them herself. Now she only designs dresses, which are sewed by her two employees.

She admitted business ha d become tougher because of competition. “The children of those who started sewing dresses 20 years ago have grown up and begun doing the same,” she said. More often than not, her bulk buyers come from Russia, Belarus and central Asia.

Dinara Amirova, who owns wedding

shops in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, said most of the wedding garments in her country came from Ukraine. “I myself got married in a wedding dress from Ukraine,” she said, and she regards Ukrainian merchandise as best value for money. To fi ll the shops Amirova’s mother regularly makes trips of almost 2,500 miles, by plane from Astana to Kiev, then by bus or taxi to Chernivtsi.

But the hardest thing is not fi nding dresses to buy, but shipping them out of Ukraine. Thousands of small-scale entrepreneurs travelling there often try to omit the customs requirements.

Ukraine’s customs service reported numerous cases of dresses being smug-gled to Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan in 2011.

It is diffi cult to assess how big the industry is. Much of it is still carried out away from the eyes of the taxman. The residents of Voloka are reluctant to divulge details about revenue . Yeremitsa said people were just fearful for their business. “Who knows if you are really a journalist?” she asked . “They think, maybe you are from the tax service or a spy of business rivals, who may steal the designs of the dresses.”

Ukrainian village has wedding dress business sewn up

A stall in Kalynivsky bazaar and, below left, a dressmaker in Voloka Photograph: Giancarlo Radice/Parallelozero

Voloka’s cottage industry sells handstitched garments to brides all over the world



International

Up for the cupNigeria

Biafra campaignersaccused of treason More than 100 Nigerians have been charged with treason after a protest march calling for an independent state of Biafra.

Supporters of the Biafran Zionist Movement were arrested after an independence rally in the regional capital, Enugu. The protest ers included many elderly war veterans from the bloody 1967 confl ict in which Biafra tried to break away from the newly independent Nigeria. “We don’t want to be part of Nigeria because Nigeria is not working as a nation,” said Chilos Godsent from the Imo Mass Movement, which has called for the prosecution of former Nigerian heads of state for their role in the Biafra war. “These arrests just confi rm the reasons why we want self-determination – this is a state where they can arrest us even though we have not committed any off ence .

“The policy and leadership of this country has done everything to exterminate and dehumanise the Biafran people. It is only through an independent nation that our capacity can truly be developed. We are gathering support from our people – we know that if we held a referendum today, 98% of the people in Biafra would support independence. ”

The protest ers are evidence of a hardcore of separatists in the region, who still campaign for independence 40 years after the end of the Biafran confl ict. The 1967 war was the bloodiest event in Nigeria’s post-colonial history, and began when the oil-rich south-eastern region – dominated by the Igbo ethnic group – seceded as the Republic of Biafra. Blockades and fl ighting between Biafran

forces and the Nigerian army led to the deaths of more than one million people, mostly from hunger and disease.

The Biafran government surrendered in 1970, ending hopes of an independent republic, but separatist sentiments have remained alive among some in the region.

The award-winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun, written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, pictured below left, will soon bring the events to a global audience. A fi lm based on the book, which chronicles the lives of a family who live through the war, is due for release in 2013 and stars Thandie Newton. Afua Hirsch

Turkey

Gaza fl otilla trial opens against Israeli chiefs A Turkish court has launched the trial in absentia of four former Israeli mili-tary commanders over the deaths of nine Turkish activists on a ship bound for Gaza in 2010 . Israel denounced the move as a “show trial”.

Tensions between Turkey and Israel will be exacerbated if Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, fol-

lows up his intention, announced last week, to visit to Gaza . The Mavi Marmara was part of a fl otilla try-ing to breach Israel’s blockade of

Gaza. Israeli commandos stormed it in international waters . Israel said passengers included militants

intent on violent confrontation. Erdogan described it as “state terrorism”.

In a 144-page indictment, former chief of staff Gabi

Ashkenazi; former commander of the Israeli navy Eliezer Marom; former air force commander Amos Yadlin; and Avishai Levy, former head of air force intelligence, are accused of inciting murder and

face multiple life sentences. Israel has expressed regret , but refused to

apologise. Harriet Sherwood Jerusalem

Italy

Giotto painted Assisi frescoes, claim restorers

United States

After Sandy, New York braces for new storm

Art restorers working on frescoes in a forgotten chapel in Assisi believe they have stumbled across proof that stun-ning images found under layers of grime are the work of medieval artist Giotto.

The discovery of the artist’s initials on the frescoes follows two years of resto-ration work in the Chapel of St Nicholas in the lower basilica of Saint Francis. The work was prompted by a 1997 earth-quake that damaged the basilica.

Experts have argued that the frescoes were at best the work of Giotto’s follow-ers in the 14th century. But restorers claim the letters GB – standing for Giotto di Bondone, his full name – prove the cleaned-up images were his .

Born in 1266, Giotto is considered a forefather of Italian renaissance art. He completed the Scrovegni chapel in Padua around 1305, while his Ognissanti Madonna hangs in the Uffi zi in Florence.

“This is one of the fi rst works of [Giot-to’s] artistic life and is of great impor-tance to reconstruct the chronology of his work and that of his workshop,” said chief restorer Sergio Fusetti of the Assisi frescoes. Tom Kington Rome

New York City’s parks and beaches will be closed at noon today for at least 24 hours as a new storm approaches just over a week after superstorm Sandy brought widespread fl ooding and wind damage, the mayor said yesterday.

“We just don’t need to send our fi rst responders into the ocean to save someone who is being foolish,” Michael Bloomberg said. He also said city offi cials would try to evacuate residents from some low-lying waterfront neigh-bourhoods today when the storm is forecast to strike .

He said the evacuations, designed to coincide with high tides when the storm surge would be at its peak, would not be as widespread as the mandatory evacu-ations of large parts of the city ordered before Sandy hit .

More than 895,000 homes and busi-nesses along the east coast remained without power yesterday . Sandy made landfall in New Jersey on the night of 29 October . Power companies said the storm aff ected about 8.48 million cus-tomers in 21 states, according to the US energy department . Reuters New York

Argentina

Protests planned over Kirchner reforms Argentina is braced for a wave of pro-tests against the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, amid growing disquiet over a faltering economy and eff orts to clamp down on the media.

Activists hope to rally thousands of people on Thursday for a string of demonstrations against a proposed constitutional reform that would allow Fernández to seek a third term in 2015, and a move to break up the country’s main media group.

In the fi ve years since Fernández succeeded her husband Néstor Kirch-ner in offi ce, Argentina has grown increasingly polarised between those who argue the president’s reforms will create a more egalitarian society, and opponents who accuse her of creeping authoritarianism.

“A wide gulf has opened,” said Jorge Lanata, the journalist whose weekly satirical TV show Periodismo Para Todos (Journalism For All) has helped shift the balance of public opinion. Uki Goñi

Racegoers line up for the Fashion on the Field



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Murdered Briton was briefi ng MI6 , says paper

Greece

Protests grow before latest austerity vote

Neil Heywood, the British business-man whose death led to the downfall of former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai , knowingly provid ed information on the high-fl ying Chinese politician’s family to MI6, according to the Wall Street Jour-nal. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was convicted in August of murdering the 41-year-old Briton .

The Journal, citing current and former British offi cials and friends of Heywood, said the businessman contin-ued to meet a contact and provide infor-mation on Bo’s aff airs after learning the person was an MI6 offi cer . His contact even warned him to be careful “not to become a headline” as his relations with Gu became tense.

After his death the foreign secretary, William Hague, issued a rare denial of intelligence links, saying Heywood was “not an employee of the British govern-ment in any capacity”.

Friends of the businessman argued his fascination with James Bond – his silver Jaguar had 007 in the registration number – was hardly the sign of an intel-ligence asset. Tania Branigan Beijing

Facing its greatest challenge since assuming power in June, Greece’s frag-ile coalition government is heading for a cliff hanger vote tomorrow on fresh austerity measures with the country paralysed by a 48-hour general strike. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets yesterday, including in Patras, above, to protest over policies that have increased poverty and unemployment .

With Greece’s eurozone future dependent on passage of the €13.5bn package, the fi nance minister, Yiannis Stournaras, implored wavering MPs to back the bill, saying it was the only way of assuring Athens did not default .

The prime minister, Antonis Samaras, has pledged the measures “will be the very last” to be imposed , but with pen-sions and wages set to be slashed, taxes increased and the retirement age raised, unions and anti-bailout forces, le d by the radical left main opposition Syriza party, plan to hold more protests today. Helena Smith Athens

Egypt

Teacher admits cutting girls’ unveiled hair A court in southern Egypt has convicted a teacher of child abuse and given her a six-month suspended sentence after she cut the hair of two schoolgirls for not wearing the Muslim headscarf.

The incident last month in the village of Qurna sparked criticism from rights groups and local offi cials. The case falls into a broader debate in Egypt over personal and religious freedoms a mid the rise of Islamist political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

The teacher, Eman Abu Bakar, who

wears the niqab that leaves only her eyes visible, was transferred to another school a fter the incident. But the father of one of the girls fi led a complaint, accusing her of abuse. Berbesh Khairi el-Rawi said Abu Bakar forced his daughter to stand with her hands above her head for two hours before cutting her hair .

The teacher was quoted as saying she cut her students’ hair after asking them repeatedly to cover their heads. A student then handed her a pair of scis-sors , she said, and he and other pupils urged her to “implement” the threats. AP Luxor

competition on Melbourne Cup day at Flemington racecourse in Melbourne yesterday Photograph: Paul Crock/AFP/Getty

Julian Borger’s blogThe latest on global security issuesguardian.co.uk/globalsecurity

es ≥


*

Financial22 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

Business editor: Julia FinchTel: 020 3353 3795 Fax: 020 3353 3196Email: fi [email protected] us at twitter.com/BusinessDesk

SOURCE: INTERACTIVE DATA

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£ £€ $Holly and ivy but no Twiggy for M&SCelebrities ditched from Christmas ad campaign

Half-year profi ts fall, but exceed expectations

Simon Neville

Marks & Spencer has dropped celebrities in its Christmas adverts for the fi rst time in 12 years to focus on product-driven mar-keting, ending a run of festive campaigns that have featured names including, Twiggy, Antonio Banderas, David Beck-ham, Helen Mirren, Dannii Minogue and, most recently, The X Factor fi nalists.

Chief executive Marc Bolland said: “I think celebrities could play an important role for some things, but not for every-thing.” This year’s campaign – which starts tonight – stars a four-year-old child with Downs syndrome but the focus is on the clothes being modelled.

Yesterday M&S reported better than expected half-year results, though profi ts were down for the second year in a row. In line with other retailers, sales fell dur-ing the Olympics with Bolland describing London as “a village” because it was so quiet.

The Dutch-born boss, who was under pressure earlier this year after admitting the company failed to buy enough stock on some advertised lines and missed sig-nifi cant fashion trends in womenswear, insisted it was now on track to become a “multichannel”, international business by the end of 2013.

When the disastrous first quarter results were revealed, Kate Bostock, head of general merchandise – fashion and homewares – left the business. Since then a string of senior appointments have been made to womenswear, menswear, lingerie and home and beauty.

Bolland said: “We took steps to address the short-term issues in general merchan-dising and as a result we delivered an improved performance.”

He appointed a new style director, former Debenhams and Jaeger boss Belinda Earl, and has moved head of food John Dixon to replace Bostock, who has since joined online rival Asos. He said Dixon and Earl had “good chemistry”, adding that Earl, “has a very good feel for the style of what the British woman wants”. Janie Schaff er from US chain Vic-toria’s Secret has also been hired to head up lingerie, freeing up current lingerie boss Frances Russell to switch to the high-profi le womenswear division.

To combat the problems which resulted in top lines selling out under the old regime, leaving shoppers frustrated, Bol-land instructed buyers to purchase fi ve times the number of important lines they

were advertising, especially knitwear, coats and shoes. The company also backed fashion trends with more confidence. M&S said it had already shifted 44,000 military-style coats.

Bolland added that the Olympics brought more confi dence to customers, but not to the bottom line. He said: “It was like a village in London … Did we see retail sales increase? No. Did we believe it was important to have done it, leading to that positive mood swing? Absolutely.”

As part of his three-year turnaround plan, which is halfway through, Bolland said he wants to turn the company into a multi channel international brand and plans further expansion overseas.

Bolland said that when he took over the company M&S had a strong brand, but a “complex and inflexible supply chain” with “unclear sub-brands” and stores that were “lacking inspiration”.

To combat the issues, it has launched a next-day delivery service on its website and wants its new iPhone app to be used more than any other fashion retailer’s. Currently, 43% of all online sales are for store collection.

Pre-tax profits fell 10% to £290m in the six months to the end of September, which was ahead of City expectations of £280m. Like-for-like general merchan-dise sales were down 1.8% in the second quarter compared with the near 7% slump

recorded in the previous period. Like-for-like sales at its food division rose 1.6%.

By comparison, Primark announced a 15% jump in operating profi ts to £356m for the year to 15 September. Like-for-like sales climbed 3% with owner Associated British Foods (ABF) fl agging strong trading in Britain, particularly over the summer months, and “encouraging” sales of its winter ranges in the new fi nancial year.

Chief executive of ABF, George Weston, said recent expansions in Europe went better than expected and the UK busi-ness continues to be strong. “We sold 7.5m items of clothing with the Union Jack between the Olympics and diamond jubilee.”

Insurers prepare for 120-year-old clients Rupert Jones

Britain’s oldest man, Reg Dean, celebrated his 110th birthday on Sunday. But it may not be long before he is overtaken in the age stakes by a new breed of “supercentenarians”. The boss of one of Britain’s main fi nancial bodies yesterday revealed that several insurers are currently modelling pension products on the basis that their customers could reach the age of 120 or even 125.

Speaking to hundreds of actuaries at a conference, Otto Thoresen, director general of the Association of British Insurers, added that within our lifetime it would be “the norm” for people to live to 100 or more. But this, he said, threw up huge challenges in terms of getting people to save more for what may end up being a very long retirement.

Life expectancy has been growing steadily for decades, and the government has already predicted that 27% of today’s under-16s will reach 100 – a total of 3.3 million people.

Born in November 1902, Reg Dean, a former church minister from Wirksworth, Derby shire, is the fi rst British man born in the 20th century to become a supercen-

tenarian – someone who has reached the age of 110 – but he won’t be the last. Legal & General yesterday quoted Office for National Statistics data showing that the number of UK people aged 100 or more has increased fi vefold – from 2,500 in 1980 to 12,640 in 2010 – and said that projections suggest the number of centenarians in the UK will exceed 160,000 by mid-2040.

During his speech in Brussels, Thore-sen said the independent Offi ce for Budget Responsibility had identifi ed the ageing

population as “one of the greatest threats to the UK’s fi scal sustainability in the next 50 years”.

He added: “I know of several insurers, and you may be among them, who are now modelling pensions and retirement savings products on the assumption that customers could live to be 120 or 125 – and with very diff erent patterns of retirement. With men and women living on average 30 years longer than they did 100 years ago, by 2100, people living to over 100 years old will be the norm. How will we ensure that mankind’s greatest achievement of prolonging life in this way doesn’t lead to poverty for millions of people, and health and social care systems which cannot cope with the increased demands being made of them?”

He set out a plan to tackle the UK “savings gap” through pension charges that are clear and easily understood to be value for money; investment options that are transparent and relevant to savers; better communication with customers; a more fl exible approach to help people approaching retirement understand the options available; and “adaptable post-retirement options to meet changing financial challenges, such as costs of funding long-term care”.

Gender pay gap persists at director level, research shows

Simon Goodley

Female executives earn £400,000 less over the course of their working lives than male colleagues with identical careers – and are far more likely to be made redundant – as they continue to suff er discrimination in the workplace.

The average woman executive earns £10,060 a year less than her male equiva-lent and is awarded less than half his bonus, according to research released today by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) .

The latest pay survey from the man-agers’ trade body, which polled 38,843 people in executive roles in the UK, sug-gests that a woman and a man starting their business careers aged 25 and retiring aged 60 would take home pre-tax totals of £1,092,940 and £1,516,330 respectively, based on today’s levels.

Ann Francke, the institute’s chief executive, said: “A lot of businesses have been focused on getting more women on boards, but we’ve still got a lot to do on equal pay and equal representation in top executive roles. Twice as many female directors were made redundant compared to male directors, so at that level in the organisation it suggests that this is not all about childcare.

“It is totally counter-intuitive [to fi re a woman who] has made director level. An organisation should be doing all it can to keep them there, to promote cultural diversity. We know categorically that more diversity results in better business results. It is shown in every single study. This is about good business sense.”

The CMI’s research comes at a time of renewed focus on how effectively women are edging towards equality in the workplace .

Last month the Liberal Democrat equal-ities minister, Jo Swinson, proposed a shakeup to company annual reports that will pile pressure on fi rms to tackle gen-der imbalances. Companies will have to report how many women they employ, from boardrooms down.

Her announcement came as the Euro-pean commissioner for justice and rights, Viviane Reding , renewed a push for quo-tas of female directors at listed companies – although her eff orts have been resisted by many member states, including the UK, which prefer a voluntary code.

The CMI study also shows how much more likely women are to lose their jobs. The CMI’s “labour turnover data” illus-trates that 4.3% of female executives were made redundant between August 2011 and August 2012, compared with 3.2% of male executives .

M&S’s Christmas TV campaign, which launches tonight, will focus on clothes rather than celebrities Photograph: M&S/PA

Age infl ation

3.3mThe number of people over the age of 100 if, as predicted, 27% of today’s under-16s become centenarians

160,000The number of centenarians in the UK by mid-2040, according to projections by the Offi ce for National Statistics


* * *

FinancialThe Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 23

Cost of storing waste in Sellafi eld up by more than £900m – report

Rajeev Syal and Fiona Harvey

The projected cost of safely storing radio-active material at Britain’s largest nuclear site in Sellafi eld has increased by more than £900m in 10 months, the National Audit Offi ce says in a report released today .

Plans to replace the ageing nuclear waste facilities in Cumbria have suff ered severe delays, auditors said. Twelve out of 14 of the major projects launched last year to build facilities to store material safely are over budget, they have concluded.

The findings have been described as “dire” by MPs. It is the fi rst offi cial audit of the Cumbrian site since a consortium of private companies was brought in to oversee safety in 2008.

Margaret Hodge, who chairs parlia-ment’s public accounts committee, urged the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to “get a grip” on the spiralling costs. “My concern is that unless the authority holds Sellafield Limited [the company responsible for the site] to a clear and rig-orously benchmarked plan, timetables will continue to slip and costs spiral.

“It is unacceptable to allow today’s poor management to shift the burden and expense to future generations ,” she said.

In 2008, the authority appointed a consortium of private sector fi rms – URS, AMEC and Areva – as a parent body of the site to bring in outside expertise. The authority plans to clear up the site over the next 108 years.

Progress in 12 of the 14 buildings and

equipment projects considered “critical” for reducing risk, and costing from £21m to £1.3bn, failed to achieve what they were supposed to and had not provided good value for money, auditors said.

A long-term plan to clean up the site was agreed last year after an earlier one stalled because it was “unrealistic”.

For more than 50 years operators failed to plan how to dispose of the radioactive waste and some of the older facilities have “deteriorated so much that their contents pose signifi cant risks to people and the environment”, the report said. The high-est risks are posed by ponds and silos built during the 1950s and 1960s to store fuel for early reprocessing operations and radioac-tive waste, according to the report.

About 240 of Sellafi eld’s 1,400 buildings are nuclear facilities and so far, 55 buildings on the site have been decommissioned.

The management of the authority and Sellafi eld have often been criticised for being a closed group of insiders . Critics say this has led to poor decision-making .

Next year, a major industry shake-up could occur as the authority will have to make a decision on whether to review or renegotiate the Sellafi eld safety contract.

A spokesman for the authority said that the report has provided a useful external check on their progress. “The NAO has rec-ognised the progress made by the NDA in developing a plan to tackle this hazardous legacy,” he said.

A spokesman for Sellafi eld Ltd said: “We have already taken steps to strengthen our approach .”

Japanese carmakers feel chill wind from islands dispute

Dan Milmo Industrial editor

The territorial dispute between Japan and China over a group of uninhabited islands is wreaking havoc with Japanese carmak-ers while benefi t ing German competitors, as Nissan was forced to slash its profit forecast and BMW posted a 40% surge in Chinese sales .

Nissan joined Honda and Toyota in suf-fering plummeting demand in the world’s largest car market due to a boycott by consumers angry about Japan ’s disputed ownership of the Senkaku Islands, known as Diaoyu in China.

Nissan cut its full-year net profi t forecast by a fi fth to $4bn (£2.5bn), refl ecting its dependence on a market that accounts for more than a quarter of sales. The scale of the boycott was revealed by October sales fi gures, which showed that Nissan and its Chinese joint venture sold 64,300 vehicles – a decline of 41% on the same month last year. Toyota and Honda reported Chinese sales slumps of 49% and 41% respectively in September.

Nissan estimated that sales in China will come in at 1.175m vehicles in 2012, 175,000 fewer than it projected. That helped to put a dent in global forecasts, with Nissan pre-dicting sales of 5.08m vehicles in the year to March 2013, down from its former fore-cast of 5.35m. “We are gradually seeing signs of recovery [in China],” said Nissan’s chief operating offi cer, Toshiyuki Shiga. “Customers are gradually coming back to dealerships.”

BMW said Chinese demand for luxury vehicles – also a boon for UK car makers such as Bentley – helped to overcome a weak European performance in the third quarter from July to September. Overall sales rose by 13.7% to a record €18.8bn (£15bn), while net profit rose 16% to €1.3bn. Chinese sales rose by 40% to nearly 80,000 units, overshadowing an anaemic European performance that saw a 2.6% increase in sales, with southern Europe dragging down performance. Even BMW’s home market disappointed, as German sales fell by 0.5%.

Mark Fulthorpe, analyst at IHS Automo-tive, said non-Japanese carmakers were benefiting from the Senkaku dispute. “Who is likely to win if people are walk-ing away from Nissan, Toyota and Honda? It will have signifi cant benefi ts for German

manufacturers and [Korean carmakers] Hyundai and Kia.”

BMW warned of an “increasingly uncer-tain market environment” with the fi nal three months of the year posing diffi cul-ties for an industry “likely to be confronted with adverse business conditions”. With the eurozone area expected to post fl at economic growth next year, hopes of a concerted revival in the European car mar-ket are slim. In September, European car sales fell for the 12th consecutive month , with Spain posting a 36.8% fall , exceeded only by Greece, with a decline of 48.5%.

UK car sales in October, published yes-terday , showed that the domestic market was outperforming the rest of Europe. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said new car registrations rose 12% compared with October last year to more than 151,000 units. So far this year, the UK car market has grown 5%.

Boycott by Chinese buyers hits Nissan profi t forecast

BMW and other European makers benefi t from row

BMW sales

Sales in China, thousands of units sold

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233

169

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SOURCE: BMW SALES DATA

BMW

MINI

BMWs are admired at a motor show in Shanghai. European makers are benefi tting from a Chinese consumer boycott of Japanese cars Photograph: Aly Song/Reuters

Marks & SpencerSheathe that knife – but Bolland is running out of time , says Nils Pratley

HSBC Will-they-won’t-they location game has lost the element of suspense

Business analysis

It’s a triumph! Marks & Spencer achieved no growth in same-store sales in Britain in the three months to Sep-tember and profi ts for the half-year fell 10% to £290m.

Not impressed? Nor should you be. Waiting for the Marc Bolland-inspired revival at M&S is turning into a mara-thon. We’re more than two years into his reign but we’ve yet to see evidence that the vast sums of capital being thrown at the ambition of becoming an “international multi-channel retailer” will prove fi nancially invigorating.

The dividend is fl at, return on capital is slipping and, to Bolland’s discomfort, rivals in the transformation stakes are much further down the track.

John Lewis, using its Waitrose stores as additional pick-up points, is on a roll. Next embarked on the multi-channel lark two decades ago via its Directory business.

Then there’s Asos, attracting the younger online fashion shoppers that M&S would love to have.

The key point about M&S’s half-year fi gures, however, is that the second quarter was much better than the fi rst. Static like-for-like sales on the home front is a clear improvement on going backwards by 2.8%. That’s the modest success that should (for the time being) stop the muttering about the knives being out for Bolland.

How much time does he have? Well, it’s clearer how long he’d like. In general merchandise, which is where the problems are concentrated (like-for-like sales were 4.3% lower over the six months), he’s shuffl ed the management pack and is promising that customers will see the benefi ts “from next summer”.

HSBC is staying in Britain – at least until 2015. Chairman Douglas Flint said on Monday that the bank’s review of where to locate its headquarters has been deferred . There is too much regulatory uncertainty and too much legislative reform on the slipway, to make a sensible decision before then, argued Flint.

Should we rejoice? No. It is better to laugh at HSBC’s arrogance in thinking of itself as a model global citizen that would be welcomed wherever it wishes to land. The reality is that, after the money-laundering allegations against the bank in the US and the looming £1bn-plus penalty , brand HSBC is not what it was. Which regulator would off er an unequivocal embrace to a company that is so big it is hard to man-age and will be watched like a hawk in future by US authorities?

Besides, HSBC, which has been based in Britain for a quarter of a cen-tury, would have to clear any emigra-tion proposal with its shareholders. There may (currently) be a tax advan-tage to not being British. But do inves-tors really want to see the bank base itself in Hong Kong, on the doorstep on the Chinese Communist party? Almost certainly not.

Given the lack of historical ties, adopting Singapore or Australia would make HSBC look like the wandering bank, which would not be good for its reputation : that is how here-today-gone-tomorrow hedge funds behave, not top-tier international banks. No, it’s London for several decades yet.

Instead of pretending there’s a real decision to be made in 2015, Flint would do better to drop these three-yearly reviews into where to locate the HQ. The game has lost suspense and the power to frighten politicians.

Read more expert analysis on our blogs at guardian.co.uk/business ≥

That amounts to a plea by Bolland for judgment on his expensive overhaul of the new celeb-free M&S to be deferred for at least a year.

If Christmas doesn’t yield a fresh setback, he’ll probably get it, if only because shareholders signed up to a plan that was always described as a three-year job. But Christmas had bet-ter be good.

Benefi ts from next summer – that’s a plea for judgment on the overhaul to be deferred for a year


*

FinancialThe Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 25

Interview

Sarah Butler

Sitting in the Olympic Stadium during this summer’s magical sporting achieve-ments was bitter-sweet for Karren Brady, vice-chairman of Premier League football club West Ham.

Nearly two years ago the club won the battle to take over the running of the stadium after the Games . But that deal was set aside following a legal challenge from London rival Tottenham Hotspur, negotiations continue to drag on and there is still no guarantee West Ham will ever make its home in the Olympic Park, in Stratford, east London.

“It is like being the winner without getting the prize,” says Brady.

She suggests West Ham could provide 1,000 jobs with its plans for the stadium and hundreds more via the redevelop-ment of its existing stadium, in nearby Upton Park, which would become homes and shops.

Of course, she sees West Ham as the only viable bidder for the stadium which she would convert into a multi-use facil-ity hosting athletics and educational facilities for young people alongside the Premier League club.

She believes that the club could attract 1 million visitors a year to watch football, keeping the whole Olympic Park buzzy.

The project would underpin her plan to transform West Ham’s image into a pillar of the community, together with an aim to back a local Academy school.

“It would be nice to think we changed the culture and created something very special about that football club,” she says.

“We know it’s a big commitment to convert the venue into a truly world class multi-use stadium. We have to invest money that could probably build three brand new Olympic stadiums,” says Brady.

With the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, now in charge of the process anything could happen.

Brady suggests that Virgin’s success in persuading the government to repeal its decision on awarding the west coast mainline contract to First Group after errors were made in considering the bids, means other signifi cant infrastruc-ture deals, including the stadium con-tract, are now being handled with even more care.

“These decisions are very important to the local community and to us and the processes have to be right otherwise there’s a challenge and it delays it even longer,” she says. Brady denies she is giving the London Legacy Development Corporation a warning, but it would be foolish for anyone to ignore her tough negotiating skills.

She says what drives her is not the money or cachet but the ability to call the shots. “I wanted one thing and that was to be truly independent. I wanted to say when and why and how.”

Growing up, Brady realised inde-pendence meant her own money so she skipped university and joined advertis-ing fi rm Saatchi & Saatchi , setting her on a career path that led her to become the youngest ever boss of a British public limited company.

From the ad agency she got a job selling advertising at London radio station LBC and was head-hunted by David Sullivan to run marketing for his Sunday Sport paper after she persuaded him to buy millions of pounds worth of advertising.

Aged 23, she then talked Sullivan into buying Birmingham City FC out of administration, and putting her in charge. She turned the business around before listing it on the London stock exchange.

For an avowed feminist on a mission to ensure women’s skills and abilities are recognised and rewarded, football was not the easiest road to choose.

After selling Birmingham for £82m in

2009, she admits that arriving at West Ham two years ago was like joining a men-only country club.

“There were no senior women and it was all about cars and membership of the Ivy club. It was all about power and nothing about responsibility,” she says.

Brady remains the only woman on the company’s four-person board but she says half of her senior management team are now female and she is about to hire another woman.

She promoted people from within the business as well as bringing in new blood. “Women were there but they couldn’t see what was under their noses,” she says.

For her, promoting women in the workplace is not just a hobby horse but the key to running a strong business. “The best companies are those with diff erent people from diff erent back-grounds and diff erent experiences,” Brady says.

She points out that football is not just

about the game but about fi nance, pitch maintenance, catering and property.

“We need so many diff erent specifi c skill sets and it doesn’t matter to us where you get that,” she says. She adds several more female bosses are on track to lead Premier League clubs in the future.

Brady, however, does not believe female boardroom quotas are the right way forward. As a high profi le and suc-cessful businesswoman, Brady gets off ered a number of non-executive directorships every month from com-panies keen to get some female per-spective. But they are all missing the point, she says, which is “to encourage a younger generation of women who can be new investors, businesswomen and directors”.

Rather than quotas, she wants com-panies who do not have women on their boards to be compelled to explain why not in their annual report.

Beyond that, she says, workplaces

need to adapt so that other women do not feel they have to return to work just weeks after having a baby in order to further their career – as she did when she was running Birmingham City.

She would also make childcare a tax deductible expense.

“It would raise more money than it would cost and be a fi rst step in recog-nising that childcare is important if you are going to work .”

Brady has a small stake in West Ham, but is also a major shareholder in a number of smaller companies including Mentore, a business whose aim is to pre-pare up and coming female executives for the boardroom.

So would Brady further her cause by working with the government? Scrunching up her nose in disgust at the idea, she says: “I don’t want to be part of some spin, with no power to do anything and no money to do something. I want to see something happen.” .

New goal for woman who took on men at their own (football) game West Ham’s Brady has high hopes for Olympic Stadium and women in business

Olympic visionVice-chairman Karren Brady, top, wants to transform West Ham’s image by converting the Olympic Stadium, as proposed above with the club’s colours. Right, outside West Ham’s present ground in 2009 Main photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

‘I wanted one thing and that was to be truly independent. I wanted to say when and why and how’Karren Brady


*

Financial26 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

Airlines

Ryanair scraps credit card concession Ryanair customers who went to the trouble of using the airline’s own credit card to avoid paying a £6 booking fee will no longer have that benefi t . Anyone taking a Ryanair fl ight after 1 December will be required to add on the £6 a per-son fee for each single journey – on top of the headline ticket price – irrespective of how they pay.

Until now, customers who took out a Ryanair Cash Passport Mastercard could avoid the credit card fee, which adds £48 to the cost of booking a return jour-ney for a family of four.

The move is the latest in a long battle between Ryanair and the Offi ce of Fair Trading . Until November 2011, it was possible to avoid the airline’s credit card

fee using any prepaid Mastercard. Since then the airline’s own credit card has been the only payment method allowing consumers to escape the booking charge. Ryanair blamed the

OFT for its rule change. Miles Brignall

France

Industry to be given tax credits of €20bn a year

Broadcasting

BSkyB strikes rights deal with Universal

Finance

Bank urges ex-directors to take cut in pension

Employment

City jobs expected to drop to 20-year low

France’s president, François Hollande, sought to shrug off his business-bashing reputation yesterday with a €20bn-a-year (£16bn) package of tax credits and other pro-industry measures.

The prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, surprised many by announcing that the government would accept much of a report by Louis Gallois, the former EADS boss, on making the French economy more competitive. “France is not condemned to the spiral of decline. But we need a jolt at national level to regain control of our destiny,” Ayrault said. “This is about giving our companies room to manoeuvre.”

Firms will be off ered tax credits worth up to €10bn next year, rising to €20bn by 2015, to be fi nanced by an increase in VAT and €10bn in public spending cuts, as yet unspecifi ed. That was less than the €30bn-a-year cut in payroll taxes that Gallois demanded, but far more than many analysts expected. The rebates will be proportionate to the company’s payroll, up to a maximum of two-and-a-half times the minimum wage, in an attempt to support jobs.

Amid rising concern about France’s global competitiveness, Hollande is keen to show that despite implementing a 75% top rate of income tax on the super-rich, he is on the side of business. Heather Stewart

BSkyB has struck a deal with Universal for exclusive rights to movies such as The Bourne Legacy and Anna Karenina .

It is the second deal BSkyB has made with a “big six” Hollywood studio – the fi rst being Warner Bros in Septem-ber – since being cleared of holding a monopoly of UK pay-TV fi lm rights. The remaining four are Disney, Paramount, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures.

The satellite broadcaster has expanded its existing deal with NBC Universal, which sells the rights for Universal Pictures in the UK and Ireland, eff ectively shutting out rivals Netfl ix and Amazon’s LoveFilm for the next four to fi ve years. Th e deal gives BSkyB exclusive fi rst pay-TV rights to new and archive fi lms include Snow White & The Huntsman, The Bourne Legacy and Les Miserables . BSkyB has also sewn up the rights to show these fi lms on Now TV, the video on demand service it launched in July to take on the newly arrived US rival Netfl ix and LoveFilm.

September’s Sky deal saw it snatch the rights to be the only UK broadcaster to show any Harry Potter fi lms for a three-month period over Christmas.

The deals with Universal and Warner Bros eff ectively mean Sky will have fi lms from these studios for about a year before they are available to other pay-TV services. Mark Sweney

Allied Irish Banks has written to former directors who were at the now nationalised bank during the fi nancial crisis asking them to take a voluntary cut to their pensions.

David Duff y, the bank’s chief execu-tive, told the Financial Times that more

than 15 former executives directors who worked at the bank in the lead-up to the banking crisis would receive letters over the next four to six weeks. “On a moral basis we believe that there is a judgment that some individuals can make a contri-bution,” Duff y told the FT.

Former AIB chief executive Eugene Sheehy is reportedly paid a pension of €529,000 (£423,000) a year, while former managing director Colm Doherty will receive a pension of €300,000 a year on reaching his 65th birthday.

AIB is 99.8% state-owned after it was forced to take a €20bn taxpayer bailout last year.

The Irish fi nance minister, Michael Noonan, said this week he had no legal power to reduce the pensions of the senior bankers involved in the bank bailout. “It is not legally possible for the new Government to put them aside but that has been said several times before – there is nothing new in that,” he said.

City job numbers are expected to fall to their lowest level in two decades next year as banks and investment houses continue to make deep cuts to ailing operations, according to a study.

The number of people employed in the fi nancial sector in London, exclud-

ing most accountants and lawyers, has sunk below 250,000 this year , 11% down from last year. It was more than 350,000 before the fi nancial crisis struck.

The Centre for Economics and Busi-ness Research (CEBR) suggests the City is being forced to shed jobs against a backdrop of depressed trading in curren-cies, gilts and equities, as well as a sus-tained drought in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The thinktank predicts the tally will fall again next year, to 237,036, before stabilising. The last time the City employed that few fi nancial workers was 1993.

Kevin Burrowes, a UK fi nancial serv-ices expert at PricewaterhouseCooper, said the sector was going through a painful shift to a “new equilibrium”. “All of our clients are re-evaluating this [job cuts] almost on a monthly basis,” said Burrowes. “Many of the banks still need to go through major change … I think the only conclusion you can really reach is that there will be further job cuts, par-ticularly in investment banking.” The CEBR chief executive, Douglas McWil-liams, said: “ The business model for many fi rms in the City, which was based on taking a percentage from yields of 8% plus, has to change in a world where low yields are likely for many years to come.” Simon Bowers

$18bnSpain is home to the world’s fastest growing billionaire. Amancio Ortega, best known for his 1,600 Zara stores around the world, has made nearly $18bn (£11bn) since October 2011, or $66m a day. That catapults him to become the third richest man in the world, with a $53.6bn fortune, close behind Mexican telecoms magnate Carlos Slim and Bill Gates, according to a new rich list published by Bloomberg Markets magazine

What’s the fastest way to lose nearly $7bn? Take your company public in the most feted fl otation of the year and watch the share price tank by more than 40%. Even after such a spectacularly bad year, Facebook’s 28-year-old chief executive Mark Zuckerberg still has a respectable $10.7bn to his name, making him the world’s youngest billionaire

Story in numbers

-$6.8bn


*

ReviewsThe Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 27

Reviews

Magnifi cent score but this Pilgrim doesn’t progress

Back on the boosShould there be more heckling at the theatre?guardian.co.uk/stage ≥

≥ Poliça, SWG3, Glasgow “No matter how alien Channy Leaneagh sounds, there remains an emotional core to Poliça that is both irresistible and slightly overwhelming, a spiritual cousin to the deafening instrumental catharsis of Mogwai” Graeme Virtue ★★★★★

More reviews online

Expert stagecraft … The Pilgrim’s Progress Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

thinks he knows how to play the game ? The angry Brown (Anthony Welsh) with his radical ideas ?

Martello-White is a terrifi c actor, and this debut play suggests he could be a fabulous playwright, too, although he needs a far sterner editor than he gets in director David Lan . The production doesn’t quite fi nd a way to marry successfully the banter of the actors with the surreal episodes in the audition room, a place of endless humiliations. The satire would be sharper and harder-hitting if the show was shorter and tighter.

Nonetheless, there is plenty to enjoy in this superbly acted piece’s exploration of black masculinity . The audition process is a metaphor for the experience of black men in a predominantly white world, where the urge to be chosen can lead to collusion and psychological turmoil. Most, like Leo Wringer’s poignant Older Black, will wait patiently but never win the prize. Lyn GardnerUntil 24 November. Box offi ce: 020-7922 2923.

TheatreUncle VanyaNoel Coward, London★★★★★

You could hardly have a greater contrast than between the stolid Uncle Vanya that has just opened at the Vaudeville and this mercurially brilliant import from Moscow’s Vakhtangov theatre. British Chekhov tends to off er variations on the realism of Stanislavski . This dazzling production by Rimas Tuminas is in a wholly diff erent tradition: that of the Russian director Meyerhold , who evolved a system of acting based on sports, acrobatics and clownish grotesquerie.

Tuminas preserves every word of Chekhov’s text. But nothing looks or sounds as we expect. The stage is free of clutter, although we glimpse

a distant prospect of a stone lion symbolising Petersburg. Characters are also vividly redefi ned: the Professor and

his young wife, Elena, whose rural visit causes so much

havoc , are normally seen as tragically mismatched; here they clearly still enjoy an actively

rumbustious sex-life and, when Vanya tries to shoot the old Prof, Elena is the fi rst to interpose her body. And for all

his ecological fervour, the visiting doctor, Astrov, is also a drunken buff oon who, in his cups, engages in a disastrous bit of DIY carpentry with the Chaplinesque Waffl es. Meanwhile, Vanya’s niece, Sonya, is no dowdy frump but a young girl whose passion for the doctor verges on hysteria.

But the joy of the production lies in its total-theatre mix of words, music, mime and symbolism. Anna Dubrovskaya’s Elena, stunning in white silk, bowls a circus hoop. Astrov shows her his images of deforestation on a projector with an unmistakably phallic funnel that emits puff s of steam. And there is an extraordinary moment at the end when Sonya ministers to Vanya, beautifully played by Sergey Makovetsky, as if he were a run-down machine that she had to lovingly reassemble. Anyone who saw the Vakhtangov when they brought Measure for Measure to Shakespeare’s Globe this summer will know they are a fi rst-rate troupe. Although this isn’t the only way to play Vanya, their Chekhov has an unforgettable expressionist audacity. Michael BillingtonUntil Saturday. Box offi ce: 0844 482 5141.

DanceRosas: En AtendantSadler’s Wells, London★★★★★

As a gaunt man slowly raises a fl ute and exhales into it raggedly, an unearthly noise emerges: a blend of ascending siren whistles and long, rasping sighs like the groans of ghosts. This extraordinary opening to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker ’s En Atendant foreshadows the work’s concerns: the coming together of sound and body, of material and supernatural ; the sense of fl esh as a vessel haunted by a chafi ng soul.

The staging is stark: a bench, a lightstrip, a line of dry earth. The exquisite music, performed live by Ensemble Cours et Coeur , is in the highly elaborated medieval polyphonic style known as ars subtilior , and serves as model for rather than accompaniment to the dance (which is in any case often performed in silence). Chrysa Parkinson’s solemn opening solo of plain walks, coltish runs and fl eeting gestures becomes source material for a kind of choreographic polyphony, each dancer embodying a diff erent “voice” within a composition of subtle symmetries and passing encounters, while one man, Carlos Garbin, walks among them in simple lines, both watcher and timekeeper. It is spellbinding. Gratifyingly, De Keersmaeker repeats whole sections turned around, so we get to see them all again from a diff erent angle.

An untamed solo by Boštjan Antoncic breaks the spell, as he tramples unheeding over the line of earth ; but it also lets in more individually expressive dances – of chasing, hand-holding, reaching and falling – as well as grander, almost religious imagery of passion , abjection and mercy.

En Atendant is demanding of its audience. If your attention wanders, you may lose your grip on it altogether. But its orchestration of structural sophistication, intimate detail and sweeping vision is exceptional, especially at the end, as the light fades and one naked being disappears into darkness, leaving only the rasp of breath. Sanjoy Roy The sequel, Cesena , plays tomorrow and Friday. Box offi ce: 0844 412 4300.

OperaThe Pilgrim’s ProgressColiseum, London★★★★★

It took Vaughan Williams more than 30 years to realise his ambition of composing a stage work based upon The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan ’s epic allegory, and it has been twice as long since the result was part of the repertory of a major British opera company. Though there have been concert performances and semi- stagings in the interim, most recently one conducted by the late Richard Hickox at Sadler’s Wells in 2008 , ENO’s production, directed by Yoshi Oida , is the fi rst fully staged professional one in London since Covent Garden hosted the premiere in 1951 and revived it the following year.

It has become an article of faith for the English-music lobby that The Pilgrim’s Progress had to be seen again as Vaughan Williams intended; though he carefully called it a “morality” and not an opera, he always insisted it belonged in the theatre. But Oida’s staging raises more questions than it answers about the work’s dramatic viability. The story of the Pilgrim’s journey to the Celestial City is presented as a series of tableaux in which none of the characters emerges identifi ably in three dimensions; even the Pilgrim is more signifi cant for what he represents than for who he is. A two-and-a-half-hour opera whose action is symbolic and whose purpose is loftily didactic, in which the dramatic pulse beats rather slowly and sometimes vanishes altogether, can be tough going at times.

Oida attempts to put some muscle into the narrative by relocating the action within a fi rst world war prison camp, strikingly depicted in Tom Schenk’s designs. In the process, it makes the fi nal stages of the Pilgrim’s journey much bleaker , as well as introducing an explicit element of Christian ritual to the early scenes, and giving a cartoonish brittleness to the always-problematic Vanity Fair sequence. The stagecraft is wonderfully expert, and there is no mistaking the eff ort that has gone into it all, but it doesn’t do the trick, and really only serves to confi rm that the 2008 concert staging provided all the theatrical context the music needs.

It is the magnifi cence of so much of that music, with its web of allusions, direct and indirect, to so much of Vaughan Williams’ output, that is the saving grace here. Martyn Brabbins clearly believes in the score’s quality and conducts it with wonderful breadth and assurance; the orchestra and chorus make it seem sumptuous. Though some of the solo singing is more variable, Roland Wood impressively sustains the role of Pilgrim, even if his tone lacks the radiance it sometimes needs; and singers of the calibre of Benedict Nelson, Mark Richardson, Timothy Robinson, Ann Murray and Kitty Whately switch between the plethora of cameo parts as they come along. Andrew ClementsIn rep until 28 November. Box offi ce: 020-7845 9300.

PopHow to Dress WellSoup Kitchen, Manchester★★★★★

How to Dress Well may sound like a lesson in tailoring etiquette, but is actually the performing name of Colorado-born Tom Krell, whose second album of ethereal R&B songs about sadness, death and devastation,

Total Loss, was released recently to rapturous acclaim.

To recreate it live, he is backed by two musicians he introduces only as “Aaron and Cameron”, plus a laptop, keyboard and violin. Behind them, a screen shows an image of a female face contorted in agony or ecstasy, the perfect visual metaphor for music that seems to have located the precise meeting place between the two.

Krell’s extraordinary, Prince-like falsetto – delivered via two microphones, and occasionally without amplifi cation at all – seems to come from a special personal place, which requires him to sing with closed eyes and work himself up into an almost transported state. “When I think about you, there’s a weight on my chest and no air,” he sings, to an awed silence. “I know you’re in a better place … I can’t say that shit and keep a straight face,” he wails, heartbreakingly.

The sublime music involves everything from piano riff s to booming fractured beats to the eerily echoed sound of Krell clicking his fi ngers, but at heart these are great American songs that could equally be strummed by Bon Iver or Bruce Springsteen. A philosophy graduate who has been diagnosed with depression, Krell must be one of the humblest, chattiest artists to front such mesmeric music. “We’ve been on tour a long time and sometimes it feels like a slog,” he admits after the heavenly Set It Right’s symphonic list of his most-missed people. “But it feels good to hear you yell at me every song.” There’s another second’s silence, and the audience yell some more.Dave Simpson

TheatreBlacktaYoung Vic, London★★★★★

A “blackta” is a black actor, often cast as the token non-white character in a TV drama. When there is only one role, the competition is fi erce, so the group of black male actors seen auditioning and facing endless callbacks in Nathaniel Martello-White ’s satire are not just friends but rivals, too.

Only one can get the green light that will off er a way out of the audition room, where they appear to be eternally stuck. For all their attempts to gain an edge over their rivals via diet, gym or competitive bluster, they know they are more likely to be cast on the exact colour of their skin or the shape of their nose rather than on their talent. Who will get “the ting ”? Will it be the desperate fantasist Dull Brown (Javone Prince)? The cynical Yellow (Howard Charles), who

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The auditioAnthony Welsh


*28 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 * The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012 29

Fat of the landLegarth geese grazing in a farm in Nesscliff e, Shropshire. The owner, William Brisbourne, rears 1,700 birds each year, mainly for the Christmas market Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Eyewitness Nesscliff e, Shropshire


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Comment Debate30 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

The Gulf protection racket is corrupt and dangerous folly

On the nauseating politi-cal doublespeak scale, David Cameron’s claim to “ support the Arab spring ” on a trip to sell weapons to Gulf dictators this week hit a new low. No stern de-

mands for free elections from the auto-crats of Arabia – or calls for respect for human rights routinely dished out even to major powers like Russia and China.

As the kings and emirs crack down on democratic protest, the prime minister assured them of his “respect and friend-ship”. Diff erent countries, he explained soothingly in Abu Dhabi, needed “dif-ferent paths, diff erent timetables” on the road to reform: countries that were western allies, spen t billions on British arms and sat on some of the world’s larg-est oil reserves in particular, he might have added by way of explanation.

Cameron went to the Gulf as a sales-man for BAE Systems – the private arms corporation that makes Typhoon jets – drumming up business from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, as well as smoothing ruffl ed feathers over British and European parliamentary criticism of their human rights records on behalf of BP and other companies.

No wonder the prime minister restricted media coverage of the jaunt. But, following hard on the heels of a similar trip by the French president , the western message to the monarchies was clear enough: Arab revolution or not, it’s business as usual with Gulf despots.

The spread of protest across the Arab world has given these visits added urgency. A year ago, in the wake of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, it seemed the Gulf regimes and their western back-ers had headed off revolt by crushing it in Bahrain, buying it off in Saudi Arabia, and attempting to hijack it in Libya and then Syria – while successfully playing the anti-Shia sectarian card.

But popular unrest has now reached the shores of the Gulf. In Kuwait, tens of thousands of demonstrators , includ-ing Islamists, liberals and nationalists, have faced barrages of tear gas and stun grenades as they protest against a rigged election law, while all gatherings of more than 20 have been banned.

After 18 months of violent suppres-sion of the opposition in Bahrain, armed by Britain and America, the regime has outlawed all anti-government demon-strations. In western-embraced Saudi Arabia, protests have been brutally repressed, as thousands are held with-out charge or proper trial.

Meanwhile, scores have been jailed in the UAE for campaigning for democratic reform, and in Britain’s favourite Arab police state of Jordan, protests have

mushroomed against a Kuwaiti-style electoral stitchup. London, Paris and Washington all express concern – but arm and back the autocrats.

Cameron insists they need weapons to defend themselves . When it comes to the small arms and equipment Britain and the US supply to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Gulf states, he must mean from their own people. But if he’s talking about fi ghter jets, they’re not really about defence at all.

This is eff ectively a mafi a-style protection racket, in which Gulf regimes use oil wealth their families have commandeered to buy equipment from western fi rms they will never use. The companies pay huge kickbacks to the relevant princelings, while a revolving door of political corruption provides lucrative employment for former defence ministers, offi cials and generals with the arms corporations they secured contracts for in offi ce.

Naturally, western leaders and Arab autocrats claim the Gulf states are threatened by Iran. In reality, that would only be a risk if the US or Israel attacked Iran – and in that case, it would be the US and its allies, not the regimes’ forces , that would be defending them. Hypoc-risy doesn’t begin to describe this rela-tionship, which has long embedded cor-ruption in a web of political, commercial and intelli gence links at the heart of British public life .

But support for the Gulf dictatorships – colonial-era feudal confections built on heavily exploited foreign workforces – is central to western control of the Middle East and its energy resources.

That’s why the US has major military bases in Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Bahrain.

The danger now is of escalating mili-tary buildup against Iran and interven-tion in the popular upheavals that have been unleashed across the region. Both the US and Britain have sent troops to Jordan in recent months to bolster the tottering regime and increase leverage in the Syrian civil war. Cameron held talks with emirates leaders this week about setting up a permanent British military airbase in the UAE.

The prime minister defended arms sales to dictators on the basis of 300,000 jobs in Britain’s “defence industries” . Those numbers are infl ated and in any case heavily reliant on government subsidy . But there’s also no doubt that British manufacturing is over-depend-ent on the arms industry and some of that support could usefully be diverted to, say, renewable technologies.

But even if morality and corruption are dismissed as side issues, the likeli-hood is that, sooner or later, these auto-crats will fall – as did the Shah’s regime in Iran, on which so many British and US arms contracts depended at the time. Without western support, they would have certainly been toppled already. As Rached Ghannouchi, the Tunisian leader whose democratic Islamist move-ment was swept to power in elections last year, predicted: “ Next year it will be the turn of monarchies .” When that happens, the western world risks a new backlash from its leaders’ corrupt folly.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

As an investigative journalist, I have for over 20 years exposed paedophiles prey-ing on children in care in, among other sorry places, Isling-ton, Essex, Hackney,

Jersey, north Wales and Romania. My work has generated numerous inquir-ies. Every one essentially confi rmed what I, brave whistleblowers and abuse survivors revealed. But did they bring child abusers to justice ? Not at all.

Inquiries are mostly the establish-ment’s way of managing dissent and pretending something is being done. I did not rejoice when David Cameron announced there would be an inquiry into allegations that children in the north Wales homes scandal were abused not just by staff but also by politicians, police and businessmen ; or when Theresa May appointed the chief of the National Crime Agency to investigate how north Wales police handled allegations of child abuse in the 70s and 80s. Those allega-tions have been known for decades. We don’t need another inquir y but a proper, long overdue police investigation.

The horrors of the Jimmy Savile scan-dal have at last made the unimaginable imaginable. Allegations that children abused in care homes and schools across Britain have sometimes also been abused by powerful outsiders are not new. But not one of the resulting inquir-ies has had the power, remit, skills or resources to investigate properly. How could they? The paedophile rings prey-ing on children in care are a form of organised crime. Only an expert national task force, staff ed by detectives and sen-ior social workers with track records in collaring paedophiles, have the faintest chance of cracking them.

These rings all join up. An investiga-tor may start by looking at a home in north Wales but soon will be looking at a linked home in north London or Devon. The paedophiles protect each other and swap children, references, cover stories, venues and customers. Yet no one ever joins up the dots and says it is time we investigated them nationally .

Worse, most inquiries depend almost exclusively upon the testimony of abuse survivors. Children who go into care have often suff ered cruel or tragic family lives, poor education and then horrifi c abuse in the system supposed to pro-tect them. Many later survive through prostitution and petty crime, serve time in mental hospitals or jail and become addicted to drugs and alcohol . They are easily attacked as poor and unreli-able witnesses. It is obscene to make them relive childhood tortures yet again unless other evidence is looked at too.

Many survivors or those supporting them have tried to point police towards the people and places used to prostitute children. They have identifi ed child brothels, transportation routes, hotels and bars, fi xers, providers of false docu-ments and outlets for the lucrative trade in images of child abuse. Almost none of this evidence has ever been acted upon.

The child protection whistleblower who contacted the MP Tom Watson last month did so because he was once in a team of just the kind needed now. I was fi rst in contact with his team and wrote about it 19 years ago, before it was abruptly closed down by orders from on high . It was a brilliant prototype, a joint police/social services investigation into the ring around childcare guru Peter Righton. It produced establishment names and revealed an alleged linked cover-up by Labour – let us never forget paedophilia is a cross-party crime – and was shut down as a result. Not one of the implicated men was prosecuted.

So, how much does Britain care for its children? If we get another inquiry stuff ed with do-gooders with no real powers, we will know. We don’t need more hand-wringing and a report pub-lished years later; we need to kick down a few doors and rescue some children.

Eileen Fairweather is a freelance journalist covering child protection issues

Inquiries fail the abused

These investigations help politicians, not children. We need a national police operation

Eileen Fairweather

Sooner or later the Arab despots David Cameron is selling arms to will fall, and the states that backed them will pay the price

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�Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe this. It has long embedded corruption at the heart of British public life

Editors are concerned about the idea of a statute. Lord Justice Leveson has not reported yet, but from the Guardian to the Telegraph by way of the Mail there is concern he

may propose a regulator for the press that is backed by legislation. This, it is argued, would by its very nature be bad for press freedom.

Why? There is the Rubicon argument: we may adopt an innocent-looking law now , but who is to say that in future less tolerant rulers won’t exploit it to gag the press? And there is the licensing argument: if a statute made newspapers participate in a regulatory system, that would amount to licensing of the press, something not seen in centuries. Neither argument survives much scrutiny.

Let’s say we had a law creating a regu-lator, at arm’s length from government and the industry, able to conduct inves-tigations and impose fi nes. Would that in itself deal a blow to press freedom?

It is hard to see how. For a start, the industry can’t object to regulation on principle because it has been insisting for 20 years that it had an eff ective regu-lator in the Press Complaints Commis-sion (though it didn’t). Second, there are decent arguments to suggest that stat-ute is the best way to ensure a regulator has teeth and can be eff ective.

Let’s say next that 15 years from now we have an authoritarian government, seeking to control the press. Our regula-tor, under statute, is independent , so it has protection. For it to cease to be inde-

pendent the statute would have to be changed through new legislation.

In other words, a future government seeking censorship powers would be in the same position with or without a regulation law: it would need to get a bill through parliament. And it’s worth remembering that if we end up with an authoritarian government our problem will be precisely that: an authoritarian government. Whether there is a regula-tion law it might want to tinker with will be way down the scale of worries.

What if the new, post-Leveson law included a clause requiring all the big newspaper publishers (those with revenues exceeding, say, £50m) to par-ticipate in the new regulatory regime? Would that amount to licensing?

It is certainly a cherished principle that anyone can publish a newspaper if they can aff ord to, and that anyone who can fi nd a place to publish may be a jour-nalist. A requirement for large corpora-tions to participate in an independent regulator is hardly in confl ict with that . Indeed, in many industries participa-tion in regulation is taken for granted as being for the public good. Nor would it be the fi rst time that newspaper publish-ers were bound by statute: they must register with the tax authorities (news-papers are exempt from VAT) ; they can be sued for libel ; they can be prosecuted for contempt of court or for breaking the Data Protection Act. They don’t opt out of these laws and they shouldn’t be able to opt out of independent regulation.

But this is a perverse way of looking at things. The Rubicon and licensing arguments summon up unlikely and

almost abstract hypotheses when we have before us a real, enduring press crisis that has been poisoning public life.

The Leveson inquiry heard of industrial- scale privacy intrusion, serial libel, relentless dishonesty and unethi-cal conduct, some of it reaching into our politics and policing. Many vulnerable people have been harmed, from the Hillsborough families to the Dowlers , and it happened because rich, powerful newspapers have been unaccountable.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle this and it can be done without impinging on press freedom. The judge’s terms of refer-ence actually require him to ensure his recommendations support press freedom, and at his hearings no voice was raised for state control of the press. It would be astonishing if he made a recommendation that impinged on the ability of journalists to report matters of public interest, however unwelcome to government and vested interests.

Our judges, appointed under statute, remain independent. Broadcast journal-ism, regulated under statute, is both trusted by the public and, in the case of the BBC, routinely hated by govern-ment. The National Union of Journalists believes that independent, accountable regulation will require statute. Polls show that three-quarters of the popula-tion feels the same way – because, it is plain, they believe nothing less will make a diff erence. If the judge recom-mends it, let it happen.

Brian Cathcart is a founder of the Hacked Off campaign

The press can live with this

If Leveson recommends regulation by law we should embrace it to protect the vulnerable

Brian Cathcart

Seumas Milne

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We need elected mayors, not police commissioners

I always suspect anyone who tells me not to vote. The campaign against next week’s election of police commissioners is meretri-cious. The vote may be less than a quarter baked. The purpose may be obscure and the process mad. But so are American elections

where the “winner” can get fewer votes than the loser. A ballot is the nearest a secular society gets to a sacred ritual, the voting booth its altar. Don’t knock it. We may need it one day.

The home secretary, Theresa May, revealed on the radio yesterday the ideological hole at the centre of her brain. She argued the virtue of elected police commissioners from the example of Boris Johnson, mayor of London. Johnson has been a poor so-called “com-missioner”, leaving Britain’s most fl atu-lent gendarmerie ineffi cient and unre-formed. But he is a public fi gure with a democratic base strong enough to sack his police chief , Sir Ian Blair, in 2008.

What May did not point out is that Johnson was not an elected police com-missioner but an elected mayor. He has a deeper mandate than any of next week’s commissioners. This year he enjoyed a plausible turnout of 38% , while they will be lucky to hit double fi gures. Last year the Tories allowed big cities to vote on whether they too wanted an elected mayor. Most said no. But why was the same option not off ered for police com-missioners? Why should this one service have direct democracy rammed down the public throat and not the rest?

No Tory to whom I have put this ques-tion can answer it. They mutter about David Cameron’s localism being two committees short of a council, nothing joined up, no coherence. But there is talk that Cameron may indeed force munici-palities to do what they declined to last year, and have mayoral elections after all. If this is so, and if the government ordains that elected mayors are their own police commissioners, what is the pointof next week’s elections? This looks to be another constitutional omnishambles.

The truth is that Westminster’s politicians are hopeless at up dating democracy. We have already had the fail-ure of House of Lords reform, the failure to change constituencies and the imbal-ance of MPs between England and the devolved assemblies. There have been two messes over “functional” democ-

racy. The attempt to make regional offi ces answer to regional assemblies collapsed under John Prescott’s abortive “Your region, your choice” initiative. Electors in the north-east voted it down by 78 % to 22% in 2004.

Then we had the much-vaunted NHS foundation elections, initiated by Alan Milburn in 2002, under his patronising “ earned autonomy ”. Millions were spent on ignored ballots which degener-ated into absurdity. Constituencies were divided between local, occupational and “rest of England”. Almost no one voted and the foundations morphed into 141 boards with only “registered trust mem-bers” voting. They are de facto private associations, not necessarily worse for that, but hardly accountable democracy.

Most social associations tend to boast features that are mildly democratic, if little more than “stakeholder consulta-tion”. This applies not just to hospitals but to charities, schools, corporations, even universities. They are Edmund Burke’s little platoons. Their vigour contrasts with Cameron’s “big society”, the operational word being big, and therefore empty of meaning.

Attempts to reform British democracy, central and local, have failed because they are rarely sincere. Democracies with “layered” constitutions, such as France, Germany and the US , delegate not just power but electoral account-ability. They trust local people to make their own decisions about who should govern them, and they accept the conse-quences, post code lotteries and all.

Westminster hates anything that costs it control. In recent history only two reforms have done so : devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the direct election of a handful of city mayors. Credit goes to Tony Blair for both, though he privately regretted devolution to Scotland. The essence of both reforms was parliament’s shifting of a critical mass of power, fi rst over a range of local services and second of at least some true electoral accountability.

No critical mass of power is being transferred next week. Directly elected mayors have not taken off in Britain, partly because they were given little responsibility, partly because most peo-ple seem relatively content with their local government. Where they are not content, as in Bristol and Doncaster, they have opted for an elected mayor. The

same applies with the police. The people of England and Wales cannot know the character or competence of the candi-dates. Except with plebiscites, as over capital punishment or drug laws, voters choosing individuals must rely on party affi liation. They default to party alle-giance, in eff ect handing power of choice to whoever nominates their candidate.

This is not valueless. It is just a matter of trust. Nothing is more senseless than to complain that the commissioners will bring “politics” into policing. What is the point of them if not? Policing is crippled by national politics already. If it must have politics, let it be local. This argument refl ects a strange political psychosis in Britain, a mistrust of the mechanisms of democracy. Whatever the reason – crooked MPs, bureaucratic councils, low turnout – it is dangerous. I have no trouble with ramming politics down people’s throats, in “forcing the people to be free ”, including making the vote as compulsory as jury service.

The police need demo-cratic oversight. They are one of the most closed, complex and costly of local services. It is right that they be brought closer to their front line clients, operating priori-

ties and all. What is not right is that such direct accountability is not extended to other local services such as educa-tion, child care, planning or transport : in other words under an all-purposes mayor or county governor.

Most grownup democracies regard such leadership as most accountable where it is embodied in one person, rather than expressed through the cabalism of party groups and shifting coalitions. Johnson and his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, have proved this in London. I know of few Londoners who would revert to the days of the LCC/GLC . Sooner or later elected mayors will come. The coalition should move swiftly to make them universal throughout local government – rendering the new commissioners obsolete.

Meanwhile, vote. If we fail to use whatever ballots the Westminster elite from time to time permits, it may one day conclude we don’t need them at all.

[email protected]

It’s right that our forces have direct democratic oversight. But education, planning, transport and other services need it too

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�The coalition should move quickly to make mayors universal in local government – rendering commissioners obsolete

� We are count-ing them out and

counting them in, as the BBC man Brian Hanrahan said during the Falklands confl ict. We are doing much the same as senior offi cials move the chairs around at the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. A very strange process it is too. There are interviews this week, but already we know that two commis-sioners, Simon Woolley and Lady Meral Hussein-Ece , have been judged surplus to future requirements by the new com-mission chair, Lady O’Neill . Woolley is, at present, the only black commissioner; Hussein-Ece the only Muslim. Both were only recently told how highly regarded they were. Both were encouraged by the government to re apply. But if they are puzzled, they are not alone. For we learn of a third commissioner who won’t return. Mike Smith chaired the com-mission’s statutory disability commit-tee, played a key role on the regulatory committee and led the highly acclaimed formal inquiry into disability-related harassment . Like Woolley and Hussein-Ece, he was the recipient of a glowing assessment and was invited to reapply. Like them, he wasn’t accorded the ben-efi t of an interview. Like them he learned his fate from a head hunter’s automated email. “I naturally am disappointed at not being reappointed for a further term,” he said . The way this is being handled must disappoint everybody. Straight out of the human resources handbook, 1986.

� Big love in south London mean-while between George Gal-

loway and Lee Jasper, the controversial former race and policing adviser to Ken Livingstone. Jasper is running in the Croydon by election under Galloway’s Respect banner. And it just shows how time can heal. Or how agendas can co in-cide. For back in 2004, they were hardly comrades. Jasper ran Livingstone’s anti-racis m festival, called Respect. Galloway pitched up with his new party, decided the name Respect was rather nifty and ran off with it. Your thing is a “mere pop concert”, he told an aggrieved Liv-ingstone. There were threats of legal action, but nothing came of it. Galloway registered his party and Jasper’s Respect festival was re named Rise. Galloway was triumphant. “We get to play Aretha Franklin all day long,” he said.

� Since the fall of Gaddafi , Britain has tried to assist Libya’s return

to democratic government . Thus rela-tions between its nascent political class and our own are cordial. But for how long? For the government of Libya has a relatively new recruit, Sami al-Saadi . He’s the minister for martyrs, respon-sible for the welfare of dependents of people who died during the revolution. And when he’s not busy being minister for martyrs, al-Saadi has more personal things to do. As one of the Libyan dis-sidents rendered to Tripoli by MI6 and Gaddafi ’s henchmen, he’s suing the former home secretary Jack Straw, as well as MI6 and the foreign offi ce. Advice to Straw and Q and any of the other shadowy types that may be in his sights : steer clear of Libyan airspace.

� Though investigations and departures go on at News Inter-

national, just occasionally someone achieves the distinction of departing unaccompanied by police or lawyers, untroubled by suspicion or rancour. This week hacks in the north gathered to applaud reporter Alastair Taylor . Taylor clocked up 33 years, covering the biggest stories, but for all his experience he still fell into the trap of seeking to assess his success via Google. “ I looked to see what stories I did over the decades which had got the most hits,” he said. “Was it the Ripper, the Shannon Matthews case or another high-profi le crime story? No, it was about a Hull man having sex with a goat as passing train passengers looked on horrifi ed.” The sublime, the ridicu-lous. All in a day’s work.

� Finally, many a reader gets in touch to ask: is it true, as you

asserted yesterday, that Denis MacShane was sacked from the BBC in the 70 s for calling Reginald Maudling a cook? The answer is no. The now disgraced MP lost his job after implying that the former Tory chancellor was a crook. There is a diff erence. It isn’t yet defamatory to compare an honourable member with the likes of Gordon Ramsay. But case law is developing all the time.

[email protected]: @hugh_muir

DiaryHugh Muir

Simon Jenkins



Founded 1821Owned by the Scott TrustNumber 51,687

Committees, culture – and crueltyChild abuse

America – a house dividedUS election

In praise of… drawing lots

Americans were still voting as this edition of the Guardian went to press. The last fl urry of opinion polls at both state and national level pointed narrowly towards the re-election of Barack Obama as president. If that has been confirmed overnight in the ballot box, it is welcome news for America and the world. It will have an important steadying eff ect for progressive politics at home and abroad. But nothing could be assumed: the poll margins were tight, as they had often been throughout the 2012 campaign.

The candidates campaigned until the bitter end in the hope of shift ing the fi nal undecid-eds . The earliest result of all, in the noctur-nal voting ritual in Dixville Notch in upstate New Hampshire, was an ominous tie. The mood elsewhere on election day was tense, an unmistakable contrast with the expectations four years ago that Mr Obama was heading towards the comfortable win he secured. This time the outcome cannot be assumed at all.

What can be said with confi dence, however,

is that these 2012 elections have once again revealed America as a sharply divided soci-ety, Dixville Notch writ large. Whoever has won the presidency this time has won it by a relatively small margin, more in line with the elections of 2000 and 2004 – though hopefully this time the contest will not be settled in the courts. Yet unless Mitt Romney has overnight led the Republicans back to a clean sweep of the White House, the Senate (where a third of the seats were up for election) and the House of Representatives (where all of them were), mandates and power in Washington are again likely to be shared between the parties.

If recent years on Capitol Hill are any guide, this is likely to be a recipe for further confron-tation, impasse and political dysfunction. Few of America’s problems are likely to be resolved in Washington over the next few years – start-ing with the “fi scal cliff ” confronting the US in January . Americans are therefore likely to become even more dissatisfi ed with their politicians and their institutions than they are

The results certainly suggest deep polarisa-tion in America, yet while there is plenty of literature to support this analysis, it would be wrong to pretend that America is riven by dis-agreement as deep and unchangeable as the Grand Canyon. American demographics are moving the Democrats’ way, and the polarisa-tion of 2012 may owe more to disappointment in Mr Obama and the general unpopularity of incumbents in hard economic times than to a fresh sharpening of the culture wars.

In theory, opinion surveys imply that the newly elected president has real scope to unite America around more moderate positions on everything from defence spending to gay part-nerships than the “divided America” stereo-type ever suggests. Whether that will happen in practice is another matter. The record is not good. Mr Obama was given no chance to be a uniter during his fi rst term. All the same, Americans are in many ways much closer to one-nation politics than the votes they cast yesterday would suggest.

already – good news for radicals of the left and the right alike.

It is tempting to assume that these divides are acquiring deeper permanency after the brief Democratic surge in 2008. It will be tragic if it is so. Part of the tragedy would be the deep-ening of the embittered nature of American public life, epitomised on the right by the motor-mouth bias of Fox News and the shock-jock radio shows, and on the left by parts of the blogosphere and social media.

Another loss, already powerfully illus-trated in this election, would be the increasing campaign focus on a few battle-ground states and counties at the expense of the virtual neglect of the rest of the coun-try. Mr Obama and Mr Romney seemed only to visit some of the US’s largest states, like California, New York and Texas, for fundrais-ing purposes , not for campaigning, because these states’ votes were not in doubt. This skews the campaign, the debate and the elec-tion. We in Britain are just as bad.

Ordinary words struggle to convey the human consequences of child abuse, and committee-speak is even less likely to do justice to its vic-tims . The home secretary headed for the Com-mons yesterday to announce the seventh and eighth institutional inquiries launched since the Jimmy Savile paedophilia allegations came to light – these concerned abuse in care homes in north Wales, and the possible inadequacy of an earlier report into this. Listening to the bickering about the scope, powers and terms of reference, it was hard to recall that the issue here was real individual men violating indi-vidual children for their own ends.

Counter intuitive as it may be, however, this is a problem that can only be tackled by addressing institutions and culture. After all, witch-hunts against individual paedophiles have been tried in the past. The News of the World’s name and shame campaign came and went in 2000, causing chaos without prevent-

ing or even exposing the sort of abuse that is currently coming to light. For the reality is that a great deal of the damage is and always has been done behind institutional walls. Eileen Fairweather explains on our comment pages today how in care homes these walls are built up out of deference to abusers and disbelief of their wards. From boarding schools to the Catholic church and now the BBC, there are signs of the same story playing out – the pow-erful closing ranks, and the powerless keeping quiet or speaking out without being heard.

The institutional questions that demand a response range from the specifi c – who on Earth handed Jimmy Savile Broadmoor’s keys ? – to more diff use concerns. The weekend remarks by the retired head of the Duncroft approved school for troubled girls, in which she dismissed former pupils’ claims about Savile as “ wild allegations by well-known delinquents ”, tell you everything you need to

know about the culture of contempt towards vulnerable youngsters among certain profes-sionals who were supposedly looking after them. Another problem is the traditional pre-sumption, rooted in two centuries of English common law, that child witnesses could not be trusted. This was overturned by statute in 1988 , but perhaps it took longer for the culture of the courtroom to change.

The reported dismissal of abuse claims now back in the spotlight by Sir Ronald Water-house, the judge who led the original north Wales inquiry, as “ embarking on the realm of fantasy ” could become a totem of that tradi-tional disbelief. That, however, very much depends on the facts that get u pturned – facts that Twittering accusers will not be patient for. That is a pity. Truth will not be advanced, nor children protected, by jettisoning the old presumption against the accuser with a new presumption of guilt for the accused.

Forget campaigns that cost $5.8bn , and which ignore voters outside swing states and seek to reduce their number within them. None of those issues troubled the process by which Egypt’s 10 million Copts chose a new pope . First, over 2,000 clergymen and laymen short-listed three candidates . Next, a blindfolded boy, himself chosen by lottery, picked out a plastic ball containing one of the three names, the idea being that his right hand doubles as the hand of God. Thus was Pope Tawadros II chosen. Experts say that a legislature drawn from the people at random would be more rep-resentative, especially of minority communi-ties. Think it couldn’t happen here? Jury selec-tion shows we are already happy to leave some crucial appointments to chance. And in May, in Runnymede’s Chertsey South and Rowtown ward, the Tory and the independent tied at 503 votes apiece. How was this democratic dead-lock broken? By drawing lots, of course.

Response

In her article on buildings security, Anna Minton devalues crime pre-vention practice, and the Secured by Design award (SBD) in par-ticular ( CCTV increases people’s sense of anxiety , 31 October ). To receive an SBD , homes must meet a minimum security standard

and footpaths, parking and gardens are designed to make potential off enders vulnerable, reducing the risk of crime.

Describing an SBD development as “oppressive”, Minton complains that “the gated estate had small windows, reinforced steel doors and grey, aluminium, military -style roofs”. SBD does not, and never has, required gated communities, nor any of the features she complains about, which are usually the choice of the architect and client.

Claiming that “high levels of security … characterise our public buildings” and that “this is because security has become a prerequisite of planning as a result of SBD” ignores the facts. Security became a factor in planning because of high crime, poor-quality security fi ttings used by builders, changing risk, and the Crime and Disorder Act, which required public authorities and police to have a crime prevention agenda . SBD is a police initiative owned by the Association of Chief Police Offi cers .

Minton states: “SBD is funded by

the 480 companies that sell the goods needed to meet the required standard.” This is misleading. The research and publications supporting SBD are paid for by fees raised from security companies that make all types of security products, not just for construction, and which are tested to prove their crime -prevention value. Products for SBD homes, as long as they meet the same British standards, do not have to be sourced from these companies . Minton fails to mention that this arrangement makes SBD self-fi nanc-ing and not a drain on the public purse.

She claims that, “despite caretakers being much more eff ective … they are not acknowledged by SBD” . But we recommend concierge entrances, care-takers and on going community manage-ment for multi-occupancy buildings.

Minton’s claim that “despite the all-pervasive infl uence of this policy, there is no evidence to support it” is unsustainable. Independent research shows that SBD properties suff er 50% less burglary : just upgrading the doors in Glasgow social housing reduced burglary by 20% .

The recent Future Homes Commis-sion report states that 43% of people view security as the most important aspect of homes. SBD is about reducing crime and the fear of crime , and many thousands of homes currently benefi t.

Alan McInnes is director of ACPO Secured by Design

If you wish to respond to an article in which you have featured , email [email protected] or write to Response, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. We cannot guarantee to publish all responses, and we reserve the right to edit

P eople like our homes – they are well secured. Don’t call them oppressive

Comment & Debate

As a G P, I have closely followed the sustained attack on the LCP – initially with horror, then with sadness and distress. It has been like watching the humiliation of an old friend. This is not because of some blind loyalty to the LCP itself, or an inability to accept that doctors can be criticised, but because – like the vast majority of healthcare professionals involved in end -of -life care – it is something I am deeply passionate about.

Ensuring that those at the end of their life achieve a good death is one of the greatest challenges in medicine. Many times when I have driven to the house of a dying patient, or even more so to the children’s hospice , every bone in my body has wanted to turn around and go home. It would be easier – the conversations and decisions you have to make are diffi cult and emotionally draining – but they are also one of the most rewarding things I do.

The LCP is not a ghoulish “death pathway” , but a compassionate, carefully written document which helps doctors, patients and their families to make the right decisions near the end of life. It ensures that nothing is forgotten – like pressure areas, mouth care or the spiritual needs of the patient – and it encourages regular review. It is not an exact science, and clearly there have been serious problems in some cases .

I am as disturbed as anybody when I hear that families have felt excluded from conversations concerning their loved ones . This is wrong and should not happen – enshrined within the very fabric of the LCP is the involvement of relatives. Where relatives have felt excluded, we need to ask why doctors were not using the LCP properly, not to attack the pathway itself.

The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has ridden into the storm surrounding end-of-life care like a knight in shining armour . He wants a revamp of the NHS constitution

to defend patients from their doctors , forcing the medical profession to speak to relatives before implementing the Liverpool Care Pathway ( LCP), which is widely used as a treatment tool in the last hours of the life of a dying patient . Hailed as a “ victory for families” by the Daily Mail, Hunt’s intervention will no doubt win him some political points . But overall the changes promise nothing that patients do not already have.

End-of-life care is too important to meddle with

Another common accusation is that families have to “defy doctors” by giving their relatives a drink – and yet the LCP states that patients will “be supported to eat and drink for as long as possible”. Artifi cial fl uid and food via drips or a naso-gastric tube may be appropriately stopped, but we need to challenge the impression that end -of -life care in any way involves stopping a conscious patient from eating or drinking.

When doctors do try to rally some defence, they are accused of arrogance . Indeed, on hearing that I was writing this article, one colleague told me I was “brave” (I think he meant “foolish”) . I cannot stop the Daily Mail writing negative articles about the LCP , nor can I prevent the Daily Telegraph from throwing its broadsheet might behind this powerfully destructive campaign, but I can stand up for what I believe in – which is the very best, person-centred palliative care.

Martin Brunet is a GP who blogs at doctorblog.co.uk

Why promise to protect vulnerable patients from doctors? They already have our heartfelt support

Martin Brunet

Alan McInnes

Ensuring that those at the end of their life achieve a good death is one of the greatest challenges in medicine



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Letters and emails

Struggle to fi nd the X factor in police chief polls

Senator Dieback Diff erent histories of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict

Cuts in funding are not the only threat to parks and greens spaces ( Letters , 5 November). The government wants to prevent communities from registering their much-loved spaces as village greens. The growth and infrastructure bill will outlaw any applications for greens on land which has been earmarked for devel-opment – even though that earmarking is a secret process. By the time local people learn that their space is threatened, it will be too late to save it. Kate Ashbrook General secretary, Open Spaces Society • T ax avoidance by multinational s ( Report , 6 November) could be resolved by impos ing a minimum corporation tax bill based on a small percentage of UK turnover. This would make management charges, transfer prices etc redundant. John Pilsbury Wrexham

• So the government wants us to pro-tect the ash tree by washing our kids, dogs and boots ( Report , 3 November). Next thing they’ll be suggesting is that we might survive nuclear war by hiding under the kitchen table. Chris Belshaw Blawith, Cumbria • I always imagined that Ash Dieback would be a Republican senator. Phil Thorp Bury, Lancashire • For those who feel they are not going to meet “the god of hell fi re” ( Letters , 5 November ), but have some atonement to make , Halfway to Paradise by Billy Fury must be the choice . Michael Rought-Brooks Scarborough, North Yorkshire

• We’re with Jen and Geoff . Our grand-children call us by our fi rst names and, far from preventing “a sense of the wonder of the passing of the generations” ( Let-ters , 5 November), it opens up delightful conversation on family relationships. It also removes distinctions between genetic and acquired grandparents. Nina Young and Derek Middlemiss Newark, Nottinghamshire

• It is, of course, only your maternal grandmother who is safe . The lyric con-tinues: “You cannae shove your granny, for she’s your mammy’s mammy ...” Frank Welsh Balsall Common, West Midlands

Like Mahmoud Abbas, my father came from Safed, and on behalf of his family I have no intention of renouncing claims arising from our expulsion from the town in 1947-48 ( Abbas sparks Palestin-ian fury after waiving right of return , 5 November). In describing massacres in the Saf ed area, the Israeli Meron Ben-venisti wrote: “These atrocities which … are regarded as libel, invented by the enemies of Israel … were, at the time they took place, known to ministers in the Israeli government, military com-manders, and even the general public.”

The rights of the expelled Palestinians have not evaporated with the passage of time. The houses they lived in and the valuables they left behind were all stolen by the Jews who moved in. The issue that has to be addressed is how the undeniable right of return of Palestinian refugees is to be managed. Having visited Safed many times , I am in two minds about whether I would actually return there. From having been a vibrant town with a majority Arab population, but a signifi cant centuries-old Jewish pres-ence, it has now become a dump. But it is for me to decide whether I want to return or accept compensation, not for the

Israelis, or indeed the president of Pales-tine, to deny that right on my behalf. Karl Sabbagh Newbold on Stour, Warwickshire

• The l etter from Ghada Karmi and oth-ers ( UK’s responsibility to the Palestin-ians , 2 November) deserves correction. The Balfour declaration made explicit that its implementation should not prej-udice the rights of the indigenous inhab-itants. In no way did it give the Zionist movement “carte blanche to transform the overwhelmingly Arab state of Pales-tine into a Jewish one”. H ow the terms of the Balfour declaration were observed was a matter for the British government exercising its responsibilities under the mandate. I doubt very much that Britain “encouraged the mass immigration into Palestine of hundreds of thousands of European Jews”. Rather the reverse .

Until the 1930s, Jewish immigration, motivated more by religious belief than Zionist nationalism, was at a fairly low level and often tolerated by the Palestin-ian population. It was in the 1930s that this all changed. The pressure of Euro-pean antisemitism motivated Jews to seek refuge outside Europe . The doors of

John Harris is quite right about the farce of voting for a police commissioner ( Why I’ll spoil my ballot , 6 November). I still don’t know who the candidates are, although I rang the helpline at least three weeks ago asking for details. I was invited to do this by an “information” leafl et posted to me. It did say I will have a fi rst and second choice. No men-tion, though, of how the voting system works. What if there are more than two candidates? And what exactly is it all for anyway? The county police authorities, made up of elected local authority mem-bers, are being disbanded. Their job was to monitor the local police force, set the budget and, if necessary, sack the chief constable. In the future, elected local authority members will sit on a “police and crime panel” to monitor the new commissioner. If the panel doesn’t like what the commissioner does, it will have a veto, including of his or her choice of a chief constable. So what’s the point of having a commissioner, who will take a high salary, no doubt with expenses. What was that about fooling the people… Penny Young South Lopham , Norfolk

• John Harris mentions that in order to cut costs in the forthcoming police elec-tions, the Conservatives who dreamt this up decided there would be no free mailshots for candidates. As a result, most people are barely aware that any-thing is happening. Not so in Cheshire. There are fi ve candidates standing, including an independent, all having had to put up a £5,000 deposit. How-ever, Stephen Mosley, MP for Chester, has used his position, which allows him to have a column in the local free newspaper, to name, support and extol the virtues of the Conservative party

candidate. So much for democracy and fairness between candidates. Phil Tate Chester

• Please, John Harris, don’t spoil your vote in the police commissioner election . In Avon and Somerset, there is a real dan-ger that a dangerous candidate could be elected. The Conservative Ken Maddock was until recently leader of Somerset county council, where he pursued an ideologically driven policy of cuts and outsourcing. His administration’s brutal plans for our libraries had national atten-tion, but there has been much more on the same lines. Maddock’s election mate-rial may be bland. But his underlying beliefs are sincere and we could expect cuts and privatisation in the police serv-ice if he were to win. We’re told the turn-out will be low, so every vote will count. Can I propose the temporary formation in Avon and Somerset of a new pressure group – Guardian Readers Against Ken ? Andy Lewis Minehead, Somerset

• Is John Harris really serious when he talks about deliberately spoiling his ballot paper in the police and crime com-missioners election? They may not be taking the election seriously in his neck of the woods, but in my area the candi-dates have been on television and had debates around West Yorkshire. I have helped deliver several thousand leafl ets to homes in Bradford East to support the Labour candidate, who happens to be a serving councillor in Castle ford, as well as being the current chair of the West Yorkshire Police Authority. Who could have more legitimacy than that?

The Labour party does not agree with police commissioners, but it had to put

up a candidate when the legislation passed through parliament. I believe that every election gives voters the opportunity to voice their opinions of the current administration, and the elec-tion of Labour police commissioners would send a message loud and clear to this useless coalition. To deliberately spoil your ballot paper is vainglorious and arrogant; it achieves nothing. The Guardian did not back the Labour party at the last election and look what we ended up with. Be careful what you wish for, John – you may just get it. Ian Parsons Bradford

• This week’s elections for police com-missioners mark the end of almost two centuries of non-political policing in England. The coalition’s enthusiasm for police commissioners is nothing to do with local democracy or public involve-ment but, once again, the golden rules of the market, ideology and “follow the money”. Commissioners will control police budgets to enable them to force

through “modernisation” of the police service and the handover of police tasks to the private sector for profi t “to reduce costs”. Just think of the potential revenues from traffi c policing alone – profi ts backed by the force of law. Another splendid example of the needs of society and citizens being ignored to promote ideology and profi ts, disguised as progress. Peter North Brinton , Norfolk

• Thanks to John Harris. His article confi rms our decision to spoil our ballot papers because of a lack of clear argu-ment of why the existing police authori-ties are ineff ective and incapable of being reformed and justify replacement by what is likely to become a political offi ce. More specifi cally at a time of “aus-terity”, who made the boneheaded deci-sion to spend £75 m on a special election in November when surely it could have waited until the May local elections? Barry and Muriel Moore Claydon, Suff olk

• At least John Harris has received a leafl et from the Lib Dems about the police commissioners election. Here in Amber Valley in mid-Derbyshire we’ve had nothing : no leafl et, no door knocks, and no hustings meetings. The govern-ment is expecting voters to fi nd out for themselves, but how many people have that much motivation? Viv Scott Belper, Derbyshire

• Won’t spoilt ballots just add numbers to the turnout? So maybe Ian Blair’s boycott is the right response? Mick Farley Burton in Kendal , Cumbria

other nations, Britain and the US in par-ticular, were shut to them. But it was the culmination of European antisemitism in the Holocaust which led to an inter-national crisis. In postwar Europe there were several million displaced survi-vors unable to return to their original countries . Had Britain admitted up to 1 million of the displaced Jews, and the US up to 2 million, the crisis in Palestine would have been solvable. Instead Brit-ain invited in thousands of Ukrainians, among them SS war criminals. Thus to the tragedy of the Shoah was added the tragedy of the Nak ba. Lionel Burman West Kirby, Wirral

• Re the Arab exodus from Palestine: there is no mention of the UN resolution which divided Palestine between Arab and Jew, which Israel accepted and the Arab s did not. Nor is there any reference to the war which followed, when six Arab nations invaded the new Israeli state with the declared aim of its elimination. With-out that rejection and invasion of Israel there would have been no Arab refugees. Paul Miller London

Is John Harris really serious when he talks about deliberately spoiling his ballot paper?Ian Parsons

Corrections and clarifi cations

• Bleeding canker is not another name for the damage caused by the horse chestnut leaf miner moth, as it was described in a panel about pests and diseases which are threatening trees in the UK. Bleeding canker is a fungus-like or bacterial infection of the bark which has nothing to do with the leaf-mining activity of the moth (The new threats, 3 November, page 14).

• A roundup of how the US presidential campaign was seen around the world said that the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez “who is also fi ghting for re-election” had bucked the trend in Latin America by stating his preference for Obama. Chávez is no longer seek-ing re-election: he won a new term of offi ce early in October ( Who do we want to win? Rest of the world speaks out , 5 November, page 6).

• A Diary item said the Labour MP Denis MacShane was famously sacked from the BBC after he accused the Con-servative politician Reginald Maudling of being a cook. Crook was the word he used (6 November, page 31).

• Further corrections and clarifi cations on guardian.co.uk include: Social work-ers ‘at rock bottom’ over issue of race and adoption, 6 November.

Contacts for Guardian departments and staff can be found at gu.com/help/contact-us. To contact the readers’ editor’s offi ce, which looks at queries about accuracy and standards, email [email protected] including article details and web link; write to The readers’ editor, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU; or phone +44 (0)20 3353 4736 between 10am and 1pm UK time Monday to Friday excluding public holidays. The Guardian’s policy is to correct signifi cant errors as soon as possible. The editorial code of the Guardian incorporates the editors’ code overseen by the Press Complaints Commission: see pcc.org.uk

Wenlock Edge

Their name comes from the Latin cyclaminos and the Greek kuklos, meaning circle. Their story comes from warm dry forests of the Mediterranean. Their colour comes from an enduring optimism and an innocence of spirit toughing it out here in November woods. The cyclamen have been in Brit-ain since the 16th century and in this wood for more than a hundred years. They belong to the primrose family, which accounts for their irrepressible cheeriness, a pink note they strike at the end instead of the beginning of the year.

When I fi rst found them about 20 years ago in the far corner of this little wood once used as a quarry for lime-kilns, the cyclamen were a single clump the size of a saucer. Since then, shaded by ash trees and hawthorns, their ivy-like leaves struggling through a thicken-ing carpet of real ivy, the saucer-sized clump expanded into a coff ee-table-sized patch, then, as it spread further, separated out into smaller pink dinner-plate islands in an ocean of glossy green.

The quarry was abandoned and there was a house here, abandoned a hundred years ago, too. Only the relics of a garden remain: a few conifers, some fl ower-ing currant bushes and the cyclamen. I imagine the story of this patch began with a handful of tiny corms from a bulb catalogue, planted to pop up pink each autumn. Those corms rolled out from a long history. Cyclamen were grown in the medieval gardens of Constanti-nople because they appeared so diff erent from common fl owers of the fi elds. The fl ower’s circular “eye”, formed by the fusing of upswept petals, peers earth-ward like a microscope. Its pink fl ushed with purple draws the human eye, esp ecially in a season of grey skies and brown rot. Its evergreen, grey-enamelled leaves have neatness and precision. Now the cyclamen seem to belong here as much as the ash trees and, in these anxious shadows, may outlive them. Paul Evans

Country diary

Labour MPs put the record straight $1bn democracy

I am puzzled that John Kampfner ( Labour’s back on the right , 6 Novem-ber) accuses me of attacking the reha-bilitative elements in the prime minis-ter’s recent crime and justice speech. I am on record as being supportive of attempts to reduce reoff ending, backed up by evidence of what works. I am committed to expanding the use of restorative justice, creating a Women’s Justice Board to reduce reoff ending and driving down crime by reforming those guilty of committing a criminal off ence. Where I am critical of the prime minister is that his speech was billed as a fresh new approach, but was instead full of rehashed announcements . The one major new policy – rehabilitation payment by results – fails my evidence-based policy test. Ongoing pilots – some started under Labour – have been ditched or simply ignored.

There’s no independent research which shows it works, so rolling it out before we have seen the results of any pilots is premature. I’m concerned at the risks to public safety and to former

off enders themselves because of botched rehabilitation policies. Sadiq Khan MP Shadow secretary of state for justice • Jackie Ashley ( Comment , 5 November) and John Kampfner both unfairly tra-duce pro-European Labour MPs like me for voting against the government and urging cuts in the EU budget . But being pro-European does not mean enabling the EU to escape spending cuts imposed by every one of its member states . Europe would be more popular with its citizens if it showed more willingness to tighten its belt as they are having to do. The austerity being imposed by the coali-tion at home and leaders across the EU is disastrous, but how can they all justify an increase in the budgets of Europe’s institutions while everyone else suff ers from their cuts? I voted last week to curb Brussels’ budget as a pro-European who believes this is in the interests of both Europe and Britain. Peter Hain MP Europe minister 2001-02

I have yet to understand the fascination of the Guardian with the minutiae of US presidential elections. Obama was elected as the candidate of change. He promised to get rid of Guantánamo , introduce a comprehensive national health service, and establish a new relationship in the Middle East and in America’s informal empire. Instead Guantánamo and the dark prisons still function, healthcare is still under the control of the same compa-nies, relationships with the Gulf autocra-cies are unchanged, along with support for Israel’s every move, and drone wars that are an aff ront to international law are bringing terror to Pakistan and the Horn of Africa. T Elections in which, whoever wins, nothing is guaranteed to change are the ultimate in capitalist democracy. We are fast moving to a similar situation in Britain. Would it be too much to ask that, instead of concentrating on the trivia and froth, you ponder deeper questions such as what kind of democracy it is where you have to raise a billion dollars to win? Tony Greenstein Brighton, East Sussex



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What’s wrong with Glasgow?Scotland’s largest city has a reputation for ill health, but that alone can’t explain its shocking mortality rates

Ali Muriel

With a referendum on Scottish independ-ence now agreed, Scottish nationalists can dare to wonder: what would an inde-pendent Scotland look like? Alex Salmond naturally has plenty of suggestions . Two adjectives he is unlikely to choose are “unhealthy” and “short lived” – but, as delegates at Scotland’s annual public health conference will hear this week, the poor health of Scotland’s citizens remains a matter of profound concern. With the lowest life expectancy in western Europe, Scotland has been in the grip of a public health crisis for decades now. And ground zero for that crisis is unquestionably the country’s largest city: Glasgow.

Whether it is deaths from cirrhosis, drug abuse, lung cancer, murder or sui-cide, Glasgow’s mortality rates are eas-ily the highest in Britain, and among the highest in Europe. Life expectancy at birth in Glasgow is the lowest in the UK – more than six years below the national aver-age for Glaswegian men (71.6 years, com-pared with a UK average of 78.2 years), and more than four years below average for Glasgow’s women (78 years, compared with the UK average of 82.3). And because Glasgow is home to more than 10% of Scotland’s total population , with nearly 600,000 people in the city itself, and more than a million in the greater Glasgow area , Glasgow’s problems are very much Scotland’s problems.

“It’s a human tragedy on a massive scale,” says Gerry McCartney, an epide-miologist at NHS Scotland. His colleague, David Walsh, a lead researcher at Glasgow Centre for Population Health adds: “You are talking about thousands of people dying before their time.”

Stand in the bustling centre of Buchanan Street on a sunny autumn afternoon, and you would be hard pressed to spot signs of a public health emergency in Glasgow. Shoppers stream past the pristine sand-stone shopfronts, looking every bit as prosperous and confident as Salmond could wish for – and no less healthy than

people anywhere else in Britain. Walk a few miles east, however, and the dire statistics become easier to believe. Glasgow’s city boundaries contain some of Britain’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

“You don’t need to be a doctor to see how unhealthy people in these commu-nities are,” says Dr Saket Priyadarshi, a senior GP in Glasgow’s addiction services, who has spent most of his professional life treating addicts in the city’s east end. He is not exaggerating. Pale men cluster outside windowless pubs puffi ng on cigarettes. A frail couple, three crutches between them, totter out of an off -licen ce, paus-ing to adjust the large plastic cider bottles in their backpacks. An obese man with a withered leg limps down Tollcross Road, eating pizza from a cardboard box.

Scientifi c mystery Yet, the conventional wisdom that Glas-gow’s ill health is all down to poverty, bad diet and bad behaviour is, at best, partial and, at worst, misleading. Despite years of research and decades of evi-dence that something has gone terribly wrong in the heart of Scotland’s largest city, the underlying causes of Glasgow’s fatally poor health remain something of a scientifi c mystery.

Poverty alone doesn’t account for Glasgow’s dismally low life expectancy.

Other British cities – Liverpool and Man-chester, for example – have rates of dep-rivation every bit as high as Glasgow, yet their life expectanc ies are substantially higher. What’s more, even Glasgow’s most affl uent citizens, those in the top 10% of the income distribution, die signifi cantly younger than their counterparts in other British cities. At best, according to the epi-demiologists’ calculations, deprivation accounts for less than half (around 40%) of Glasgow’s “ mortality gap ” compared with the rest of the UK. The other causes are still unknown.

Epidemiologists call it “the Glasgow eff ect ”, which sounds reassuringly scien-tifi c , but, as Walsh readily concedes, it is nothing more than a label scientists have chosen for their ignorance.

“The use of that word [‘eff ect’] excites people,” he laments. “They start say-ing ‘because of the Glasgow eff ect …’ as though we know what it is. The whole point is – it’s something we don’t know the answer to.”

With colleagues at NHS Scotland and the University of Glasgow, Walsh has devoted much of the past five years to uncovering what makes Glasgow so dif-ferent, compared with other, similarly deprived British cities. If you think deep-fried Mars bars are to blame for Glasgow’s ill health (as many English commentators seem to), then think again: obesity rates in the city are actually lower than in some English cities.

Nor can Glasgow’s infamous penchant for alcohol and cigarettes explain the puz-zle . According to the largest health surveys in England and Scotland, Glaswegians neither binge-drink nor smoke more than their peers in Liverpool or Manchester. Drug abuse (particularly heroin ), knife crime, murder and suicide are all signifi -cantly more prevalent in Glasgow than in other cities. But that only prompts the question – why is this the case? What is it about life in Glasgow that seems to predispose some of its citizens to such destructive behaviours?

“Lots of people have their own pet hypotheses about it,” Walsh says . In a

Sighthill housing estate, now partially demolished. Many of Glasgow’s social problems are no worse than those of other UK cities and violent crime is decreasing Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

recent research paper , Walsh, McCartney and their co-authors, Chik Collins and David Batty, assessed no fewer than 17 competing explanations for Glasgow’s ill health. There are theories that blame the weather (perhaps it is vitamin D defi ciency or chilly winters?), those that blame the data (perhaps Glasgow is simply poorer than it looks?), plenty of theories that blame the Glaswegians (a culture of hedonism, sectarianism or alienation) and still others that point the finger at the Tories (a “political attack ” on Glas-gow, conducted by Margaret Thatcher’s government). Some have more sup-porting evidence than others, but all are unproven, says Walsh. “The main thing to say is that it’s not going to be one thing. It’s going to be a combination of diff erent factors interacting,” he says.

This leaves Scotland’s policymakers in something of a quandary: how can you tackle a problem when you don’t know what is causing it? The answer so far has been to bring in increasingly heavy regu-lation of unhealthy choices. In recent years, Scotland has become a trailblazer for public health regulations . The country was the fi rst in Britain to ban smoking in public places , and hopes to become the fi rst to introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol .

These policies are wholeheartedly welcomed by Dr Linda de Caestecker,

director of public health for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde . She has pressed for restrictions on the opening of new bars and off-licences, and on the serving of unhealthy food in schools and public buildings, and is pondering whether councils might restrict the opening of fast-food restaurants near Glasgow’s schools. “I get accused of being sort of ‘regulation for everything’, ” De Caestecker notes, drily. “But at the very least we need to make the healthy choices cheaper than the unhealthy choices.”

Scotland’s approach to tackling deaths from violent crime has been rather more creative. A decade ago, Glasgow lan-guished as “ the murder capital of west-ern Europe ”, with rates of knife crime and homicide more than double those in London, but its homicide rate has fallen by a third since the early 2000s, and violent crime is also decreasing.

The city’s innovative Violence Reduc-tion Unit (VRU), established by Strath-clyde police in 2005, can claim a large share of the credit, having piloted a range of unorthodox strategies to cut violent crime . These include giving police offi cers full-time posts on school campuses, bring-ing violent gangs into court en masse to confront the communities they terrorise, and training dentists and vet s to recognise the signs of domestic abuse . “We took the attitude that it’s so big and so complex, it doesn’t make any diff erence where you start,” says VRU co-director, detective chief superintendent John Carnochan, candidly. “Just make a bloody start.”

Scotland’s potential All of which makes Glasgow’s dismal life expectancy all the more demoralis-ing. If Scotland is to fulfi l its potential – whether independently or as part of the UK – then Glasgow needs to heal. But, for now, social scientists continue to juggle dozens of diff erent research projects, all aimed at uncovering the causes of the city’s malaise. Scotland’s policymakers can only hope they succeed – and the sooner the better.Interview, page 37 ≥

The average life expectancy of men in Glasgow, in years. The UK average is 78.2

71.6The proportion of Scotland’s population that lives in Glasgow10%



To order original Clare cartoons, signed by Harry Venning, call 0330 333 6839.

One of the most diffi cult things to learn as a teacher is the limits of your own infl uence. Nothing made this clearer to me than working with pupils who were looked after or in need of protection. Life outside school for these children made learning inside school impossible.

The social worker who was working with one pupil was an agency mem-ber of staff and was the child’s sixth social worker in 12 months. Social work appeared to be a profession over-stretched and demoralised. Yet I’ve met many inspirational social workers who are true leaders – able to bring diff erent agencies together and solve problems in the child’s best interests . I am proposing a graduate fast-track programme that draws on the Teach First scheme and is about getting more of these leaders into children’s social work.

When the team at the IPPR thinktank investigated the problem, it quickly became clear there were three points most people agree on: the status of the social work profession is low, the work requires a demanding mix of skills and

We would also aim to give Frontline participants the best training and prepa-ration so that they are able to practi se as a social worker after a year. I have been speaking with social workers over the last year to design the outline of best-in-class training. It would include theory and the essentials of social work degree courses, but would focus on skills such as risk assessments, intervention methods, care planning and court work .

To succeed, Frontline also needs to includ e opportunities for experienced practitioners to spread their wisdom, so that local authorities become bet-ter at training and supporting new social workers. We would also prepare Frontline participants by giving them leadership development .

Many professional bodies have said that at a time of cuts and record demand, social work is under even greater pres-sure and more resources are needed. However, money alone will not trans-form social work. Reform is also required to rebrand the profession and make it more attractive to top graduates. Front-line could play a valuable part in this, as Teach First has done for teaching.

attributes, and protecting vulnerable children is one of the most vital and rewarding professions . So my work was to develop something radical that could raise the prestige of the profession and prepare the most sought-after gradu-ates and career switchers to be excellent social workers.

Like Teach First, our Frontline pro-posal, which was launched last month , aims to attract the most academically able, highly skilled and motivated people into the profession with a simple message : make a diff erence and learn to be a leader. And, like Teach First, the majority would stay in the profession for the long term whil e those who leave would be connected to the mission of challenging social disadvantage.

Social work desperately needs a fresh image, says Josh MacAlister

Josh MacAlister is the project leader for

Frontline, an associate fellow at the IPPR

and a teacher in Greater Manchester

Senior government ministers had already answered a central thrust of Lord Heseltine’s formula for creating growth in England before he made a much- publicised pitch last week to transform the country’s economic fortunes.

Heseltine thinks sweeping Whitehall reforms, leading to stronger localism

and active support for business delivered by regional partnerships, will go some way toward narrowing the divide between an increasingly powerful London, the surrounding south-east, and the rest of England.

But barely two weeks before he launched what amounted to his alternative economic strategy, the government slipped through a growth and infra-structure bill designed to remove yet more power from town halls. So whatever the warm words of George Osborne and David Cameron , in welcoming Heseltine’s bulky report, commissioned by Downing Street, the government thinks the opposite to Hezza.

As the Conservative-led Local Government Association (LGA) notes, the bill clashes funda-mentally with the government’s localism agenda with “sweeping new powers … to remove decision making from democratically accountable councils”. This means a “massive shift of resources”, says the LGA, from town halls to the Planning Inspectorate, a quango answerable to ministers. Instead of getting local approval, developers will be able to by pass town halls and make applications to this quango for, what the Department for Communities and Local Govern-ment calls , “economically essential development”, yet to be defi ned but doubtless including more retail and business parks and much else.

Much of Heseltine’s localist vision had been undermined before he even delivered his report. The Economist helpfully noted that the report under-lined the “divide between tax-cutting centrists and regional devolvers” in the Conservative party – just as it did during Margaret Thatcher’s reign, when Heseltine clashed with the former prime minister.

Heseltine and Cameron are poles apart. The government has already scrapped a regional struc-ture that might have delivered some equity across the country: eight regional development agencies, regional planning and much else. Why? Because of a visceral dislike of all things “regional ” by those in the zone occupied by communities and local government secretary, Eric Pickles. He will ostensibly oversee the new centralised planning regime.

England is now the only major economy with-out a regional strategy – except in one select corner. Greater London has not only kept its regional plan, powerful transport functions, development agency and interventionist institutions, but also had its powers strengthened in the Localism Act.

Having scrapped development agencies for the rest of England, the government created 39 institu-tions called Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), non-statutory, business-led bodies with tiny budgets. But a survey by the Work Foundation think tank fi nds business leaders are so disenchanted with these bodies that they are ready to walk away – unless ministers give them real powers and fi nance.

Heseltine wants to do just that. But dominant centrists in the government remain dismissive of the thrust of Heseltine’s agenda for a coherent national industrial strategy backed by much stronger powers for large cities and surrounding conurbations.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope. Nick Clegg has unveiled “city deals ” for 20 specifi c areas to com-plement eight approved in July. The aim is to devolve more power and funding, with councils working with LEPs to produce strategies for local growth.

A modest fi rst step, perhaps – crucially, dependent on a changing mindset in the Treasury – but it seems to be the only show in town. Peter Hetherington writes on communities and regeneration

Osborne ha d already rejected Hezza’s plan

Peter Hetherington

Much of Heseltine’s localist vision had been undermined before he even delivered his report

Opinion

Clare in the community Harry Venning

Second thoughts

Savile case shows inpatient voice is crucialously what they have to say, we must share some of the responsibility for what happens as a result.

In light of this, the decision to aban-don the only survey that monitors how safe people feel as inpatients on psychiatric wards seems particularly ill -judged. Until last year the Care Quality Commission (CQC) conducted three inpatient surveys. There was a general survey of all inpatients – except those on psychiatric and maternity wards, who were surveyed separately. This exclusion still stands, but psychi-atric inpatients are no longer covered by a separate survey. They are not sur-veyed at all.

I cannot think of a group of people whose experience it is more important to survey than mental health inpatients. As individuals their word is disastrously easy to dismiss, especially in a situation where it is their word against a doctor or a nurse, for example, with no third party to serve as a witness. Incidents between patients are often not taken seriously. I was punched in the face on one ward by a patient, who was clearly unwell, in full view of the staff , and absolutely nothing happened at all.

On another ward, two patients, who were both extremely vulnerable and too unwell to be responsible for what they were doing, repeatedly had sex. The female patient was clearly disturbed by it and reported to me in graphic detail what was going on. When I spoke to the nurses, it turned out they were fully aware of the situation and routinely giv-ing the female patient the morning-after

pill along with her morning med ica-tion. They were “doing their best ” to stop it, they said, but it was clear to me that they found the whole thing highly amusing too.

And in case you thought such inci-dents were consigned to the “mixed ward ” past, I should say this took place on one of the newer “segregated ” wards, where the female patients’ sleeping area is separated from the communal eating and recreation areas by a locked door that only staff can open.

Is it any wonder, then, that the last CQC survey of psychiatric inpatients in 2009 found that fewer than half of them reported always feeling safe on psychiat-ric wards? And yet they have abolished the only means by which many patients can express their concerns and hope to be listened to.

It is only in numbers that the ignored can hope to make an impression. When the fi rst few women began to speak up about Savile’s behaviour, his nephew, Roger Foster , was brutally dismissive, describing himself as “disgusted and disappointed” that such claims were being made. With a further 300 people now stepping forward, his tone has changed markedly.

The charity, Rethink Mental Illness, ha s launched an e-campaign to persuade the government to rein troduce the mental health inpatient survey. It can be accessed via its website rethink.org, and I would urge you to sign it.

Clare Allan is an author and writer on mental health issues

Now that about 300 people have alleged they were abused by Jimmy Savile in a range of institu-tions over more than 50 years, the various inquiries into how

he was able to continue his behaviour unchecked are likely to take some time. We don’t need to wait for an inquiry, however, to tell us the most immedi-ate and obvious truth: it is crucial to listen to people whose word it is easy to dismiss.

As the horrifying events at Winter-bourne View private hospital near Bris-tol have also made clear, the individuals who society fi nds easiest to ignore are the very same people whose voices we need most to hear. These are the peo-ple that abusers will target precisely because they know they are very likely to get away with it. And in so far as we leave people vulnerable by failing to listen to them or by failing to take seri-

Clare AllanIt’s my life

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The country’s Labour leader wants free healthcare, not the independence debate, to dominate the political agenda

Peter Hetherington

When Johann Lamont, Scotland’s Labour leader, called for a mature debate on the funding of Scotland’s cherished public services, from free personal and nursing care to free NHS prescriptions and tuition-free universi-ties, the outcry was predictable.

S he was accused by the SNP govern-ment of moving to destroy “shared social bonds”. And some Labour activ-ists privately questioned the timing of her speech at the end of September, when Lamont cautioned: “This is the stark choice Scotland has to face: if we wish to continue some policies as they are, they come with a cost that has to be paid for either through increased taxa-tion or direct charges or cuts elsewhere.”

With the temperature in the great con-stitutional debate rising two years before an independence referendum, could Lamont’s musings prove to be a high-risk strategy? “Telling the truth, and con-fronting the challenge, is what politics is about,” she replies. “People need an hon-est appraisal of what the choices are.”

She ha s already raised several ques-tions about those choices. What, for instance, is progressive about a chief executive on £100,000 a year getting free prescriptions when a pensioner has to endure cuts in a care package; or a well- paid lawyer escaping fees for children at university when one in four unemployed young people in Scotland cannot get into further education as colleges struggle with cuts, Lamont has asked .

Since becoming Labour leader in Holyrood last year, she has certainly made an impact, if the eff ect she is hav-ing on a normally bullish, combative fi rst minister Alex Salmond is anything to go by. “She’s getting under his skin like no predecessor,” says a seasoned observer in the Holyrood debating chamber.

We meet in her parliamentary offi ce, shortly before a debate initiated by Labour on the future of an independent Scotland in the European Union.

Lamont, 55, is relaxed, thoughtful, engaging, and determined that the inde-pendence debate will not dominate the political agenda for the next two years. “Some people defi ne the only change as constitutional change,” she says. “That’s the fi rst challenge. I’ve always said that Alex Salmond has the mandate to ask the question. But there is a pre-sumption made among nationalists that constitutional change is the answer to all the questions that are problematic in our communities, and my job is to talk about what is happening in the real world,” she stresses.

Our conversation begins with the community politics, dear to her heart, in her native Glasgow. She enthuses about community-based housing associations and co-operatives meeting local needs, rather than faceless, remote social landlords, then recall s with aff ection a rewarding, 20-year teaching career before entering the Scottish parliament in 1999. Although she taught English,

Facing up to Scotland’s ‘stark choice’

she is rooted to older party values, with a deep commitment to fairness. Perhaps this explains why Lamont, never afraid of the socialist label, believes that at a time of a shrinking Scottish budget Labour has to address the language of priorities. She takes comfort from a report by the commission on public serv-ice delivery for the Scottish government, chaired by the late Scottish TUC general secretary Campbell Christie, and pub-lished last year. “He talked about ‘com-peting demands’ – something we have to wrestle with. There are lots of things you aspire to, but how do you make sure they are funded? What I’m frustrated by is simply an assertion that things are fi ne when we know in our communities that things are not.”

She volunteers one example: free personal and nursing care for elderly and infi rm people in Scotland – but not, of course, in England. Her critique might surprise many south of the border. Annual costs are creeping towards £500m. “To have this, it’s got to be prop-erly funded. It can’t be when you say we’ve got this fantastic policy … when, at the same time, the threshold to access care is increased, when you charge for things … you did not charge for in the past – community alarms, or whatever – when you drive down most terms and conditions and you’ve got what

care workers describe to me as a job of “task and go ” – go into people’s homes for 15 minutes then back out the door. That’s not care. Is it acceptable that someone is tucked up in a bed at 6pm because of the pressure care workers are under? We’ve got care workers, particu-larly in the private sector, who are not even getting paid for travel time. ”

She adds: “What I want is a much more serious debate about the scale of the challenge because I do think there’s an awful lot hidden. Now if we’ve not got a compassionate care system – and a government that says it’s so fantastic we won’t even look at it . But it bears no rela-tion to what’s happening in families and communities – that is unacceptable.”

This, of course, begs a wider question : should prescription charges (which cost approaching £60m annually) be free for everyone? “ I think we need to ask those questions,” she replies. “If I believe we need free personal care, we need an hon-est discussion about what it costs with a well-managed, well-trained workforce.”

So charging, then, for some services that are currently free? Lamont pauses briefl y. “We have said we need to look at all of these policies. We can’t have what is currently the position, where we assert one thing and the reality is something diff erent. I would empha-sise again that we [the Scottish Labour

party] supported the policy [originally], but, in my view, there’s nothing credible about supporting a policy without the means for it to be delivered.”

Lamont’s further gripe is a council tax freeze launched as a stop gap measure in 2007-08 by the then minority SNP administration, pending the introduc-tion of a local income tax. When the party ditched the local income tax proposal , fearing an electoral backlash, it continued with a freeze. The result is that local government in Scotland is arguably now more centralised than its English counterpart. Lamont says: “The logic of the SNP position, with all Scottish councils getting the same compensation to keep the tax frozen for the past fi ve years, is that the council tax will wither on the vine. The freeze is underfunded.”

Of one thing she is sure. “We will not get back to 2010 funding levels for another 16 years. The demographics of Scotland tell you there’s a challenge ahead. They [the SNP government] knows already there’s a gap between the policy and reality on the ground.”

And if the SNP government won’t address it, she will – high risk, or not. Whether Ed Miliband follows her exam-ple by addressing tough social policy choices facing a party aspiring to UK government remains to be seen.

Healthy informationThe use of patient data, ahead ofthe results of the Caldicott reviewguardian.co.uk/health-care-network ≥

Read more on our professional networks

Interview Johann Lamont

I’m frustrated by the assertion that things are fi ne in our communities when we know they are not

her work involved liaising with social workers, and education psychologists , “largely asking ‘ Why do children fall out of school?’” she explains.

“I’ve got a very deep and abiding pas-sion about education being far more than buildings and textbooks; it’s what chil-dren bring into school with them. A lot of our job was drawing youngsters into school , working with families,” she says.

Although labelled a Blairite by SNP critics after the Edinburgh speech, which received lurid headlines about Lamont demanding an end to the “something for nothing” culture, those close to the Scottish Labour leader say she could never be labelled new Labour . Rather,

Portrait by Murdo MacLeod

Curriculum vitae

Age 55.

Family Married, son and daughter.

Home Cathcart, Glasgow.

Education Woodside secondary school, Glasgow; Glasgow University , MA Hons ; Jordanhill College of Education, postgraduate secondary teaching qualifi cation.

Career 2011-present: leader, Labour group and Scottish Labour party; 2008-11: deputy leader, Labour party, Scottish parliament; 2006-07: deputy minister of justice, Scottish executive; 2004-06: deputy minister for communities in Labour-Lib eral Democrat coalition, Scottish executive; 1999-present: MSP for Pollock, Glasgow; 1990-99: English teacher, Castlemilk high school , Glasgow; 1982-89 : English teacher, Springburn Academy, Glasgow; 1979-82 : English teacher, Rothesay Academy, Isle of Bute.

Interests Running, watching football and “soaps ”.

of life and vulnerable genes . But the question remains about the degree to which we are entitled to require the working young to pay for breakdown repairs of ancient errors, excesses and “events” ; repairs that will amount to no more than a short-term patch-up job anyhow.

Such misgivings were not reassured by last night’s phone call from Penny. Her car had failed its MOT . “ Not worth repairing, all that rust needed welding, and something about the steering and suspension, cost more than a new car,” she said.

She would never make the link between a commodity and a human. But I could and so, I imagine, can the politicians.

Stewart Dakers is a 74-year-old community worker I

met Charlie at the bus stop the other day and his body was bris-tling with indignation.

“See, it’s not his fault,” he concluded after a fairly long explanation. “You don’t get like that without something being wrong.”

“That” was one of his two sons ’ obesity. It transpired that he had been refused a hip replacement because he was too overweight. This seemed to me a quite reasonable refusal; after all, what was the point of replacing an item of bodily equipment, the mechanical failure of which could be attributed to having too much to carry, without addressing the issue that caused the damage in the fi rst place?

“And in any case, when you’re too fat, there’s a problem with the anaes-thetic,” Joyce had suggested when I mentioned it to her at the community centre. “ Nobody just gets obese – you make it happen, you’re responsible,” she said, and off she twinkled on her smug little ankles.

Mulling it over that evening at home, it occurred to me that Charlie’s son’s sit-uation was iconic of our times. We eat,

drink and make merry in the know ledge that “tomorrow ” is a lot further off than it used to be, thanks to the NHS and its technologies.

My daughter Penny came round at the weekend and I mentioned the business.

“So he’s overweight,” she snapped. “ Anybody bother to ask why?”

She’s a bit of a leftie but then, work-ing as she does at the sharp end of the care sector, I guess she’s entitled.

“Look, no one wants to be obese; it’s an addiction,” she said. “ You don’t like what you see in the mirror so you look for comfort.”

She’s right, I guess. Comfort food, from burgers to coke, is big business and, in the present circumstances, com-fort is in high demand. In Charlie’s son’s case, there was much besides . From what I’d picked up over the years, he’d not had it easy. An unhappy schooling

with low-threshold special needs, a cou-ple of redundancies, divorced ; in other words, circumstances had aggravated a naturally ill-disciplined appetite into addictive mode.

After she’d left, however, I recalled my initial reaction to Charlie’s com-plaint, which generated some pretty uncomfortable thoughts. Charlie’s son got fat; my fellow crumblies and I have got old. Is there a diff erence ? I mean, if Joyce’s and my argument were to become policy, then ... Exactly.

Our need for repair derives from our lifestyles. We are products of our personal appetites and the manner in which we satisfi ed them, whether it took the form of indulgence in food, narcotics, work, or of abstention from exercise and attention to health. Again, we may claim that we are victims of happenstance, the normal accidents

Stewart DakersGrey matter

Is it ever OK to decide that a person is so old they are beyond repair?

Wrong callWhy whistleblowing is important for charitiesguardian.co.uk/voluntary-sector- network ≥



Outsourcing policymaking: the benefi ts

A Guardian public leaders network poll shows deep scepticism over government proposals to “outsource” policy-making , with 81% of senior managers opposed to the idea.

Many of the 500, mainly senior, man-agers in the survey acknowledged that consultation on policymaking should be much wider, and wanted to see policies informed by the views of practitioners, thinktanks, academics and others with an informed understanding of the issues . They supported proposals to increas e the number of options presented to minis-ters, increas e the radicalism of options, and to better recogni se stakeholder and citizen views . But the overwhelming concern raised was that ministers would commission advice from those who shared their existing views, leading to an “unchallenged policymaking process”.

That is not the intention, according to cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood . “If anything, it’s the other way round ,” he says, stressing that the aim is to broaden

Jill RutterPublic manager

Yet neither of these seems to be regarded as “outsourcing policy”. The focus and concerns are about the contestable policy fund , which enables ministers to commission policy advice from beyond Whitehall. The Cabinet Offi ce established the fund earlier this year as part of its civil service reform plan. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank won the fi rst contract to carry out a review into how other civil services work, with a particular focus on accountability sys-tems. Policy making is not so good that it should be exempt from innovation. The fund needs to be seen as an interesting – and, at the moment – minor experi-ment. There have been others under this government, which the institute has explored in its study, Opening Up Policy Making . In addition, the Welsh govern-ment is setting up an external Public Pol-icy Institute to give advice to ministers .

Ministers need to be transparent about how they set up and handle the results, to counter the concerns about commis-sioning “convenient ” advice. They need to learn from these innovations , but they could be more radical, too.

The way to test the added value of outsourced policy advice would be to publish it alongside civil service advice. Then we would really be able to judge the quality of the civil service against exter-nal pretenders. Competition could raise standards on both sides. It might reassure ministers – and the public – on the quality of civil service advice. Everyone , includ-ing the civil service , would benefi t.

Jill Rutter is director of the Institute for Government’s better policy making pro-gramme and is a former civil servant

the range of advice given to ministers .The need for more challenge accords

with the fi ndings of research that the Institute for Government published in April 2011 . We found the ministers we interviewed (from the previous Labour government ) thought that, too often, civil servants were not well-connected enough with current thinking in academia and thinktanks, and lacked depth of knowledge in the subject areas they were dealing with. At the same time, the institute found civil servants self-cen-soring the advice they put to ministers .

There is nothing new about open-ing up policymaking. Indeed, recent research by King’s College London has documented the explosion in the number of ad-hoc external “celebrity” reviewers appointed to advise the last two govern-ments . In the past week, Lord Heseltine’s review of growth has been published and Sir Howard Davies, former head of the FSA, has told us how he is going to take forward the remit on his inquiry into airport capacity.

Expert insight

A high proportion of social housing tenants are jobless. How can housing providers best help them into work?

John Coburn, H act housing and empow-erment network Range of services [We found] 88% of housing providers are off ering help, advice, services or work opportunities to residents; [yet] only 42% of housing pro-viders know the employment status of their tenants or residents. The introduc-tion of the universal credit, and the end to direct payment [of rent], will mean that getting your tenants into work is not just about a moral mission. It will also be about protecting your business from risk.

Bernadette O’Shea, chief executive, Hounslow Homes Apprenticeships We recently did an audit of our staff and found that

about 40% live in the borough and about 10% are tenants. In the next year we are going to concentrate on how we can increase th ese numbers. We have started by extending our apprentice programme and really focusing on recruiting local young people and increasing the number of girls. Suggestions from an apprentice-ship group are: don’t make it easy for people on benefi ts; target placement opportunities for tenants in the company; make doing some kind of work compul-sory, even for a few hours a day; help people to improve their CVs; and provide childcare to enable parents to work.

Lynsey Boother, senior employment and skills adviser, National Housing Federation In-work support We need to provide pre-employment support, with realistic expectations and goal setting, and keep people in work once they’ve secured it. There is a history of programmes that ignored people once they were in work, only to fi nd them back on job-seeker’s allowance in less than three months from a job start. That pattern of short-term, low-hope jobs must also be addressed. Providing some support and taster days ; having mentors in place ; and sessions on motivation, planning, under-standing yourself and your job are all proving useful, say [housing] employers.

The Guardian’s professional networks bring together advice, insight and best practice from professionals. Read the full Q&A at http://bit.ly/ULJKSB

‘I want Aisha to grow up stronger than I am’Female genital mutilation is illegal in the UK, but an asylum seeker fears it will be forced on her daughter if they are deported

Rachel Pugh

The fi rst thought Binta Jobe has on waking each morning is of the day she was taken, aged nine, by family, into the bush and forced to undergo female genital mutila-tion (FGM). It was done without anaes-thetic, by an old woman with no medical training. Now the 23-year-old Liverpool-based asylum seeker from the Gambia is fi ghting to save her three-year-old daugh-ter, Aisha, from the same fate.

The World Health Organisation defi nes FGM as “all procedures that involve partial or total removal or injury of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons”. It estimates that up to 140 million females worldwide have experienced the proce-dure, including 92 million in Africa.

“I dream of blood,” says Jobe, who suff ers recurrent infections, sexual prob-lems and pain as a result of the surgery. “It’s an abuse. I just want Aisha to be able to grow up stronger than I am. We have no choice about it in our country. I did not understand that I had rights until I came to the UK.”

Jobe arrived in the UK in 2008 to join her husband who had come to study. Within weeks of Aisha’s birth, there was talk of arranging her circumcision. Jobe fl ed with her daughter. She applied for asylum in 2010, based on her belief that she and her daughter will be tracked down by extended family and Aisha subjected to FGM if they are forced to return to the Gambia.

FGM is still legal in the Gambia, where, according to Unicef, about 78 % of the female population undergo the procedure . Under the UN 1951 Refugee Convention , fear of being forced into FGM is grounds for seeking asylum. It is also regarded by the U N as torture and as “inhuman and degrading”. Yet the UK Border Agency (UKBA) refused Jobe’s application for asylum and her last appeal was turned down in September .

“After careful consideration, both we and the courts have ruled that [ Jobe] is not in need of asylum. The court found [she] could live safely elsewhere in the Gambia and that the law provided suffi -cient protection for her and her daughter,” says a UKBA spokesman .

The government launched the UK’s fi rst all-party parliamentary group on FGM in December 2011 to address FGM both here and abroad. FGM is illegal in the UK under the 2003 Female Genital Mutilation Act, as is sending UK residents abroad to undergo the procedure.

Jobe’s case has be en taken up by human rights lawyer, Peggy Layoo, who is apply-ing for a judicial review. Layoo condemns UKBA’s stance as “utter hypocrisy”.

She says: “FGM is akin to rape, but it is not being taken seriously by UKBA . It is a denial of the suff ering of women in the third world. We all know that FGM is going on, yet the government does not want to do anything about it.”

A 2001 study estimated 66,000 African women in England and Wales had under-gone FGM, and a further 23,000 girls under the age of 15 were at risk. Jobe’s case is viewed by many of those working with asylum seekers as the tip of the iceberg.

Jobe’s pupils dilate with fear at the prospect of returning to the Gambia. She was only 13 when she was married against her will to a family friend more

than 20 years older than her . She cannot read or write. Young women like herself live in compounds in the Gambia with an extended family and she says a sin-gle woman arriving in this small country would stand out and be found by family who would punish her for going against her culture.

“If I go back to the Gambia I might as well just say, ‘ Here I am, come and take me.’ It is a place of gossip and they will just track me down. I will just end up losing my child,” Jobe says.

Sylvia Chant, professor of developmen-tal geography at the London School of Eco-nomics and an expert on the Gambia, sub-mitted a report as evidence to back Jobe’s case. She agrees that Jobe would have few options – for example, prostitution – if she returned to the Gambia , that both she and Aisha would be extremely vulnerable to violent victimisation and neither would receive any state protection.

UKBA says the Gambia has begun mak-ing moves to change the culture around FGM, working with Gamcotrap , one of the oldest women’s rights NGOs in the

Gambia, and through local “dropping of the knife ” ceremonies.

Lauren Butler, an immigration case worker at Rochdale Law Centre, is work-ing on four asylum cases similar to Jobe’s involving FGM. She thinks UKBA’s deci-sions are often based on unreliable sources and are made from a middle-class, white perspective. “They are not apprehending the situation. It is something between wilful ignorance and cultural disbelief,” she says.

UKBA states: “Female genital mutilation is an abhorrent crime, and we are working with international agencies to help prevent women and girls becoming victims.”

But Maurice Wren, director of char-ity Asylum Aid, accuses the government of double standards. He says: “At a time when government is publicly promising action against FGM practised in the UK, it is appalling to think that women and girls who have claimed asylum here are being sent back to face exactly the same abuse overseas.”

Some names have been changed

Binta Jobe and her daughter face being returned to the Gambia, where 78% of females undergo FGM Photograph: Gary Calton

There is concern that ministers would commission advice from those who share their existing views



Social value under the spotlight

At a time when gov-ernment spending is being cut back but the demand for pub-lic services is rising, it’s vital to squeeze the most from every pound of public

money spent. From the contractor building social housing to the caterer who supplies the sandwiches for meetings, the decisions public bodies make about the people they do business with can have a huge knock-on eff ect in their communities. Take the right decision and you can create appren-ticeships and jobs, support fl edgling social enterprises and put extra money into the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

That’s why social value has become such a hot topic for the people delivering our public services. Politicians also want to seize the opportunity to gain wider social benefits from spending decisions. The Social Value Act, which comes into force next year, will require commissioners to at least consider social value when they are agreeing public services contracts.

But for the focus on social value to have real impact, both buyers and suppliers need to be geared up for the challenges ahead. At a roundtable on commissioning for social value in public sector contracts, hosted by the Guardian in association with Fusion21, there was agreement that in this economic climate it was vital to fi nd new ways of working.

The debate was conducted under the Chatham House rule, which allows com-ments to be reported without attribution to encourage a frank exchange of views. One participant kicked off the discussion by saying: “It’s about a shift from a needs-based to a change-based approach. We are looking at how we generate value by using the investment we already have on the table diff erently.”

A mixed picture Already, some organisations are making great strides at both measuring social value and embedding it in their business. But it’s a mixed picture. One contributor, referring to public sector procurement, said: “Some areas seem to be doing very well and have the energy to make things happen and some don’t, even though they are all working to the same rules.”

Among those taking the issue seriously, the roundtable heard, is Liverpool city council, which has said it will go beyond what the Social Value Act sets out by giv-ing preference where possible to social enterprises bidding for contracts. It has also changed its procurement rules to favour organisations with the smallest gap between the lowest and highest paid earn-ers. A participant said: “Cost and quality are always going to be predominant but we think if we can send out a signal to the market that’s important.”

The roundtable heard that local author-ities and other big commissioners should ensure the contract requirements they put in place are not too onerous for smaller social enterprises to fulfi l. Requiring three years of accounts or a £2m turnover, for example, could rule out new social enter-prises that might otherwise be able to use the benefi ts of the contract they win in the local economy. That sentiment was shared by another contributor, who said: “There are numerous hurdles within the current procurement process which really restrict social enterprises. We need to look for new models of working and we need to look at how we avoid a monopoly. Unless we really upskill SMEs [small and medium enterprises] we will have the big boys coming in and the small ones being squeezed out.”

Another barrier is the concern over potential legal challenges to procure-ment decisions in what is traditionally a risk averse part of the public sector. According to one participant, for that to change, both sides of the deal should be clear about what’s expected and a strong relationship of trust needs to be fostered among procurement teams.

But it’s not just about commissioners changing the way they do business. Sup-pliers also need to adapt. “It is diffi cult for [social enterprises] to compete,” said one contributor. “There are barriers around things like OJEU [the Offi cial Journal of the European Union, which publishes tender notices]. But it is also important that we understand what matters to people.”

The roundtable also heard that defi n-ing social value is not an easy task. Dif-ferent public service providers will have their own views about what added social benefits they want to gain from the money they spend. As one partici-

From next year the public sector will need to consider the wider community eff ects of contracts, in addition to service and cost. As Kate Murray heard at a recent debate, creative methods of procurement will be needed

in bureaucracy – and a sense of what they are trying to achieve. “You need to have a whole understanding of social value going through the organisation, right down to the people ordering the sandwiches, rec-ognising that if you go to that person it might be slightly more expensive but you create jobs,” said one contributor. “There needs to be a cultural shift in getting this embedded on the ground.” Another par-ticipant added: “Procurement isn’t a silver bullet. It’s got the potential to do a lot of things, but just including a requirement for social value in a contract doesn’t guar-antee outcomes. You need to make sure the outcomes are delivered and proven. Decisions should be made at the highest level, not just pushed down.”

If this change is to be successfully implemented, good leadership will be essential, the roundtable was told. So too

Bringing programmes together to create long-term work is one possible way of incorporating social value into construction contracts Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

will be creative thinking. There are some fresh ideas out there already. Sometimes they involve changing the way an organi-sation works to bring about positive out-comes. For example, the roundtable heard that Fusion21, originally set up by housing associations as a procurement vehicle, has now become an employer too, seconding people into jobs because of the inherent instability of the construction market.

Another idea, suggested one partici-pant, would be to bring construction pro-grammes together to create sustainable employment opportunities. “The problem with our construction industry is it is stop-start. If we work together to aggregate our build programmes, we can create relation-ships with the supply chain, we can get consistently low costs and we can deliver consistently long-term jobs and training. It’s not about more money, it’s about using the money we have more strategically.”

There are signs the focus on social value could be extended beyond it simply being negotiated on an ad hoc basis as contracts come up. One participant said they would like to see savings in procurement chan-nelled into a specifi c pot to fund social pro-grammes, rather than allowing suppliers to adopt their own approaches and risking “gimmicks or tokenism”. “This is the art of the possible,” the participant said. “There is potential through a pot mechanism to fund lots of social programmes – tackling worklessness, reducing reoff ending, get-ting single mums into work: solutions that have meaning in the community.”

That might not only pay off for stretched public bodies striving to squeeze every penny they can out of the funding going into their communities, but for the wider business world. According to one con-tributor, some forward-thinking compa-nies are starting to recognise that a com-mitment to social value demonstrates to their customers that they are in it for the long term. “The public sector is leading the way,” the roundtable was told. “A real measure of success would be if it’s picked up by the private sector and recognised as a good thing not just for ethical reasons, but because it makes business sense.”

The Social Value Act

The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires public authorities to have regard to economic, social and environmental wellbeing in connection with public services contracts.

The policy has been largely welcomed by commissioners. “The Act should empower organisations to be a little bit braver,” said one participant to the roundtable. “We probably can do most of what we want to do under the existing framework, but it will give added comfort to those who have been receiving cautious advice that they can go ahead.”

‘It’s not about more money, it’s about using the money we have more strategically’

‘You need to have a whole understanding of social value through the organisation’

Roundtable report commissioned by Seven Plus and controlled by the Guardian. Discussion hosted to a brief agreed with Fusion21. Funded by Fusion21. Contact Trish Holst on 020-3353 2347 ([email protected]) For information on roundtables visit: guardian.co.uk/sponsored-content

At the table

pant said: “Social value is in the eye of the commissioner.”

But giving communities a big voice in setting their own priorities is bound to help make sure social value provisions really do have a positive impact on the ground – as is good dialogue.

“If social value is in the eye of the com-missioner, then how do you infl uence that eye?” asked another contributor. “For me it’s about who infl uences the key people before they start making decisions about what they are going to commission. It’s not just about opening up the process to diff erent smaller competitors, it’s how do you influence key policy makers when they are sitting down and thinking about what they will spend the money on?”

On top of that, public services providers will need to have robust ways of measuring outcomes – without getting bogged down

The Guardian roundtable in association with Fusion21

Cllr Paul BrantChairman of the board,Riverside Housing

Anne LundonEnterprise consultant,Plus Dane Group

Steve AggerSocial strategist,Fusion21

Dr Jo MeehanUniversityof Liverpool

Ken TalbotNew -build consultant,Alliance Procurement

Chris MurrayDirector and chair,Core Cities and Fusion21

Steve MooreExecutive director business development,Helena Partnerships

Rosie JollyChief executive,Social Enterprise Network

Louise HarrisHead of social responsibility,First Ark Group

Caroline PriceDirector,The Big Life Group

Bill TaylorRetrofi t consultant,Fusion21

Hannah FearnEditor,Guardian Local Government Network

Dave NeilsonChief executive,Fusion21

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40 The Guardian | Wednesday 7 November 2012

SocietyGuardian Trustees’ Week

between the two . But to tap into this opportunity, charities must think more broadly about how they recruit and whom they target. In many cases, word of mouth is no longer suffi cient to secure the diver-sity of skills and backgrounds required.

The average age of a trustee is 57, so we also need to broaden the demographic. Older people contribute much in terms of experience and time but they may not, for instance, be as familiar with the reach that social media can provide for fundraising and recruitment as someone in their 20s. Currently, 18 to 24-year-olds make up just 0.5% of trustees , despite representing 12% of the population . Even then, they tend to be confi ned to education- and training-related charities. How can we address the challenge of an ageing population if we don’t involve the next generation?

Again, this has the potential to be a win-win situation, as the role of trustee can provide younger people with experience of a range of work-related responsibilities, such as managing accounts and resources, enhancing their employability in a very competitive jobs market.

But of course, it’s not all about what can be gained. Selfl essness and commitment are the hallmarks of so many trustees and seeing the practical, tangible diff erence their eff orts can make is often the major motivating factor I have every confi dence that there are talented, committed people out there – of all ages and backgrounds – who would welcome the opportunity to direct their energy and enthusiasm to a worthwhile cause. There has never been a better time for them to come forward.

Nick Hurd is the minister for civil society. For details of Trustees’ Week events and links to partners who have vacancies, go to trusteesweek.blogspot.com.

Charities may have to think smarter

New charities rely heavily on supporters and contacts to recruit trustees, research by the Charity Commission suggests.

More than half (53%) of all charities seeking registration with the commission say they look to their staff or volunteers to fi nd trustees, while 46% cite personal connections and 39% word of mouth.

Only 10% have advertised trustee vacancies online and 6% have done so in print . More than four in 10 (41%) say their trustees have sought support from another charity in the same fi eld.

The commission, which surveyed 667 organisations seeking to register over the 12 months to August, wants charities to

think more widely and creatively when appointing trustees so that their boards have the right skills and diversity.

Sam Younger, the commission’s chief executive, says: “I would encourage charities to recruit as widely as possible for new trustees, targeting in particular young people who are often able to bring new talents and perspectives .”

The survey found 34% of the fl edgling charities wanted to appoint trustees. Fundraising expertise was the skill most sought, followed by knowledge of charity law and regulation and strategic planning and business development.David Brindle

‘We need new faces around the table’Trustees’ Week allows the unsung heroes of charities to enjoy a day in the sun, says civil society minister Nick Hurd. But it is also an opportunity to attract a new, more diverse range of potential trustees

London 2012 shone a spot-light on the immeasurable role that volunteering plays in our society and it was great to see frontline vol-unteers so fully recognised. But the spotlight needs to shine further still.

When we think about volunteering, certain roles spring to mind: the helper in the local charity shop, the gap-year stu-dent teaching children abroad, the mum who delivers meals to elderly neighbours . But they can’t do it alone. None of these activities happen by chance . From the smallest community group to the largest organisation, behind every good charity is a team of dedicated trustees.

They go by many names – board mem-bers, governors, committee members – but the essence of their role is the same: they are the people responsible for run-ning a charity. They provide leadership and strategic direction; they take respon-sibility for good governance; they decide priorities and allocate resources.

Much of this vital work goes unnoticed, so Trustees’ Week (until 11 November) , organised by the Charity Commission and partners , is a n opportunity for those behind the scenes to enjoy the spotlight . Crucially, I hope it will also serve to reach out to a new wave of potential trustees.

Big recruitment driveThere are 162,000 registered charities in England and Wales , with more than 940,000 trustee s. The government is working to make it eas ier to get involved by introducing a new legal structure, the “charitable incorporated organisation ”, which will protect trustees from personal liability for the fi nances of their charity. But around 50% of charities are thought to

carry at least one trustee vacancy, which calls for a massive recruitment eff ort.

We need new faces around the table. This is a crucial time for the voluntary sec-tor – public service delivery is opening up to social enterprises; the huge potential of digital technology has yet to be fully grasped; and the economic situation remains tight. So we want trustees who bring the kind of leadership and business skills that the sector needs if it is to con-tinue to deliver the support upon which so many rely.

It’s a two-way street. B usinesses have much to gain by supporting trustees among their staff . For those in employ-ment, being a trustee enables them to transfer and gain experience and skills

Charities must think more broadly about how and who they recruit Getty


SocietyGuardian Executive Senior, Management More jobs at guardianjobs.co.ukWednesday 7 November 2012 41

Advertisement No: 01/2012/LNThe Government of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan Negara Brunei Darussalam invites suitably qualifi ed applicants for the following senior posts in the Government Services, Brunei Darussalam.

1. Specialist Education Offi cer 2. Senior Education Offi cer (A) 3. Senior Education Offi cer (B) 4. Specialist Education (Special Level) 5. Education Offi cer 6. Scientifi c Offi cer (Clinical Chemistry) 7. Scientifi c Offi cer (Microbiology) 8. Sports Coach (Golf) 9. Meteorological Offi cer

Application Procedures:Qualifi ed applicants are invited to apply any posts that suit their area of expertise.

Applicants are advised to download and print Application Form SPA1 from our website or obtain the Application Form SPA1 from Embassy/High Commission of Brunei Darussalam.

Note:

Applicants are requested to complete and submit their applications by fi lling in Application Form SPA1. Please specify clearly the name of post that you wish to apply in the application form. (CODE NUMBER for each post is NOT REQUIRED). Please attach copies of testimonials, academic certifi cates and transcripts (from secondary school to highest qualifi cation obtained) and other relevant documents, together with completed application form.

Incomplete application forms or application forms submitted via Email/Fax without any attachment of relevant documents will not be entertained.

Application form can be submitted EITHER to: THE SECRETARY PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION (PSC) 1ST / 2ND FLOOR, PSC BUILDING BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN BB3510 NEGARA BRUNEI DARUSSALAM

OR Email: [email protected]

OR Embassy / High Commission of Brunei Darussalam

Please visit Directory of Missions Abroad at: http://www.mofat.gov.bn

Conditions of Appointment:Successful candidates will be appointed, in the fi rst instance, on a (3) three year contract. Renewal of the contract is based on mutual agreement. Benefi ts, includes air fares, children’s education allowance, annual leave with pay, subsidized housing, an interest free car loan and gratuity of 25% of the fi nal basic salary for Division I, II and III or 15% of the fi nal basic salary for Division IV, for each completed month payable at the end of each contract.

At present, there is no income tax in Brunei Darussalam.

General: 1. Must be prepared to perform duties outside normal working hours, on shift duties/on-call or during public holidays, and also must be prepared to serve in any part of Brunei Darussalam. 2. Has a valid driving license. 3. Maintain a high professional standard at all times. 4. Other terms and conditions are bounded by the rules and regulations that are enforced from time to time.

Any enquiries, contact us through: Email: [email protected] Telephone: (673) 2 383455 Fax: (673) 2 384393

Note: Email and contact numbers are for QUERIES ONLY. For application, please refer to Application Procedures.

Details regarding each post, conditions of appointment, application procedure, the requisite qualifi cation and experience, terms and conditions and duties and responsibilities can be obtained from PSC website http://www.spa.gov/bn/ or through our Embassy or High Commission of Brunei Darussalam at

Brunei Darussalam High Commission, 19-20 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PG.

CLOSING DATE:30 NOVEMBER 2012

Founded in 1905 and with an ambition to be the UK’s leading health and wellbeing mutualorganisation, Benenden Healthcare Society is in an exciting phase of growth and development.Combining the recent constitutional changes that open up membership eligibility with thedevelopment of new products and services, provides substantial opportunities for balancedexpansion. A further £40m investment in the Society’s renowned Kent hospital (which employsc.450 of the 650 total staff) will also enhance its capability to provide the highest quality of care.

With a turnover of £80 million, Benenden Healthcare Society is now seeking a Chief Executive to succeed the current incumbent, who is due to leave in 2013. Accountable to itsmembership of over 900,000 through the Committee of Management, the Chief Executive will lead an experienced executive team in steering the organisation through the strategicchallenges of a rapidly changing healthcare environment in the UK. This is likely to involveseeking appropriate partnerships or acquisitions, as well as developing new products andservices, some regulated, to be offered to the expanding membership, whilst retaining theethos and values of a mutual society.

Candidates for this role are likely to be experienced general managers with a background inboth commercial leadership and healthcare, and either with firsthand experience of workingin a regulated mutual or friendly society environment, or a strong personal identification withthe culture of such organisations, and recognition of the importance of membership. TheChief Executive needs to be an adept strategist and innovator, a motivational and inspiringleader and a sophisticated and confident public communicator for Benenden HealthcareSociety. A high degree of political sensitivity will need to be combined with a prior trackrecord demonstrating leadership of growth and achievement.

For further information about the role and how to apply, please visit www.rraresponses.com or telephone +44 (0) 20 7830 8063 for assistance.

Closing date: 5pm on Wednesday 21 November 2012

Chief ExecutiveCompetitive package • York

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CARE CENTRE MANAGERAttractive SalaryThe Trustees of the Institute of Our Lady of Mercy wish to appoint a suitably qualifi ed and experienced Manager for their Care Centre which provides residential care for 20 older people, specialist care for 30 people living with dementia and 18 ‘extra care’ apartments for people who require varying levels of care / support in their own home.

The successful candidate must be able to lead the team ensuring high care standards and oversee the day to day running of the facility dealing with all aspects of management.

Candidates must have: • A relevant management qualifi cation • Experience of managing a range of services for older people including services for

people living with dementia • Ability to assess and meet the needs of a diverse service user group • A thorough working knowledge of current CQC legislation • Empathy with the aims of the charity and support for the Mercy ethos of the Institute

We have an excellent reputation in the provision of care and are looking for a manager who can help maintain our standards. Appointment will be subject to a satisfactory CRB check at enhanced level.

For an informal discussion contact: Mrs Sandra Atkinson (Area Manager) on 07807 006 218

An application pack is available from Alison Muhl, Administration Manager, by emailing: [email protected] with your details or call Alison on (0113) 250 0253.

Closing Date: Friday 30 November with interviews arranged for 11 December 2012.

Registered Charity No 290544


42 SocietyGuardian Executive Senior, Management, More jobs at guardianjobs.co.ukWednesday 7 November 2012

Training & Volunteer Mentor Offi cer12 Months pilot fi xed term contract(future development possible subject to funding and evidence gathering)

£22,663 - Pro rata/part time - 18.5 hours per week

We are an organisation offering support, information and advice to people living with or affected by HIV & AIDS and providing awareness raising information via Outrite, our health promotion project.

You will be responsible for proactively ensuring the contribution and skills of our current and future volunteers is maximised.

A track record of experience in working with staff and volunteers to lead on all aspects of recruitment, selection, training and management of volunteers within the organisation. Leading and developing awareness raising workshops and training courses across the remit of sexual health.

Job pack available for download from www.bpcnw.co.uk or by contacting BPCNW, PO Box 321, Crewe CW2 7WZ Tel. 01270 653150 [email protected]. For further information please speak to Paul Marsh - Director of Services 01270 653150.

Closing date for applications: 4th December 2012

Interviews for this post will be held on Tuesday 18th December 2012 at our offi ce in Crewe.

To produce exceptional graduates, we need

exceptional staff. Visit our website to see

how you could help.

An environment that encourages creativity, diversity and excellence.

Want to find more job opportunities

with University of the Arts London?

Follow us on Twitter @UALJobs

www.arts.ac.uk/jobsUniversity of the Arts London aims to be an equal opportunities

employer embracing diversity in all areas of activity.

Make sure we’re not kept in the dark.

Discretion is vital. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member.

A conversation turns from sport, to the economy, to politics. And you’re there not just to translate it, not just to interpret it; you’re there to enable us to make the right choices to help safeguard national security.

www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/mandarin

Mandarin Intelligence AnalystsLondon | £27,000 plus £3,000 language allowance

To advertise contact

Guardian JobsLondon: 020 3353 3400Edinburgh: 0131 272 2751

guardianjobs.co.uk

Be the one to help us to make a difference to the lives of young children and their families in Accrington.

Sure Start Hyndburn is a registered charity in Lancashire with lead responsibility for delivering Church & West Accrington and Accring-ton South Children’s Centres. Sure Start Hyndburn also has a subsidiary organisation which leads on the commercial aspect of the organisation. We are seeking to appoint two dynamic and exceptional individuals to strengthen our management team, build on our successes and take the organisation forward.

Chief ExecutivePart time 18.5 hours per week Salary guide pro rata £55,000 (FTE)This post could be made available on a consultancy basis.

We require a skilled leader who is creative, visionary, has the ability to think strategically and has good business and fi nancial acumen. The successful candidate will have experience of working at a senior level in the statutory or voluntary and community sector and within the Children’s Services Sector.

Candidates should demonstrate a history of proven leadership, management, commissioning and fund raising and have good analytical and problem solving skills. Partnership working is integral to the delivery of our strategic plan and the successful candidate will excel at relationship building, networking and have a track record of raising the profi le and income of an organisation.

Operations Manager - Full TimeSalary guide £40,000 - £45,000

We require an experienced professional from the Children’s Services Sector to undertake a key role in leading the operational implementation of all activities and service developments. The successful candidate will have management responsibility for Service Managers and take a lead role on ensuring Health is delivered across the programme.

Experience at a management level across the statutory or voluntary sector including working with partners, parents, carers and local communities is essential. Candidates will demonstrate success at managing change and delivering complex programmes of work. They will also show a high aptitude for performance management, project management and data analysis.

Closing date for applications: Wednesday 21 November 2012 at 5.00 pm.

Interviews will take place during week commencing 3 December 2012.

For an application pack please ring (01254) 357980 or for an informal discussion please contact Lynn Wright on (01254) 387757

Equal Opportunities StatementAn Equal Opportunities Employer welcoming applications from all sections of the community.RehabilitationThe post you are applying for is covered by the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. If successful you will be required to apply to the Criminal Records Bureau for a ‘disclosure’.


SocietyGuardian Executive Senior, Management, Public Services, Courses More jobs at guardianjobs.co.ukWednesday 7 November 2012 43

Our research and evaluation programme seeks to provide robust high quality intelligence that draws on good practice, partnership working, and the most innovative thinking to help shape the skills and employment policy landscape for the next decade and beyond.

Do you have research, statistical or economic skills which could help develop our insights? If so then visit http://www.ukces.org.uk/work-with-us/recruitment for details of our current opportunities.

At Middlesex University, we have a clear vision of our future. Our goal is international excellence and to achieve it, we must think strategically, basing all decisions on sound data.

As Head of Planning, you will ensure that we make the most of our management information. It’s a brand new role, where you will lead our Planning Unit, which collates, analyses and interprets a range of University data. This is a new approach for us and you will be tasked with raising its profi le within the University.

With experience of supporting business, strategic and operational planning at senior executive level, you will be an organised, analytical professional. You have strong communication and presentation skills, plus an MBA, postgraduate qualifi cation or relevant professional qualifi cation.

If you are keen to help shape major changes and see their impact, please apply by visiting www.mdx.ac.uk/jobs

Closing date: 23 November 2012.

Our future’s in your handsHead of Planning£60,000 - £70,000Hendon, LondonRef: PL01

Service Director

Salary c. £56,000 per annum

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a highly motivated and established leader to help us to achieve our new strategic aims. As we embark on a signifi cant period of change by expanding our reach as a local hospice, this high-profi le role will carry the responsibility for customer engagement, service development, information services, and the commercial dimensions of St Catherine’s, whilst, providing corporate leadership as a member of our new senior team.

You will need solid leadership and management experience, have sound strategic and commercial expertise, in addition to experience in setting and managing budgets. You will possess a proven track record of developing, running and scaling effective services. Naturally, you will have exemplary communication skills, with the ability to build high-level relationships across a complex range of stakeholders.

For an informal chat about the role, please ring Shaun O’Leary, CEO, on 01293 447350.

For further information or an application pack please call the HR Department on 01293 447384, email [email protected]. or visit our website: www.stch.org.uk

Closing date for applications: 22nd Nov 12Interviews anticipated: 28th Nov 12

This post will be subject to Enhanced CRB disclosure

Registered charity no. 281362

The Guardian

carries more

public

sector

recruitment

advertising

than

Community

Care or any

other

publication

Source: NMR Dec 08 - Nov 09

Children and Families Group Manager Ref CE1291

£42,014 - £48,200 per annum

An exciting opportunity has arisen to lead and manage Cheshire East’s

Adoption and Special Guardianship Service. We are looking for an

innovative Group Manager with sound knowledge of the adoption

framework to deliver an excellent service for Cared for Children needing

adoptive and permanent families. Having outstanding social work

expertise, alongside a proven track record in decision making, care

planning and permanency work, you are likely to have managerial

experience already. You will be a sound communicator, able to build

positive relationships across Childrens Services to ensure that adoptive

and permanent families are secured in a timely way. If you are passionate

about ensuring the best possible outcomes for Cared for Children, we

would like to hear from you.

For an informal discussion, please contact Julie Lewis, Principal Manager

Cared for Children on 01606 271851.

For further information and to apply visit www.cheshireeast.gov.uk/jobs

For enquiries please email [email protected] or

telephone 0300 123 5500. Please quote job reference.

Closing date: 15 November 2012.

TrusteeUnpaid

The University of Salford Students’ Union is the representative body for students of the University of Salford and provides wide-ranging services for its members. The Union is a charity with annual revenues of £2 million and 75 staff. Our services range from a bar and café to a student advice centre, and 80 student sports clubs and societies to retail outlets.

We are seeking someone with a track record of working at a senior level in the private, public or voluntary sectors, who is able to infl uence the strategic direction of an organisation and can demonstrate effective leadership qualities. The right candidate will command confi dence, have sound judgement and strong communication skills; s/he will be an excellent role model, resourceful and credible because of what they do and how they do it. We would particularly like to hear from individuals who may possess senior management experience in human resource management, fi nancial management or broad commercial management.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a successful and dynamic organisation and to develop skills and knowledge. For an informal conversation about this opportunity, please contact Phil Benton, Chief Executive, on 0161 351 5400.A full application pack and further information are available atwww.salfordstudents.com/externaltrustee or by emailing [email protected]

Closing date for applications 30 November 2012.

To advertise contact

GuardianJobsLondon: 020 3353 3400Edinburgh: 0131 272 2751

guardianjobs.co.uk

Camden

Finance Director £40,506 - £44,910 per annum, pro rata | 28 hours per week

As a Senior Management team member, you will have responsibility for the effective financial management of Age UK Camden. You will undertake the Company Secretary role, work with the CEO to identify the market for existing and potential services, oversee and undertake business and financial planning to produce business cases with robust financial modelling.

You will be a qualified accountant (ACCA, CIMA or ACA), with an entrepreneurial approach to developing new services in a not-for-profit organisation. Essentials include: a strategic approach to finance, experience of production of management accounts, managing audits, and excellent communication skills. As well as strategic

skills, with one finance officer to manage, you must be prepared to be “hands on”.

This post is based near Euston Station which has excellent transport links.

For further details and an application form, please visit www.ageukcamden.org.uk alternatively email [email protected] or telephone 020 7239 0400. No CVs and no agencies, please.

Closing date: 9am on Monday, 26th November 2012. Interviews: Tuesday, 18th December 2012.

Age UK Camden is committed to being an equal opportunities employer.

Registered Charity No. 293446

Age UK Camden has a turnover of £2.1 million, employs 68 staff, engages 250 volunteers and provides crucial services to 6,000 older people every year.

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The closing date for applications is Saturday 17th November 2012

The British Council creates international opportunities for the people of the UK and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide.

The British Council is committed to a policy of equal opportunities

Director Society, Middle East and North Africa£47,000 p.a. + benefi ts. Based in Cairo, with regional travel


44 SocietyGuardian Exec Senior, Management, Pub Services, Jobs Online, NoticeboardMore jobs at guardianjobs.co.ukWednesday 7 November 2012

ParentPlus Programme Manager Chance UK NJC Scale SO2, sp32 £30,351- sp34 31,935 + 5% pensionBayswater, LondonRef: 4536882 Job Type: PT, 21hrs p/w

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PROVISION OF FLEXIBLE INTEGRATEDDRUG AND ALCOHOL RECOVERY SERVICES

FOR ADULTS RESIDENT IN HARINGEY

PROVIDER EVENT/TENDER OPPORTUNITY

MEET THE BUYER EVENT

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A Meet the Buyer event is being held to inform Service Providers of the forthcoming procurement opportunity for provision of a new, fl exible integrated drug and alcohol recovery service system.

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To book a place, please email [email protected] by 27th November 2012. Places may be limited to 2 persons per organisation.

RESTRICTED TENDERING PROCESS

Interested organisations are invited to express and interest in the tendering of the provision of fl exible integrated drug and alcohol recovery services. To complete the Pre Qualifi cation Questionnaire (PQQ) please register on www.competefor.com. The PQQ, will be available from 6th December 2012.

Head of Older People and Adults Integrated Health & Social Care CommissioningWest Sussex up to £82,000

This new role is part of our commitment to improve outcomes for those who live in West Sussex through the commisioning of Integrated Services.Visit www.gatenbysanderson.com. Alternatively, for a confi dential discussion about these roles please contact John Wilson on 0113 205 6074 or David Slatter on 0121 644 5704.

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Protecting consumers andpowering the future of

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Open Age, a user led charity providing leisure, learning and employment opportunities for older people in Central London is looking for pro active staff with community outreach experience:

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VERNA JOAN WILSON NEE WOOD (DECEASED)

Pursuant to the Trustees Act 1925 any persons having a claim against or an interest in the Estate of aforementioned deceased, late of Beckside Cottage, Beckside, Kirkby-in-Furness, Cumbria, LA17 7TQ, who died on 17/07/11, are required to send their particulars thereof in writing to the under mentioned Administrators on or before 19/12/12, after which date the Estate will be distributed having regard only to the claims and interests of which they have had notice.

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www.dogstrust.org.uk A Dog is for Life

East LondonEducation Officer Full timeBased at Head Office, LondonDogs Trust is the UK's largest dog welfare charity.Every year, we look after over 16,000 dogs at ournationwide network of Rehoming centres and wenever destroy a healthy dog.

Our 17 full time Education Officers deliver workshopsand activities in schools and other settings, designedto educate children and young people fromcommunities with significant social problems inresponsible dog ownership. We are now recruitingan Education Officer for East London based at ourHead Office.

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Dogs Trust is an equal opportunities employer.

The successful candidate requires an enhanced CRB disclosure check.



Obituaries Obituaries deskEmail: [email protected]@guardian.co.ukTwitter: @guardianobits

Birthdays

Ian Balding, racehorse trainer, 74; John Barnes, football coach, 49 ; Michael Byrne, actor, 69; Dame Silvia Cart-wright, former governor general of New Zealand, 69 ; Lindsay Duncan, actor, 62; Sir Paul Ennals, former chief executive, National Children’s Bureau, 56; Billy Graham, evangelist, 94; James Gray, Conservative MP, 58; Lucinda Green, equestrian, 59 ; Danny Grewcock, rugby player, 40 ; Philip Hollobone, Conserva-tive MP, 48; Dame Gwyneth Jones, op-eratic soprano, 76; Joni Mitchell, singer and songwriter, 69; Jean Shrimpton ( Jean Cox), hotelier, former model, 70; Sharleen Spiteri, pop singer, 45 ; Mor-gan Spurlock, documentary maker, 42; Tinie Tempah, rapper, 24; Sir Anthony Wheeler, architect, 93 ; Peter Wilby, journalist, 68.

Announcements

Carter’s Symphony of Three Orchestras (1977), inspired by Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge, evokes all the confl icting energies of America Photograph: John Lent/AP

Elliott Carter

The American composer Elliott Carter, who has died aged 103, was, apart from Pierre Boulez , the last survivor of the heroic age of postwar musical modernism, and perhaps its greatest exponent. In

the 1950s, when Carter wrote his fi rst masterpieces in his new self-made, fabu-lously intricate language, that age was in full fl ood. By the time he wrote his play-ful late masterpieces, it had long since passed into history.

And yet despite his longevity, Carter never became what so many aged art-ists become: relics of a bygone age, constantly interviewed for their memo-ries of the past. He always lived in the present tense. By the same token, he and his music were completely impervious to fashion. The music lost its hectic intri-cacy of the 1970s and 80s and became so graceful in its modernist purism that it took on the mysterious quality of a classic – always contemporary, through being essentially timeless.

Most composers’ biographies bear out the adage that geniuses are born, not made. With Carter the reverse was true. There was no revelation in early childhood of unusual gifts . What dis-tinguishes Carter’s early years is not precocious musicality but precocious maturity and self-belief. He was born in New York, at a time when the fi rst sky-scrapers were appearing on the skyline, but milk was still delivered by horse and cart. His father was a lace importer and Elliott often accompanied his father on buying trips, which allowed him to learn French and Flemish at fi rst hand.

It was a solid bourgeois upbringing, but the boy soon showed a rebellious streak . His father hoped he would take over the business and must have been annoyed to fi nd his son so passion-ate not just about music, but beastly modern music. The young Carter was attracted to anything new : he attend ed the fi rst American performance of The Rite of Spring, in 1924. In the same year Carter met the founding father of Ameri-can musical modernism, Charles Ives . The frail elderly man took to the deter-mined young man, describing him in a letter of recommendation to Harvard University as “rather an exceptional boy. He has an instinctive interest in litera-ture, and especially music.”

At Harvard, Carter studied English literature, but he also learned ancient Greek, sang in the Harvard Glee Club and wrote incidental music for theatre productions. A career as a music critic or a humanities teacher (he taught for sev-eral years at St John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland), combined with some com-posing for choirs on the side, seemed his most likely prospect. But Carter’s per-sistent explor ations and self-questioning suggest an inkling of a bigger goal.

The next 15 years were ones of slow maturing, revealed in a trying-out of various idioms . In retrospect, these years take on an awesome quality of self-possessed, unhurried progress toward a goal whose essence was glimpsed, but for which the technical means were as yet lacking. What Carter was searching for was a music apt for the multilayered experience of being alive in the 20th century. But he was

aware that the obstreperous American modernism of Ives, Henry Brant and Edgard Varèse wouldn’t do.

Urban and “machine-age” sounds and gestures did not interest him; they were too much of the moment. He wanted a modernism beyond fashion and to achieve that some European sophistica-tion would be necessary. All the things he had absorbed would eventually fi nd a place in his modernist idiom: the idea of dramatic personages found in Mozart operas, the independent layers of Eng-lish madrigals, the syntactic rigour of Arnold Schoenberg – and the combina-tion of strict and free rhythm in jazz pianists he admired, such as Art Tatum.

Synthesi sing all these within a coherent idiom that was both authentically contem-porary and authentically American would prove ago-nisingly hard. From 1932 he spent three years in Paris acquiring a solid technical

grounding from neo-classicism’s leading proselyte, Nadia Boulanger, which left its mark on his String Quartet in C .

Once back in America, Carter became the musical director for Lincoln Kirst-ein’s Ballet Caravan, for which he com-posed the ballet Pocahontas, and in 1939 he married the sculptor Helen Frost-Jones. Like his slightly older contempo-rary Aaron Copland, Carter was swept up in the populist spirit engendered by the Depression. One result was his Holi-day Overture, composed in 1944 during a summer stay on Fire Island.

Copland was a guest during that sum-mer and his ballet Appalachian Spring was written at the same kitchen table as Carter’s overture. Copland’s ballet was a perfect piece of American arcadiana . Carter’s overture, though sharing some of Copland’s upbeat diatonic fl avour, had an admixture of Carter-ish com-plexity and dissonance. His inability, or refusal, to strike a purely populist note helps to explain why, with his 40th birthday looming, he was still a mar-ginal fi gure. When Copland published a survey of “younger talents to watch”, in 1948, Carter did not get a mention, a fact which – despite his aff ection for Copland – still rankled in later years.

Eventually Carter realised that all the accumulated baggage of his music – the neoclassicism, the madrigalian refer-ences, the Greek texts, the Americana – would have to go. In the Piano Sonata of 1945, written the year he moved with his wife into the brownstone apartment

he would live in for the rest of his life, Carter retains the massive rhetoric of the American sublime. But the cyclic form, the startling use of piano reso-nances and rhythmic fl exibility mark a huge step forward. The Cello Sonata of 1948 is another leap towards a really radical conception of form. The piece at the end seems to loop back to its open-ing, in a way that recalls Stéphane Mal-larmé’s conception of a book that one can begin at any point. At the beginning, a strict metronomic “ticking” in the piano is combined with a rhapsodically unfolding line in the cello. Nothing quite like this joining of two radically opposed worlds moving at diff erent speeds had been heard in music before.

But it was in the First String Quartet of 1951 that Carter’s new conception of independent musical layers, sometimes co-operating, sometimes clashing , came into focus. To achieve it, Carter cut him-self off from his usual surroundings and moved to the Arizona desert for several months. What survives from his old manner is a rhetoric of wide intervals, as if the American sublime has been subli-mated and purged of anything local.

That joining together of strenuous-ness with an ever-increasing allusiveness would defi ne Carter’s creative project for the next two decades. It revealed itself in three works of astounding complex-ity that occupied him for more than 10 years: the Double Concerto, premiered in 1961, the Piano Concerto – written in 1964-65, partly in Berlin – and the Con-certo for Orchestra of 1969.

Carter was now in his 60s, and his life had long since settled into a pattern that mingled teaching and composing during the academic year with more con-centrated creative work during summer retreats at the Carters’ modest country home at Waccabuc in upstate New York. He had reached the age at which most composers are in some way retrenching.

No body could have guessed that Carter was just getting into his stride, and that ahead of him lay more than four decades of creativity. In the 1970s, after a gap of nearly 30 years, he returned to vocal writing in a series of intricate set-tings of American poets such as John Ashbery, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. This decade also produced the distilled essence of Carter’s style: The Symphony of Three Orchestras (1977). Inspired by Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge, the piece evokes all the confl ict-ing energies of America, with a soaring trumpet solo that captures Crane’s image of a gull wheeling over Brooklyn Bridge.

American composer who dominated the heroic age of postwar musical modernism

By the 1980s, Carter was established as modernism’s not-so-grand old man. He was not ignored in America, but it was the respectful esteem of prizes and fel-lowships that came his way rather than aff ection. As ever, Carter was a frequent visitor to Europe, where his uncom-promising modernism found a warmer reception. However, he was an indefati-gable worker and was much involved in practical ways with American musical life. He taught, principally at the Juil-liard School, in New York, held guest professorships in the US and in Europe and served on the board of the American section of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Up to the 1970s, Carter had been a constructivist composer. Some pieces were based on polymetric grids, and all of them involved complex rhythmic gear-changes known as metric modula-tions. Carter also made use of a systema-tised harmonic system, involving tables of all possible permutations of a given set of intervals. Manipulating these systems involved immense labour and copious sheaves of preliminary sketches (well over a thousand pages for A Sym-phony in Three Movements).

But from the 80s Carter increasingly composed free-style, by ear. This is one reason for his increased productiv-ity. Another is that the knotted density of his 60s and 70s scores gave

way to a new transparency – though the musical thought is more quicksil-ver than ever (“When will Carter start to write an old man’s music?” was the plaintive comment of a composer sev-eral decades his junior .) A stream of chamber miniatures emerged, as well as elegant concertos. The greatest surprise of Carter’s later years was the appear-ance of an opera, What Next?, fi rst performed in 1998. However, not all the late works were light in tone. Sympho-nia, premiered in 1996, is his weightiest achievement, with a middle movement, Adagio Tenebroso, that is the most perfect example of Carter’s desolate, unfathomably dark slow movements.

In the 1990s, America seemed to wake up to the fact that the most revered liv-ing composer on the planet was one of their own. As if to make up for lost time, a stream of home-grown commissions followed. There were more surprises, including a piece composed in 2007 for string orchestra, Soundings, of astonish-

ing simplicity. This aloof procession of slow chords comes close to Morton Feld-man, a composer often thought of as Cart-er’s opposite. When this was pointed out to him, he said, “I know”, with a naughty twinkle. “When you get to my age”, he said, “you just want to have fun.”

Despite the death of his wife in 2003, Carter’s cheerful spirit seemed undimmed. He continued to travel across the Atlantic for performances of his music . The concert for his 103rd birth-day contained three US and three world premieres, and last month saw the world premiere of Dialogues II , for piano – Dan-iel Barenboim – and chamber orchestra .

Carter was, under his genial demean-our, a fi ghter. To the end one could detect a determined set of the jaw . And there is sometimes a surprisingly aggressive tone in his letters . These clues point to the inevitable human cost of such an implacable struggle sustained over so many years, which perhaps only those closest to Carter had to bear. For the rest of the world, Carter off ers an inspiring image of the heights to which determined creative self-fashioning can rise, and a body of work that in its total integrity, masterly craftsmanship and many-sided expressive power, already deserves the name of classic.

Carter is survived by his son, David, and a grandson. Ivan Hewett

Elliott Cook Carter, composer, born 11 December 1908; died 5 November 2012



guardian.co.uk/sport

Is Compton the answer to England’s long game? Cricket, page 48 ≥

Chris Cook Exeter

Cue Card confi rmed his talent with a most impressive victory in the Haldon Gold Cup here but did more to ignite arguments about his future than to settle them. He is the pride and joy of the Tizzard fam-ily, who lavish attention on him at their Dorset yard, while also being the cause of much friction over the breakfast table when they discuss the question of his ideal distance.

This was a notable success for Joe Tizzard, Cue Card’s 32-year-old jockey, who has long argued for the horse to be kept to shorter trips, such as the two miles and a furlong of this race. It was Joe who spotted the Haldon Gold Cup as a suitable target when his father, Colin, the trainer, had been looking at a much less valuable contest at Kempton on Monday.

“Once he said it, it was obvious, wasn’t it?” Colin conceded from the winner’s enclosure. “I probably would have thought of it the day after.”

It is an insight into the direction Tizzard Sr’s thoughts were tending that, on the morning of this race, he entered Cue Card for Haydock’s Betfair Chase over three miles. The way his horse coasted around in the lead, fi nally pulling 26 lengths clear of Edgardo Sol and Meno-rah, forced an immediate rethink.

“Does he need to go three miles now? Can he go that fast and stay? I don’t know .” The trainer was a picture of cheerful cogitation as others hugged and took photographs close by.

“It’s probably the best feel he’s ever given me. He’s made fast horses look slow today,” said Joe, who, when pressed, suggested that two and a half miles may be Cue Card’s optimum. But both

men seem to accept that the King George VI Chase over three miles on Boxing Day is a challenge that should not be ducked, Kempton’s sharp circuit off ering less of a test than other courses.

“We’ll have to do it at Christmas, won’t we?” Colin said. “It’s the ideal track .” Cue Card is now no bigger than 10-1 for the King George, having been 25-1 previously.

Another run is planned before Kempton but the Betfair Chase is no longer favour-ite. Huntingdon’s Peterborough Chase over two and a half miles seems more likely, while a more ambitious option would be the two-mile Tingle Creek against the mighty Sprinter Sacre, who beat Cue Card at this year’s Cheltenham Festival . A fi nal decision will not be made until the Tizzards have engaged in several more debates. “We have them every day, don’t worry,” Colin said, ruefully. “I don’t mind a bit of input …”

Half an hour later, this became a big day for the family when they won the novice chase with Theatre Guide, taking the nota-ble scalp of Hinterland, who had been fan-cied for the Arkle at next year’s Festival. Down the back stretch, Theatre Guide was so far behind Colin thought his son must

have decided just to do “a good school-ing job”, but Ruby Walsh and Tony

McCoy, riding the two favourites, had gone too fast in front and were sitting on exhausted ani-

mals by the turn for home.Defeat for Edgardo Sol and Hinter-

land brought an end to Paul Nicholls’s tre-mendous recent run , though his wins in

the opening two novice hurdles under-lined the depth of young talent at his

yard. More is to come; the champion trainer revealed he has two half-

brothers to Best Mate, called Nitrogen and Pure Oxygen, to unleash in the coming weeks.

Racing NottinghamChris Cook Top Form

12.10 Auntie Kathryn Auntie Kathryn

12.40 Rio Sands Tenancy

1.10 Shiatsu Blue Lotus

1.40 Dashing Star Arabian Skies

2.10 Motion Lass Muhtaris

2.40 St Moritz Colonial

3.15 Maven Leviathan

3.50 Monthly Medal Astra Hall

Warwick12.50 Aegean Destiny Spoil Me

1.20 Full Ov Beans Daneva

1.50 Ironically J T Muffi nman

2.20 Shangani Hazy Tom

2.55 Defi nite Chance Iron Chancellor

3.30 Kilcascan Overton Lad

4.05 Mischievous Milly Lillybrook

KemptonChris Cook Top Form

4.25 Villoresi Villoresin

4.55 Islesman Inthar

5.25 Atlantis City Rottingdean

5.55 Twary Twary

6.25 Italian Riviera Italian Riviera

6.55 Spring Of Fame Sp Of Fame (nap)

7.25 Rustic Deacon Validus (nb)

7.55 Sir Dylan Eanans Bay

Chepstow1.00 Roger Beantown Roger Beantown

1.30 Tolkeins Tango Sin Bin

2.00 Cre’ll Crusader (nb)Ski Sunday

2.30 Sophonie Sophonie

3.05 Lady Bridget Todareistodo

3.40 Royal Mile (nap) Royal Mile

4.15 Admiral Blake Noble PerkToday’s big races6.55 KemptonRichard Hughes Floodlit Listed Stakes (Class 1) 1m 4f £18,714

7.25 KemptonPeter Slattery Big Birthday Handicap(Class 3) 1m £6,663

1 (6) 004041 Layline (15,D) Miss G Kelleway 5 9.3 DOUBTFUL —

2 (4) 215353 Media Hype (59) Mrs K Burke 5 9.3 M Harley 87

3 (3) -46336 Modun (53,CD,BF) S Bin Suroor 5 9.3 S De Sousa 88

4 (7) 2/250- Nebula Storm (J14,BF) G L Moore 5 9.3 G Baker 83

5 (8) 5-2120 Spring Of Fame (47) S Bin Suroor 6 9.3 M Barzalona 90

6 (1) 036030 Tappanappa (23,CD) B Ellison 5 9.3 W Buick★ 86

7 (2) -14111 Viking Storm (53,D) H Dunlop 4 9.3 P Hanagan 88

8 (5) 621126 Sequence (41,D) Sir M Stoute 3 8.6 R Hughes 89

1 (7) 300U00 Loyalty (6,CD) D Shaw 5 9.7 P Mathers★85

2 (3) -15314 True To Form (6,CD) M Meade 5 9.6 D Probert87

3 (4) 315- Validus (396,CD) L Cumani 3 9.5 Kirsty Milczarek90

4 (5) 066604 George Guru (60,CD) M Attwater 5 9.5

M Coumbe (3)82

5 (8) /1-204 Terdaad (103,C,D) S Bin Suroor 4 9.3 S De Sousa89

6 (10) 5-1360 Invisible Hunter (60,D) S Bin Suroor 3 9.3

M Barzalona86

7 (12) 520103 Shavansky (26,CD) B Millman 8 9.0 J Millman85

8 (2) 500600 Albaqaa (6,D) P O’Gorman 7 8.12 D Holland87

9 (1) 56450- Eighty Eight Red (422) Ed Walker 4 8.12 L Morris84

10 (14) 10022 Chapter And Verse (14,CD) Mike Murphy 6 8.11

J Crowley88

11 (13) -32013 Rustic Deacon (28,C,D) W Musson 5 8.11

R Da Silva (3)86

12 (11) 40036 Red Seventy (4) R Hannon 3 8.8 R Hughes83

13 (6) 0-1 Net Whizz (48,CD) J Noseda 3 8.8 W Buick89

14 (9) 324665 Jack Who’s He (6) P Evans 3 8.7 C Catlin84

Betting 7-2 Net Whizz, 5-1 Chapter And Verse, 13-2 Validus, 8-1 Rustic

Deacon, Terdaad, 12-1 Invisible Hunter, George Guru.

Betting 9-4 Viking Storm, 5-2 Spring Of Fame, 9-2 Modun,

5-1 Sequence, 12-1 Media Hype, 16-1 Nebula Storm .

Godolphin have taken the honours in three of the last four renewals and

Spring Of Fame is the pick, even though he struggled on his return to

British action. He was seventh to Grandeur at Newbury, but the form is

strong because the winner followed up on the Breeders’ Cup undercard,

and the placed horses have acquitted themselves well since too.

Today’s tips

Joe Tizzard steers Cue Card to a highly impressive victory in the Haldon Gold Cup Chase at Exeter

Who’s running today? Racecards, news and live results online at guardian.co.uk/horseracing

Card heads to top of the pack with King George fi rmly in his sights

Lord Coe takes the Olympic reins – with in-tray full of issuesThe new BOA chairman must decide how to exploit nation’s high standing, writes Owen Gibson

When he is voted in unopposed as the chairman of the British Olympic Association today , Lord Coe will be at once joining an organisation on the crest of a wave and in some diffi culty. On the one hand, it has just played a major part in delivering the best British performance at an Olympic Games in over a century, under the unremitting glare of a home Games. On the other, it faces long-running questions over its fi nances and remit amid a looming debate over the post -Games sporting landscape. But the appointment of Coe, London 2012’s fi gurehead with a large reservoir of political, public and international goodwill to draw on, will give it the best opportunity possible to face those challenges – assuming he can devote enough time to them . Among the challenges in his in-tray are:

Finances Before taking the job, Coe sought assurances that the BOA’s creaky fi nances would not damage his ability to do it. Dismal sales of BOA scarves and medallions during the Games, not to mention a long-running row with Coe’s Locog over the deal that originally licensed the Olympic rings to the 2012 organisers, left the BOA’s balance sheet in a parlous state. Its 2011 accounts revealed a £411,000 loss but the more serious impact will be felt this year when the full cost of delivering the 550 -strong British team

to the Games are taken into account. In its recent accounts, it revealed that it had extended its overdraft to £5m for the fi rst quarter of next year. There is also an ongoing debate about whether it should lobby for a share of public money for some areas of its operation – such as the museum it wants to build on the Olympic Park – or remain entirely independent of government.

Legacy Coe was once fond of saying it was for others to deliver on the legacy created by the Games . But his decision to accept an off er from David Cameron to be a governm ent advis er and cheerleader for the Olympic legacy and an entreaty from the sports minister, Hugh Robertson, to take on the BOA role have left him among those who will be judged on whether the promises he made to secure the Olympics are being kept. The success of the Games has not only given the BOA a platform to exploit but also left Britain’s standing at an all -time high among the global sporting community. A bid for the 2018 Youth Olympic Games has already been submitted on behalf of Glasgow, but it will be for Coe to decide how else best to capitalise.

Role A long overdue debate on the respective roles and responsibilities of the alphabet soup of British sports administration bodies had been put off until after the Games. A full-blown merger of UK Sport, the Olympic funding agency with which the BOA under outgoing chairman Lord Moynihan regularly clashed, and grassroots body Sport England is likely to be put on ice in favour of streamlining their operations and moving to new offi ces. Before the Games, Moynihan

One of Lord Coe’s main tasks will be to defi ne what sort of organisation he wants the British Olympic Association to be Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

had spoken ambitiously about the BOA taking a lead role in coaching, school sport and a host of other areas that could lead to clashes and overlap. Coe’s task will be to defi ne what sort of organisation he wants the BOA to be .

Staff Ahead of the arrival of the new chairman, the BOA chief executive, Andy Hunt, presented a restructuring plan to the board designed to streamline the number of senior staff and save money – and potentially cement his own position in the process. The departure of Sir Clive Woodward, although by his own volition, will also help save money. Under the plan, the number of divisional directors will be reduced from 11 to seven and the overall headcount from 87 to 52 . Coe will have to pilot the organisation through this morale-sapping period and emerge the other side with a clearer idea of its future role.

Commercial The rationale behind the investment by Moynihan and Hunt – who expand ed the commercial team ahead of the Games – was the lure of the rewards on off er once the rights to the Olympic rings return to the organisation at the beginning of next year. But aside from a new contract with Adidas and a marketing deal with the International Olympic Committee’s commercial partners, which will bring in £13m over the next four years, there has been little progress in getting other deals over the line. The hope is that Coe’s longstanding links at the highest levels with some of the biggest multinationals, and Locog’s success in delivering more than £700m of sponsorship income will help seal more of those deals.



Rugby union Autumn internationals Tennis

Wales drop Phillips in warning to players considering a move to England or France Paul Rees

Wales have sent a warning to anyone con-sidering a big-money move outside the region by ditching their Lions star Mike Phillips.

The Bayonne scrum-half has been dropped from the side to face Argentina at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday as a sign that the country will favour home-grown players instead of those who move to the Top 14 or the Aviva Premiership.

“Going to France or England could aff ect international careers,” said Rob Howley, Wales’s interim head coach. “Only players who are based in Wales can take a full part in the vital 13-day preparation we have before international periods and, while it is diffi cult leaving the likes of Mike Phil-lips out, because of their experience, we have to take the hit because we are hugely supportive of our regions.”

Only one of the five squad members who earn their livings outside Wales will start against Argentina, the Toulon prop Gethin Jenkins. He had, said Howley,

Kevin Mitchell O2 Arena

Very little that Roger Federer does on a tennis court does not bear the royal imprint, and the defending champion was at his most imperious in dismissing the intermittently pesky challenge of Janko Tisparevic as he embarked on a quest for his seventh title at the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals.

That would put him two ahead of Pete Sampras and Ivan Lendl and, make no mis-take, would give him immense pleasure.

Federer, at 31, remains a phenomenon, the owner of 17 slam titles and, to the incredulity of many in the game, hungry for more. It hurt him to be denied the chance of fi nishing the year as the world No1 after losing to Juan Martín del Potro in Basel two weeks ago and he is clearly intent on revenge this week – although the Argentinian, in Federer’s group, is not without his own certainty of purpose after a good run of matches.

Tipsarevic, the most cerebral of players, was left shaking his head between games in the fi rst set yesterday , in which he cob-bled together three games in the half -hour it lasted; after a further 38 minutes, the deed was done, Federer closing it out 6-1.

This was one of those days when the Swiss – in and out of sorts in recent weeks – looked loose and mean, killing points early when he chose, letting them fl ow when his eighth-seed opponent mus-tered some resistance. He has hinted of injury without being specific; there was nothing wrong with his effortless elegance yesterday .

Of the thousands pouring off the under-ground at North Greenwich before lunch to pay homage to Federer, it was not just the hardcore doubles fanatics who knew that Jonathan Marray was neither French nor a spelling mistake.

Once a battler on the milk-and-bananas circuit, scrapping for partners and living where ver the tournament organisers felt fit, Marray, with the latest Wimbledon doubles title on his mantelpiece , is not only British but a pretty decent player.

He was good enough to combine with his quirky and talented Wimbledon cohort Frederik Nielsen again in seeing off Mahesh Bhupathi and Rohan Bopanna, the fi fth seeds, the abbreviation of whose names on the big screen fell pleasingly as “Bhu/Bop”.

However, Marray (who has played with near namesake Jamie Murray) is already looking for another partner, as Nielsen is trying his hand at singles next year. To that end, Marray has placed an ad on the ATP website, a sort of lonely hearts section for the game’s dispossessed.

“Bhu/Bop” were not quite sharp enough yesterday for the subtleties of “Mar/Nie”, who won their first-round match in Group B 6-4, 6-7 , 12-10. They trailed 5-1 in the champions tie-break and had to save two match points.

What a year it has been for Marray. Acknowledged as the best footballer among other players in pick-up games, incidentally, he is also regarded as a ridicu-lously gifted volleyer, perhaps the best on tour. But he is a realist too.

“There’s not many events like this,” he said, “and I’m enjoying every minute of it. This is the top end of the game, staying at fi ve-star hotels. I’ve played a lot of Futures and Challengers, most of my career. In Uzbekistan we were staying in the fl ats of some local residents, who were probably thrown out for a couple of weeks while we were there.

“You fl y into Tashkent, and it’s a six-hour car journey to the tournament. There was an uprising, and the British consu-late had to come in and drive us out in an armed convoy. It’s all character-building stuff , isn’t it?” With a dividend.

secured release from his club for next month’s fourth international against Australia, unlike Bath’s Paul James, Per-pignan’s James Hook, who is on the bench despite Jonathan Davies’s injury creating a vacancy in the centre, and Phillips. The second-row Luke Charteris will be avail-able to face the Wallabies as a quid pro quo after Wales released him back to his club, Perpignan, this week.

Three of Wales’s grand slam winners this year who will be out of contract with their regions at the end of the sea-son, Jamie Roberts, Alex Cuthbert and Dan Lydiate, are being chased by Top 14 clubs . With Wales chilling out in Poland before the autumn series, the Six Nations and World Cups, excursions for which French and English clubs are not obliged to release players, the preparation will become counter productive if many more render themselves unavailable.

“This makes you think a lot more about what you want to do next season,” said Roberts, the Cardiff Blues and Lions centre, reflecting on the damage play-ing in France could do to his Test career.

“ Whatever decision I make has to be the right one for me: there are a number of fac-tors to consider, including international rugby. It is a huge call.”

Although it was Howley who was artic-ulating the counter attack on French and English clubs, he was speaking with the assent of the Wales coach, Warren Gat-land, who is on secondment to the Lions for the season, apart from later this month when he returns to take charge of the Tests against New Zealand and Australia. He has long warned players of the consequences of playing outside Wales but the fi nancial problems besetting regional rugby are threatening to generate a mass exodus.

Wales have chosen the Scarlets’ Tavis Knoyle, who missed the Six Nations after having shoulder surgery, at scrum-half, the fourth player they have used in the posi-tion this year, because of the integral part he played in last week’s Poland camp.

“Team dynamics are important and when you take yourself out of them, as some have done, it aff ects preparation. It is important that when players go abroad they have to take a judg ment on the

fi nancial aspect or wearing the national jersey,” Howley said.

He admitted it was easier for Wales to make an example of a player in a position where they have strength in depth than one who is short of rivals. The one new cap will, coincidentally, be an Englishman who plays for Ospreys, the Exeter-born Aaron Jarvis who qualifies through a grand-mother who was born in Merthyr Tydfi l . He replaces the injured Adam Jones, the player he understudies at regional level.

Wales considered moving James across from loosehead but, as in the back row where one of their options in the absence of Ryan Jones and Lydiate was to play two open sides as fl ankers, Sam Warburton and Justin Tipuric, they have opted for a spe-cialist: Josh Turnbull will wear the No6 jersey, and cover the second row . Wales team to play Argentina, 2.30pm , Saturday L Halfpenny (Cardiff Blues); A Cuthbert (Cardiff Blues), S Williams (Scarlets), J Roberts (Cardiff Blues), G North (Scarlets); R Priestland (Scarlets), T Knoyle (Scarlets); G Jenkins (Toulon), M Rees (Scarlets), A Jarvis (Ospreys), A W Jones (Ospreys), I Evans (Ospreys), J Turnbull (Scarlets), S Warburton (Cardiff Blues, capt), T Faletau (Newport Gwent Dragons).Replacements R Hibbard (Ospreys), R Bevington (Ospreys), P James (Bath), R McCusker (Scarlets), J Tipuric (Ospreys), M Phillips (Bayonne), J Hook (Perpignan), L Williams (Scarlets).

Mike Phillips is starting games for his French club side, Bayonne, but has been replaced at scrum-half by Wales with Scarlets’ Tavis Knoyle Gaizka Iroz/AFP/Getty Images

Launchbury is launched into Lancaster’s world of promise

Robinson hopeful Gray can help Scots end All Blacks whitewash

Robert Kitson

England have sprung a surprise by elevat-ing the uncapped Wasp back-row forward Joe Launchbury into their matchday squad for Saturday’s game against Fiji. The 21-year-old Launchbury, who did not feature in the original autumn selection, has been promoted ahead of the more experienced James Haskell, Phil Dow-son and Ben Morgan who have all been released back to their clubs.

The Exeter-born, Sussex-reared young-ster was outstanding for Wasps against Saracens on Sunday and can operate at both fl anker and lock. His selection under-lines head coach Stuart Lancaster’s will-ingness to show faith in talented youth, with the 21-year-old Saracens prop Mako Vunipola also in line to win his fi rst cap off the bench this weekend.

England are also confident their uncapped hooker Tom Youngs will prove a big hit at Twickenham. The 25-year-old, poised to become the third member of the Youngs family to play Test rugby, has only been playing in the front row for

Mike Averis

Any chance Scotland have of ending their 107-year run of losing to the All Blacks would seem to depend on healing hands of their team doctor, James Robson, with Richie Gray last night passing a fi tness test ahead of the world champions on Sunday and assorted others making rapid returns to health.

The Scotland coach, Andy Robinson, said yesterday that he would take no chances on Gray’s damaged ankle before naming the Sale lock in his starting line-up despite earlier suggestions from his club that he had n o chance of being fi t. Gloucester’s Jim Hamilton, who damaged a rib against Leicester, also seems to have had a remarkable turn around to give Rob-inson his fi rst-choice second row .

Elsewhere, Geoff Cross starts at tight- head prop despite not having played since suffering concussion, while the wing Sean Lamont, the fl y -half Greig Laidlaw and loose head prop Ryan Grant are a lot healthier than they were during last week’s training session at St Andrews.

three years but England’s forwards coach Graham Rowntree believes his selection will be fully vindicated.

While Youngs owes his elevation to the knee injury suffered by Dylan Hartley, Rowntree is adamant the newcomer has not been chosen prematurely. Back in 1997 Clive Woodward picked the inexperienced Andy Long of Bath, who was abruptly sub-stituted at half-time and never featured again. Rowntree, a long-time colleague of Leicester’s director of rugby Richard Cockerill, insists history will not repeat itself. “From what I’ve seen the signs are he’s ready. You can’t be absolutely sure until you see him up against the best in the world but the fact Cockers has kept faith in him every week says a lot to me. I’ve every confi dence in Tom.”

“What’s also impressed me is how he’s come back from setbacks in games,” said Rowntree. “He’s got a strong character and will just get stronger and stronger. I’ve already seen him in some tough environ-ments holding his own. ”

Youngs’s father Nick won six caps at scrum-half for England in the 1980s, while his younger brother Ben is set to be named on the bench when Lancaster confi rms his team on Thursday. England’s 23-man squad

Forwards D Cole (Leicester), T Johnson (Exeter Chiefs),

J Launchbury (Wasps), J Marler (Harlequins), T Palmer (Wasps),

D Paice (London Irish), G Parling (Leicester), C Robshaw

(Harlequins, capt), M Vunipola (Saracens), T Waldrom

(Leicester), D Wilson (Bath), T Wood (Northampton), T Youngs

(Leicester) Backs B Barritt (Saracens), M Brown, D Care (both

Harlequins), O Farrell (Saracens), T Flood (Leicester), A Goode

(Saracens), U Monye (Harlequins), C Sharples (Gloucester),

M Tuilagi, B Youngs (both Leicester)

However, with Chris Cusiter, Duncan Weir, Rory Lamont, Graeme Morrison, Jon Welsh and Moray Low already out, Robinson was anxious about Gray, one of Scotland’s few likely Lions next summer. The 23-year-old has not played since Sale’s Heineken Cup match against Cardiff and last Friday was withdrawn from the league game against London Irish, Sale’s chief executive, Steve Diamond, saying the lock’s ankle would not be right in time for the match against the All Blacks either.

Then came the announcement that Gray had trained fully yesterday after-noon . Robinson then made a point of thanking Robson, also the Lions doctor, and his team of physiotherapists .

In 28 attempts Scotland have never beaten the All Blacks, but this time they hope to fi eld something of a secret weapon in their Dutch wing Tim Visser, who will be making his fi rst Test start at Murrayfi eld .

Visser, once of Newcastle, has scored heavily since he moved to Edinburgh and won his fi rst two caps on Scotland’s suc-cessful summer tour, scoring twice on debut against Fiji , and then playing in the win over Samoa in Apia . “Hopefully I have been able to get in under the radar, ” said the 25-year-old .

Scotland team to play New Zealand, 2.30pm , Sunday S Hogg ; S Lamont (both Glasgow Warriors), N De Luca , M Scott , T Visser ; G Laidlaw (all Edinburgh), M Blair (Brive); R Grant (Glasgow Warriors), R Ford, G Cross (both Edinburgh), R Gray (Sale Sharks), J Hamilton (Gloucester), A Strokosch (Perpignan), R Rennie (Edinburgh), K Brown (captain, Saracens).Replacements S Lawson (London Irish), A Jacobsen (Edinburgh), K Traynor (Bristol), A Kellock (Glasgow Warriors), D Denton (Edinburgh), H Pyrgos , R Jackson (both Glasgow Warriors), M Evans (Castres).

Tom Youngs is ready to become the third member of his family to play Test rugby for England against Fiji on Saturday

The Scotland second row Richie Gray is feeling optimistic over his chances of facing the All Blacks on Sunday

Federer mean and masterly again as he seeks title No7

Roger Federer, owner of 17 grand slam titles, is hungry for more prizes



Cycling Cricket

Saturday 21 July, 16:36 European Summer Time, Avenue Jean Mermoz, Chartres. Stage 19, 2012 Tour de France

It was nine months since the 2012 route had been confi rmed with the long time trial on the last Saturday; in all that time I would never have imagined, or perhaps only in my wildest dreams, that I would go into that stage with a two-minute lead on my rivals. I had my mind

set on that day from long before the Tour started, but the ideal scenario had always looked quite different. It had seemed that if I could be within 30 or 40 seconds of someone like Cadel Evans going into that last time trial I would be capable of taking the yellow jersey off him and win-ning the Tour.

Looking at the way the 2012 Tour was structured, we had always worked on the assumption that if I could avoid dropping too much time on the climbs I might be able to take the jersey on that day. I’ve never considered myself that good in the mountains at the Tour but I knew I could limit my losses on the best climbers at the summit fi nishes. The strategy we had worked on in the previous couple of years was simple: empty myself to the summit on every mountain stage of the Tour, but never with a view of winning up there or leading the race, just concentrate on los-ing as little time as possible.

It was during the stage before, the stage into Brive, that I started thinking about that time trial. We had got the last two Pyrenean stages out of the way without any great damage, so then my thoughts immediately turned to Bonneval. About then, I began thinking, “What if you can win the stage to seal the Tour?” Leading the race clearly took the pressure off. I wasn’t trying to take the yellow jersey off Cadel, I was defending it, but it wasn’t a

done deal, because any serious mechani-cal problem, or something else like a crash could have meant the race was over.

At the start of a time trial in a profes-sional race a lot of the riders roll out of the gate in a very relaxed way, as if they’re going out on the Sunday club run. But I always do the same thing: I bounce back on the bike when the starter does the fi nal countdown – “Five, four …” – and then I push back on to the guy holding the back of the bike as if my back wheel is locked into a start gate on the track. Then I hit that fi rst couple of hundred metres as if it was a pursuit: fl at out. I always do it. At that point it’s so diffi cult to keep calm.

So now, I’ve come down the ramp in Bonneval, made my massive start eff ort, and then it’s time to get a grip. I really back off the pressure, and that’s where I start to use my power output on the lit-tle screen on the handlebars as a guide to keep myself under control.

At Bonneval, the stage started uphill, so naturally you’re pushing a lot more power. For the fi rst 600 or 700 metres I’m just trying not to go too much over 600 watts, get over the top, then I really set-tle down and that’s where Sean [Yates, Team Sky’s sporting director] starts talk-ing to me: “Right, come on, Brad, this is it, this is your area, this is your domain, this is what you do best. Let’s settle in.” The power I’ve chosen is over 450 watts so on the fl at sections I’m looking at hold-

ing 450–460 watts, and whenever the road ramps up slightly I’m taking it up to about 470, 480, 490, but again trying not to go over 500 watts, and likewise then, when it was slightly downhill, I’m coming back down to 430.

I can sustain 450 watts for an hour, so obviously the fi rst 20 minutes is not diffi cult. In a time trial, the fi rst 20 min-utes you’re just out there, cruising along; you’re trying not to go too hard, to hold back the emotion, not to get too much adrenaline from all the crowds along the way and all the British fl ags, to resist that urge to go that little bit harder, because that’s where the danger is.

I know that I’m in the best shape of my life, so it’s about keeping in that control-led state. That’s what time-trialling is all about .

The fi rst reference point in my head is 17 or 18 minutes into the stage, because that’s when I take a gel. I use these little markers for myself as well as the time checks out on the course.

By then I’ve had the fi rst time check which is at 14km; I’m 12secs up on Chris Froome. At that point I’m thinking, “Right, you’ve got 45 minutes to go, Brad, you’re 12 seconds up, your lead is intact, you’re going to win the Tour, let’s keep concentrating, you’ve got 45 minutes left of everything you’ve worked for this year; this is it.”

Sean is talking to me in the earphone all the time, but I’m not always listening . He’s saying, “This is great, Brad, you’re fl owing, you’re eating up the kilometres, you’re 12 seconds up on Froome, the rest are nowhere.” But he’s actually giving me very important information, for example, “You’re coming into a little village now, Brad, there’s a slow, sweeping right, it’s full.” When he says “It’s full”, that means I can stay in the skis – stretched out on the time trial handlebars – “No worries, you’re coming up now, round this corner there’s a sharp left. Back off slightly, take care, you don’t need to risk it at this point, hard right, then you’re away, then you can get back down to it.”

He’s seen the course at least three or

’

‘Your lead is intact, you’re goingto win the Tour’

In the third extract from his autobiography Bradley Wiggins explains how he all but won the 2012 Tour on the 53km time trial from Bonneval

�

I’m in the best shape of mylife, so it’s about keeping in that controlled state. That’s what time-trialling is all about

�

Owen Gibson on the pressing issues Lord Coe has to overcome at the BOAPage 46

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England need a long game – and Compton may just be the answer

Cricket Mike Selvey Ahmedabad

As a Somerset batsman in the late 70s and early 80s, Peter Roebuck once wrote that he believed it was his job, duty even, to make sure he was at the crease to prevent Viv Richards and Ian Botham batting together. And while this may not have gone down well in the Taunton bars and festival beer tents, it was a salient point that he was making. Place two players of such extravagant attacking instincts together, close friends even, and you encourage excess, one attempting to outdo the other, perhaps, potentially entertaining but possibly to the detriment of the team eff ort. What he was saying is that good teams maintain a balance so that even perhaps the most violent batting side of them all, the great West Indies of that era, had players such as Larry Gomes as a counterpoint and troubleshooter.

For an hour and a half on Monday after-noon , at the Dr D Y Patil Stadium in Mum-bai, we were shown the antithesis, as Nick Compton and Jonathan Trott started to put together a partnership in which they appeared not just utterly absorbed in their batting but totally oblivious to time. Yet, although there could be a reverse argu-ment that a more explosive batsman bat-ting with either man would help keep the innings on track, there are times – and this tour is one of them – when it is the long game that will serve England best both as providing the best foundations to win and a bulwark against defeat: it is monumen-tally diffi cult to recover from an early loss

in India. Test match cricket, lest we forget, can be played over fi ve days.

Which brings us back to Compton. This is a man who has timed his run into the side to perfection, coinciding with that early summer period when the twilight began to descend on the career of Andrew Strauss. England have been mindful for a while of the demands that this tour might bring and the strategy they would like to adopt . Once Strauss retired, the impera-tive was there for Geoff Miller and his fel-low selectors to fi nd a replacement.

Already they had in mind the callow Yorkshire lad Joe Root . But then here, ready-made in Compton, was an experi-enced campaigner who has done the hard yards with two counties and, stagnating, had reinvented himself in a way that another Somerset player, Chris Tavaré , managed, aimed at the demands of crease occupation and from that eventual run scoring and Test cricket. At 29, the fl ow-ering has come late by modern standards where promise, if not yet achievement, is more readily spotted and monitored.

It was not just the volume of runs that Compton managed in the spring this year but the fact that he made them at a time when every other batsman in the country was struggling, at one stage, by the end of April, having outscored the next most prolifi c almost by a ration of two to one. On some pitches, the ball moved around so extravagantly that batsmen, schooled in more robust ways of see-ball-hit-ball, were fl ummoxed that their hard-wicket shots brought not runs but downfall.

“How do you drive on these?” was a common refrain, as they threw their bats at the ball and trudged their chastened way back to the pavilion. And the answer to that, as Compton showed throughout that testing April and May, was that you just don’t. It is not compulsory. On an Eden Gardens minefield in 1977 , Tony Greig scored one of the great Test match centuries for England precisely by eschew-ing one of his strengths. Sachin Tendulkar cut out the cover drive completely from his game and made a memorable double century for India at Sydney in 2004 .

Watching Compton on Monday, the qualities for which he had been chosen and earmarked as the prime candidate to succeed Strauss were evident. What England wanted from him was above all confi rmation of what they believed they had bought into, and over the course of four hours he gave it. He was disciplined with anything off line and played forward when he could . But, with a solid backfoot game that sees the ball played late under his eyes, he looked unfl appable and abso-lutely certain in his mind that what he was doing in his own time, in his own way, was precisely what England wanted to see.

England remain optimistic that Stuart Broad and Steven Finn will be fi t to take part in the fi rst Test in Ahmedabad on 15 November , although neither may play in the fi nal warm-up from tomorrow . Finn has not played since pulling up with a thigh strain during the opener in Mumbai last week, and over the weekend Broad underwent a scan on his left heel which bruised during the second match . England intend to monitor his progress with a view to getting overs into him in the match. He is unlikely to be risked, however, if there remains any suspicion that taking part would damage his Test prospects . Finn is making excellent progress and, viewed as a key member of the pace attack , would play in the fi rst Test without the match practice . Mike Selvey

Bowlers on the mend



Football Exclusive webchat live on the webJoin Bradley Wiggins at 1pm tomorrow guardian.co.uk/sport ≥

four times. He’s ridden the course with me in March, he’s driven the course the day before, he’s driven it in the morning behind one of the other riders, so he’s got everything written out in the car next to him. He’s constantly giving me that info like a co-driver in a rally.

One thing I like about him is that he’s very controlled. You see some directeurs sportifs hanging out of windows, it’s just ridiculous. Sean is a bit like a boxer’s trainer in the corner, with that calm voice: “Come on, Brad, this is fantastic what you’re doing now, just keep on what you’re doing now.” He is constantly bringing me back under control, because as a bike rider your urge is always to go harder in time trials. Sean is the guide, the cool head.

The further we go into the race, the more I’m begin-ning to realise: “This is it, I’ve won the Tour, I’ve done it.” With each kilo-metre going by, I’m a lit-tle more inspired by that thought and that makes

me push even more; there is a sort of aggression, a hunger within me, an urge to keep gaining as much time as possible. I want to win this race. There is no sense of, “Oh, you’ve done it now, you can back off slightly.” No: I want more, more, more.

So then we come off the big, wide main roads on to smaller roads in the last 10km and it’s starting to get painful . The physi-cal eff ort is beginning to take its toll: the fi rst 20 minutes are almost easy, the next 20 minutes you’re having to concentrate more, but the last 20 minutes is where the pain starts kicking in. You’re think-ing, “I’m actually struggling to hold this now.” But in spite of the pain, I’m still able to lift it up.

And at about 5km to go we turn left on to this little road and then the gradient starts ramping up . I’m still pushing and it’s really hurting and with every kilome-tre that’s going past, once we’re within 5km to go, I’m beginning to think of a lot of other things, and that is inspiring me to push on even harder.

The thoughts come, but not to the detriment of the eff ort. I’m going just as hard, and what’s going through my head is inspiring me more and more.

I’d be going out in December, I’d be in the gym at 6am doing my core work, then getting out on the bike early doors; four hours, fi ve hours; I’d be riding all round Pendle, out on Waddington Fell in a hail-storm, thinking, “Oh shit, I’m two hours from home now, this is ridiculous, I’m two hours out, how am I going to get home?” I’d get back and my fi ngers wouldn’t bend from the cold, so Cath would have to take the gloves off my hands, but I’d think, “This is what is going to win the Tour.” It had said four hours on the programme; it was three degrees outside and it was hailing up there in the hills, but I just had to go and do that four hours because that might make the diff erence; Cadel Evans might not go out, might not do anything that day.

I’m back in Tenerife on a day when we’ve done four and a half, fi ve, six hours; we’ve done fi ve or six eff orts throughout the day and a couple of the guys are stuck to the floor. Tim [Kerrison, Sky’s head of performance science] is saying, “OK, guys, there’s an option of a last eff ort here, I know a few of you are a bit nailed now so you can just roll up if you want, but if you feel you can do this last one, go for it.” I’m going over those summits in Tenerife, with Shane [Sutton, Sky’s head coach] tell-ing me, “Come on, Brad, this is where the Tour’s won, you know.” That was where I’d hit it: it’s like not everyone is going to do that last eff ort. That was the one which would push me over the edge, but that’s

what I’ve always done with the training. It was all for the Tour de France …

And here I am with six minutes left of it. This is what it was for …

I’m on the phone to Cath when I was in Tenerife training at Easter; the kids were off school, and she was saying “God, they’re being a nightmare, running riot, I wish you were here.” It was Ben’s birthday. “Why are you not here?” he and Bella ask; I tell them and they sort of understand why. I say to Cath , “Come on, it will be all right, love, this will all be worth it, you know, we’re not going to do this for ever …”

This is what it’s been all about; Cath and the kids, all the sacrifi ces they’ve made to get me here.

We’re getting into those last kilometres and I’m thinking of those things, thinking of my childhood, when I started dream-ing about the Tour, how I started cycling when I was 12. I’m about to win the Tour de France, and I’m taking my mind back to riding my bike as a kid going to my grand-parents’, thinking of everything I’ve gone through to be at this point now.

I’ve led the Tour for two weeks . There have been only two leaders of this year’s Tour de France. Bernard Hinault man-aged two weeks in the jersey once, in 1981; Lance Armstrong never managed it; Eddy Merckx led for longer, but he was the greatest ever.

The closer I’m getting to the line, Sean starts saying to me, “Come on, Brad, just empty it, 1k to go, 600 metres to go and the Tour’s over.”

So I am emptying it to the line as if it is a training eff ort in Tenerife and I have to get out every last little bit. And that’s where the punch in the air happens as I cross the line. It comes from all that emo-tion I was going through in that last couple of kilometres, for all that hour, for all that morning, for all the days before that time trial. That’s the defi ning image of the Tour for me: crossing the line and the punch. It is an incredible, incredible feeling.©Bradley Wiggins 2012

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Extracted from Bradley Wiggins: My Time published by Yellow Jersey Press tomorrow. To order your copy for £14 (rrp £20) with free UK p&p visit guardianbookshop.co.ukor call 0330 333 6846Bradley Wiggins – A Year in Yellowwill be screened on Sky Atlantic HD on Wednesday 21 November at 10pm

Murray hat-trick helps Holloway enjoy his opening night at Palace

Support for Strachan grows as McLeish cools on Scottish return

npower ChampionshipJacob Steinberg Selhurst Park

Crystal Palace 5 Ipswich Town 0Bolasie 24, Moritz 90,

Murray 50pen 55pen 63

If Ian Holloway had the slightest concern about leaving Blackpool to become Crystal Palace’s new manager, he need not have worried. It is not often a manager joins a club in November and sees them go top of the league after winning his fi rst match, but these are heady times for a rampant Palace, who were inspired by Glenn Mur-ray’s second-half hat-trick. For Ipswich, rooted to the bottom of the table, the memory of Saturday’s win at Birmingham City on Mick McCarthy’s debut seems so far away now. McCarthy’s only concern is survival, whereas Palace are dreaming of the Premier League.

Dougie Freedman, the man Holloway replaced after his departure to Bolton Wanderers, enjoyed legendary status at Selhurst Park but it is impossible not to warm to Holloway instantly. As he emerged from the tunnel moments before kick-off , he lapped up the acclaim of the crowd and even shook hands with one young fan. With the mood so good, Hol-loway probably would have embarked on a lap of honour if Murray had not shot inches wide from close range in the fi rst minute after Yannick Bolasie had caused havoc with a mazy run from the left.

However after Ipswich survived a claim for a penalty when Danny Higginbotham appeared to trip Murray, the visitors grew in confi dence, pressing eagerly and pre-venting Palace from fi nding the danger-ous Wilfried Zaha on the right fl ank. Their threat was minimal though and when Pal-ace made the breakthrough after 24 min-utes, it provided a perfect illustration of why Ipswich are in so much trouble.

A punt forward from their goalkeeper, Stephen Henderson , looked innocuous enough but when it was returned by Dam-ien Delaney and Owen Garvan fl icked the ball on, Ipswich’s defence froze as Murray, retreating from an off side position, left it for Bolasie to dart through and score with a beautifully judged lob.

Murray was almost rewarded for his quick thinking with a goal of his own, only to be denied by a marginal off side decision, before Zaha brought the best out of Henderson with a sharp toe poke.

Ewan Murray

The consensus for Gordon Strachan to be named the next Scotland manager is building after Alex McLeish effectively ruled himself out of the running .

Strachan is the fi rm favourite to succeed Craig Levein, who was sacked on Monday evening . McLeish has also been mooted as a candidate but the 53-year-old, who managed Scotland in 2007, played down the notion of a return to the post.

“I left the national team to take up club football, I felt I was missing the day-to-day stuff ,” he said. McLeish resigned the post and became Birmingham City manager, despite some notable victories, including against France in Paris . “I’m still of that mind. I wouldn’t like to be unfair to the Scotland fans in terms of coming back to the job. A lot of people would maybe think I was a hypocrite. I don’t want to say I don’t want the Scotland job but I feel I’ve still got some time left in club football.”

On Strachan, his former team-mate at Aberdeen, McLeish added: “Gordon Stra-chan is a pretty good candidate to me. He’s had success at club level with Celtic.”

The only moment of worry for Palace in a comfortable fi rst half was when Julian Speroni had to turn over Jonathan Parr’s errant clearance at the far post.

Zaha had been relatively quiet but he did not take long to make his mark after the break, causing havoc four minutes into the second half. Receiving the ball on the left, he duped Carlos Edwards with a sublime piece of skill, romped into the area and then fell under a challenge from Luke Chambers. “He’s just too good for you,” the Palace fans sang and they are not wrong. Murray coolly sent Henderson the wrong way from the spot.

Five minutes later, the linesman spot-ted Aaron Cresswell’s push on Garvan and Murray beat Henderson again, sending his penalty low into the bottom right corner. Extraordinarily Murray had a chance to score a third penalty in the space of 11 min-utes, only to shoot too close to Henderson. It did not matter though. Two minutes later, Murray had his hat-trick, tapping in from three yards out after a stunning run and cross from Joel Ward on the right.

Ipswich, fi ve points from safety, were a sorry bunch by the end. Yet few sides could have lived with Palace in this form. Holloway has chosen well.

Gary Caldwell, the Wigan Athletic and Scotland centre-back, also played under Strachan at Celtic. “I think so, he’s a pas-sionate manager and a very passionate Scot,” said Caldwell of the likelihood of Strachan succeeding in international management.

“I had three good years with him at Celtic and he achieved great things there. He’s been out of management for a while and I’m sure he will be hungry. I think the national team job needs a passionate guy. It is not an easy job. I’m sure he is a guy who will come with a real passion and do well for Scotland.”

Strachan has yet to break his silence but it is understood he would be keen on it. His latest successor as Celtic manager, Neil Lennon, has also spoken on behalf of Strachan but claimed Scotland’s players must take responsibility for recent woes. “I’m biased but I’d go for Gordon,” Len-non said of the former Coventry City and Southampton manager. “I don’t know if he’d thank me for that. I don’t know what his thinking is and I know he’s enjoy-ing his media work. But for me he’s an outstanding candidate for the job.

“The players need to have a look at themselves as well. They need to leave egos at the door and put the whole focus on Scotland for the two weeks or however long they are away from the clubs. I’m not sure all of them have done that looking at performances and attitude. The next man-ager has to be really, really disciplined and set down his rules and the players have to adhere to them.”

The Scottish Football Association has said it will wait until after next week’s friendly in Luxembourg before starting the process of replacing Levein. Billy Stark, previously the Scotland Under-21 coach, will name a squad for that encoun-ter today but some experienced names – including Scott Brown and Allan McGregor – are expected to sit the game out.

Ian Holloway laps up the acclaim of the Crystal Palace fans before the game

Gordon Strachan has been described as a passionate Scot hungry to succeed

Crystal Palace 4-3-3

Speroni; Ward, Ramage,

Delaney, Parr; Jedinak,

Dikgacoi•, Garvan (Moritz,

69); Zaha, Murray (Easter, 69),

Bolasie.

Subs not used

Price, Blake, Moxey, O’Keefe,

Appiah.

Referee A Sheldrake

Ipswich Town 4-5-1

Henderson; Edwards,

Chambers, Higginbotham,

Cresswell; Martin, Reo-

Coker•, Wellens, Drury

(Emmanuel-Thomas, 70),

Murphy (Smith, 70); Campbell.

Subs not used

Loach, N’Daw, Chopra,

Scotland, Mohsni.

Tomorrow My relationship with Mark Cavendish – the king of sprinters



Football Champions League

Results

FootballUEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUEGroup A

P W D L F A Pts

Porto 4 3 1 0 6 2 10

Paris St-Germain 4 3 0 1 10 2 9

Dynamo Kyiv 4 1 1 2 5 7 4

Dinamo Zagreb 4 0 0 4 0 10 0

Dynamo Kyiv (0) 0 Porto (0) 052,000

Paris St-Germain (1) 4 Dinamo Zagreb (0) 0Alex 16, Matuidi 61 Ménez 65 Hoarau 80 47,000

Group B

P W D L F A Pts

Schalke 4 2 2 0 8 5 8

Arsenal 4 2 1 1 7 6 7

Olympiakos 4 2 0 2 7 7 6

Montpellier 4 0 1 3 5 9 1

Olympiakos (1) 3 Montpellier (0) 1Machado 4, Greco 80 Belhanda 67penMitroglou 82 25,000

Schalke (1) 2 Arsenal (2) 2Huntelaar 45 Walcott 18Farfan 67 Giroud 2650,000

Group C

P W D L F A Pts

Málaga 4 3 1 0 8 1 10

Milan 4 1 2 1 4 4 5

Anderlecht 4 1 1 2 1 4 4

Zenit St Petersburg 4 1 0 3 3 7 3

Anderlecht (1) 1 Zenit St P’burg (0) 0Mbokani 17 19,000

Milan (0) 1 Málaga (1) 1Pato 73 Eliseu 4020,000

Group D

P W D L F A Pts

Borussia Dortmund 4 2 2 0 6 4 8

Real Madrid 4 2 1 1 10 7 7

Ajax 4 1 1 2 6 8 4

Manchester City 4 0 2 2 6 9 2

Manchester City (1) 2 Ajax (2) 2Y Touré 22 De Jong 10 17Agüero 74 40,222

Real Madrid (1) 2 Borussia Dortmund (2) 2Pepe 34 Reus 28Ozil 89 Arbeloa 45og65,000

NPOWER CHAMPIONSHIP

P W D L F A Pts

Crystal Palace 15 9 3 3 30 21 30

Middlesbrough 15 9 2 4 25 19 29

Cardiff 15 9 1 5 31 22 28

Hull 15 9 1 5 23 19 28

Leicester 15 8 2 5 21 14 26

Blackburn 15 6 6 3 21 18 24

Huddersfi eld 15 7 3 5 21 21 24

Brighton 15 6 5 4 19 11 23

Derby 15 6 5 4 24 19 23

Burnley 15 7 2 6 29 29 23

Nottingham Forest 15 5 7 3 21 18 22

Blackpool 15 6 3 6 25 22 21

Wolves 15 6 3 6 19 18 21

Millwall 15 5 5 5 27 25 20

Leeds 15 5 5 5 22 22 20

Watford 15 6 2 7 19 22 20

Bolton 15 5 4 6 21 23 19

Birmingham 15 5 4 6 17 22 19

Charlton 15 4 5 6 20 23 17

Sheffi eld Wed 15 4 3 8 20 26 15

Barnsley 15 4 3 8 15 23 15

Peterborough 15 4 0 11 17 23 12

Bristol City 15 3 2 10 24 31 11

Ipswich 15 2 4 9 11 31 10

Birmingham (0) 2 Bristol City (0) 0Burke 59 King 73 14,380

Bolton (0) 0 Leicester (0) 0

Brighton (0) 1 Peterborough (0) 0Dobbie 90 23,703

Burnley (0) 1 Leeds (0) 0Austin 83 14,470

Charlton (2) 5 Cardiff (2) 4Jackson 39 45 Helguson 4Stephens 54 Mason 24Haynes 59 Noone 90Hulse 65 Gunnarsson 9015,764

Crystal Palace (1) 5 Ipswich (0) 0Bolasie 24 Murray 50pen 55pen 63 Moritz 90 15,517

Derby (0) 2 Barnsley (0) 0O’Connor 69 Tyson 90 20,808

Huddersfi eld (1) 2 Blackburn (1) 2Novak 15 90 Rhodes 4314,597 Murphy 55pen

Hull (1) 2 Wolves (0) 1Aluko 29 Chester 67ogSimpson 51 14,768

Nottm Forest (0) 0 Middlesbrough (0) 020,150

Sheffi eld Wed (0) 0 Blackpool (1) 2 Ince 1819,978 Sylvestre 83

Watford (0) 0 Millwall (0) 011,293

LEAGUE ONE

P W D L F A Pts

Sheffi eld Utd 16 8 8 0 19 10 32

Stevenage 16 9 5 2 23 17 32

Tranmere 15 9 4 2 32 14 31

Crawley Town 16 9 2 5 24 22 29

Notts County 16 8 4 4 28 17 28

Doncaster 15 8 3 4 20 14 27

Swindon 16 7 5 4 23 14 26

Brentford 16 6 7 3 22 17 25

MK Dons 15 6 5 4 18 11 23

Preston 16 6 5 5 26 20 23

Yeovil 16 7 1 8 26 24 22

Bournemouth 16 5 6 5 26 28 21

Colchester 16 5 5 6 17 20 20

Crewe 16 5 5 6 16 21 20

Carlisle 16 5 5 6 20 28 20

Walsall 16 5 4 7 19 25 19

Portsmouth 16 5 3 8 22 24 18

Oldham 15 4 5 6 16 17 17

Coventry 16 4 5 7 18 23 17

Leyton Orient 15 5 1 9 11 18 16

Shrewsbury 16 3 5 8 17 22 14

Scunthorpe 16 3 4 9 15 28 13

Bury 16 2 6 8 17 28 12

Hartlepool 15 1 5 9 13 26 8

Bournemouth (2) 2 Shrewsbury (1) 1Daniels 3 Richards 14penMcQuoid 6 5,022

Colchester (0) 0 Notts County (2) 2 Bishop 173,051 Judge 44

Coventry (2) 3 Crawley Town (0) 1Fleck 9 Clarke 56McGoldrick 45 65 8,862

Doncaster (0) 0 Crewe (1) 2 Dalla Valle 55,411 Pogba 71

Oldham (0) 1 Bury (1) 2Simpson 90 Tarkowski 34og4,120 Schumacher 86pen

Portsmouth (0) 0 Brentford (1) 111,328 Donaldson 9

Preston (0) 1 Carlisle (1) 1Cummins 90 Garner 31pen9,249

Swindon (0) 0 Sheffi eld Utd (0) 08,354

Walsall (0) 1 Scunthorpe (2) 4Grigg 90 Canavan 13 50 Duff y 302,787 Clarke 75

Yeovil (1) 1 Stevenage (1) 3Madden 6 Morais 2 Akins 482,900 Dunne 63

LEAGUE TWO

P W D L F A Pts

Gillingham 16 11 3 2 30 10 36

Port Vale 16 9 4 3 35 18 31

Cheltenham 16 8 5 3 22 17 29

Fleetwood Town 16 7 6 3 22 14 27

Bradford 16 7 4 5 24 18 25

Rotherham 15 7 4 4 24 18 25

Torquay 16 6 6 4 23 19 24

Rochdale 16 6 6 4 23 21 24

Burton Albion 15 6 5 4 23 20 23

York 16 5 8 3 21 19 23

Exeter 16 7 2 7 23 24 23

Southend 16 6 4 6 22 19 22

Accrington Stanley 15 6 3 6 18 22 21

Northampton 16 5 5 6 21 22 20

Dag & Red 16 4 7 5 23 24 19

Chesterfi eld 16 4 7 5 17 18 19

Morecambe 16 5 4 7 18 21 19

Oxford Utd 16 6 1 9 24 30 19

Plymouth 15 4 5 6 20 21 17

Bristol Rovers 15 3 5 7 16 26 14

AFC Wimbledon 16 4 2 10 18 31 14

Wycombe 15 3 4 8 13 23 13

Barnet 16 3 4 9 14 26 13

Aldershot 16 3 4 9 12 25 13

Aldershot (0) 0 Wycombe (0) 02,042

Barnet (0) 1 Torquay (0) 0Hyde 79 1,544

Bradford (0) 0 Chesterfi eld (0) 08,841

Bristol Rovers (1) 2 Southend (2) 3Broghammer 10 Tomlin 40Clarkson 85pen Hurst 444,721 Cresswell 64

Exeter (1) 2 AFC Wimbledon (0) 0Cureton 32 O’Flynn 71 3,249

Fleetwood Town (1) 1 Rotherham (1) 1Parkin 21 Arnason 192,498

Gillingham (0) 0 Cheltenham (0) 06,096

Morecambe (0) 0 Accrington Stanley (0) 01,410

Oxford Utd (0) 2 Dag & Red (1) 3Craddock 60 65 Williams 36 Howell 545,074 Wilkinson 62

Port Vale (1) 2 Rochdale (0) 2Pope 27 62 Grant 734,139 Tutte 87

York (1) 1 Northampton (0) 1Blair 23 Akinfenwa 583,039

BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER

P W D L F A Pts

Newport County 17 11 3 3 36 19 36

Wrexham 16 9 5 2 29 15 32

Luton 17 10 2 5 30 23 32

Grimsby 18 8 6 4 25 14 30

Forest Green 17 9 3 5 27 17 30

Dartford 17 9 2 6 27 19 29

Macclesfi eld 16 8 3 5 28 25 27

Gateshead 18 6 8 4 24 21 26

Stockport County 17 6 6 5 26 23 24

Telford 17 5 8 4 29 24 23

Woking 18 7 2 9 33 35 23

Hereford 17 6 5 6 25 28 23

Tamworth 18 7 1 10 22 25 22

Mansfi eld 16 6 4 6 23 28 22

Lincoln City 17 5 5 7 25 26 20

Southport 17 5 5 7 25 33 20

Alfreton Town 16 4 6 6 18 26 18

Barrow 17 4 6 7 21 32 18

Kidderminster 17 3 8 6 20 19 17

Cambridge Utd 17 4 5 8 29 35 17

Braintree Town 16 4 5 7 18 25 17

Hyde 16 4 4 8 21 28 16

Ebbsfl eet Utd 17 3 6 8 23 33 15

Nuneaton 17 2 8 7 22 33 14

Dartford 0 Forest Green 1; Gateshead 2 Alfreton Town 0; Hereford 1 Luton 0; Hyde 3 Grimsby 2; Lincoln City 3 Braintree Town 0; Macclesfi eld 2 Tamworth 0; Newport County 6 Cambridge Utd 2; Nuneaton 1 Mansfi eld 1; Southport 1 Wrexham 4; Stockport County 3 Barrow 1; Telford 2 Ebbsfl eet Utd 2; Woking 2 Kidderminster 2

BLUE SQUARE BET NORTHHalifax L Vauxhall Motors L

EVO-STIK SOUTHERN PREMIER LEAGUEBashley L Totton L; Cambridge City L Bedworth L; Redditch 0 St Albans 2

RYMAN PREMIER LEAGUEConcord Rangers L Hampton & Richmond L; Whitehawk L Kingstonian L

NEXTGEN SERIESGroup Three Ajax L CSKA Moscow L

CricketTHIRD ONE-DAY INTERNATIONALPallekele New Zealand 188-6 (BJ Watling 96no). Sri Lanka 200-3 (TM Dilshan 102no, AD Mathews 54no). Sri Lanka won by seven wickets (D/L Method).

TennisATP WORLD TOUR FINALS (O2 Arena, London)Singles: Group B: R Federer (Swi) bt J Tipsarevic (Ser) 6-3 6-1.Doubles: Group A: L Paes & R Stepanek (Ind/Cz) bt A-u-H Qureshi & J-J Rojer (Pak/Neth) 6-4 7-5.Group B: J Marray & F Nielsen (GB/Den) bt M Bhupathi & R Bopanna (Ind) 6-4 6-7 (1-7) 12-10.

American footballNFLNew Orleans 28 Philadelphia 13

Fixtures(7.45pm unless stated)

FootballUEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUEGroup E Chelsea v Shakhtar Donetsk; Juventus v NordsjaellandGroup F Bayern Munich v Lille; Valencia v BateGroup G Benfi ca v Spartak Moscow; Celtic v BarcelonaGroup H Braga v Manchester Utd; CFR Cluj v Galatasaray

NPOWER LEAGUE ONEHartlepool v Tranmere; MK Dons v Leyton Orient

LEAGUE TWOPlymouth v Burton Albion

CLYDESDALE BANK PREMIER LEAGUEMotherwell v Dundee Utd

Hazard

17

Mata

10

Torres

9

Cech

1 Terry

26

David Luiz

4

Ivanovic

2

Bertrand

34

Oscar

11

Mikel

12

Ramires

7

9

Adriano

Fernandinho

7

Teixeira

29

Hubschman

3

Willian

10

30

Pyatov

Mkitaryan

22

Kucher

5

Srna

33

Rakitskiy

44

Rat

26

Chelsea v Group E

Shakhtar Donetsk 7.45pm SS3

Venue Stamford BridgeReferee CV Carballo (Sp) Radio BBC 5 Live

ChelseaSubs from Blackman, Turnbull, Azpilicueta, Ferreira, Marin, Romeu, Sturridge, Moses, Piazón, CahillDoubtfulDavid Luiz, MataInjuredCole, Lampard

Shakhtar DonetskSubs fromKanibolotskiy, Gai, Shevchuk, Kryvtsov, Chygrynskiy, Kobin, Stepanenko, Costa, Patrick, Dentinho, Ilsihno, Eduardo, DevicDoubtful NoneInjured None

9°

Key • One booking from suspension Probable teams

Di Matteo demands spirit of champions

Dominic Fifi eld

The scenario feels eerily familiar. Chel-sea are a team under threat and confront daunting opponents in Shakhtar Donetsk tonight , with Roberto Di Matteo sug-gesting they need to muster “the perfect game” to reassert some authority on the section. The Italian has used such rhetoric before, most notably ahead of last season’s semi-fi nal against Barcelona, but his was a recognition that the holders must now improve to progress.

Their continued participation in the Champions League teeters on the brink. On the assumption Juventus’ slick approach play finally yields a first win against Nordsjaelland in Turin, Chelsea must defeat the Ukrainians at Stamford Bridge to ensure their destiny remains in their own hands. Shedding points tonight followed by defeat to Juve later this month could jettison them ignominiously and prematurely from the competition. This is an occasion to draw strength from the experiences en route to Munich.

The manager conceded as much. “We’ll need to be at our best and must have the perfect game,” said Di Matteo. “It’s more than just about our status [as holders]. Every individual player going on the pitch has to perform at the best of their ability.

Chelsea need victory against leaders Shakhtar

Cole still out injured but Terry returns to defence

Roberto Di Matteo wants his players to draw on the experience of winning last season’s Champions League trophy to earn victory over Shakhtar Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

P W D L F A GD Pts

Shakhtar 3 2 1 0 5 2 3 7Chelsea 3 1 1 1 7 4 3 4Juventus 3 0 3 0 4 4 0 3N’jaelland 3 0 1 2 1 7 -6 1

Results

Chelsea 2 Juventus 2, Shakhtar 2 Nordsjaelland 0

Juventus 1 Shakhtar 1, Nordsjaelland 0 Chelsea 4

Nordsjaelland 1 Juventus 1, Shakhtar 2 Chelsea 1

Remaining fi xtures

Today Juventus v Nordsjaelland, Chelsea v Shakhtar

20 Nov Nordsjaelland v Shakhtar, Juventus v Chelsea

5 Dec Shakhtar v Juventus, Chelsea v Nordsjaelland

Group E

There are comparisons certainly to last season, when we had must-win games. This is another. Fortunately, we have play-ers with the experience who have been through that before and performed in big games like this. That will help them deal with the pressure.”

This is Shakhtar, a team who have never previously prevailed competitively in England, and not Barça but it feels an awkward collision nonetheless. The visi-tors have swept all before them domesti-cally, their winning streak in the Ukrainian league now stretching to 23 games to leave them 12 points clear at the top this term, but Mircea Lucescu’s charges have been just as imposing in European competi-tion. Their only blot on a perfect record was the group draw in Turin, a match Di Matteo conceded they should have won, and they certainly succeeded in scarring the champions at the Donbass Arena a fortnight ago.

On that occasion they scored early and then picked off the visitors on the break, wounding them down either fl ank with Alex Teixeira , Henrik Mkhitaryan and Willian a menacing trio operating behind Luiz Adriano . Teixeira isolated and exposed Ashley Cole, the full-back left critically unprotected. He will be absent altogether tonight as well as potentially from Sunday’s visit of Liverpool – and, along with Frank Lampard, surely from England’s squad for next week’s friendly against Sweden – with a hamstring com-plaint picked up in the defeat to Manches-ter United. His wait for a 100th cap will be extended into 2013.

Ryan Bertrand was trusted in the Champions League fi nal, albeit in a more

advanced role ahead of Cole, and will step in at left-back but will expect to be severely tested by Teixeira’s trickery. The visitors will sense vulnerability in the home back-line, even with John Terry restored after his domestic ban. “Chelsea are very strong, but we’re not the weakest,” said Lucescu, who was the last visiting manager to win a group game here, with Besiktas in 2003. “I prepare my players knowing all teams can be beaten, even Chelsea at home.”

The holders conceded 10 in the four matches Terry missed, and the captain was present in Ukraine when only Petr Cech’s brilliance kept the visitors afl oat. “We con-ceded early and lost our organisation over there,” said Branislav Ivanovic . “They’re one of the best counterattacking teams in the group, so this will be very diffi cult. If we’re going to be successful, we have to be stronger defensively as a team. That is the part of our game we have to improve. We will create chances against any team. The question is about our defence. That’s what we have to work harder on.”

This team boasted the ability to grind out results against Bar ça and Bayern Munich in the spring, relying upon a com-bination of dogged defence and Didier Drogba’s brawn up front to muscle their way to a fi rst European Cup. That style has evolved since – “Changing,” was how Di Matteo described it – and there are valid questions over whether their more flamboyant approach, in its relatively embryonic form, can see them prevail against Europe’s more impressive sides, into whose number Shakhtar are hoping to burst.

Yet the management are not for changing.

Smalling ready to make United return at Braga

Paul Wilson Braga

Chris Smalling has a chance of playing in Portugal to night as Manchester United try to seal Champions League qualifi cation with four straight wins for the fi rst time since they won the competition in 2008.

The defender has not played since injuring a metatarsal in pre-season train-ing, but Sir Alex Ferguson has promised he will be involved. Phil Jones is also ready to start training next week so United’s injury problems in defence are beginning to clear, so much so that Ferguson could be tempted to rest senior defenders such as Rio Ferdinand and Patrice Evra. Paul Scholes, 38, has stayed at home. “We want to keep him fresh for later in the season. At his age he can’t play all the time, so we are just taking care of an old man.”

Ferguson is pleased to see light on the defensive front. “Since the start of the sea-son we’ve been operating on the border-line in that area, playing Michael Carrick at centre-half and so on, so it’s good to get back up to strength. We will be stronger as a unit with Smalling and Jones back .

“I misread the group stage last season but have been picking stronger teams this time, because you must reach the next stage,” Ferguson said. “Most peo-ple will have Barcelona and Real Madrid among their favourites but I have also been impressed with Borussia Dortmund. Those three teams have outstanding chances, and I hope we can join them.”

W hen Uefa began tinkering with their major tournament in Ferguson’s first decade he was not happy , believing extra teams and extra games made it harder to succeed in Europe if you still wanted to win your domestic title. Now clubs have acquired squads big enough to cope with the extra demands, Ferguson is a complete convert : “It is a fantastic tournament now, the opportunity to regularly play against the best has made it better.”

Braga probable Beto; Salino, Coelho, Douglão, Elderson; Custódio, Viana; Alan, Micael, Amorim; Eder.Man Utd probable Lindegaard; Da Silva, Evans, Smalling, Büttner: Nani, Carrick, Anderson, Young; Rooney, Hernández. Referee F Brych (Ger)

P W D L F A GD Pts

Man Utd 3 3 0 0 6 3 3 9CFR Cluj 3 1 1 1 4 3 1 4Braga 3 1 0 2 4 5 -1 3Galatasaray 3 0 1 2 1 4 -3 1

Results

Cluj 0 Man Utd 4, Galatasaray 0 Braga 2

Braga 0 Cluj 2, Man Utd 1 Galatasaray 0

Galatasaray 1 Cluj 1, Man Utd 3 Braga 2

Remaining fi xtures

Today Braga v Man Utd, Cluj v Galatasaray

20 Nov Cluj v Braga, Galatasaray v Man Utd

5 Dec Braga v Galatasaray, Man Utd v Cluj

Group H



Sport Xxxxxx

Injury rules Hooper out of Barça visit and ruins chance of England call Ewan Murray

The Celtic striker Gary Hooper is facing the double blow of sitting out Barcelona’s visit to Glasgow tonight and missing out on an England call-up due to injury.

Hooper, who has a hamstring prob-lem, was set to join his club-mate Fraser Forster in the England squad for next Wednesday’s friendly against Sweden in Stockholm. The Football Association is understood to have contacted Celtic about Hooper’s fi tness but were handed a bleak prognosis by the Scottish champions’ medical team.

“I would say he’ll not play,” Neil Len-non said of Hooper’s chances of play-ing against Barcelona. “He’s very, very doubtful.”

The England manager, Roy Hodgson, was reportedly due to attend the match with Barcelona but the suggestions yes-terday were that he will in stead head for Chelsea against Shakhtar Donetsk . Hodgson will name his party for Sweden tomorrow .

Walcott and Giroud shake Schalke but Arsenal surrender priceless advantage

P W D L F A GD Pts

Schalke 4 2 2 0 8 5 3 8Arsenal 4 2 1 1 7 6 1 7Olympiakos 4 2 0 2 7 7 0 6Montpellier 4 0 1 3 5 9 -4 1

Results

Montpellier 1 Arsenal 2, Olympiakos 1 Schalke 2

Arsenal 3 Olympiakos 1, Schalke 2 Montpellier 2

Arsenal 0 Schalke 2, Montpellier 1 Olympiakos 2

Olympiakos 3 Montpellier 1, Schalke 2 Arsenal 2

Remaining fi xtures

21 Nov Arsenal v Montpellier, Schalke v Olympiakos

4 Dec Olympiakos v Arsenal, Montpellier v Schalke

Group B

Schalke 4-2-3-1

Unnerstall; Uchida (Höger, 26;

Papadopoulos, 66), Höwedes,

Matip•, Fuchs•; Jones•,

Neustädter; Farf án, Holtby

(Barnetta, 90), Afellay;

Huntelaar.

Subs not used

Hildebrand, Kolasinac, Mortiz,

Draxler

Arsenal 4-2-3-1

Mannone; Sagna, Mertesacker,

Koscielny, Vermaelen;

Arteta, Wilshere; Walcott,

Cazorla• (Coquelin, 90),

Podolski• (Santos, 90); Giroud.

Subs not used

Shea, Jenkinson, Djourou,

Arshavin, Chamakh.

Referee N Rizzoli (It)

David Hytner Veltins-Arena

Schalke 2 Arsenal 2Huntelaar 45 Walcott 18, Giroud 26

Farfán 67

Arsène Wenger had insisted that Arsenal’s situation was “not dramatic” yet this is a team who seem to trade exclusively in the commodity. There was the familiar cock-tail of hope and anxiety here, together with headline-grabbing plot-lines, includ-ing Theo Walcott’s goalscoring return to the starting line up for a big game. Olivier Giroud’s header was another highlight.

Arsenal started poorly only to take charge when Schalke lapsed for a period in the middle of the fi rst half. Yet Wenger’s team lacked ruthlessness and they surren-dered the initiative when they conceded in fi rst-half injury-time to Klaas-Jan Hunte-laar, which reshaped the tie again.

They could be relieved that Schalke’s second-half plunder extended no further

than Jefferson Farf án’s equaliser. They came under severe pressure and that the goalkeeper Vito Mannone was their out-standing performer told its own story. And yet, with the last act, Walcott streaked clear and, with only the goalkeeper Lars Unnerstall to beat, he saw his shot blocked. His goal took his season’s tally to eight from four starts in all competitions. There would not be a stunning ninth.

Arsenal had arrived on the back of the dispiriting defeat at Manchester United and a couple of other bad results. This was their latest rocky ride but the conclu-sion was positive. It will irk the travelling support that what should have been an unassailable lead was frittering away but Schalke did not deserve to lose. Wenger would surely have signed up for the draw beforehand and, indeed, at any point after Farf án’s goal until Walcott’s last-gasp chance. Arsenal remain favourites to emerge from Group B.

There was a priceless quality about his Walcott’s early strike. Roman Neust ädter erred with a loose back-header that put Giroud clean through and encouraged him to show fl eet of foot and conviction. There was neither from the striker and he was

dispossessed but Walcott had followed up and, after forcing a break past Unnerstall, he rolled into the empty net.

The goal had come against the run of play, with Arsenal’s tweaked back-line, that featured Thomas Vermaelen at left-back in place of the hapless Andr é Santos, coming under early pressure and enduring nervous moments. Schalke’s speed on the break had been a feature of their 2-0 win in London and they gave warnings here when first Huntelaar found Christian Fuchs and he saw his shot defl ected wide by Mikel Arteta .

Walcott’s goal had a fortifying eff ect; Arsenal felt the confi dence fl ow through them and their second goal was a beauty, showcasing Giroud’s strengths. He linked with Lukas Podolski, after taking a pass from Jack Wilshere and broke for the near post. Podolski, booed by the home crowd at the outset, beat the substitute Marco H öger to sculpt the cross and Giroud, all alone, thudded home with a stooping head. Arsenal had not previously scored with a header this season.

Yet Wenger’s team allowed the hosts to fashion a lifeline. Farf án had gone close with a rising drive and Giroud headed straight at Unnerstall when Lewis Holtby’s header froze the Arsenal defence. Hunte-laar’s fi nish was low and true. Vermaelen has never made any secret of his lack of fondness for the left-back role and his positioning was suspect here. There was a fretfulness about Arsenal at the back.

Schalke dominated the second half and ought to have equalised when Arsenal’s defence was caught square and Huntelaar tip-toed through one on one. It was a heart-stopping duel; Mannone blocked to come out on top. Schalke battled back from the brink. The home supporters found their voice, particularly when claiming a pen-alty for handball against Per Mertesacker, following a dramatic scramble. The ref-eree Nicola Rizzoli was unmoved.

The pattern felt entrenched; Schalke pushing, with Holtby instrumental, and Arsenal attempting to cling on. Arteta smuggled a H öger shot clear from in front of the line while Mannone beat away Holt-by’s attempt from distance. The equaliser had been trailed and it arrived when poor marking at the far post allowed Holtby to fl ick on and Farf án’s drive fl ew in, despite Vermaelen’s eff orts to clear.

Theo Walcott of Arsenal, centre, triesto get the ball beyond the outstretched leg of Schalke’s Benedikt HöwedesJoern Pollex/Bongarts/Getty Images

Lennon’s hopes of upsetting Barça have been undermined by fi tness worries over Hooper and others. The Celtic manager has already ruled out Emilio Izaguirre,

Lassad Nouioui and James Forrest whil e Georgios Samaras is a doubt.

Barcelona required a stoppage-time goal to defeat to night’s opponents in the Camp Nou a fortnight ago , after which Celtic were roundly praised for their

performance. “Barcelona might think: ‘ We really have to turn it on and put this team in their place,’” Lennon said. “It could also be great motivation for us that it’s still fresh in the players’ minds and still raw with them, that they put so much into the game and got nothing from it and they could go one better this time.

“I said at the start that I wanted to qualify so from that point of view my ambitions haven’t changed. It would be great if we could get something out of the game and if not then maybe we will need

to get something from Benfi ca, or even win that one.

“We didn’t bargain on anything from Barcelona – the performance in the Camp

Nou was a bonus for us and we will have to play as well if not better in this match. The environment at Parkhead could be dangerous for us with the crowd and we have to temper the expectations.”

Indeed, in the week Celtic are celebrat-ing 125 years since the club’s inception Lennon off ered a nod to history by saying a victory would rank among their best ever in Europe. “If you look at our team then it didn’t cost a lot of money compared to Martin O’Neill’s and Gordon Strachan’s Celtic teams,” Lennon said. “And this Barcelona side has gravitated to another level since we last played them in 2007-08 [in the Champions League fi rst knockout stage] . Their performances over the last fi ve years have been at a diff erent level to everyone else.”

Barcelona are in the midst of their best start to a domestic campaign in their own, 113-year history. Victory in Glasgow would also guarantee Champions League pro-gression with two group games to play.

“This is probably our most important game for is left of this year,” said their manager, Tito Vilanova. “If we win, it will

Gary Hooper had been earmarked for an England call-up but has injured a hamstring

then allow us to rest some players and use the youth team in the other games.”

Vilanova could recall Gerard Piqué, who has returned from injury, but Adriano will miss out because of a torn hamstring.

Celtic probable Forster; Matthews, Wilson, Ambrose, Mulgrew;

Brown, Kayal, Ledley, Wanyama, Commons; Samaras.

Barcelona probable Vald és; Alves, Piqué, Mascherano, Alba; Xavi,

Song, Iniesta; Pedro, Messi, Villa.

Referee B Kuipers (Ned).

P W D L F A GD Pts

Barcelona 3 3 0 0 7 3 4 9Celtic 3 1 1 1 4 4 0 4Sp Moscow 3 1 0 2 6 7 -1 3Benfi ca 3 0 1 2 1 4 -3 1

Results

Barcelona 3 Spartak Moscow 2, Celtic 0 Benfi ca 0

Benfi ca 0 Barcelona 2, Spartak Moscow 2 Celtic 3

Barcelona 2 Celtic 1, Spartak Moscow 2 Benfi ca 1

Remaining fi xtures

Today Benfi ca v Sp Moscow, Celtic v Barcelona

20 Nov Benfi ca v Celtic, Sp Moscow v Barcelona

5 Dec Barcelona v Benfi ca, Celtic v Sp Moscow

Group G



Football Champions League

Ajax reveal the limitations of Mancini’s angry rebuttal

Roberto Mancini was entitled to lose his cool on Monday, when he allowed him-self to become irritated by persistent questioning about his conversations with other clubs during the summer and the likely longevity of his tenure at Manches-ter City. Just imagine Sir Alex Ferguson’s response to such perceived impertinence. But the questions were legitimate, given the Italian’s failure to follow the conquest of the Premier League with credible per-formances on the grander European stage, and they grew more pointed in retrospect as City conceded two early goals to Ajax last night .

With one point from three matches, some sort of a return was required from last night’s meeting with the four-times winners of the competition, but City’s defence, which has now kept only three clean sheets in 16 matches this season, was once again found badly wanting at set- pieces as Siem de Jong twice exploited a criminally negligent failure to deal with corner kicks.

At least there were signs of wounded pride in City’s reaction to a double blow that silenced their supporters. Yaya Touré, who had allowed De Jong to run on and send a glancing header past Joe Hart for the second goal, produced a marvellous piece of chest control followed in the same movement by a falling volley . And after almost an hour of further suspense, Sergio Agüero’s deft opportunism presented City with a vision of escape.

It would be easy to characterise the match in moral terms, as a Manichaean battle between two opposing an d irrec-oncil able views of how to achieve success in football. Easy, and probably right, since there can be no doubt that whereas City are after success as quickly as possible, at almost any cost, the current Eredivisie champions concentrate their eff orts on the good husbandry involved in sourc-ing their own talent and on adhering to a coherent tactical philosophy passed down from one generation to the next.

No struggle, then, to see Ajax as the more naturally sympathetic of the two. There would have been plenty of neu-trals happy to rejoice in their 3-1 victory in Amsterdam a fortnight ago, and again in their early gains last night. But it takes all sorts to make football, and buying suc-cess in some form has frequently been the recipe for rich entertainment. The lustre of the 1950s Real Madrid team or of Arrigo Sacchi’s Milan was hardly dimmed by the

knowledge that they had been compiled with vast fi nancial resources.

Sheikh Mansour will be hoping the world will see his club in a similar light. That can take time, as Roman Abram-ovich could tell him. It is now nine years since the Russian bought Chelsea but only recently, with the assembly of a glittering midfield trio, have outsiders started to see them as something more than merely formidable.

Before the arrival of the sovereign wealth of Abu Dhabi in east Manchester four years ago, the emergence of a group of young players suggested that City might be on their way to creating the sort of pro-duction line patented by Ajax 30 years ago. But the process of turning academy gradu-ates into fi rst-team players proved too dif-fi cult and unreliable for the new owners. When City need a player now, they buy one off the most expensive shelf.

But will the fi nal stage of City’s emer-gence as a European superpower take place under Mancini’s management? After Ajax’s second goal went in, he looked like a man who had glimpsed the gallows. That, however, was not quite the end of the story.

His high-earning superstars started the match encouragingly, as if only too aware of the signifi cance of the occasion and seemingly with the desire to prove that they have not degenerated, over the course of a single summer, into a bunch of warring egos. While Carlos Tevez battered �

After Ajax’s second goal went in, Mancini looked like a man who had glimpsed the gallows

�

Richard WilliamsEtihad Stadium

Talking pointsBig names but no big performances

City’s defence was in disarray and the star players again went missing in Europe. By Jamie Jackson

1 City had yet another defensive nightmare After four attempts City’s clean sheet return in this season’s Champions League campaign remains nil. Roberto Mancini’s gang have tightened up domestically but, in the sport’s elite club competition, sloppy goals are killers, especially early ones at home . Here it took just 10 minutes for Siem de Jong’s opener to arrive and for an Italian manager the manner of this and the visiting captain’s second was pretty sickening. Ajax were virtually out-manned two-to-one in the area when the contest’s opening corner was fl oated in from the right and Nik las Moisander could touch the ball on to De Jong, who fi nished from close range. His second was even more lax from the home side: Christian Eriksen’s corner was delivered from the left and Yaya Touré, unforgivably, allowed De Jong to wander

away unmarked before he glanced a free header beyond a helpless Joe Hart.

2 Apart from Silva, this was close to City’s best XI A damning impression of this City performance was that it was reminiscent of the England side on their lost nights. Where a regal authority in performance might be expected of the domestic champions, instead the Blues off ered a kind of frantic desperation pocked by clumsy fi rst touches, errant passes and absent defending that had them chasing the game before even 20 minutes had been played. Despite a long list of injuries David Silva was the only major absentee as Joleon Lescott would have missed out anyway because of his part in the 3-1 debacle in the Netherlands a fortnight ago. This meant that the XI Mancini could send out was

close to his strongest side, in a familiar 4-2-3-1.

3 City’s gang of four up front continue to struggle Before this outing the only forward of the Blues vaunted gang-of-four to score in this competition from open play was Edin Dzeko, in the opening 3-2 defeat at Real Madrid. The spurning of chances in front of goal has been a recurring complaint from the manager. Of the dour 0-0 draw at West Ham United last time out Mancini wrote in his pre-game notes: “We had 65% possession and, I think, 22 shots. This is a lot of shots

without scoring a goal! ” From a strike force that also numbers Carlos

Tevez and Sergio Agüero, until Agüero’s equaliser a Mario

Roberto Mancini’s side were not at their best against Ajax

close to his4-2-3-1.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10

11 12

13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24

25

Guardian cryptic crossword

No 25,787 set by Philistine

Across 1 Cat causes other crea-

tures great suff ering (13)

9 USA twice interfered with Libyan leader: nothing new there (2,5)

10 Source of energy about player (7)

11 It could be kind now to search me (1,4,4)

12 Bracket partner’s joint (5)

13 Perhaps a feature of the Katmandu sky (4)

14 Flyer’s deal with greedy person takes a very long time (4,6)

16 Black and white fi rm sells our product (10)

19 Wine went up (4)20 Devil’s tie? (5)21 Type that may be 5th

and 7th in military academy (4,5)

23 Managed to come back with speed to provide the commentary (7)

24 Once more pick up another cheque, useful ultimately to make money (7)

25 Trouble in the loo (13)

Down 1 Ladies and gentle-

men of the audience, lyric content has been replaced by a true revo-lutionary artist (8-7)

2 Stir up right and throw out of offi ce (5)

3 As you like it, part of Florida (7)

4 Loveless, 20, married and ruined (7)

5 Break strike a great success (5,3)

6 May be ten out of ten are docile, playing in friendly agreement (7,8)

7 Interesting ale brewed in 22 (5,9)

8 Two in three, perhaps, going north, diced with death: one reason for judgement (5,9)

15 I left Suzie wet in a dominant state (8)

17 Do not interfere with auditor’s credit in trad-ing places (5,2)

18 You are rumoured to be involved with Masai warrior (7)

22 Pass on: (5)

Solution No. 25,786

L A S A G N E H A G G A R DE I O X A L S IO R G A N I C G R A M P U SN H E H U D H TI N T E R C E D E I R A T EN E Q O L NE N D O W U N R E L A T E D

A E A UW O O D S C R E W S A B R EE C H L U NT H U M B T O P S E C R E TL L A A L L M IA L I A S E S U N G U E N TN S I S G I S LD E T E N T E S I N C E R E

Stuck? For help call 0906 751 0038 or text GUARDIANC followed by a space, the day and date the

crossword appeared another space and the CLUE reference to 85010 (e.g GUARDIANC Monday12 Across1). Calls cost 77p per minute from a BT Landline. Calls from other networks may vary and mobiles

will be considerably higher. Texts cost 50p per clue plus standard network charges. Service supplied by

ATS. Call 0844 836 9769 for customer service (charged at local rate, 2p per min from a BT landline).

Want more? Access over 4,000 archive puzzles at guardian.co.uk/crossword. Buy the Guardian Cryptic

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Weather&Crossword

Weather forecast

UK and Ireland Noon Summary

-10°

-5°

15°

0°

5°

10°

15°

20°

25°

30°

35°

Wind (mph) X

Temperature (°)

Moderate

Moderate

Slight

Channel Islands

Shetland Islands

16

23

Rain

Sunny intervals

Overcast/dull

Mostly cloudy

Showers

Light rain

Heavy showers

Sleet showers

Temperature (°) X

10

11

11

11

11

11

11

13

26

1008

1012

1016

1020

1024

1004

Cent S England, Channel Is, London, SE EnglandAfter a chilly but fi ne start, it will turn rather

cloudy through the day, but it will remain largely

dry. Moderate westerly winds. Max temp 9-12C

(48-54F). Tonight, clear periods. Min temp 6-9C

(43-48F).

Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, NE England, E Midlands, W Midlands, E Anglia It is going to be

a generally dry day with patchy cloud and good

spells of sunshine. Feeling mild. Fresh to strong

westerly winds. Max temp 9-12C (48-54F).

Tonight, rain in the north. Min temp 5-8C (41-

46F).

SW England, Wales After a few early bright spells,

it will be fairly cloudy with a few spots of drizzle

for a time. Moderate to fresh westerly winds. Max

temp 9-12C (48-54F). Tonight, pockets of rain.

Min temp 5-8C (41-46F).

Northern Ireland, NW England It is expected to

be a windy and generally overcast day with patchy

drizzle or light rain at times. Strong westerly

winds. Max temp 9-12C (48-54F). Tonight, patchy

light rain. Min temp 5-8C (41-46F).

SW Scotland, SE Scotland, N Isles, W Isles, NE Scotland, NW Scotland A windy but mild

day. Largely fi ne in the east with sunny spells.

Outbreaks of rain elsewhere, heavy in places.

Strong westerly winds. Max temp 10-13C (50-

55F). Tonight, outbreaks of rain. Min temp 5-8C

(41-46F).

Ireland It will be mainly cloudy, apart from a few

early brighter spells. Patchy rain spreading in from

the west later. Strong westerly winds. Max temp

10-13C (50-55F). Tonight, largely cloudy and dry.

Min temp 6-9C (43-48F).

Thursday Friday Saturday MondaySunday

High 14 Low 3 High 12 Low 2 High 12 Low 1 High 13 Low 3High 11 Low 2

UK and Ireland Five day forecast Atlantic front Noon today

Low P fills. High Q declines. Low R deepens.

Warm front

Cold front

Occluded front

Trough

HQ

LP

LR

992

1024

1032

1000

1000

1000

1008

1008

1008

1016

Around the world

Ajaccio 18 64 Cloudy

Algiers 18 64 Cloudy

Ams’dam 10 50 Sunny

Athens 20 68 Fair

Auckland 16 61 Fair

B Aires 29 84 Sunny

Bangkok 34 93 Cloudy

Barcelona 15 59 Sunny

Beijing 10 50 Sunny

Belgrade 12 54 Sunny

Berlin 6 43 Rain

Bordeaux 12 54 Fair

Boston 6 43 Cloudy

Brussels 10 50 Fair

Budapest 13 55 Fair

C’hagen 7 45 Fair

Cairo 29 84 Sunny

Cape Town 22 72 Sunny

Chicago 6 43 Cloudy

Christ’rch 10 50 Cloudy

Corfu 24 75 Sunny

Dakar 30 86 Cloudy

Denver 16 61 Cloudy

Dhaka 24 75 Rain

Dublin 11 52 Cloudy

Faro 18 64 Sunny

Florence 17 63 Sunny

Frankfurt 8 46 Cloudy

Funchal 17 63 Drizzle

Geneva 9 48 Cloudy

Gibraltar 15 59 Rain

H Kong 27 81 Sunny

Harare 29 84 Sunny

Helsinki 1 34 Snow

Innsbruck 6 43 Rain

Istanbul 21 70 Cloudy

Jo’burg 28 82 Sunny

K’mandu 24 75 Sunny

Kabul 19 66 Sunny

Karachi 32 90 Fair

Kingston 31 88 Fair

L Angeles 31 88 Sunny

Larnaca 26 79 Sunny

Lima 21 70 Sunny

Lisbon 16 61 Sunny

London 9 48 Cloudy

Madrid 12 54 Sunny

Majorca 17 63 Rain

Malaga 14 57 Rain

Malta 25 77 Sunny

Melb’rne 21 70 Sunny

Mexico C 18 64 Fair

Miami 25 77 Cloudy

Milan 13 55 Sunny

Mombasa 30 86 Sunny

Montreal 2 36 Sleet

Moscow 10 50 Rain

Mumbai 32 90 Fair

Munich 6 43 Cloudy

N Orleans 22 72 Cloudy

Nairobi 23 73 Cloudy

Naples 20 68 Fair

New Delhi 25 77 Fair

New York 6 43 Cloudy

Nice 18 64 Sunny

Oporto 15 59 Sunny

Oslo 0 32 Fair

Paris 10 50 Sunny

Perth 21 70 Fair

Prague 6 43 Cloudy

Reykjavik 3 37 Rain

°C °F Weather

Sun & Moon

Sun rises 0704

Sun sets 1623

Moon rises -

Moon sets 1308

New Moon 13 November

Rio de J 26 79 Fair

Rome 19 66 Cloudy

Shanghai 13 55 Sunny

Singapore 31 88 Showers

St P’burg 4 39 Drizzle

Stockh’m 2 36 Cloudy

Strasb’g 10 50 Sunny

Sydney 28 82 Sunny

Tel Aviv 30 86 Sunny

Tenerife 25 77 Sunny

Tokyo 14 57 Showers

Toronto 1 34 Cloudy

Vancouv’r 12 54 Sunny

Venice 14 57 Sunny

Vienna 9 48 Showers

Warsaw 5 41 Showers

Wash’ton 9 48 Sunny

Well’ton 10 50 Rain

away at the visitors’ rearguard, Samir Nasri and Sergio Agüero probed for fi ssures, and Pablo Zabaleta enjoyed some success in exploiting the space left by Daley Blind, the adventurous left-back and son of the great Danny Blind, the only man to hold a winner’s medal from every Uefa and Fifa club competition.

City opened the second half, too, as if full of dangerous intent, with Mario Balo-telli replacing the ineff ectual Javi García. There were yellow cards for rash chal-lenges from Blind and Toby Alderweireld in the opening fi ve minutes as Ajax started to look unsteady. Agüero had the ball in the net in the confusion that followed a Touré free-kick, only to be given off side, and Touré burst through on the left , pro-ducing a low cut-back intercepted by the alert Christian Poulsen.

I t took 10 minutes for Ajax to make their fi rst incursion into the City half, De Jong bidding for a hat-trick goal with a 25-yard drive that briefl y inconvenienced Hart. But then City were back on the attack, although their eff orts were not enough to draw a full-throated response from their supporters, who seemed still stunned by the events of the fi rst 20 minutes.

How paradoxical it is that City’s Italian manager should appear to have lost con-trol of his defence, now so unreliable that there was a mass sigh of relief midway through the second half when Hart, under pressure, succeeded in punching away another of Christian Eriksen’s corners.

Mesut Ozil rescued Real Madrid from defeat to Borussia Dortmund at the Bernabéu, his 89th-minute free-kick securing a 2-2 draw in Group D’s other game. It was a superb curling strike from the former Schalke and Werder Bremen player as he capitalised on Sven Bender’s foul on José Callejón.

Real had dominated in terms of possession but trailed for most of the game. Marco Reus had volleyed Dortmund in front in the 28th minute. Pepe equalised with a header six minutes later but Real’s Alvaro Arbeloa poked the ball into his own net on the stroke of half-time to restore the visitors’ lead.

For all the ball Real enjoyed they created few genuine chances and Dortmund’s tactic of playing on the break almost earned them another victory to add to the 2-1 success they achieved last month.

Victory would have put the German champions in a dominant position but they lead Real by only one point, with games at third-placed Ajax and at home to Manchester City to come. Staff and agencies

Ozil leaves it late to rescue Real Madrid

Clockwise from left: Siem de Jong, left, scores Ajax’s fi rst goal past Joe Hart; Yaya Touré brings Manchester City back to 2-1 after a fi ne piece of control; Sergio Agüero equalises for City; a late eff ort by Aleksandar Kolarov is ruled out for off side; Mario Balotelli argues with referee Peter Rasmussen at the fi nal whistle

Balotelli penalty was the sole other return in Europe, which is hardly good enough .

4 Not even captain Kompany is performing in Europe This was an evening for City’s outfi eld big guns to fi nally fi re. Last night , with the big six missing the injured Silva, the remaining quintet of Vincent Kompany, Samir Nasri, Tevez, Yaya Touré, and Agüero, began either poorly or anonymously. Kompany produced an early mistake that allowed Ajax to get in behind and hand them an initiative . There were further mistakes from the Belgian, while Touré fi rst gave possession to Lasse Schone near the halfway line, then was culpable for Ajax’s second. Later there were goals from the Ivorian and Agüero but, overall, this was another disjointed display from a band who should be

taking apart an opposition as young and callow as this Ajax side.

5 City’s hopes of progress all but died against Ajax City’s hopes hung by the fi nest of gossamers after the visiting side’s second . Before, Mancini had written in his programme notes: “What is most encouraging is that our form here at home is still very strong. We have not lost a game here in almost two years and have not lost at home in European competition, either, while I have been manager.” With less than four minutes remaining, Borussia Dortmund were beating Real Madrid 2-1 and Dzeko had the chance to give City the lead for the fi rst time and fi nally lift them off the bottom of Group D. But the Bosnian missed, then Madrid equalised as the hope, like this year’s tilt at the Champions League, all but died.

JO

N S

UP

ER

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P,

PH

IL N

OB

LE

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EU

TE

RS

, A

LE

X L

IVE

SE

Y/G

ET

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guardian.co.uk/sport

Wednesday 07.11.12

�The further we go into the race the more I’m beginning to realise: ‘This is it, I’ve won the Tour, I’ve done it’�Exclusive extract from Bradley Wiggins’ autobiography, page 48 ≥

Schalke 2Arsenal 2Gunners settle for a point after blowing leadPage 51 ≥

�

Adkins fears sack by Southampton before weekend’s game cling on until the weekend, he recognises that, despite retaining the support of the vast majority of the club’s fans, he would need to register a second win of the cam-paign to prolong his tenure .

“Someone is always going to be the favourite to be sacked,” said Adkins at the Hawthorns. “If you’re bottom of the

Dominic Fifi eld

Nigel Adkins is understood to be fearful that he will have lost his job before Sat-urday’s visit of Swansea City to St Mary’s following Southampton’s dismal start to the Premier League campaign.

The club’s executive chairman, Nicola Cortese, and its hierarchy have been dis-mayed by the team’s form after a summer of lavish spending ahead of the return to the top fl ight after a seven-year absence. Defeat to West Bromwich Albion on Mon-day left them bottom with four points from 10 fi xtures, eight of which were lost .

Adkins acknowledged after that defeat

that he should be considered favour-ite to become the first Premier League manager to lose his job this season, and the Southampton offi cials discussed his position yesterday . Cortese is believed to be considering his options but will remove the manager, who steered the club from near the foot of League One to successive promotions , only if a replacement can be secured quickly.

The manager has begun his prepara-tions for Saturday’s visit of Swansea despite his own concerns he could have been removed by then from a position he has enjoyed for a little over two years. He remains convinced he can secure the team’s survival this season but, should he

league, you should be the favourite prob-ably. I’m very positive … I know I’m a better manager today than when I joined Southampton. I’m not going to hide away from that, but what a great challenge we face. If I don’t believe we can do it, then the players aren’t going to believe it.”

Southampton have conceded 28 goals in their 10 league games , losing all of their away games . Their attack-minded approach ha s left them horribly vulner-able at the back with little indication that lessons are being learned.

Their toils have been endured despite an outlay of around £30m in the summer – they broke their transfer record twice to secure Jay Rodriguez from Burnley

and then Gastón Ramírez from Bologna . Cortese’s sights had been set upon estab-lishing the team in mid-table.

The poor results have already tempered that outlook, even with three of their next four matches being at home, though the availability of potential replacements remains an issue. While it seems unlikely the club would seek to off er Harry Red-knapp a return to St Mary’s, Paolo Di Canio’s impressive progress at Swindon Town has been noted.

Of other notable contenders mooted for the position, Alan Shearer, a former player at the club, is available even if his manage-ment experience is limited to a brief spell with Newcastle that ended in relegation.

Nigel Adkins has led Southampton to eight defeats in 10 Premier League games this season after their return to the top fl ight

Mancini on the warpath after City fail to salvage lifeline against Ajax Daniel Taylor Etihad Stadium

Manchester City 2 Ajax 2Y Touré 22 De Jong 10 17

Agüero 74

The harsh reality for Manchester City is that they had to win this match and, how-ever much we can admire their powers of recovery, the outcome was still shrouded in great disappointment. Roberto Manci-ni’s team showed great qualities of perse-verance but there are grave consequences for carelessness at this level and City’s second season in the Champions League is ending, pretty much like the fi rst, as an ordeal of their own making.

A team that allows their opponents a two-goal lead inside the opening 16 min-utes is always playing with fi re. Siem de Jong’s goals for Ajax left City needing a feat of escapology that was beyond them and, though Yaya Tour é and Sergio Ag üero did redress the defi cit, the night was to end in a certain amount of acrimony, too, with Mancini marching on to the pitch to confront the match offi cials. When a television cameraman tried to get close, Mancini’s anger then turned on him.

Mario Balotelli, a second-half substi-tute, had been denied a penalty in stop-page time and a few minutes earlier an offside decision ruled out a potential winner for Ag üero. Aleksander Kolarov had, indeed, been offside but Balotelli was unfortunate and City’s frustrations threatened to spill over in these moments, with a number of players surrounding the Danish referee, Peter Rasmussen.

Their grievance was legitimate but this was also a night when City paid the price for their generous defending and, from here, even if they beat Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund in their fi nal two games it may not be enough.

The way they started the match made it feel like a trick of the mind that this was a team that had not lost on their own ground in the Premier League for getting on two years. City boast the most formidable home record in English football but they were terribly soft goals to concede, both coming from corners and due, in part, to Mancini’s players leaving it to one another and not being decisive enough.

It was the kind of carelessness that meant Tour é started to go with De Jong for the second goal but then, for no apparent reason, gave up, abandoning the case and leaving a dangerous opponent unmarked to fl ash his header past Joe Hart straight from Christian Eriksen’s delivery.

De Jong’s fi rst had brought an incensed Mancini out of the dugout to remonstrate with his players. He was smiling, but his eyes fl ashed with anger. Niklas Moisander had applied the fi rst touch in a congested penalty area and, with a slight defl ection off Vincent Kompany, the ball was running

out for another corner. Or at least that is what City’s defenders seemed to think until De Jong, alert and purposeful, slid in at the far post and skimmed the ball over Hart with a shot that was still rising as it hit the net. It was the kind of angle from which keepers hate to be beaten and per-haps Hart could be accused of going down too quickly. The real mistake here was leaving him so exposed in the fi rst place.

All of the failures that City have demon-strated in their two seasons in the Cham-pions League – the hesitant defending, the lack of confi dence and struggle for cohe-sion – were evident in those moments. It was strange, too, that Tour é’s goal was not followed by a more concerted spell of pressure.

They did sporadically threaten but it was still disjointed for long spells.

Ag üero, one of the more accomplished strikers in the business, loses some of his

threat when he is deployed on the left. City never quite look so refined when David Silva is missing and Ajax held out comfortably until half-time.

That goal, however, did offer hope. Samir Nasri, trying to fi nd space on the right, curled in the cross with the out-side of his boot. Moisander’s header, under pressure from Ag üero, cleared it only as far as Tour é who controlled on his chest, swivelled and, leaning back, vol-leyed in a goal of great body strength and technique.

Mancini brought on Balotelli for the second half, taking off Javi Garc ía and moving Ag üero to a more central position. The Argentinian quickly had a chance to run through on goal but lost his footing. Shortly afterwards, he prodded the ball past Kenneth Vermeer in the Ajax goal but from an off side position.

There were, however, signs of a team gaining in momentum and belief. De Jong’s dipping 30-yard eff ort needed a fi ne save from Hart but Ajax were increasingly being pinned back, holding on to their lead and considerably more cautious than in the opening 45 minutes.

After 74 minutes Balotelli fl icked on a long punt from Hart and this time Ag üero was clinical, quick and incisive and drill ed his shot past Vermeer into the bottom corner.

Richard Williams, page 52 ≥

P W D L F A GD Pts

Dortmund 4 2 2 0 6 4 2 8Real Madrid 4 2 1 1 10 7 3 7Ajax 4 1 1 2 6 8 -2 4Man City 4 0 2 2 6 9 -3 2

Results

Dortmund 1 Ajax 0,Real Madrid 3 Man City 2

Ajax 1 Real Madrid 4, Man City 1 Dortmund 1

Ajax 3 Man City 1, Dortmund 2 Real Madrid 1

Man City 2 Ajax 2, Real Madrid 2 Dortmund 2

Remaining fi xtures

21 Nov Ajax v Dortmund, Man City v Real Madrid

4 Dec Dortmund v Man City, Real Madrid v Ajax

Group D

Manchester City 4-2-3-1

Hart; Zabaleta, Kompany,

Nastasic, Clichy; Garc ía

(Balotelli, h-t), Barry

(Kolarov, 85); Nasri, Y Tour é,

Ag üero; Tevez (Dzeko, 66).

Subs not used

Pantilimon, Maicon, Sinclair,

Meppen-Walters.

Referee P Rasmussen (Den)

Ajax 4-3-3

Vermeer; Van Rhijn,

Alderweireld, Moisander,

Blind•; De Jong, Poulsen•

(Fischer, 87), Sch öne

(Enoh, 77); Boerrigter

(Sana, 90), Eriksen, Babelt.

Subs not used

Cillessen, Veltman, Denswil,

Dijks.

Mario Balotelli appears to be hauled to the ground by Ajax’s Ricardo van Rhijn in the dying moment of last night’s 2-1 draw Martin Rickett/PA

the guardian 07.11.2012

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