Let’s not jump to conclusions (unless we feel like it).

A lot of the mainstream media and many commentators on social networks are busily and scrupulously pointing out that it is wrong to jump to conclusions about the ‘motivation’ of the madman responsible for the carnage in Nice. According to this point of view, there is no link to be made between this latest outrage and any religious, political or cultural grouping and it is, at the very least, morally dubious to draw any conclusions from the ethnicity or religious affiliations of such a deranged individual.

Fair enough. I can see why that seems like a reasonable line to take. Just because the adherents of a certain politico-religious movement -in the cause of furthering some clearly delineated global ambitions- behave like mediaevalist savages doesn’t mean that everyone who follows a certain religion should be tarred by association.

I accept that premise, although I do struggle to understand why some folk will deny that such a link could possibly exist, even when the perpetrators of attacks make explicit claims about their motivations. To ignore or repudiate the avowed aims of these perpetrators (in effect, to deny them agency), requires quite an intellectual leap on the part of those doing the repudiating. Some might put it down to arrogance, but I’m not convinced that this is necessarily the case. I’d be more inclined to the view that it represents a conscious reaction to a sub-conscious wound; terrorism wins, not when it blows people up, but because -when it blows people up- it forces some otherwise rational minds to rebrand ‘fear’ as ‘conscience’.  

As someone who generally tries to form my opinions around rational interpretations of the available evidence, I’d agree that it’s usually unwise to jump to conclusions from a base of flimsy evidence. But over the last few weeks, I have gathered the distinct impression that jumping to conclusions has become all the rage; some of the very same people and news organisations urging caution and restraint over Nice have been doing quite the opposite over the binary choice faced by the British electorate at the recent EU referendum. 

First there was the disgraceful citation of the murderous actions of a mentally ill individual as ‘evidence’ that the Leave campaign had somehow unleashed dark and powerful forces. It was depressing to witness seemingly rational people choosing to interpret a psychotic episode in a way that satisfied their own prejudices. Since the vote, various attempts have been made to suggest, for example, that relatively minor examples of stupidity and nastiness (like someone posting anti-immigration graffiti) represent evidence of a gathering tidal wave of racist enmity in the UK. Anyone who can argue, on the one hand, that some racist idiot shouting ‘Paki go home’ (disgraceful as that undoubtedly is) is evidence of malicious intent among 15 million voters while, on the other, suggesting that the latest in a very long line of atrocities has got ‘nothing to do’ with Islam is, intellectually speaking, unlikely to pass go and unlikely to collect £200.  

It is either acceptable to jump to conclusions from little available evidence, or it is unacceptable to jump to conclusions from little available evidence. Whichever side you’re on, you can’t pick one of those options when it suits your own particular prejudices and then pick the other option when it doesn’t.

Although … now that I think about, it’s obvious that some people can do just exactly that.

Which people? 

The kind that you shouldn't take seriously.

It's time to ditch that immigration bargepole

Such is the degraded nature of our national discourse on the topic of immigration that I feel obliged to start this piece with a statement, or -in modern parlance- a trigger warning.

I am a free-marketeer. I believe that capitalism, while far from perfect, provides the greatest good for the greatest number. I believe this because all of the available evidence leads me to that conclusion. Further, that belief in the free market comes with a belief in the free movement of people, which means that I am in favour of immigration, including economic migration. 

Questions relating to how, when, why and in what numbers people move from one country to another ought to be considered important enough for reasoned discussion, but it has been clear for some time that ‘polite’ society has considered such questions to be out of bounds. Mainstream political parties won’t talk about it and the default liberal-left position has been: if you question immigration policy, you’re a racist. No wonder then, that rather than try to talk honestly and rationally on the subject, many folk opt to deploy the proverbial ten-foot bargepole to help them steer well clear of it. When you consider the public reaction to the refugee crisis, it’s little wonder that some choose to keep their own counsel. From the haughty tenor of some of the posts on the various social networks, you’d think that anyone not waving a ‘refugees welcome’ banner while organising a street party for the new arrivals was deserving of the kind of opprobrium normally reserved for members of the SS who have been discovered living in exile in South America. At the very least, many people appear to believe that a failure to subscribe to the ‘open our doors and let everyone in’ line is somehow morally dubious. I was intrigued by the number of people posting online statements about their willingness to take refugees into their own homes. I’m not in a position to say whether these statements were genuine, or merely tiresome examples of virtue signalling; I don’t suppose we’ll know for sure until we check back in a couple of months to see how they are all getting on with their Syrian lodgers.

During our national debate (I use that word in the loosest possible sense), we continue to use the emotive term ‘refugee’ when, under European law, someone cannot be classed as a refugee if they have crossed several ‘safe’ borders after having fled their own country. Many of the folk we are being urged to accept with open arms can, by no meaningful legal definition, be described as refugees. Accordingly, one must assume that they are economic migrants. I’ve already stated that I am in favour of economic migration and believe that it has enriched our country, but would add this caveat: nation states should have the right to make informed and rational decisions about how they manage their numbers. And, whether we like it or not, the numbers are important.      

A few weeks ago, when people started circulating an idiotic meme about Britain’s shame in only accepting 216 refugees (which anyone could have debunked after about twenty seconds of research), they inadvertently touched upon that key question. If you are willing to state that 216 was the ‘wrong’ amount of refugees to accept, you have implicitly acknowledged that there must be a ‘right’ number of refugees to accept. Let’s discount for the moment the fact that some folk think we should have an absolute 'open doors' policy, in the same way we’d discount the fact that some folk believe the earth to be flat. I don’t know if the ‘right’ number of refugees is 15,000, 150,000 or 1.5million. I would expect the people we elected to govern the country to have a view based on their knowledge of the likely impact on services, infrastructure, housing, social cohesion and so on. We have to trust them to make that decision because -much as it may surprise some folk to learn- personal conscience doesn’t trump reality. Making a grand pronouncement about our moral obligations might make some people feel good about themselves, but they shouldn’t expect other human beings with other thought processes and experiences, other opinions and observations, to go along with them.   

Just as it’s idiotic to believe that all refugees are potential terrorists, it’s also idiotic to believe that there won’t be terrorists (or terrorist sympathisers) among the hundreds of thousands of folk currently entering Europe. We know there will be, because the jihadists have not only told us, they have demonstrated that they have agents and sympathisers operating in major European cities. These facts may be awkward and inconvenient for some folk to accept, but that’s the thing about facts: they don’t need you or me to feel awkward or inconvenienced about accepting them. They just are.   

As always, our interpretation of events may depend on where we get our news from, but five minutes on the google machine should make it obvious that this is a much more difficult and complicated topic than some folk believe. For every feelgood news item featuring smiling locals welcoming trainloads of refugees with open arms, there are myriad alternative stories about a less welcoming side. These stories, among other things, reveal a growing unease among local populations about the sudden influx of huge numbers of folk (the vast majority of them young single men) from North Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. We might not like to hear about hostility towards these migrants, but it is happening and there are reasons why it is happening.

I work in an educational setting on the outskirts of an average British city. Many of the students I work with come from areas which might be described as disadvantaged. Last week, I had a discussion about the refugee crisis with a group of 12 young people. What struck me was the sheer unanimity on this topic among the group; every one of them expressed views which, if aired on twitter, would probably have PC Plod at the door ready to press ‘hate crime’ charges. I’m expressing it politely when I say that these youngsters did not go along with the view that their country should welcome refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants. And I’m willing to bet that, for each of those kids, there will be a set of parents or carers with the same outlook. I do not believe that this is down to wickedness; these are simply people whose perceptions of this complicated topic are viewed through the filter of their experiences within their own communities. No doubt some of you reading this will already have concluded that such folk will have been brainwashed by the ‘right wing’ press, but that, I think, is an intellectually lazy position, one which wilfully ignores the experiences of those who believe that they have most to lose from immigration; that is, the people against whom many migrants will be competing for low-paid jobs and cheap housing.

I’m fine with immigration, but I’m middle class, middle-aged and comfortably off. I’m not unemployed and I’m not on the social housing waiting list. If I was and I lived in a poor community in which social and cultural tensions already existed, I probably wouldn’t be as keen on it as the average college professor, TV journalist or MP. And I’d probably be even less keen if I lived in a place like Rotherham, where the values of the governing class are so grotesquely skewed that they can suppress information about the systematic brutalisation and rape of 2,000 girls in the name of ‘community cohesion’, but can ban a middle-aged couple from fostering children because they supported a political party that said that it would limit immigration. Not a party that said it would introduce concentration camps or outlaw any particular religion; a party that said it would limit immigration. I can’t explain why those in power acted the way they did without using words like arrogance, stupidity and cognitive dissonance. If you can think of anything more damaging to the notion of community cohesion than a willingness on the part of the authorities to interpret heinous criminal activity through the prism of ethno-religious sensitivity, please let me know; my mind can’t possibly be any more boggled than it already was by those disgraceful events. Rotherham provided the perfect illustration of a political climate in which legitimate concerns are stifled and declared off-topic, a climate in which the Untermensch are excluded from any discussion because they’re deemed to be stupid, racist and volatile. Little wonder then, that many folk, rather than talk about the issues, will reach for that bargepole.

How did we get to this point? Well, here’s a clue:

Andrew Neather, a speech writer and adviser to Tony Blair in the early 2000s, was quoted as saying that Labour’s relaxation of immigration controls were designed to "open up the UK to mass migration", although ministers were reluctant to discuss this move publicly, fearing that it would alienate its "core working class vote". In a phrase which has rightly become notorious, Mr Weather said that Labour ministers wished to change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity".

Who was consulted about this plan? Did it ever appear in any Labour manifesto? And whose noses were actually being rubbed in it? If those ministers were really convinced that their policies were right, shouldn’t they have talked openly about them instead of operating by stealth?

When the Amsterdam treaty of 1999 formally incorporated the Schengen agreement into European law, commentators who pointed out the obvious (i.e. that opening Europe’s doors to potentially millions of poor Africans and Eastern Europeans could have catastrophic consequences) were routinely dismissed; they usually wrote for the wrong newspapers and had the wrong political views. And bit by bit, we got used to the idea of having to creep gingerly across eggshells, because polite society had declared omertà on the topic of immigration, hoping that it would go away.

But sooner or later, reality always puts its marker down. It doesn’t matter what polite society or mainstream political parties think, because if enough people think immigration is the big issue of the day, immigration will become the big issue of the day. And, when mainstream head-in-the-sand parties decide to keep their heads in the sand, the electorate invariably looks for alternatives. 

I sometimes wonder if it occurs to folk who use 'shaming' tactics that they are at least partly responsible for the increasing support enjoyed by so-called extremist parties. Yes, if you have ever dismissed someone as a narrow-minded bigot without listening to their concerns about immigration, I’m afraid you are culpable. It’s true that we have no shortage of narrow-minded bigots, but extremist parties didn’t invent racism; they have grown -and will continue to grow- in response to the mainstream’s unwillingness to listen to views deemed to be morally or intellectually beyond the pale. By now, it should be obvious to everyone that closing debate down by shouting ‘racist’ doesn’t solve anything; in fact, it does quite the opposite, as Europe’s political leaders are discovering. Look up what is happening in Sweden if you want a glimpse of the future.

If we were able to have an honest and rational discussion now, I suspect that a majority of the British population would go along with the following two propositions:

It would be wrong to refuse to accept any refugees.

It would be wrong to have an absolute ‘open doors’ policy towards refugees.

Somewhere in between those two extremes is a position that the majority of us will support, because most people -on some level- appreciate that Society is a compact between those who are living now, those who shaped the world in which we live and those who will follow us. Our liberal culture (and its attendant freedoms) was not won in a lottery; it was fought for over hundreds of years, paid for by the lives of millions. It has survived by creating wealth and prosperity, adapting to change, welcoming and assimilating incomers and entrenching a set of core values within a complex system of cultural, societal and political mores. No single generation, no ephemeral governing group, no cabal of keyboard warriors is empowered to change that. To put it simply: we do not have the right to give the house keys to anyone who fancies turning up. And if we put that to a vote, most people would go along with it. Because, again, most folk know (if few are prepared to say) that while we are obliged to act morally and to help refugees as much as we reasonably can, we do not owe millions of folk from other continents our standard of living.   

If you believe that we do, you should act according to your conscience. You should sell your house and car and donate the proceeds to an appropriate charity. You should take refugees into your home and share your life with them, or go and work for voluntary services overseas. What you shouldn’t do is demand that other people (and future generations) pay for policies that you think are morally upstanding. You are entitled to hold those views, but you have no right to hold other folk to those standards.

It is clear that our continued use of that intellectual bargepole has not had the desired effect. All it has done is build up resentment and open the door to folk who won’t necessarily have entirely benevolent intentions. 

There is, however, still time to adopt a mature and rational approach to the topic.

We should be discussing and debating the issues of culture, demographics, assimilation, impacts on education, housing, health services and social cohesion. Because we live in a civilised country, I believe that the economic, social, cultural and moral case for controlled immigration can be made and won.

But I suspect that some of us aren’t yet ready to have that grown-up discussion.

When the subject comes up, too many shrill voices will still cry ‘racist’ and, fearful of being called the only thing that is worse than being called a paedophile, folk will -publicly at least- reach once again for that bargepole.  

And something that is already quite ugly could get a whole lot uglier.

Content, in context

A friend told me an interesting story the other day. He was in the car with his kids, listening to a football discussion on the radio. Graham Taylor, the former England football manager, was talking about the reasons why the English national team consistently under-performs. Mr Taylor said: "the problem is that there are too many foreigners playing in the English premier League". Most folk would probably accept that there is a link between the number of indigenous players playing in a domestic league and the success, or otherwise, of that country’s national team. Because of the incredible riches on offer, the English game attracts some of the best international footballers, which makes it more difficult for young English talent to break through to the top level. The percentage of English players playing in the top flight of the English League is very low (30%) compared to other -demonstrably more successful- national teams. In Italy, 57% of the players in Serie A are eligible to play for the national team, while in Spain 65% of the players in La Liga are available for selection by the national manager. It is, therefore, factually correct to state that the English football manager has fewer options than his Italian or Spanish counterparts when it comes to picking his first eleven. So Mr Taylor has a point.

Anyway, to get back to my friend. When his teenage kids heard that ‘too many foreigners’ remark on the radio, they both exclaimed: “but he can’t say that … it’s racist!”

The context of the remark was completely lost on them. This was not because they weren't bright kids, but because -I'd suggest- that is how they’ve been taught to respond to anything even remotely connected with what has become a taboo subject. They have been trained to react to certain words and phrases with a mixture of horror and revulsion (with maybe a touch of righteous indignation on the side). You might say that this is a good thing and is at least an improvement on the societal and conversational mores extant in say, 1975, but there is a disquieting element to such a Pavlovian reaction. Of course, young people should be taught that racism is a bad thing, but surely it is more important that they are taught to recognise and interpret the context of a remark?

Last week, Donald Sterling -owner of Los Angeles Clippers basketball team- was banned from the National Basketball Association for life after a recording emerged of him expressing views that were perceived to have been racist. Mr Sterling was recorded asking a woman not to associate in public with black people; he didn’t use any specific racist terminology, but the content and context of his remarks made his views perfectly clear.
Let’s shelve for the moment the question of whether or not it was right that he should have received a lifetime ban from the sport. The point is that Mr Sterling managed to reveal his deep-rooted racism without using any of those taboo words and phrases, the words and phrases we’ve taught our kids to recoil from. He was condemned by an understanding (or at least an interpretation) of his content and context.

If we train young people merely to recoil at phrases like ‘too many foreigners’, we have failed them, no matter how good we think our intentions might be. A response to words alone is almost always inadequate, because context determines the meaning of things. It is the understanding of context (and the forming of an appropriate response to it) that marks out a thinking person. If kids are taught to respond to key words and phrases without thinking about setting, nuance, tone, or any of the awkward possibilities of context, we have opened the door to something quite sinister.

It’s been said a million times, but it’s worth saying it a million times more: we shouldn’t be teaching kids what to think, we should be teaching them how to think. Mere words are only part of the story.

Just don't use the M-word

The ridiculous furore over the England football manager and the ‘monkey’ joke says a lot about the sorry condition of our cultural discourse. In case you missed it, Roy Hodgson –during the half-time interval in England’s game against Poland- was reported to have told an ancient joke about the relationship between an astronaut and a monkey; he used it to illustrate the connection that he required two of his players to make during the second half of the game. Here’s the joke:

NASA sends a man and a monkey together into space. After they’ve been up in space for a while, the intercom crackles and ground control gets in touch with an instruction: 'Monkey, fire the retros.' So the monkey fires the retros. A little later, another instruction comes through: 'Monkey, check the fuel supply.' So the monkey checks the fuel supply.
Later on, another instruction comes through: ‘Monkey, check the life support systems’. So the monkey checks the life support systems.
By now, the astronaut is getting pretty hacked off with this state of affairs, so he contacts ground control and says: 'Hey, when do I get to do something up here?' The folk at NASA get back to him: 'Don’t worry. In 15 minutes, we want you to feed the monkey.'

Now, as far as this joke related to the tactics Hodgson was trying to impart to his team, Chris Smalling (who is white) was to be the astronaut, while Andros Townsend (who is black) was to be the monkey. Smalling’s job, as the manager saw it, was to supply Townsend with the ball. One of the players in the dressing room -whose identity has yet to be revealed- felt that this was racially insensitive, and later leaked the ‘story’ to the press, where, of course, it was devoured. Some elements of the chattering classes viewed the incident as problematic. Indeed, had you been listening to BBC radio the day after the match, you might have been tempted to believe that this was a major story which could conceivably have led to Hodgson losing his job (in spite of the fact that Andros Townsend had publicly stated that no offence was meant and none was taken).

For those who don’t follow the sport and may have some prejudice against football and footballers, I should point out here that Roy Hodgson is by no means a run-of-the-mill manager. He has lived and worked in several countries, is fluent in five languages and conversant in three more. He lists Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Sebastian Faulds among his favourite writers. By most reasonable standards, he would be considered to be a cultured individual and has a reputation within the game for being a thoroughly decent chap. You could argue that he chose a rather convoluted way to make his point; perhaps he would have been better advised to have said: ‘just get the fucking ball to Andros as soon as you can’. But in using the joke to make his point, he would not have considered the possibility that it might have caused offence, not because he is a closet racist but because he is a nice man. I’m willing to speculate that it would simply not have occurred to him that there was any link between black people and monkeys.

But even if it hadn’t been someone like Roy Hodgson telling that joke, the folk who over-reacted would still have been wrong to over-react. Surely the notion of any link between a black footballer and a monkey is so utterly ridiculous that only a complete moron would entertain it? It’s as ridiculous a concept as claiming that all Welsh people smell of turnips. If anyone tried to promote that particular idea, they would deservedly be laughed at or, more likely, ignored by polite society.

With that in mind, one can’t help but wonder why so many people reacted in the way they did to the monkey joke; in fact, it’s tempting to speculate that there might be more to it than meets the eye.

During the recent American presidential election campaign, there was some hostile media reaction to one of the speeches given by the Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Some mainstream commentators accused Romney of using ‘dog whistle’ politics to appeal to extreme right-wingers. According to these critics, he was talking in code in order to re-assure the lunatic fringe that he was the real deal. On the surface, it may have looked like he was speaking the language of consensus, designed to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters, but he was actually giving out secret messages that only his core support would understand. These messages would re-assure them that a victorious Romney would indeed govern as a hard-line, kick-ass Republican president. This interesting theory, however, was deftly undermined by the cultural commentator Mark Steyn, who pointed out a simple and devastating truth: if you can hear the dog whistle, it usually means that you’re the dog.

By sensing something ‘offensive’ in Roy Hodgson’s joke, by making some connection between a black footballer and a monkey, the person who leaked that story and the people who took offence on behalf of Andros Townsend have perhaps revealed rather more about themselves than they might comfortably care to acknowledge.

Let's have a fair fight

Now that the gloves are coming off in the run up to the US presidential election, I’m hoping that the media coverage improves on the execrable example of 2008 and that there is at least a modicum of impartiality and the possibility of something approaching reasoned discussion and debate. Last time around, the mainstream media was very firmly behind Obama, generally perceived to be the fresh, attractive and culturally significant candidate in what many folk viewed as a landmark election. It was certainly a landmark election for the BBC, in the sense that the corporation pretty much abandoned even the pretence of impartiality in favour of pushing the received narrative, namely that Obama was the chosen one.

I am not unsympathetic to the notion that there were all kinds of cultural reasons why the election of an African-American president was unequivocally a good thing, but there was very little discussion about the actual politics, beyond repeated use of those campaign bromides about ‘hope’ and ‘change’.
It seemed that so much emotional and intellectual capital was invested in the Obama project that barely a dissenting voice was tolerated. Caught up in what, at times, seemed like an almost messianic zeal, some reporters hinted that only a ‘racist’ Republican vote could have kept Obama out, seemingly unaware that the decisive element of any racist vote, by definition, would have to have come from the Democrat side. It is very rare indeed for the hard core Republican vote to fall below 40% (George W. Bush had polled 50.6% in the 2004 vote). Before Obama, the last Democrat to get 50% of the popular vote was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Since then, no fewer than four Republican candidates had polled more than half of the popular vote, none of them running against a black candidate. To have imputed race as a motive was a disgraceful slur on the American electorate.

On a personal level, I found myself surprised -more than once- by some of the throwaway remarks that folk were prepared to make. They seemed not to understand that, if it is wrong to make a negative judgement on someone because of the colour of his skin, then it must also be wrong to make a positive judgement based on the colour of his skin. Some of those remarks may have come -as the saying goes- ‘from a good place’ but we shouldn’t forget that those positives and negatives are merely aspects of an equation in which the key component is that willingness to pass judgement based on skin colour.

Beyond the race issue, some of the day-to-day coverage also left a lot to be desired. I recall one particular example, a vivid illustration of the lack of perspective and balance that was all-too-common.

Dom Joli was hosting a Sunday morning news and current affairs show on Radio Five Live and was interviewing a number of guests on the subject of the election. At one point in the discussion, the American goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann –at that time resident in the UK- was asked if he would be sending in a postal vote. He replied in the affirmative, stating that his family, from several generations back, was firmly Republican.

Joli said: "Oh ... that's a bit weird". An awkward pause followed, before Mr. Hahnemann, to his credit, handled the slight with good manners and no little grace, allowing the conversation to move on.

A couple of things were remarkable about this incident. First, Joli was clearly confident that he had license to be rude to a guest and to write off about 46% of the American electorate as ‘weird’; in other words, he was comfortable with being explicitly partisan on a news and current affairs show. The second remarkable thing comes from the realisation that Joli's bewilderment about Hahnemann's support for the Republicans was actually genuine. He was truly shocked that the goalie could have those political views.

The word 'bias' is inadequate in a case like this, because the notion of bias infers an understanding that you are favouring one position as opposed to another. If you are biased, you choose to discriminate because you are aware that you have a favoured position. What should we call it when someone is literally unable to understand or appreciate that other folk might have another, entirely legitimate, take on things?

It would be nice to think that the race issue can be parked and that the records of the individual candidates will be the focus of the discussion. It would be nice to think that our state broadcaster will seek to uphold standards of probity, honesty and impartiality.

It would be nice, but I’m not going to hold my breath. 

The summer of 1976

The West Indies cricket team, back in the UK for another series against England, has endured a spectacular fall from grace since the mid-nineties, having been the dominant force in world cricket for the best part of two decades.

Despite the often dismal standards to which they have slipped, I will always have a soft spot for them. This is mainly because I first got interested in the game by watching their great side of the mid-seventies, featuring magical players like Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd and the incomparable Viv Richards. The swagger with which that man made his way to the crease seemed to put the opposition in its place before he had even started to unleash his outrageous and devastating variety of strokes. To see Richards at the top of his game -a rapid, ruthless and stylish accumulator of runs- was to witness the essence of cool.

The 1976 series between England and the West Indies had infamously been preceded by England captain Tony Greig’s remarks about hoping to make the West Indies ‘grovel’. It was an unfortunate remark to have made at the best of times, but coming from a white South African, those words seemed –at best- to have been catastrophically ill-judged. It would be an understatement to say that Greig’s remarks gave something of an edge to the series. For that alone, one might have been inclined to support the West Indies, but I had another, more personal reason for getting behind the visiting team.

When I was in my early teens, there was a lad who, every summer, used to come up to Glasgow from Manchester to spend a big chunk of his school holidays with Scottish relatives. Let’s call him ‘Mike’. He was a junior member of Lancashire County Cricket Club and an avid England supporter. He was rather less than fond of the West Indians and used a variety of derogatory terms to describe both individual players and the team; his favoured epithet for the West Indies was ‘the bus conductors’. In modern terms, I suppose he’d be described as a bit of a racist. I didn’t mind the fact that he supported his country, but there was something about the way that he couched this support in terms of sheer hatred for the opposition that seemed just too ugly to be comfortable with. Enforced exposure to Mike (who, in everyday aspects of social intercourse, was by no means a pleasant young man) meant that it just seemed kind of natural for me to support whoever was up against England.

The first two matches in the series had been drawn, with England making a pretty good fist of it against the supremely talented opposition. By the time of the third test at Old Trafford in July, Mike had arrived in Glasgow for his annual sojourn. I recall him boasting, on the eve of that match, that Lancashire’s Frank Hayes, playing on his home turf, would ‘sort those fucking bus conductors out’. I didn’t know anything about Frank Hayes, but was not –at that point- inclined to wish him well.

In the first innings, the tourists posted a modest 211, with Gordon Greenidge making a remarkable 134 out of this total. The home side went in late on the first day with high hopes of establishing a first innings lead, but endured a vicious battering from the West Indian pace attack. By the time Frank Hayes arrived at the crease on the second morning, England had four wickets down with only 48 on the board. The home crowd would have hoped that there was perhaps an opportunity for their hero to dig in and help turn the match back in England’s favour, but one ball later, poor Frank was heading back to the pavilion having failed to trouble the scorers. In attempting to fend off a vicious short-pitched delivery from Andy Roberts, he had been unable to do much more than send the ball lobbing in a sad arc of surrender to Clive Lloyd in the gulley. Around half of the crowd sat in stunned silence, while the other half let rip with whistles, hooters and what sounded like a bewildering variety of percussive instruments; those West Indians sure knew how to make a noise. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, at least one wee boy probably shouted something like “get it up ye!” at the TV.

According to Wisden:

In eighty-five minutes England were all out, the last eight wickets, in fact, going in an hour for 25 runs. Holding, who took five for 9 in 7.5 overs was the leader of a fearsome trio. Some balls lifted at frightening speed and Greig and Underwood both had narrow escapes from what could have been serious injury. Woolmer and Hayes received balls which were all but unplayable and even the greatest of batting sides would have been severely taxed.

Dismissed for 71 in that first innings, England went on to lose the match by the small matter of 425 runs. I had no gripe against Frank Hayes or English cricket, but young Mike’s ugly mean-spiritedness made me take great pleasure from the way that Clive Lloyd’s team dismantled England over the course of that summer. The 3-0 series defeat seemed comprehensive at the time, but worse, far worse, was to come; over the next fifteen years, that all-conquering West Indies side would go on to wipe the floor with all available opposition and would twice hand out 5-0 series thrashings to an utterly hapless England.

When I was growing up, there was no great level of interest in cricket among young Glaswegians. It was (and, for some, still is) seen as a boring English game played by, and for, effete posh boys from private schools. I count myself lucky to have first sampled the game at a time when a magnificently talented side was somewhere near the beginning of an upward curve that would see them dominate world cricket for many years. The dazzling ability of those West Indians sowed the seeds of a love that has endured to this day.