The Independent - 26 March 2016

ISSUE NO.
9,193
2
Saturday
Edition
SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016
7 7 1 7 4 1
9 7 4 8 6 8
WWW.INDEPENDENT.CO.UK
Inside today Four special edition magazines

Sixteen-page souvenir supplement featuring Sebastian Faulks,
Helen Fielding, Robert Fisk, Kate Mosse&Andreas Whittam Smith
PLUS
Unforgettable photographs from our archive IN THE MAGAZ INE

Three decades of brilliant writing about culture IN RADAR
Simon Calder looks back on half a lifetime on the move IN TRAVELLER
NEWS P.22
WO RLD P.29
IN SPORT
VOICES P.45
VO I CE S P.43
Simon Kelner
meets old adversary
Alastair Campbell
Patrick Cockburn
on the Shia army
threatening Baghdad
John Carlin
on Johan Cruyff
and total football
Janet Street-Porter
on how cycle fanatics
are ruining London
Howard Jacobson
on becoming an
accidental columnist
City on the edge: another day of fear in Brussels
Tram passengers are evacuated during an anti-terrorist operation in Brusselss Schaerbeek district; three people were arrested, and explosions were heard
P.3 2
A F P/ G E T T Y
Revealed: British connection

in plot to kill a Saudi king
EXCLUSIVE
DAVID CONNETT
AND PAUL PEACHEY
A British-based dissident is
being pursued through the
courts by the UKs elite crime
agency over a plot to assassinate the former Saudi king in
a hit ordered by the ex-Libyan

leader Colonel Gaddafi, The
Independent can reveal.
The National Crime Agency
(NCA) has targeted Professor
Mohammed al-Massari in a tax
inquiry to retrieve 600,000
he is accused of receiving from
the Libyans for his alleged role
in the audacious plot, which
he vehemently denies. The

plan was to kill the former
King Abdullah by firing a missile at his motorcade.
The Independent can also
disclose that Scotland Yard
interviewed Professor Massari
in 2014 during a criminal investigation into the alleged conspiracy. The Saudi dissident
has lived in London since 1994.

The action against Professor
Massari and another UK-based
Saudi dissident comes almost a
decade after details of the murder plot first emerged.
The timing has fuelled suspicions that counter-terrorism
officers acted against the two
men following pressure from
the Saudis, who are controversial allies of Britain in tackling

global terrorism but have been
outraged by the London activities of the prominent critics of
the Riyadh regime.
Documents reveal how London with its large community
Continued on P.4 >
SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016 THE INDEPENDENT
News
Contents
26.03.16
NEWS
New generation turned

off by Madonna
Editorials
Queen of Pop has become a

toxic figure for millennials,
according to new research
P.6
The Thirty Years War
UK economy in middle
of a lost decade
For three decades we have combated hypocrisy, ignorance,

tyranny, poverty, clich, deceit and celebrity nonsense. If
you care for what weve done, join us in the fight online
Damage wrought by the

financial crisis has been bigger
than feared seven years ago
P.17
WORLD
Iraqis step up protests

against corrupt elite
Fears for Baghdads Green
Zone as senior political
figures flee in fear
P.29
MAGAZINE
A celebration of
Independent pictures
Photography has always been
at the heart of this newspaper.
Here we share our best images
P.9
RADAR
Why I love working with

assertive women
Hollywood star Diane Kruger
on the joys of being directed
by pain in the ass females
P.16
TRAVELLER
Munich takes spring

in its stride
Next months festival in the
Bavarian capital provides a
gentler version of Oktoberfest
P.10
SPORT
Hodgson turns to the

Tottenham Four
Kane, Dier, Alli and Rose will
all start in tonights friendly
against Germany
P.2
I NSIDE W ESTMINSTER
WORLD VIEW
ANOTHER VOICE
Andrew Grice
Peter Popham
Rosie Millard
The Lib Dems saved the

Tories from themselves
P.15
Other Karadzics are thriving

all over the world
P.34
Life is speeding up. Time to

get with it
P.41
PLUS Voices 39 Weather 48 Business 49 Games & Puzzles 60 Prize Crossword 63
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newspaper in 1986.
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There is such a thing as the spirit of The
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The Independent is, above all, a pioneer. But it
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and will inform our journalism in the digital
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Our first edition was published during the
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Saturday 26 March 2016. Registered as a newspaper with the Post Office
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THE INDEPENDENT SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016
My thanks to our
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EVGENY LEBEDEV
LETTER FROM
THE PUBLISHER
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News
Saudi
dissident is
investigated
for role in
Gaddafi plot
to kill king
< Continued from P.1

of politically connected expats
allegedly became the recruiting ground for the plot, which
is said to have stemmed from
a public row between the two
Arab leaders at a summit.
Gaddafi ordered his intelligence chiefs to find a way of
killing Abdullah after the row
caught by television cameras
was played across the Arab
world. Libyan intelligence
bosses allegedly paid hundreds
of thousands of pounds to the
British-based dissidents to find
people inside the kingdom to
carry out the killing.
Abdullah was Crown Prince
at the time of the plot, but considered the most powerful figure in the kingdom as his halfbrother King Fahd was ailing.
He succeed to the throne in
2005 and was in power until
his death last year.
The murder plan only came
to light after an American middleman, Abdurahman Alamoudi, was stopped at Heathrow
airport in 2003 with $336,000
in his luggage.
Alamoudi later confessed
to his part in the plot as part
of a plea deal and is currently
serving 23 years in a US jail for
illegal dealings with Libya.
The diplomatic ramifications of the case were considered so grave that the names
of the two British-based dissidents were suppressed in US
court papers for a decade. The
secret court documents detailing their alleged involvement
were only unsealed last year.
As part of a plea deal, Alamoudi gave two statements to
Scotland Yard which placed

Professor Massari and another
London-based dissident, the
surgeon Saad al-Faqih, at the
heart of the conspiracy. In one
of the statements, Alamoudi
claimed Professor Massari
secretly flew to Libya to meet
Gaddafi. He also details a series
of secret meetings at London
restaurants and hotels where
money was handed over and
details of the plot discussed.
Both London-based dissidents have denied taking part
in the assassination bid. They
also deny meeting and taking
money from Libyan officials.
They claim that Alamoudi
made up the allegations in
return for having his sentence shortened. The other
main co-operating witness, a
Libyan intelligence agent, has
reportedly been pardoned by
the Saudi authorities.
The plot was being uncovered as Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing of the
Pan Am flight over Lockerbie
and agreed to pay compensaMETROP OLI TAN P OLI CE
LETTER TO DI SSI DENT
Dear Professor Doctor

al-Massari,
I write to advise you of our
wish to interview you in
connection with an alleged
conspiracy to murder the
now King of Saudi Arabia
(and related money laundering offences) which occurred
in 2003. We wish to interview you under caution at a
police station.
(5 September 2014)
tion. A few months later the

then Prime Minister Tony
Blair travelled to Tripoli where
he hailed a new relationship
with the Libyan leader and
claimed Gaddafi was willing to
join the UK in the fight against
terrorism.
UK court papers show that
the NCA is currently seeking to recover more than
600,000 allegedly paid to
Professor Massari by the Libyans to find Saudis who might
be willing to kill Abdullah. The
police move to seize his assets
comes despite the fact the
Crown Prosecution Service
is declining to bring charges
against him and Dr Faqih after
Scotland Yards earlier criminal investigation.
Professor Massari, 69, a
former Kings College physics lecturer, described the
claims he was involved in the
assassination plot as absurd.
Theres nothing in the bank.
They want the house. I thought
that they wanted to close the
file. Now Im thinking it may
be political, he said.
Dr Faqih said: Im aware
that they [British police] have
been informed by the Saudis
of allegations, and they have
neglected or ignored that
information for 10 years.
He added: Apparently the
British police and also the
British Establishment are
convinced that none of these
allegations are true.
Police allege that both men
were approached in London in
2003 by the Libyan intelligence
agent Colonel Mohammed
Ismael and Alamoudi, who was
recruited to help Gaddafi exact
revenge following the summit

row in 2003. The Saudi Prince
told the Libyan leader: Your
lies precede you and your grave
is in front of you.
Alamoudi later told investigators: The plan was to get the
dissidents involved initially in
disruption. After they accepted
money, they would then be
pressurised into providing
details of persons capable of
carrying out violent actions
within Saudi Arabia.
In a second statement he
said action and disruption
referred to sabotage and they
were seeking people willing
to be involved and carry out
significant acts of violence,
sabotage and, as the plot developed, murder and terrorism.
He claimed he gave the
London-based dissidents
up to $1m in return. He also
claims he introduced the senior Libyan intelligence agent
Moussa Koussa to Professor
Massari. Alamoudi claims
Koussa offered the Saudi dissident weapons and stressed
the main target was Crown
Prince Abdullah. In his statement to Scotland Yard, Alamoudi said: Massari was happy
at Gaddafis request to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah.
He said it could be done, but it
would be difficult.
As a result of the London
meetings, Col Ismael travelled
to Saudi Arabia in November
and delivered $2m in cash in
bags to a hotel room in Mecca
where theywere to be collected
by the would-be assassins.
However the Saudi authorities were alerted to the
plan and made arrests. Col
EX PLAINER ROW THAT

PROVOKED THE PLOT
Muammar Gaddafi ordered

the hit on Crown Prince
Abdullah after a public row
at an Arab summit in Egypt
in March 2003, according to
court documents.
Gaddafi, detailing concerns
about US troops in Saudi
Arabia, said: King Fahd [the
ailing ruler] told me that his
country was threatened and
he would co-operate with the
devil to protect it.
Abdullah responded saying
that Saudi Arabia was a Muslim country and not an agent
of colonialism like you and
others. Wagging his finger
at Gaddafi, he went on: You,
who brought you to power?
Dont talk about matters that
you fail to prove. Your lies
precede you, while the grave
is ahead of you.
Abdurahman Alamoudi, the
US middleman in the plot,
claimed that he met Gaddafi
in Tripoli three months later
when the dictator spoke at
length about his hatred of the
Crown Prince and referred to
him as a pig, according to his
statement for Scotland Yard.
Gaddafi then instructed
me that I must tell [British-based dissident] Saad
al-Faqih to kill Crown Prince
Abdullah. This was to come
about in one of two ways:
either a personal attack, or a
revolution which would overthrow the Saudi regime. This
was the first time that I had
been told of the plan to assassinate the Crown Prince.
Ismael, who fled to Egypt,

was arrested and sent back to
Saudi Arabia where officials
said he confessed his role and
has since been interviewed by
US investigators.
Although the NCAs tax
action against Professor Massari continues, Scotland Yards
criminal investigations into the
two British-based dissidents
have been dropped. The British Government even backed
Dr Faqihs successful application to be removed from a UN
sanctions list for allegedly supporting al-Qaeda.
Observers believe his
removal from the list infuriated
the Saudi authorities who then
renewed their pressure on the
UK to act against both men.
Saudi Arabia has been suspected of targeting the men
in the past. Dr Faqih was
stabbed in the leg by two men
who forced their way into his
London home claiming to be
plumbers in what he claimed
was a kidnap attempt in 2003
by the Saudi authorities.
Professor Massari fought off
attempts to deport him from
Britain in the 1990s after the
Conservative government
admitted that top Saudi officials had brought pressure to
have him expelled.
Professor Massari denies he
received money from Libya,
and the sums of money that
the NCA allege he received
were from family funds. He
said that he was told by police
they wanted to interview him
just to tidy up the files.
The Saudi Arabian embassy
in London did not respond to a
request for comment.
Left:
Professor
Mohammed
al-Massari at
his London
home
yesterday.
Right: King
Abdullah in
Kuwait in
2009.
Muammar
Gaddafi
with Moussa
Koussa in
Doha in
2009
P E TER
M AC D I A RM I D ;
PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT THE MA I N PL AYE R S
Moussa Koussa
A Libyan foreign intelligence
chief, Foreign Minister and
one of Gaddafis closest
confidants. Expelled from
Britain in 1980 after publicly
threatening to kill Libyan
opposition figures living in the
UK. Credited with identifying
Islamic extremist groups
which later became al-Qaeda,
which led to Libya issuing
the first international arrest
warrant for Osama bin Laden.
He fled Libya and flew to the
UK in 2011. He lives in Qatar.
R E UTERS ;
A BAC A /PA
Mohammed Ismael
Colonel in Libyan intelligence
services. Trusted by Abdullah
Senussi, overall head of
Libyas intelligence services
before Gaddafis overthrow.
He is said to have facilitated
payments to Saudi dissidents
in London to take part in the
Abdurahman
Alamoudi
outside the
White House
in 1996 AFP/
GE T T Y
assassination plot. Arrested

in Egypt in November 2003
after the plot unravelled. He
returned to Saudi Arabia and
confessed his involvement but
received a royal pardon. Now
believed to live in Saudi Arabia.
Abdurahman Alamoudi
Eritrean-born US citizen.
Founded the American Muslim
Council to lobby for Muslims
in the US and is a former
Islamic adviser to President
Bill Clinton. Arrested at
Heathrow in September 2003
with $336,000, and detained
again in the US later that year.
Was accused in a US court
of being a senior al-Qaeda
financier and playing a role
in the assassination plot. He
admitted three charges of
illegal financial dealings with
Libya in 2004 and was jailed
for 23 years. He is still in jail.
News
Muslim murdered hours after Easter message

LEWIS SMITH
A devout Muslim shopkeeper

was savagely killed in the
street shortly after posting
an Easter message to my
beloved Christian nation.
Asad Shah, 40, died from
injuries sustained in the attack
on Thursday night in which
his killers are believed to have
stabbed him and stamped on
his head. Medics tried to save
him but he died in hospital.

Police Scotland, who yesterday arrested a man in connection with the attack, said
they were treating the death as
religiously prejudiced.
An eyewitness said two men
had set upon the shopkeeper
and said: One was stamping
on his head. There was a pool
of blood on the ground.
Floral tributes were yesterday placed outside Mr Shahs
shop, a newsagent and con-
Respected
shopkeeper
Asad Shah wrote
on Facebook:
To my beloved
Christian nation
venience store close to where

he was attacked in Shawlands,
Glasgow, as residents left
messages of sympathy.
A few hours before he was
killed, Mr Shah wrote on Facebook: Good Friday and a very
Happy Easter, especially to
my beloved Christian nation...
Lets follow the real footstep
of beloved holy Jesus Christ
(PBUH) [peace be upon him],
and get the real success in
both worlds xxxx.
Madonnas
Rebel Heart
tour has
grossed
100m but
her erratic
behaviour
may be
alienating
potential
new fans
GR AHAM
DE N HO LM/
GE T T Y
IMAGE S
Immaterial
girl? The
academic
verdict on
Madonna
EXCLUSIVE
ADAM SHERWIN
MEDIA CORRESPONDENT
Madonnas many incarnations and reinventions have

enthralled her fans for 30
years, but the Queen of Pop
has now become a toxic figure for millennials, according
to new academic research.
When The Independent
made its debut on 7 October
1986, the strains of True
Blue by Madonna topped the
pop charts. She was also seen
as an innovator across fashion
and style, who courted controversy and inspired generations of women.
But much has apparently
changed in recent years. The
57 year-old is now seen as an
inauthentic media manipulator, whose latest on-stage
antics are deemed desperate
and embarrassing, a survey
seen by The Independent

has found.
The research, by Jeetendr
Sehdev, marketing professor
at the University of Southern
California, found that Madonnas desire to stay relevant with
younger audiences has damaged the $1bn brand she has
built over more than 30 years.
The study, based on interviews with 1,000 young adults,
has been published during a
difficult period for Madonna.
The concluding Australian leg
of her Rebel Heart tour was
marred by erratic behaviour,
including late starts, slurred
lyrics and reports of drinking
during shows.
During one show, Madonna
referenced a bitter custody
battle with ex-husband Guy
Ritchie over their 15 year-old
son Rocco, who is living with
his father in London despite
the singers pleas for him to
join her in the United States.
EMPLOYMENT
NEWS IN
BRIEF
Ageism affects applicants

who sound older on CVs
Jobs applicants can suffer
ageism simply by promoting
traits associated with older
people, a study has found.
Kent university
psychologists found that
people are more likely to
select candidates described
with characteristics
stereotypical of younger
people. The participants
in the study were more
join her in the United States.

The Madonna who could
outrage the Catholic Church,
trample over sexual boundaries and turn Voguing into a
dance craze during the imperial phase of her career, now
ranks amongst the lowest
of 500 celebrities when the
attributes honest, genuine
and cool are tested.
Millennials are highly distrustful of Madonna, who
is 17-times less influential
than Taylor Swift and 15times less influential than
Adele, according to the poll
of young Americans. Three in
five people viewed an incident
during a Brisbane show when
she pulled down the top of a
17-year-old fan exposing her
breast, as little more than a
desperate publicity stunt.
Her continued efforts to
remain sexually appealing
were described as desperate and inauthentic. Three
in five said her image was
embarrassing.
Madonnas damaged
brand has also negatively
impacted the perception of
the younger collaborators on
COOLER THA N MA DONNA
IN F LUENTIAL STA RS
Taylor Swift
Adele
Justin Bieber
Zayn Malik
Pew Die Pie
Bruno Mars
KSI (YouTube gamer comedian, rapper, and occasional
actor from Watford with 12
million subscribers)
The Fine Bros (New York
online film producers
behind hit YouTube series
of reaction videos)
Research: Prof Jeetendr Sehdev
her Rebel Heart album. Diplo,

Avicii and Nicki Minaj were
rated less culturally relevant
amongst millennials who are
aware of their collaborations
with Madonna.
Older generations who once
admired her brand are losing
faith too. Professor Sehdev,
who advises brands on corporate endorsements using
a research-based approach to
quantify celebrity influence,
also found a 23 per cent decline
in generation X-ers who once
agreed that Madonna was an
iconic cultural force.
Professor Sehdev said:
M a d o n n a s d e s p e r a t e
attempts for attention have
damaged her legacy.
He added: 1980s media
manipulation tactics simply
dont work any more and turn
off younger audiences. This is
not about Madonnas age and
her sexual image but about
her being perceived as inauthentic.
Writing off Madonna could
prove a dangerous game.
Despite its rather shambolic
conclusion, the Rebel Heart
tour grossed 100m, playing
to one million fans at sold-out
shows.
Professor Sehdev cited
Yo uTu b e s t a r s s u c h a s
PewDiePie as figures who
have supplanted Madonna
among millennials due to
their unprecedented levels
of transparency, sincerity
and authenticity. Yet their
legacy may not match Madonnas global impact on popular
culture over an extended
period.
Last week a British judge
told the singer and Ritchie
that it would be a very great
tragedy if they did not thrash
out a deal over custody of
Rocco.
Her tactics
simply
dont work
any more.
She is
seen as
inauthentic
likely to choose those

with young personality
descriptions such as
creative and IT literate,
rather than those with
older descriptions such as
careful and considerate.
Asked to select the
candidate they felt would
help maximise profits,
participants consistently
favoured the young profile.
Regardless of whether the
job was for a supervisor or
supervisee role, over 70
per cent of participants
preferred the young profile.
E D U CATI ON
Teachers turn to alcohol

to cope with job stress
Teachers are turning to
drink, cigarettes, caffeine
and prescription drugs
to help them cope with
the stress of their job,
according to a survey by the
NASUWT teaching union.
Nearly one in four said
they drank more alcohol to
help them cope, and more
than one in five consumed
more caffeine.
News
There but for the grace of God

Here at The Independent weve
made enough mistakes in our
time, but our dear friends at
The Guardian were reeling
yesterday after one of the
more spectacular cock-ups in
recent newspaper history.
Publishing the wrong picture is a hazard of newspaper
production as The Guardian
demonstrated when it filled
the front page of its sports
section with a shot that was
supposedly of the late, great
footballer Johan Cruyff but
The first edition

of yesterdays
Guardian carried
this picture of the
Dutch footballer
Rob Rensenbrink
to accompany
its tribute to
Johan Cruyff
in fact was of a Dutch teammate, Rob Rensenbrink.

The Twitter account Dutch
Football was one of many
that latched on to the error,
tweeting: Oh dear! Guardian Sports back page tribute
to Johan Cruyff uses picture of
Rob Rensenbrink instead.
Not a moment to be proud
of, said someone closely
involved with The Guardians
coverage of Cruyffs death.
The picture was corrected in
later editions.
Cereal Killer
Cafe owners
Alan and
Gary Keely
at the Brick
Lane branch
LUCAS
OT TO N E
Cereal Killer
Cafe brothers
bowl over the
Middle East
KATIE GRANT
One of the
sheikhs of
Dubai came
in. We hang
out in bars,
they hang
out in cafs
When Alan and Gary Keery

decided to open a caf in east
London selling only cereal to
the public they became objects
of ridicule and even found
themselves at the centre of
an anti-gentrification riot as
a mob of angry protesters singled out their premises.
Now, it appears the Belfast-born twins may have the
last laugh as the Cereal Killer
Cafe is to open an outpost in
Dubai, The Independent can
reveal the beginning of what
is poised to be a major international expansion campaign.
Currently the brothers, 33,
run two Cereal Killer Cafes,
both of which are based in
London. The first outlet, on
Brick Lane, east London,
opened in December 2014;
a second branch in Camden,
north London, followed five
months later, and this spring
the Cereal Killer brand will go
global. Alan Keery revealed
there has been a massive
amount of interest internationally from people wanting
to open their own Cereal Killer
Cafes, and confirmed a branch
is set to open Dubai in May.
Weve had huge interest
from across the Middle East
about setting up branches out
there, Alan said. We get a
lot of people coming in from
the Middle East. One of the
sheikhs of Dubai came into
the caf. They dont have a big
drinking culture. We hang out
in bars, they hang out in cafs.
Theyre loving it because its
like a dessert.
Billed as the UKs first speciality cereal cafs, Cereal Killer
stocks 120 types of cereal from
around the world, 30 varieties
of milk and 20 toppings. Prices
range from 2.50 for a small

bowl of All Bran Flakes to
4.40 for a large bowl of speciality cereal imported from
the US. Whole, semi-skimmed
and skimmed milk come free
but a premium option such
as bubblegum flavoured milk
will be an extra 40p. Customers arent just paying for the
meal but the experience
too, Alan claimed. Memorabilia from the 1980s and 1990s
decorate the premises and are
designed to take customers
back to their earlier years.
However, the business is not
to everybodys taste. Last year
the hipster twins became the
unwitting poster boys of east
London gentrification, and
came under attack for allegedly
making the area unaffordable
for poorer residents.
In September protesters targeted the Brick Lane branch,
daubing red paint on the windows and forcing the staff and
customers inside to barricade
the doors as the mob outside
lambasted the no-good gentrifying rich hipsters. If anything,
though, the riot helped boost
trade. We had a lot of people
come in to support us after we
were attacked. Business has
been great, Alan said.
The proprietors are coy
when it comes to disclosing
takings but estimate they have
served 150,000 customers
since December 2014. With
the licensing agreement for
Dubai signed and entrepreneurs across the Middle East
clamouring to open their own
Cereal Killer Cafes, the Keery
brothers are enjoying the fruits
of their labour. Were in talks
with Jordan and Lebanon.
They can use our name and
our recipes and well share the
tricks of the trade. Its all in our
brand bible, Alan said.
10
News
Homeless children put at

risk of harm as councils
move their families on
EXCLUS I VE An Independent investigation reveals the shocking effect of
spending cuts on children who fall through the welfare net. By DA N I E L S M E E
Children in homeless families
who have been shunted out
of their local areas by councils trying to save money on
accommodation are dying
from neglect and abuse, after
disappearing from support
services during their moves.
The legacy of the housing
crisis and the Governments
cuts to welfare is proving
deadly for some of the most vulnerable people in the country,
an Independent investigation
has found. Evidence suggests
that the transfer of homeless
families to other parts of the
country could have resulted
in suicides and miscarriages.
Tens of thousands more
are at risk from the damaging
practice because councils,
unable to cope after years of
budget cuts, are not meeting
their basic safeguarding duty
and the current system is not
fit for purpose, experts say.
Anti-poverty campaigners
say the revelations show the
potential impacts of what Iain
Duncan Smith called inexcusable and unfair benefit
cuts when he resigned as the
Work and Pensions Secretary
last week.
The problem is proving particularly acute in London. Figures obtained by this newspaper show that 64,704 homeless
families were moved by councils in the capital between July
2011 and June 2015, with 4,053
families moved out of Greater
London completely.
The Independent understands that dozens of local
authorities have raised serious
concerns about whether they
have sufficient information to
support families moved into
their area and are not aware
of problems until crisis point.
The cases uncovered include:
the death of a six-month-old
child from head injuries
a 13-month-old child who
died from ongoing abuse
the death of a neglected
one-year-old baby
an eight-month pregnant
woman who miscarried after
collapsing from stress and
exhaustion
the death of a seven-yearold boy.
The Independent has also
documented more than 20
cases of councils threatening
to pull families apart and take
children into care if homeless
families do not accept out-ofarea moves, more than 100

cases of depression caused by
forced moves, and more than
30 cases of homeless children
unable to attend school.
Last April, a High Court
judge criticised persistent and
endemic failures in communication between local authorities which regrettably has
resulted in vulnerable families
being without support or services. Mr Justice Cobb said that
the conduct of Tower Hamlets
council, in London, in failing
to notify Havering council of a
homeless family it moved into
the area, was shameful.
The Supreme Court reiterated last year that the practice is
unlawful in the vast majority of
cases. But this has largely been
ignored amid accusations
that forced moves amount to
social cleansing.
A yet-to-be-published academic study into out-of-borough placements, funded by
the Feminist Review Trust,
has found multiple examples
of stress, depression, insomnia, anxiety, panic attacks, self
harm, suicidal feelings and
some cases of miscarriage.
Jane Pritchard, the head of
housing at TV Edwards solicitors said: Im shocked by the
absence of common sense,
joined-up thinking, good
management and compassion in how homeless services
are delivered.
John Healey, the shadow
minister for housing and planning, said: These findings lay
bare the reality of a growing crisis of spiralling homelessness
combined with cuts to housing
support and services.
He added: Without a
change of course, I fear that the
problem will become yet more
acute. These stories are the tip
of the iceberg of the housing
crisis but they must shake ministers out of their complacency

about homelessness.
Rough sleeping has more
than doubled since 2010 with
overall levels of homelessness
up 42 per cent. The number
of families in emergency
bed-and-breakfast accommodation has doubled over
the same period. Official statistics released this week show
that, as of 31 December 2015,
there were a record-breaking
18,670 homeless families living
in temporary accommodation
outside of their local authority
area, with nine-in-10 of them
moved by a London borough.
Problems arising in the sharing of information about these
families, and safeguarding
them, have been known about
I am shocked by the
services absence of
common sense, joined-up
thinking and compassion
for more than a decade but
deaths are still occurring.
A serious case review into
the death of a six-month-old
homeless child moved with
her mother between the London boroughs of Newham and
Redbridge warned in 2008
that the city-wide Notify database, used to share information about the whereabouts
of families that are moved, is
significantly under-used.
Yet, in December 2015, a
serious case review into the
death from abuse and neglect
of a 13-month-old homeless
child found again that despite
the appearance that Notify
has London-wide coverage, it
appears that only two-thirds of
CASE STUDY ONE-ROOM HELL I N A HOSTEL
Elina, a mother with three

girls, was moved out of Newham into a hostel. She was
initially offered somewhere in
Birmingham, but finally was
moved out of the Newham
area but still within London.
There was one
room for all of
us in the hostel
and all the kids were getting
upset, misbehaving. My eldest daughter had nowhere to

sit and do her homework. The
younger girls had nowhere to
play. I was getting depressed
and getting anxious. Its more
like surviving in these places
than living. Luckily we are
now in our own flat [in Basildon] but it is a long way from
our previous home.
London boroughs actually use

it regularly and reliably.
The report concluded that
generally, as families are
moved to different boroughs
by housing providers, there
is no effective system where
there are children in the family,
to notify either health or childrens services that these families have moved in or out.
Another serious case review,
also published last December,
involving a homeless woman
moved by Westminster to
Ealing where a one-year-old
baby died due to neglect,
warned that the needs of
unborn children are not properly considered in housing
decisions, and this could leave
some at risk of serious harm,
stating this is likely to be a
London-wide problem.
Where homeless families
are moved out of London completely, even the patchy coverage of the Notify system does
not exist. Despite the Housing
Act stating that councils must
send detailed information to
receiving areas within 14 days,
this is not being done in many
thousands of cases.
Notes from a meeting of the
London Safeguarding Childrens Board in February 2015
state that a review has found
that Notify can give a false
sense of assurance to housing
departments that they have
discharged their responsibility
to safeguard vulnerable children and Notify has now been
removed from child protection
procedures entirely.
The Independent understands that Notify will be
replaced by another system
which will track out-of-area
homeless placements, but this
is yet to be implemented.
A Government spokesman
said: Councils have a duty of
care to their residents and must
ensure that where a family is
offered new accommodation
their needs continue to be met.
The Government is supporting
the most vulnerable people in
our society and has already committed 139m to homelessness
programmes and announced
a further 100m accommodation support at the Budget.
In addition as part of our
welfare reforms were giving
councils 870m for discretionary payments for those
who need extra help.
Local authorities
accused of illegally
neglecting
vulnerable people
DANIEL SMEE
Councils are being accused of

breaking the law by failing to
provide suitable accommodation for homeless families.
In one case discovered by
The Independent, a homeless child suffering from
bone cancer, initially stuck
in hospital because Camden
council failed to provide suitable accommodation, is now
sleeping in his grandmothers
dining room.
His father sleeps next to him
on the floor. He is currently
undergoing intensive chemotherapy and his doctors and
other medical professionals
have confirmed that accommodation offered by Camden
council is not suitable.
His father said: Its an
extremely difficult situation. I
just want the best for my child.
He keeps talking about killing

himself, and the housing situation is really not helping.
My son is in a wheelchair
and Camden keep offering
me accommodation that isnt
wheelchair accessible.
Another homeless family
with three children, placed by
Newham council in mouldy,
mice- and cockroach-infested,
overcrowded accommodation
outside of the area, faced being
split up due the councils own
failings.
The father is a full-time carer
for his disabled wife, who is
wheelchair bound and suffers
from rheumatoid arthritis, pulmonary tuberculosis, severe
asthma, and depression. The
accommodation provided to
them by Newham council is
not wheelchair accessible. The
travel time for the children to
attend school is two-and-a-half
hours each way.
11
This child,
currently
receiving
treatment
for bone
cancer, is
homeless
and
being
forced to
sleep in a
relatives
dining
room with
his father
(also
pictured)
TERI
P E N GILLE Y
In February 2013, a court

order demanded Newham
provide suitable accommodation to the family within eight
weeks, but this was ignored
by the local authority, leaving the director of housing in
contempt of court and facing a
possible prison sentence.
As the family languished
in dangerous and unsuitable
housing, the mother subsequently became suicidal, her
mobility decreased, and she
constantly struggled with
chest infections and breathing difficulties.
In April 2014 the children
were removed and placed in
foster care by the local authority they were moved to, due
to the father being overburdened in his role as primary
carer, the childrens poor
attendance at school, the
childrens frequent illness and
the poor condition of the family home. The children were
then returned to their parents
in April 2015, but again face
being taken from their mother
and father because of the condition of the property and the
strain the family is under.
The family is now seeking
to judicially review Newham
council for breach of their
legal duty to suitably house the
family, and for ignoring 2013s
court order to rehouse them.
Councils are spending
around 2m every day on
bed and breakfast accommodation in the private sector,

much of which is unsuitable
and even dangerous. In London, councils spent over half
a billion pounds (667m) in
the last financial year on bed
and breakfast according to a
report published in February
and commissioned by London
Councils, with 170m not
funded by central government
and paid for out of other council budgets.
The pressure on finding
CASE STUDY
TRAGEDY AFTER MOVE
Katie and her children were

moved from Bromley to
temporary accommodation in
Southwark after she became
homeless. Her son Matthew
was prescribed the wrong
inhaler by a new GP and
died after having an asthma
attack. Katie now suffers
from depression and regular
panic attacks.
There is no future
after losing your
child, Katie said.
You cant comprehend
the future because its too
painful and all your plans,
hopes, dreams just fly out the
window. I just get up in the
morning, find a way to get
through the day, then go back
to bed at night.
accommodation in the midst

of a deepening housing crisis
means that bed and breakfast
providers are auctioning off
rooms to councils. The Independent understands that,
despite attempts made by
London boroughs not to compete and outbid each other for
accommodation, this is still
happening.
As the February report
states: One [housing] officer
commented on his rent
negotiations with temporary accommodation providers: They were pretty much
phoning round and playing us
[boroughs] all off each other,
saying x is offering 34 on
that, will you offer 35?
Regulation for bed and
breakfast accommodation for
homeless families is practically
non-existent, meaning poor
conditions are common. The
owners of B&Bs are frequently
not background checked by
councils, or proprietors use
family members as directors,
meaning that even those with
a criminal history may be used
by councils to house families.
A 2013 report on B&Bs
found that homeless people
face threats of theft, blackmail
and sexual exploitation from
owners.
London Councils were yet
to respond last night. Newham
and Camden councils could not
be contacted for comment.
CASE STUDY PREGNANT AND HOM ELESS
In 2013, Mary, who was eightmonths pregnant when she

had to move from London to
Birmingham, lost her child
after collapsing from exhaustion and stress caused by
the re-location. The stress of
being homeless and of moving
120 miles away had severely
damaged her health.
Mary was kicked out of
her mothers flat when she
became pregnant.
I was 26 weeks
the first time I
went to the council and they said they couldnt
help me and asked me to
leave, Mary said. I walked
around Westfield shopping
centre in Stratford until it
closed and then I sat on the
25 night bus.
The second night I went to
the police and they referred
me to a homeless shelter,
but it was full. I went back
the third day and I was told
Id be put in Birmingham.
Being homeless and pregnant was so very hard. I went
to my doctor and said Ive
had enough of living. I was
so down.
The second week after Id
been moved to Birmingham I
was hospitalised for four days.
I was dehydrated, my blood
pressure was low, I had low
potassium, low iron. I was on
a drip. The doctors werent
comfortable with me leaving
the hospital. I hadnt been
eating or drinking properly;
because of the stress I guess.
Marys baby was due on
6 August 2013 but she miscarried in July. Soon after the
baby died, a housing officer
from her council called Mary
to ask if she was speaking to
any journalists.
Her current whereabouts
could not be established. Her
unborn child is buried in a
graveyard in Birmingham.
Some names
have been
changed
to protect
identities
12
News
Isis deputy leader killed in

bombing raid, says US
DAVID USBORNE
AND ANDREW BUNCOMBE
A former physics teacher

who rose to become secondin-command of Isis has been
killed in a bombing raid, US
military chiefs claimed yesterday.
Abd al-Rahman Mustafa alQaduli, a long-standing member of the terror group who
was once favoured by Osama
bin Laden, had earned a $7m
bounty before his reported
death, said to have been during a US operation in Syria
earlier this week.
US Secretary of Defence
Ash Carter revealed the
demise of al-Qaduli, the Isis
finance chief and reported
architect of some of its foreign attacks. We are systematically eliminating Isils
cabinet, he said, using the

alternative acronym for the
group.
Last week the Pentagon
said it had also succeeded in
killing the groups minister of
war, Omar al-Shishani.
Mr Carter would not reveal
where or how al-Qaduli, who
was deputy to Isis leader Abu
Abd al-Rahman
Mustafa al-Qaduli
was considered
the man most
likely to rise
to the top
Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been
killed. Long considered to be
the most likely candidate to
rise to the top of Isis, al-Qaduli
joined al-Qaeda in 2004 and
rose to become deputy to its
late leader in Iraq, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi.

An Isis fighter on the outskirts of Palmyra. Many jihadists make their way back to Europe to continue their jihad R E U T E R S
Jihadists hiding in full view are

the most dangerous threat of all
The huge influx of refugees from Syria gives terrorists the perfect cloak to
move freely around Europe. RO B E R T V E R K A I K reports on a deadly commute

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Western security agencies

are blind to the terror plots
being hatched in the Middle
East because of the unknown
number of jihadists who have
been dispatched to Europe by
Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
This worrying gap in intelligence was cruelly exposed
in Tuesdays bomb attacks in
Brussels and reinforced by the
arrests of a dozen more terror suspects trained in Syria
who have been picked up in
security operations across
Belgium and France. While
many were known to the Belgian and French agencies as
petty criminals, the crucial
intelligence about their travel
to and from Syria was not.
The blame for this intelligence failure has been placed
on the growing number of
migrants fleeing the Middle
East for Europe and terrorists
disguising themselves as refugees. But the refugee crisis is
merely a political diversion.
Since the start of the Syrian conflict five years ago
tens of thousands of Islamist
extremists and jihadists have
left Europe to join terrorist
groups in the region and a half
of them have returned home
to Europe. If anything the
more recent migration crisis
has increased levels of security and led to the tightening
of border controls, making it

more difficult to travel unhindered across Europe. And a
terrorist with an EU passport
can always find much safer
and less unpleasant means
travelling between states.
It was only in 2013 that
Western governments woke
up to the dangers of young
Muslims travelling to Syria,
being trained as terrorists and
sent back to Europe to act out
the kind of atrocities that wit-
The former head of MI6

says Europes security
bodies are just forums for
an exchange of views
nessed in Paris and Brussels.
MI5 describes this as the
terrorism blowback fighters returning to the UK intent
on carrying out bombings
and shootings. One Whitehall security source said: All
we can know is that they have
been in a war zone and come
into contact with any number
of bad people.
Now they are back in Britain after they have done their
jihad but how many put the
whole experience behind them

and get on with whatever they
were doing before they left?
And how many are planning
terrorism?
The security services estimate that 800 British jihadists
have gone to Syria, others put
the number as high as 2,000. I
have been told of two British
citizens who joined Islamic
State and returned to the
UK without any contact with
UK security services. One
of them made the trip three
times without any questions
raised before dying in a suicide attack in Iraq two years
ago. The other didnt like IS
and so came home. There
must be many more who have
made similar trips outside the
sight of security services.
Even when suspects are
known to MI5 and the Metropolitan Police there are simply
not enough resources to subject them all to 24/7 surveillance. Besides, close security
doesnt always work. At least
two terror suspects have managed to flee the UK for Syria
while under tight surveillance
from the security services.
If you live in a democratic
country then it is very hard to
stop people leaving the UK,
a security source said.
The human blunders of the
French, Belgian and German
intelligence agencies in recent

months demonstrate that
missed intelligence opportunities can cost lives.
Turkeys unheeded warning to Belgium and Holland
about one of the Brussels
bombers shows how difficult
it is to get national agencies
to work together. This week
the former head of MI6, Sir
Richard Dearlove, delivered
a withering attack on some of
the intelligence sharing agencies across Europe. Though
the UK participates in various European and Brusselsbased security bodies, they
are of little consequence,
he said. The Club de Berne,
made up of European Security
Services; the Club de Madrid,
made up of European Intelligence Services; Europol and
the Situation Centre in the
European Commission are,
generally speaking, little more
than forums for the exchange
of analysis and views.
Here in the UK, MI5 and
the Mets Counter Terrorism
Command have foiled seven
plots linked to Syria in the
past year. But the unknown
number of violent jihadists
living in British communities means they cannot be
expected to win every time.
World news, P.32-33
13
UK special forces presence in Libya confirmed by leaked briefing from king

CHARLIE COOPER
UK special forces have been

operating in Libya since January, according to a leaked
memo from a confidential
briefing delivered to US lawmakers by the king of Jordan.
King Abdullah met congressional leaders in January,
briefing them on a range of
strategic matters relating to
the fight against Isis in Libya,
the civil war in Syria and the

threat posed by al-Shabaab
militants in Somalia.
Leaked notes from the
meeting state that Jordans
own special forces will be
imbedded [sic] with British
SAS in Libya.
Suspicions that the UK
had deployed SAS troops to
Libya, which descended into
political chaos after the fall of
Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 following a Western interven-
tion spearheaded by Britain

and France, have been rife for
several weeks.
Responding to reports of the
leak, the Ministry of Defence
said it did not comment on
special forces operations.
However, intelligence analysts
Stratfor said earlier this month
that British and US forces were
operating in western Libya,
while French special forces
had established themselves
in the east around Benghazi,
Britain giving
Bahrainis
lessons in using
sniper rifles
EXCLUSIVE
JAMIE MERRILL
British commandos are training Bahrains armed forces

which violently put down
pro-democracy protests during the Arab Spring in 2011
in the use of sniper rifles,
The Independent can reveal.
The revelation that elite
Royal Navy commandos are
running week-long training
courses for Bahraini personnel has outraged human rights
campaigners, who accuse the
regime of using snipers to
target protesters during antigovernment protests in 2011.
Pro-democracy activists in
Bahrain say the military training by elite troops from the
Royal Navys 43 Commando
Fleet Protection Group proves
that the British Government
is turning a blind eye to
abuses in the country.
The Independent can reveal
that the most recent training
took place when specialist
commandoes visited Bahrain
in January on board the Royal
Navy frigate HMS St Albans.
The warship docked at
HMS Juffair, Britains new
naval base in Bahrain, and
Royal Marines marksmen
trained multiple groups of
Bahraini personnel and were
awarded Bahraini sniper
badges in return. Bahraini
authorities have already
requested that the elite snipers return to run the course for
a new batch of recruits.
Britain has taken the lead
internationally in arguing
that Bahrain has reformed its
security forces since its violent
crackdown on dissent during
the Arab Spring, but a Human
Rights Watch report released
last November found that torture and illegal detention are
still common in the country.
Last night Labours shadow
Defence Secretary, Emily

T h o r n b e r r y, d e m a n d e d
guarantees about how sniper
training would be deployed
in future. She said: People
will be rightly concerned to
discover that our elite commandos have been tasked
with training sniper units in
Bahrain, which risk being
deployed against the civilian
population of the country.
The revelation comes two
week after the prominent
human rights activist Zainab
al-Khawaja was arrested and
imprisoned with her 15-monthold daughter on charges of
insulting the monarchy. In
a letter smuggled out of jail,
she wrote: There are governments willing to turn a blind
eye to our suffering and shake
hands with those who oppress
us, but I also believe there are
also enough good people in the
world who cant stand silently
in the face of oppressions. I
hope this letter finds its way
out of this prison and into the
heart and hands of all those
freedom-loving people.
An MoD spokesperson, said:
The UK enjoys close links
with Bahrain, which reinforce
our commitment to the region.
We dont shy away from raising
issues of concern, including
human rights, at all levels within
the government of Bahrain in all
our defence discussions.
Zainab
al-Khawaja,
seen here
at an earlier
protest, was
arrested for
insulting the
monarchy
EPA
with the goal of combatting

Isis, which has capitalised on
the political chaos to gain a
foothold in the country.
Earlier this week, David
Cameron was challenged by
the Scottish National Partys
Westminster leader Angus
Robertson to confirm or deny
the presence of special forces,
after he said in a carefully
worded statement that Parliament would be consulted
if there were plans to send
conventional forces to train

Libyan forces.
Mr Cameron said the Government had a longstanding
policy of not commenting on
special forces. He told MPs:
The work that our special
forces do is vital for our country. Like everyone in this country, they are subject to international law, but I do not propose
to change the arrangements
under which these incredibly
brave men work.
In the memo of King Abdullahs meeting with congressional leaders, including John
McCain, the chairman of the
Senate armed services committee, and Bob Corker, the
chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, the
king is reported to have said
Jordanian forces were able
to assist the SASs operations in the country because
Jordanian slang is similar to
Libyan slang.
14
News / Politics
Corbyn attacks Tory plans for all

schools to become academies
RICHARD GARNER
EDUCATION EDITOR
Jeremy Corbyn won a standing ovation from teachers last

night as he condemned government plans for all schools
to become academies as the
asset stripping of our education facilities.
The Labour Party leader,
who became the first leader of
any political party to address
the National Union of Teachers conference in living memory, pledged that Labour would
support the unions campaign
to oppose the plan.
Delegates will be expected
to back an emergency motion
this weekend warning of
industrial action if the Government goes ahead with its
plans, which would mean
17,000 schools, mostly primaries, becoming academies by
2022. A one-day national strike
is planned before the end of the
summer term. In his speech to
the conference, Mr Corbyn,
told the conference: This is

an ideological attack on teachers and on local and parental
accountability, an attack which
was nowhere in their manifesto
at the last general election.
As part of the plan, the Government said they intend to
scrap legislation whereby all
schools have to have an elected
parent representative on their
governing body.
He added: The Tories want
to shut parents out of having
a say in how their childrens
schools are run. I want schools
accountable to their local communities, not to those pushing
to be the first in line for the
asset-stripping of our education facilities to be handed over
to somebody else.
Mr Corbyn, who was given
a standing ovation by teachers even before he started
speaking, said he had very
real fears about the intentions of the Government and
those who pay these exorbitant salaries to run academy
chains. Some chief executives
have been paid in advance of

250,000 a year. He said the
Government should instead
be tackling the current crisis in the education system.
Children are facing rising
class sizes, there is a shortage
of teachers and parents already
face a crisis in school places.
The forced academisation
will do nothing to address
any of these problems. And
yet 700million will need to
be found to fund this needless organisation that fails
to address a single issue that
matters to teachers, parents
or pupils.
He said that school budgets
were being cut in real terms for
the first time since the 1990s,
adding: The pressure of work
forced more teachers to quit
last year than ever, over 50,000,
and the Government has now
missed its trainee teacher targets for the last four years in a
row. That has resulted in half
a million children now being
taught in classes of over 31 in
primary schools. Mr Corbyns
speech comes as the union is

squaring up for a battle with the
Government over the plan.
The union is expected to
debate an emergency motion
over the weekend which will
warn of industrial action over
the proposals. Kevin Courtney,
the NUTs deputy general secretary, warned there could be
many more disputes because
the plan would mean scrapping
national salary scales and allow
schools to set individual salaries for their teachers.
The union is confident it will
win support to defeat the plans
in Parliament as many senior
Conservatives in local government have spoken out against
them. The right-of-centre Tory
think-tank the Bow Group.
Spokesman Hector Marchetti
has also said the plan followed
a worrying trend in recent
years to further centralise
decision making from local
communities. As the plan
was not in the Conservative
manifesto, the House of Lords
is free to throw them out.
15
Inside Westminster
Andrew Grice
Cameron and Osborne ought not to forget:
Lib Dems know where the bodies are buried
Jeremy
Corbyn at
the NUT
conference
in Brighton
yesterday PA
Poor election showing

could see Labour revolt
NIGEL MORRIS
DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR
Dissident Labour MPs are

preparing to make public
demands for Jeremy Corbyn
to stand down as leader if the
party fails to notch up steady
gains in elections across
England, Wales and Scotland
in six weeks time.
They have set a series of
electoral yardsticks which they
believe Labour should achieve
to demonstrate that Mr Corbyn is succeeding in winning
back voters who have deserted
the party in recent years.
The former frontbencher
Angela Smith added to the
pressure by accusing him of
snatching defeat from the
jaws of victory during a turbulent week for the Tories.
If Corbyn is not prepared to
buckle down and show proper
leadership he should just go,
and give us a chance to get a
leader who can properly take
on the Tories, she told the
Daily Mirror.
Top of the Labour leaders
critics list is London, where
Sadiq Khan is favourite to win
the mayoralty for the party
after Boris Johnsons eightyear spell in City Hall.
They are also looking for
signs of a revival in Scotland,
Sadiq Khan
is currently
odds-on to win
the London
mayoralty back
for Labour
where Labour support collapsed at the general election,

and for evidence that it can see
off a challenge from Ukip in its
strongholds in South Wales.
Several marginal councils
in the south of England will
provide a key test of Labours
electoral health on 5 May.
They include Southampton, where Labour lost a seat
at the election and has a narrow
majority on the city council,
and Crawley in West Sussex,
where Labour has a council
majority of just one. In the
Midlands Labour could suffer
the setback of losing control of
the councils of Dudley, Redditch and Cannock Chase.
Opponents of Corbyn argue
that Labour should be gaining
hundreds of council seats at
this stage of the parliament.
Corbyn allies are taking heart
from signs that both Labour
support and his personal ratings are edging up after the disarray over George Osbornes
budget, Iain Duncan Smiths
resignation from the Cabinet
and Tory in-fighting over the
EU referendum.
However, one former minister told The Independent:
Its looking pretty grim at
the moment, which means
Labour councillors could lose
their seats because Jeremy has
no appeal on the doorstep.
Political revenge is
another dish best
served cold, as the
Liberal Democrats
are discovering.
Cannibalised by their Coalition partners
at last years general election, the Lib Dems
are now shining a very unflattering light
on the Conservatives and undermining
David Camerons attempt to portray them
as a modern, compassionate, One Nation
government. They have also put another
cloud over George Osborne as his hopes of
succeeding Mr Cameron dwindle.
Tory ministers dismiss the flurry of Lib
Dem attacks as sour grapes from a defeated
and dejected party that saw its number of
MPs cut from 57 to just eight and is now
off the radar. But this is unfair. The Lib
Dem accounts of the five-year Coalition
Government are given by people who know
where the nasty partys bodies are buried
because they were there.
When I interviewed Nick Clegg last
month, he was most definitely not bitter. I
invited him repeatedly to complain about
how the Tories ruthlessly seized Lib Dem
seats by warning that they would hop into
bed with Labour and the SNP in a hung
parliament. Mr Clegg refused the bait,
saying there is no point in whingeing
when you lose.
But the former Deputy Prime Minister
gave me a revealing insight as he argued that
Mr Cameron, without the need to secure Lib
Dem support, is squandering the Coalitions
progressive legacy. Mr Clegg recalled that
when the Lib Dems repeatedly proposed
more public housebuilding to relieve the
housing crisis, they were rebuffed by this
crude Cameron-Osborne response: All it
does is to produce more Labour voters.
Further evidence of the Tories narrow,
partisan approach emerged this week in a
riveting book, Coalition, by David Laws,
the former Schools Minister (published
by Biteback). He details how Mr Clegg
acted as a brake on Mr Osbornes constant
demands for welfare cuts. He writes: The
Lib Dem leader thought that a major
weakness of both David Cameron and
George Osborne was that they had little
sympathy with or understanding of people
on very low incomes, and were inclined to
write them off politically as not our voters.
Mr Clegg even considered ending his
cherished Coalition over the Tories plans
to balance the books on the backs of the
poor while they resolutely protected the
rich. Mr Laws says: George Osborne saw
welfare as a big political dividing line. He
wanted Labour to be seen as the party of
welfare scroungers, and he hoped that the
Conservatives could position themselves
as the party of the strivers. To help
protect working-age benefits, the Lib Dems
proposed cutting the winter fuel allowance
and free TV licences for pensioners. Mr
Osborne was prepared to bite the bullet; Mr
Cameron wavered, but in the end judged
that saving only 100m was not worth the
political hassle.
If all this was coming only from the Lib
Dems, we might dismiss it as a backward

look at the Coalition through their end of
the telescope. But the Lib Dem accounts
are all the more convincing because Iain
Duncan Smith made remarkably similar
criticisms after his spectacular resignation as
Work and Pensions Secretary last weekend.
He echoed the claims that CameronOsborne saw the welfare budget as a cash
cow; were balancing the books on the backs
of the poor and got the old-young balance
wrong by over-protecting pensioners.
The result, he claimed, was that we were
not all in this together after all. Most
damagingly, Mr Duncan Smith argued that
the Tories lost the mantle of a One Nation
party caring about those who dont even
necessarily vote for it, who may never vote
for it. Surely, a centre-left party and a rightwing Tory cant both be wrong? This is toxic
for a party desperate to detoxify itself and
colonise the political centre ground.
There is more trouble ahead on this
front. There are more Lib Dem books
to come, including one from Mr Clegg
himself in September surely, another
dish of cold revenge.
Some Tory ministers admit privately that
they miss their former Coalition partners.
Why? Because the need to square the Lib
Surely, a centre-left party

and a right-wing Tory cant
both be wrong?
Dems meant there was a form of Cabinet
government. Since the election, they say,
most key decisions are handed down by
Downing Street and the Treasury, and that
no one else matters.
Mr Cleggs constant claims that the
Lib Dems anchored the Coalition in
the centre ground cut little ice with the
voters in May last year many of whom,
as Mr Laws concludes, never forgave their
original decision to join forces with the
Tories in 2010. But Mr Clegg was right, and
the restraining hand of his party helped to
blunt the Tory axe. In turn, this helped Mr
Cameron win enough trust to secure an
overall majority last year a bitter irony for
the Lib Dems, who did the right thing for
the country in 2010, if not for themselves.
Most Tories did not expect to win the
election. They thought their best hope was
another Con-Lib coalition. Mr Osborne was
almost certainly banking on the Lib Dems
wielding a veto on some of the 12bn of
welfare cuts in the Tory manifesto.
If the Tories were still in coalition now,
the Lib Dems would surely have stopped
the Chancellors proposed 4.4bn cuts to
disability benefits getting past first base.
So he would have avoided his humiliating
post-Budget climbdown and further
damaging the Tory brand. The Lib Dems
might have saved a
bit less money, but
they might also have
saved the Tories
from themselves.
17
News
T H E LO S T DECA DE

120
115
110
105
PRODUCTIVITY HAS FLATLINED

UK PRODUCTIVITY (OUTPUT PER HOUR)
7,000
index 2008=100
1997-2008
trend growth
Flatlining
productivity
100
.SO OUTPUT PER HEAD

HAS STAGNATED.
GDP PER HEAD
Stagnating GDP per head
13.5
6,500
11.5
11.75
11
5,750
80
1998 00 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 16
5,500
2000 02 04 06 08 10 12 14 16
The damage wrought by the

financial crisis on the UK
economy has been immense
and bigger than just about
anyone feared seven years
ago. Previous recessions in the
1990s, the 1980s and the 1970s
were followed by periods of
relatively rapid above-trend
growth as the natural resilience of the economy kicked
in. But not this time. In almost
every year since the 2008-09
recession official forecasts
have pencilled in an imminent bounceback, a re-emergence of the old pattern. Yet
in almost every year they have
been disappointed. And now,
seven years after the so-called
Great Recession ended, the
realisation is dawning that the
UK economy seems to be in
the midst of a lost decade.
Here is the story of the lost
decade in charts.
1) Productivity
The motor of economic growth
and rising living standards is
rising productivity. This is the
amount of output the entire
economy produces for each
hour worked. Rising output
per hour pushes sustainable
increases in GDP and also
allows workers wages to rise
without setting off damaging
inflation. But since 2008 productivity has gone sideways.
If output per hour continued
growing at the same trend rate
as the period after 1997 the
UKs productivity would have
been 10 per cent higher.
2) GDP per head
GDP has risen, rather weakly,
since the financial crisis. But
adjusted for the expanding
population there has been virtually no growth since 2008.
3) Wages
Flat-lining productivity and
GDP per head are the central
reasons wage growth has been

10 years of rock bottom interest rates
Projection
period
9.87
1997 99
01
exceptionally weak. Average wages peaked at 12.75

an hour in 2009. Today they
are still 1 lower than that.
According to projections from
the Office for Budget Responsibility they will not return to
the 2009 level until 2021.
4) Interest rates
The Bank of England cut
interest rates to their effective floor of 0.5 per cent in
2009 in order to cushion the
impact of the recession and
to stimulate borrowing and
spending. The expectation
of financial markets after the
recession ended was the Bank
would have to raise rates to
stop inflation taking off. But
the economy never picked up
sufficient velocity. And the
Bank has felt unable to raise
rates. With annual consumer
inflation falling to just 0.3 per
cent, well below the Banks 2
per cent target, financial markets do not expect the Bank to
put up rates until 2019.
5) The size of the state
The austerity imposed by the
Coalition in 2010 and continued by the Tories since 2015 will
impose a decade of contraction
in the size of the state relative to
the size of the economy. While
spending on pensions and welfare has been rising the things
the state has been doing itself
has been contracting severely.
This has imposed a massive
squeeze on public services.
And next?
Some economists are openly
wondering if the UK is in the
grip of a secular stagnation
as a result of gross imbalances
in supply and demand, not just
in the UK but the global economy. Others wonder if debts
incurred before the crisis will
need to be written off before the
recovery can begin in earnest.
Yet some feel the gloom is overdone and the UK will embark
on a period of strong productivity growth. We should hope the
latter group are right.
Projection period
10
Most severe 10-year squeeze on
size of state since the end of the
Second World War
The UK economy
is in the middle
of a lost decade
BEN CHU
ECONOMICS EDITOR
SOURCE: ONS, OBR, RESOLUTION FOUNDATION, MACROBOND
15
10
9.5
.AND PUBLIC SPENDING IS ENDURING A SEVERE SQUEEZE

NOMINAL % GROWTH IN GOVERNMENT CONSUMPTION Y/Y
Projection period
12

20
10.5
85
.WHICH MEANS INTEREST RATES

HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO RISE
BANK OF ENGLAND POLICY RATE

12.5
6,000
90
WHICH IS ONE OF THE REASONS WAGES ARE STILL

BELOW THEIR PEAK
CPI-ADJUSTED EARNINGS AN HOUR
13
6,750
6,250
95
75
In almost
every year
since the
recession
forecasts
have been
disappointed
03
05
07
09
11
13
15
17
19
21
0
08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
2000
2005
2010
2015
2020
From left:
Chen Luwen
(in the
front row,
third from
right) with
her dance
troupe;
the front
page of the
Independent
on Sunday
in June 1997;
in Hong
Kong, a
Christies art
expert looks
at Andy
Warhols
Mao,
estimated to
be worth up
to $12m
M I KE C L A RK E/
A F P/G ETTY
She said he had a large

sexual appetite, was a good
lover and not just interested
in his own needs.
Her professional life after
her relationship with Mao
ended was not without danger
of its own. By 1997, she had
amassed a fortune as an arms
dealer, with clients including
Iraq. She described herself as a
middle woman who helped
to facilitate the buying and
selling of weapons. One deal
involved selling Chinese landto-air missiles to Saddam Hussein for Iraqi use in the IranIraq war. She said that deal
was worth $300m.
The arms-dealing appears
to have got her into trouble
in China, because when she
went back to the country in
1986 for a family visit, she was
arrested in the car park of her
hotel, taken away from her
son, and put under effective
house arrest for 18 months.
She was told she had been
betraying Party secrets outside China by talking about
her life with Mao.
She blamed communist
19
Chen said
she sold
Chinese
land-to-air
missiles to
Saddam
Hussein
Chinas new leader Deng

Xiaoping, who had by this
point fallen out with a senior
party official for whom she had
brokered the arms deals (one of
which allegedly involved buying helicopters from France).
All of this was to be revealed
in a book, for which Chen was
seeking a large advance. She
photocopied a picture of herself and gave it to The Independent the only picture of
herself she had (far left), with
other members of the dance
troupe with whom she had
performed at Chairman
Maos court.
But one day in the summer
of 1997, she stopped returning
calls. So did her son. Journalists from The Independent
went to her house, but there
was no one there. While she
had been offered asylum by
Britain, her first choice had
always been the US. It is
thought she went there, but
precious little record of her
existence can be found.
So was it all true? The relevant Whitehall officials
were contacted but they
wouldnt comment. But in
2011 a man called Szeto Wah
died. He had been a democratic Hong Kong politician
and a long-serving member of
its Legislative Council under
British rule. His memoirs were
published posthumously.
They referred to an
unnamed mistress of
Mao Zedong who was helped
out of Hong Kong by Operation Yellowbird.
Various parts of his description exactly match Chen
Luwens story, including the
fact she had a son, had been in
a PLA entertainment troupe,
had worked in arms dealing,
had been held under house
arrest in China for a period
and had paid Triads to get her
to Hong Kong.
In other words, utterly
extraordinary though it
appears, the answer is quite
probably yes.
Bees found to use complex alarm signals

TOM BAWDEN
Honey bees have developed

the most sophisticated language for communicating
danger ever found in the insect
kingdom allowing them to
deliver a warning by buzzing
and head-butting at the same
time, new research finds.
Scientists have revealed that
Asian honey bees use a sliding
scale of vibrational pulses
to warn colleagues that danger lies ahead. The higher the

pitch, the greater the threat.
The so-called stop signal
is typically used to warn fellow
bees that a giant Asian hornet
or other danger lies just around
the corner but it may also be
used to deliver other kinds of
news, for example to call off
the search for a new nest site.
The bee delivers its message
by vibrating and head-butting
those members of the colony
giving directions to food or

shelter instructions communicated through a sophisticated waggle dance.
This is the first demonstration of such sophisticated
alarm-signalling in an insect.
Previously, such signals has
only been reported in vertebrates like birds and primates,
said James Nieh, a professor at
UC San Diego, which carried
out the research with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
21
News
Captain Britain,
coming soon to
a small screen
near you
ADAM SHERWIN
MEDIA CORRESPONDENT
Is it a bird, is it a plane or
Boris Johnson bulging out of
Lycra underwear? Captain
Britain is here to save the world
with a homegrown, Brexit-era
superhero set to join Marvels
ranks of caped crusaders.
A leaked image of a suitably
patriotic skin-tight outfit,
designed for a new television
series, has sent comic book
fans buzzing with speculation
that Britains first superhero is
to be resurrected.
Real name Brian Braddock,
Captain Britain was an obscure
Seventies character, loosely
affiliated to Marvels Avengers,
whose claim to fame was saving
Prime Minister Jim Callaghan
from the evil Red Skull.
Born in Maldon, Essex, to a
vaguely aristocratic family, the
UKs answer to Captain America was tasked with upholding
the laws of Britain, after being
granted the superpowers of
strength, speed and flight from
the mystical Merlyn.
Launched in 1976, the Captain Britain weekly comic
folded a year later and the
character has since appeared
in anthologies and team-ups.
However with Marvels
front-rank superheroes doing
battle in franchises like The
Avengers, while Daredevil,
Jessica Jones and Agents of
SHIELD entertain millions on
the small screen, the vaults are
being raided for comic book
PUBLIS HING
NEWS IN
BRIEF
JK Rowling has shared

two rejection letters she
received when pitching
work under her pen name
Robert Galbraith.
The author was famously
rejected by several
publishing companies
when she pitched her first
novel, Harry Potter and the
Philosophers Stone.
Sharing pictures of
heroes that could be dusted

down for a relaunch.
Ciara McAvoy, an awardwinning film poster designer
whose portfolio includes
X-Men: First Class and Star
Wars: Episode III Revenge of
the Sith, posted an image of a
new Captain Britain costume,
resembling the kind of aerodynamic outfit the GB Winter
Olympics team might adopt.
She added the tweet: Who
will be playing Brian Braddock
in the upcoming TV series
#CaptainBritain? #Marvel
Asked whether the series
was genuine, she replied: I
am being paid to do the promo
poster, so yes, Id say this is
really happening.
She added: It might take
a while before the announcement. Theyre making a sizzle
reel and its gonna be awesome.
I cant reveal anything yet, but
hopefully Ill be able to soon.
Chris Lark, a producer from
Albuquerque, New Mexico,
and owner of Cool Mint Productions, later confirmed he
was guiding the project: Right
now we are in very early stages
of development and working
on things like the budget.
Comic fans debated whether
actors such as Daniel Craig or
Tom Hiddleston could portray
the lantern-jawed captain. It
was suggested that the superhero could take on Isis terrorism in a gritty series set in
contemporary Britain.
In his comic book encounters, the character fights to rescue Britain from neo-Nazis.
Marvel character Captain Britain will be revived for a new

television series, currently in early development M OVI EP I LOT.CO M
Take heart, even JK

Rowling gets rejections
I am being
paid to do
the promo
poster, so
yes, Id say
this is
happening
her post-Potter rejection

letters on Twitter, Rowling
said: Yes, the publisher
who first turned down
Harry also sent [Robert
Galbraith] his rudest
rejection (by email)!
Rowling obscured the
identities of the editors who
sent them, noting that she
intended to inspire other
writers rather than seek
revenge.
I had nothing to lose
and sometimes that makes
you brave enough to try,
she said.
R E LI GION
Printers take Chriss

name in vain
A church was presented
with signs reading Chris
is risen after a mix up at
the printers.
Acomb Parish Church,
in York had ordered four
banners saying Christ is
Risen, but the T was missed
off. However, assistant
curate Ned Lunn said the
error was seen before the
signs were delivered.
22
News / Interview
The media landscape is changing, and with it the
relationship between government, press and public.
Alastair Campbell, who played a significant role
in this process, talks to former Independent editor
SI MON KE L NE R about spin, Iraq and his recurring,
violent nightmare about Tony and Gordon...
I find
it very
difficult
not to tell
the truth
Incredibly, by the time the
Chilcot report comes out, the Independent
wont be around to report it. Given that the
Independent was one of the most vocal
critics of you, Tony Blair and the Iraq war,
you must be quite pleased about that.
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Not at all. I think its
really sad. What concerns me is that the
Independent is going, and there are job cuts
at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily
Mail is still rampant, making lots of money
by millions of people clicking on pictures of
cellulited women. I think thats sad.
S K : And what does that tell you?
AC: It tells me theres something wrong with
our culture, and our media culture.
S K : Do you expect to be criticised by Chilcot?
AC: I am not going to answer that.
S K : In your book Winners, you say that
New Labour could have done things better.
In which particular ways?
AC : This may sound arrogant, but I believe that
if wed done teamship better, wed still be there.
Where we fell down was the inability to hold
together. Tony and Gordon were the most obvious
part of that, but not the only part. We should have
learnt from the great football teams. The players
may not like each other. They have egos, they have
their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams.
S K : But isnt that about leadership?
AC: Partly. I remember talking to Alex Ferguson
about Tony and Gordon, and he said: Why
doesnt Tony just get rid of him? But if you sack
someone in football, they cant turn up to training
the next day. In politics theyre still on the pitch.
Gordon would still have been a big player.
S K : Was it a failure of Blairs leadership not
to have got rid of Gordon Brown?
AC : Sometimes I do, and sometimes I dont.
S IM O N K EL N E R :
Front pages of The

Independent from 29 January
2004 (top) and 12 July 2003
I left in 2003 hating it, glad to get out, even

though I then went into a massive depression.
Tony slowly sucked me back in for the 2007
campaign, and from six months out, I was basically working full time trying to keep the TonyGordon thing together for the campaign. It was
awful. How much better could we have been
if we hadnt wasted so much energy on this?
As Tony said in his book, Gordon was brilliant
and impossible. If hed just been one of those
things, the options are obvious.
SK: But Ferguson was right, wasnt he?
AC: Maybe. But the other thing we should have
done better, which explains why weve now got
Corbyn, is that we didnt bring people on. If
you look at the other people around at the time
Charles Clarke, Alistair Darling, Byers, Jack
Straw, Blunkett theyve all gone. And theyre
not old. Whats happened is that someone who
is quite old Jeremy Corbyn is now leader. We
have to take some responsibility for that.
SK: Is that because you had a bunker
mentality, and couldnt see the bigger
picture?
AC: No. We were control freaks. Thats different.
SK: In his feral beast speech in 2007,
Tony Blair says no one is to blame for the
breakdown in trust between politics, media
and the public. You appear to blame the
media, who, you say, spin the whole thing in
one direction. But wasnt this what you did
in government?
AC : For all that the papers would say I was a
liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings
as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would
say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult
not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for
what I said. I dont believe that large numbers
of political reporters are remotely accountable
for what they say. And whats more I think a lot
of them dont give a fuck. We have newspapers
printing stuff which they know is not true. I
think thats the difference.
SK: But as a journalist, you worked for the
Daily Mirror, a paper which slanted things
to suit its political agenda.
AC: I was biased.
SK: You were biased. So what are the
journalists you complain about?
AC: Theyre dishonest.
SK: Do you not feel any responsibility for the
lack of trust between politics, media and
the public?
AC: I dont, really. I dont see how I could have
done things differently.
SK: Did you write the feral beast speech,
which singled out The Independent as
the example of all thats wrong with modern
newspapers? Do you think that was unfair?
A C : No, it was very much Tonys speech. I
thought it was wrong to make The Independent the emblem of the feral beast, because the
real drivers of it were Murdoch and Dacre. And
he should have said that.
SK: Why didnt he say that?
AC: He was always ambivalent about the Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the
chance to believe it was just about The Independent. And that was wrong.
SK: From the inception of New Labour, you
and Tony Blair set about wooing Rupert
Murdoch. Do you think the relationship you
fostered was an expediency too far?
AC: Paul Keating told us before we were elected
that you can do deals with Murdoch without
saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that
kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about
the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we
had to do something about media ownership
and self-regulation. Tony disagreed.
SK: Was that because of his relationship
with Murdoch?
AC: No. It was because it would have taken a lot
of political energy and capital.
SK: The perception was that Blair was in
Murdochs pocket.
AC : It was not good. The relationship was too
close. It was not healthy.
SK: Have you ever fallen out with Blair?
AC: Not really. Only when the personal and the
political collided. Over the Bristol flats, for
23
instance, we ended up saying something that

wasnt true, and that was very difficult.
SK: Is Blair more interested than you in money?
AC : I think he is more impressed by financial
success than I am.
SK: On Iraq, do you feel that this papers
opposition to the war has been vindicated?
AC: Under your editorship, you moved to a fusion
of news and comment. I never had a problem with
that, but I couldnt stand it when you questioned
our motivation, saying it was because Bush wanted
us to, or because of oil. That was bollocks. And on
the question of vindication... Is Iraq nowwhere we
want it to be? The answer is clearly no.
SK: So much was written and said about
you. Why did you create such a furore over a
BBC news item broadcast only at 6.07am?
AC: It was a report that went around the world.
[Andrew] Gilligan said that, according to his
contact, No 10 had put intelligence into the Iraq
dossier knowing it to be untrue. I never met David
Kelly, but I knew from what he told other people
that this was not his view. The BBC were saying
that Tony Blair was making up lies so that he could
send young men and women to war, maybe to die.
I think that if the BBC had done their jobs professionally, theyd have realised that you couldnt
justify what they said. And nothing has emerged
since to justify that report.
SK: The BBC lost a good DG and chairman
over the row. Do you worry about the
damage you did to one of Britains most
trusted institutions?
AC : I wish the whole thing hadnt happened.
Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the
BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend
themselves. But that is not their job.
SK: Does David Kelly haunt you?
AC: Im not going to answer that question in those
terms. I just find the whole thing incredibly sad.
Such a waste, but I wont take the blame. That
happened because a journalist with an agenda
broadcast something which should never have
been broadcast, and the BBCs handling of it was
woeful. And thats never going to change for me.
SK: You are bolstered by certainty. Did you
ever have second thoughts about the war?
AC: No, but sometimes Jonathan [Powell] and
myself would go to Tony and ask him if he was
absolutely sure about this or that. That was our
job. But ultimately it was his decision.
SK: Was there a pact between Blair and Bush
that you werent party to?
AC: Absolutely not.
SK: But Christopher Meyer [ex-ambassador
to the US] said there was a deal signed in
blood between the two leaders.
AC: Seriously? He wasnt there and I suspect he
was rather annoyed not to have been invited.
SK: How do you explain the rise of Donald
Trump?
A C : You could ask the same question about
Corbyn. Or Le Pen. All of this is happening
because there has still been no reckoning post
the financial crisis. So governments have fallen,
one bloke has been to prison, the banks have
gone pretty well back to status quo, the rich are
getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.
And its fuelling anger. And somehow Trump,
who represents the worst aspects of capitalism,
has persuaded people he can deal with that.
SK: How long willLabour be out of power?
AC: We lost the last election to a Prime Minister
whos not that popular, to a government with
not that good a record, and that worries me.
A leader whos considered unelectable is also
unassailable because of whats happened in the
Labour Party. And thats dangerous.
SK: Do you do God?
AC: No. Tonys convinced Im going to find God.
I do have spiritual moments, but I dont think
its God.
SK: Do you have nightmares?
AC: Yes. I have a nightmare about Tony and Gordon killing each other. Not every month, but
now and then. I also have a recurring dream
about losing. Were about 20 points ahead in the
polls, and the results come in and weve lost.
SK: How do you see your place in history?
AC: I do think its strange that I get associated
with Iraq more than the people who were
Alastair
Campbell at
his home in
Hampstead
and (left)
with Simon
Kelner JAS ON
ALDEN
Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. Its

because of my closeness to Tony, which I dont
regret at all. I think that was a privilege. Now I
get paid to talk to people about how to keep a
good reputation in the modern media age. I feel
like thanking Paul Dacre every time, because
the reason they ask me is because they think
Ive come through the other end with a pretty
good reputation. Loads of people get a bad press
but have a good reputation. Beckham think
what he went through. Clinton, likewise. You
just have to be true to yourself.
Simon Kelner was editor of The Independent
from 1998 to 2008 and 2010 to 2011. He is now
chief executive of Seven Dials PR
When I
was a
journalist,
I was
biased.
Todays
journalists
are
dishonest
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24
Saturday 26 March 2016 THE INDEPENDENT
News
Why we
should all
want to
be sent to
Coventry
TECHNO LOGY
news in
b r ief
Cancer op broadcast
in virtual reality
A British cancer patient

is set to become the first
in the world to have their
operation broadcast in
virtual reality. The live
stream will come from the
Royal London Hospital on
14 April. Shafi Ahmed, who
will perform the operation,
called it a gamechanger
for healthcare innovation
and education.
About 50 Christians from all over the world walking to

Holy Island on Good Friday during an annual pilgrimage
in Berwick-Upon-Tweed J e ff J M itche l l / Getty
finds out why Historic

England is hailing the citys charm
Cahal M i lm o
Its creators
hoped to
encourage
something
of a
socialist
paradise
Barely three weeks after

German bombers had
obliteratedthe medieval core
of Coventry and killed nearly
570 people in November 1940,
its chief architect announced
that the Nazi atrocity had
presented the city with a longneeded opportunity.
Prior to the outbreak of
the Second World War, the
Labour leaders of the Midlands city had commissioned
their young, visionary civic
architect, Donald Gibson,
to come up with a plan to
overhaul the cramped and
traffic-choked centre as Coventry blossomed from a quiet
Victorian market town into a
burgeoning industrial hub.
It failed to make much
progress until, with impressive chutzpah, Gibson and the
citys elders saw a silver lining
in the cataclysmic intervention of the Luftwaffe.
At the end of the war Gibson
wasted no time in finalising
his plans for revolutionising
central Coventry mingling
high-grade architecture with
civic art and building Europes
first pedestrianised shopping
centre to create a blueprint
for a civic reinvention that
once complete by the early
1960s brought admirers flocking from across the world.
But while the other centrepiece of Coventrys post-war
resurrection, Sir Basil Spences pared-back cathedral,
continues to attract plaudits
and appreciative crowds some
five decades after its completion, conservationists are
concerned that the equally
pioneering work of its reimagined city centre much of it
already listed is in danger of
becoming obscured and lost.
Historic England, the
governments conservation
watchdog, this week published a book chronicling the
rebuilding of Coventry. Its
aim was to alert residents and
officials alike that, far from
having inherited another concrete carbuncle of the sort that
many argue inflicted more
damage on Britains post-war

cities than the Luftwaffe, they
are the custodians of revolutionary architecture.
It has raised particular concern about the fate of the civic
zone of council offices created by Gibson and his successors, whose future is unclear
while a new headquarters for
the city council is built on the
edge of the centre.
With its boarded-up shopfronts and much of the original
1950s architecture obscured
by later additions, some might
struggle with the idea that central Coventry should take its
place alongside Brazils Brasilia or Englands new towns
as exemplars of 20th-century
civic architecture.
But campaigners are eager
to highlight the radical nature
of Coventrys makeover,
which its creators hoped
would encourage something
of a socialist paradise, with
features including the Precinct the traffic-free galleried shopping area inspired
by Chesters medieval Rows
where citizens were expected
to gather for activism and
morris-dancing.
The Independent was this
week taken on a walking tour
of Coventrys unsung treasures, including its circular
Central Market, decorated
with murals by art students
from Dresden, and its centrepiece Broadgate Square, originally intended to be decorated
with a monumental arch now
in-filled with a branch of a
building society.
Jeremy Gould, emeritus
professor of architecture at
Plymouth University, who
co-authored the Historic England book with his architect
wife Caroline, said: These
are such an important set of
buildings. Coventry was at the
forefront of post-war reconstruction and it was the first
time that an architect had produced an example of how you
make a new town or city centre. It was built with the best
materials to stand the test of
25
COVENTRY FIVE THINGS TO S E E
A4
05
S ST
HALE
IL
Coventry
Cathedral
LS
3
A405
T
OF
CR
RD
CORPORATION
ST
1
PER LANE
PEP
COVENTRY
Coventry
University
5
B4
544
ST JOHN ST
1 Broadgate (1948-53)
The centrepiece of Donald
Gibsons vision for Coventry,
the wide square was designed
to have a monumental arch, a
hotel and a department store.
It still retains its Peeping
Tom clock with Lady Godiva
riding out on the hour.
Broadgate House and Hotel Leofric, at the entrance to the Upper Precint, in Coventry city centre ST E V E N BA KE R / E N GLISH HE R ITAGE
time. It was viewed as hugely
successful architects and
planners rushed from across
the world after the war to see
how it was done. It could and
should be preserved.
With faades of Travertine
marble and Westmorland
slate, the key buildings in the
centre were designed to form
long avenues with the spire of
the firebombed cathedral a
symbol of post-war reconciliation along with Spences new

church at their apex. Each
major structure also featured
works by leading British artists, including a tiled mural
by illustrator Gordon Cullen
and a row of extraordinary
semi-relief concrete panels
by sculptor William Mitchell, which currently provides
a faade for a chicken shop.
Coventry City Council last

year unveiled a regeneration
plan for its core area, which
pledged to maintain the listed
post-war buildings, including
the Central Swimming Baths,
and acknowledged that later
additions to Gibsons design
had spoilt its clarity.
But Historic England said
it wanted to shine a light on
buildings in Coventry, which
may have fallen out of favour,

including the Scandinavianinfluenced City Architects
office from which Gibson
and his successors conducted
their work.
Prof Gould said: It wasnt
a glitzy or a showy architecture, it was supposed to be
rooted in a sense of place. It
would be good if that could
be rediscovered.
2 The Precinct (1953-55)

Europes first pedestrianised
shopping area was the key to
the redesign, offering trafficfree shopping on a long axis
in line with the spire of the
citys bombed cathedral.
3 City Market (1956-58)
The circular market hall was
the creation of Gibsons
successor, Arthur Ling. With
its concentric rows of stalls
and Socialist realist murals,

it remains one of Coventrys
best-loved buildings.
4 Belgrade Theatre (1955-58)
The first new municipal
theatre to open since the war,
it was intended as a venue
for left-wing productions to
explore issues of cultural,
social, political and moral
significance. It was named
following a gift of beech
wood for its ceilings from the
capital of then Yugoslavia.
5 Bull Yard sculptures (1966)
The Aztec-inspired concrete sculptures by William
Mitchell were designed as
the facade for a city centre
pub. They now adorn a fastfood restaurant.
26
News
Introductions to Shakespeare
No.18 The Tempest
concludes our series of personal interpretations of Shakespeare
with a reflection on a play often seen as the Bards own valedictory message
JOH N LIC H FIE LD
An enchanted island fantasy,

set in a sea of ambiguity
The Tempest is the only Shakespeare play to have become a
science fiction movie. It is
about evil and forgiveness,
nature and sophistication,
youth and age, art and life.
It explores, centuries ahead
of its time, the moral contradictions of the European colonisation of the New World.
The play was first staged in
1611, five years before Shakespeares death and nine years
before The Mayflower sailed
for America. It was probably
the last play that Shakespeare
wrote entirely by himself.
When I was 17 years old,
The Tempest was one of my Alevel set texts. I also studied it

at university.
I was charmed and puzzled by it at 17. Nearly half a
century later, it seems to me
the most perfect and the most
tantalising of Shakespeares
plays. It contains some of his
finest poetry:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and
our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest also contains
one of Shakespeares most
moving and enigmatic characters. Caliban, the man-
monster, is presented as a
stupid, treacherous, murderous, would-be child-rapist.
And yet he has some of the
most lyrically beautiful lines
in Shakespeare.
Be not afeard; the isle is full
of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that
give delight and hurt not.
Caliban is the first profound
portrait in Western literature
of the native peoples about
to be destroyed, corrupted or
civilised by European colonisation. The fact that the portrait is ambiguous brutal but
poetic should not be a sur-
prise. The play is ambiguous.

Can tired, unthinking wickedness be redeemed by youthful, unthinking innocence?
Is sophistication preferable
to raw instinct or rural simplicity?
Shakespeare asks the questions. He does not provide the
answers. The actress Vivien
Leigh once said that this was
what made Shakespeare so
wonderful to act. He leaves
so much unsaid.
To appear in a Bernard
Shaw play, she said, was like
catching a train. One just
speaks the words and sits in
Tim
McMullan
as Prospero
at the Globe
theatre,
London;
(far right)
Alastair Sim
in the role in
1962 G E T T Y
THE INDEPENDENT Saturday 26 March 2016
27
ones place. But Shakespeare

is like bathing in the sea one
swims where one wants.
The Tempest is part King
Lear, part Midsummer Nights
Dream. It is the Shakespeare
play that comes closest to
observing the classical dramatic requirements that
events should occur in real
time and in one place.
The third classical unity
consistency of tone and
action is trampled with
Shakespearean exuberance.
There is a drunken sub-plot.
There are songs and fairies and
apparitions and rude words
such as horse-piss. You will
find none of those in Greek or
French classical drama.
The action of The Tempest
takes place on a small island
in the Mediterranean. In the
film Forbidden Planet (1956),
the island becomes a far-away
world in a distant galaxy.
Prospero, the deposed
Duke of Milan, has become a
Gandalf-like sorcerer. He lives
with his 15-year-old daughter,
Miranda, and his monsterservant, Caliban.
He calls up a storm which
maroons on the island a gaggle of courtiers, including the

wicked brother who deposed
him and the King of Naples,
who plotted against him.
Everything seems to be moving towards the body-strewn
ending of a typical Jacobean
revenge tragedy.
Then Prospero suddenly
declares that he intends to
forgive everyone.
The symbol of the renewal
of hope is the instant love of
Miranda and Sebastian, the
son of the King of Naples.
So the play ends happily.
Yes, but with a dark undercurrent of warning.
Miranda, a teenager who
has never seen anyone but
her father and a monster is
delighted when the island is
invaded by men.
She says:
O brave new world,
That has such people in t!
P r o s p e r o k n ow s b e t ter. What seems beauteous
today can be ugly or wicked
tomorrow.
He puts down Miranda
with the chilling line: Tis
new toyou.
Themes
Innocence; revenge; exploitation; magic.
shak espeare AT A G LA N C E :
THE TEMP E ST
Plot
The magician Prospero, the rightful Duke of
Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, are stranded
on a godforsaken spit of land after being set
adrift by his jealous brother, Antonio. Reluctantly served by the spirit Ariel and the
deformed Caliban, son of Sycorax the witch,
Prospero raises a tempest to shipwreck a vessel carrying Antonio, King Alonso of Naples,
his son Prince Ferdinand, Sebastian, the Kings
brother, and the trusted Gonzalo. Prospero
works his magic on Ferdinand and Miranda
and they fall in love. He thwarts Antonio and
Sebastians plans to kill the King and, after
messing everyone about, he decides to forgive
those who have wronged him. The play ends
with the voyage back to Naples and Prospero
requesting a big round of applause.
Background
First staged in 1611, The Tempest is widely
thought to have been the last play the Bard
wrote alone. It may have been influenced
by the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda
in 1609. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, Caliban, not Prospero, was seen as the
starringrole; now the latter is coveted by
the thespian elite. In 2000, Vanessa Redgrave
played the character as neither a man nor
a woman. Simon Russell Beale played a
resentfulAriel in Sam Mendes 1993 RSC
production.
Key characters
Prospero: enigmatic sorcerer
Ariel: captive spirit under Prosperos charge
Caliban: monstrous, symbolic savage
Top lines
You taught me language; and my profit ont
is, I know how to curse, Caliban abuses Prospero, Act 1, Scene 2
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep,
Prospero reflects, Act 4, Scene 1
Where the bee sucks, there suck I: in a cowslips bell I lie: Ariel on himself, Act 5, Scene 1
O brave new world, that has such people
int!: Miranda discovers men, Act 5, Scene 1
LUKE BARBER
29
A fateful journey
Tributes to a genius
Hope turns to despair
Travesty of justice
33
35
36
37
Taxi driver who unwittingly took bombers

to Brussels airport heard tirade against US
Comedy world mourns lost creativity

of writer and actor Garry Shandling
Refugee registration centre on Greek

island of Lesbos becomes an open-air prison
Turkeys closed-doors trial of journalists

accused of espionage comes under fire
World
Protesters at one of the entrances to the Green Zone a fortified area in the centre of Baghdad used by the government after Friday prayers yesterday A l i M o hamed /Anado l u Agency/ Gett y
Baghdads danger zone

Fearful politicians and diplomats are fleeing the Green Zone as demonstrators protest against what they see as a symbol
of Iraqs corrupt elite. patrick co ck b urn reports that the area could be overrun, and the army is unlikely to defend it
Some 200 Iraqi political figures and members of foreign
embassies have fled the Green
Zone in Baghdad fearing that
it may be invaded by hundreds
of thousands of protesters
enraged by the corruption
and incompetence of the Iraqi
government.
The demonstrators are
followers of the radical Shia
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who

once fought the US occupation and has re-emerged over
the past month as the one
leader who can tap into popular rage against a kleptocratic
elite that many Iraqis see as
having ruined their country. Furious crowds outside
the Green Zone, which has
become a symbol of the iso-
lation and luxurious lifestyle

of the Iraqi leadership, have
been shouting: Lets get rid
of them, they are all thieves.
I dont think the security forces would fire on the
demonstrators if they broke
into the Green Zone, said a
former Iraqi minister earlier
this week. He believes that the
protesters would probably tar-
get the mansions in which live

leaders of the Dawa Party, the
Shia party which dominates
the government.
Marchers a week ago were
confronted by serried ranks
of riot police in white helmets defending checkpoints
immediately outside the walls
of the Green Zone, but the
police stood aside and did not
resist when protesters pushed

forward.
The sense of crisis in Baghdad increased on Thursday
when the Oil Minister, Adel
Abdul-Mahdi, said he was
transferring authority over
the oil industry, on which
Iraq is wholly dependent, to
his deputy, citing the anxiety and chaos caused by the
political situation. There have

been street protests against
government corruption in the
past, but the current ones are
far larger than before and are
actively supported by a much
wider part of the population
who fear the state will not be
able to pay their salaries. A

Continued on P.30 >
30
World
Cruz rejects affairs story and blames Trump

rupert cornwell
in washington
Senator Ted Cruz has denied

as garbage a claim made in
a supermarket tabloid that he
was covering up five extramarital affairs.
In a development in which
the Republican campaign
turned from poisonous to
squalid, Mr Cruz told reporters the claims in the National
Enquirer were untrue. He said

it had been planted by his rival
Donald Trumps henchmen.
Mr Cruz called the tycoon a
rat, and added: The question
that people are asking is how
low will Donald go.
Speaking in Wisconsin, he
accused Mr Trump of being
a coward who has problems
with strong women.
Earlier on CNN, a Trump
supporter had accused one
of Mr Cruzs spokeswomen
The
question
people are
asking is
how low
will Donald
go
of having an affair with the

senator. Amanda Carpenter,
a CNN commentator who had
worked as Mr Cruzs communications director, said: It is
categorically false. You should
be ashamed for spreading this
kind of smut.
The accusations have the
potential to seriously damage
Mr Cruzs standing among
evangelicals and social conservatives who are the bedrock of his support.
Raise your
voices and
shout so the
corrupt get
scared of you
Sadrist leader, who did not
want his name published, told
The Independent: Muqtada
al-Sadr could have overthrown
the government a month
ago if he had wanted to, but
instead he is demanding that
[the Prime Minister Haider]
al-Abadi, dismiss his cabinet
and appoint technocrats as
ministers in order to stamp
out corruption.
Mr Sadr gave the government a 45-day deadline to
introduce radical change
which expires at the end of
this month.
Mr Sadr, always a powerful
force within the Shia community and with a bloc of 34 MPs
in parliament, is presenting
himself as a non-sectarian
populist leader with a wellorganised movement behind
him. At his first mass rally in
Tahrir Square in Baghdad on
26 February, he told the vast
crowd: This demonstration
is the voice of the displaced
Property prices in central

Baghdad are as high as in
London because there is
so much dirty money
people and the oppressed
Sunnis. Abadi must carry out
grassroots reform. Raise your
voice and shout so the corrupt
get scared of you.
Although Mr Sadr could
certainly get his followers to
invade the Green Zone if he
wanted to, he probably prefers
not to carry out this threat for
the moment, fearing that an
invasion of an enclave full of
palaces, wealthy houses and
government offices could lead
to mass looting, as notoriously
occurred when Saddam Hussein fell in 2003. Instead he has
set up three camps which are
staging sit-ins at three gates
into the Green Zone where
3,000 protesters, with identity cards issued by the Sadrist
movement, are encamped.
Critics of the Sadrist movement say that it has itself had
ministers in the government
who are as crooked as the others. Corrupt officials in the
banking system protect themselves by making fraudulent
loans to people and parties
that might prosecute them.
There are also doubts about
how far technocrats, however honest and professionally capable, would be able to
have an impact on an admin-
istrative machine that is so

dysfunctional and controlled
by a mafia with wide networks
of power and influence.
By one estimate, there are
25,000 Dawa Party members
that run the government and
have accumulated great wealth
in the past decade. Property
prices in central Baghdad are
as high as in London because
there is so much dirty money
looking for an investment,
said an Iraqi economist in
Baghdad who wanted to
remain anonymous.
The crisis is reaching a peak
now because Iraq is rapidly
running out of money due to
the continuing low price of oil,
even if this is slightly up on a
month ago. Ministers say the
problem is that salaries and
pensions alone cost the government $4bn a month and
oil revenues are only $2bn, so
available financial reserves will
run out later this year, though
exactly when is disputed.
Almost all project and
investment spending has
been halted, but the Iraqi
government still has to pay for
seven million people through
salaries or other benefits, with
660,000 working for the interior ministry alone. Many salaries, such as those of ghost
soldiers who do not exist,
are diverted to army officers
or defence ministry officials.
Many jobs require little
or no work and are part of a
patronage-client system common to oil states, in which oil
revenues stunt or eliminate
all other forms of economic
activity. I am not sure you
can say that Iraq has a private
sector which is not dependent on the state, said the Iraqi
economist, noting that even
the tomatoes in Baghdad markets are grown in Iran.
Mr Sadrs blend of religion, economic populism
and Iraqi nationalism is particularly appealing to Iraqis at
a moment when oil revenues
are far below what is necessary, despite oil production
of 4.5 million barrels a day.
During UN sanctions in the
1990s, when the Iraqi state
was starved of cash with devastating consequences for the
population, Mr Sadrs father,
Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr,
created a vastly popular Shia
revivalist movement which
led to him being murdered
in 1999 by Saddam Husseins
gunmen, along with two of
his sons. His surviving son
Muqtada is now becoming
the conduit for similar popular anger.
BAGHDAD
KADHIMIYAH
RUSAFA
KARKH
Tigris
GREEN
ZONE
RASHEED
IRAQ
miles
31
P o la nd
ne ws in
b rie f
china
Large-scale logging to go
ahead in Unesco forest
This official
picture shows
a Korean
Peoples
Army drill
featuring
long-range
artillery
pieces at an
undisclosed
location in
North Korea
Polands environment
minister has approved a
plan to allow extensive
logging in Europes last
pristine forest, arguing
its the way to save it from
woodworm. Greenpeace
has called the logging a
black scenario for the
Bialowieza Forest, which
is on Unescos World
Heritage list. AP
KCN A /AFP/
G etty I m age s
Romeo and
Juliet mutiny
divides young
Palestinians
donald macintyre
in gaza
Romeo and Juliet ends with

the deaths of the star-crossed
lovers bringing peace between
two hostile houses, both alike
in dignity. But, for Palestinian school students, Shakespeares tragedy has done the
opposite by reinforcing the
split between Gaza and the
West Bank.
Protests by Gaza teachers
against the English secondary-school curriculum drawn
up for this school year by the
Fatah-dominated Palestinian
Authority (PA) in Ramallah
have ensured that 17- and 18year-old students of English in
the Hamas-controlled coastal
enclave will be studying King
Lear, while their West Bank
counterparts are taught Romeo
and Juliet.
Teachers in the enclosed
and more conservative Gaza
argued that the story of young
love across the factional divide
between the Capulets and the
Montagues was unsuitable.
Among the reasons cited
for the opposition were fears
that the plot glamorises suicide regarded as a serious
sin by many Muslims and
might encourage teenagers to disobey their parents.
Teachers were also worried
that students might download one of several film versions containing immoral
love scenes. The play can also
be read as opposing arranged
marriages of the sort still
practised in sections of Palestinian society.
Although suicide rates
in Gaza, which has faced 10
years of economic siege as
well as three major Israeli
military onslaughts, have
been historically low, local

human rights agencies report
that 16 confirmed cases in the
past three years reflect a sharp
rise among young people, who
face one of the highest levels of
unemployment in the world.
After meeting teachers from
Gaza, PA education officials
agreed to make the simplified
form of the play an option
for the annual examination,
allowing schools in Gaza to
study Lear instead. The large
majority of Gaza schools run
by the Hamas de facto government have opted for Lear.
One opponent of Romeo
and Juliet, Mrs Jehan al-Okka,
an English teacher at Bashir El
Rayyes High School for girls
in Gaza City, said she would
prefer not to have Shakespearean tragedies in the syllabus
because of their emphasis on
dysfunctional family life and
often violent death. There
is a contradiction between
Islam and our culture and the
things Shakespeare is trying
to convey, she said. Romeo
and Juliet encourages suicide
and disobeying parents.
While agreeing that some of
Shakespeares drama was out
of step with Islamic culture,
the school principal, Samia
Ismail Sqeiq, herself a former
English teacher, said that King
Lears depiction of Goneril and
Regan as arch villains demonstrated the importance of people honouring their parents.
From Ramallah, Ehab
Shukri, an adviser to the Minister of Education, denied that
there was any conflict with
Islamic or Arab cultural values
and said Romeo and Juliet was
part of an international cultural experience. He added:
There are many love stories
in Arab culture which deal
with this experience.
The plot
glamorises
suicide,
regarded
as a sin
by many
Muslims
New parents to be offered

extended leave from work
Authorities in Chinas
capital will extend leave
from work for new mothers
and fathers, state media has
reported, in what appears
to be the latest incentive to
encourage families to have
more children. Last year,
the Communist Party said
it would relax its one-child
policy, allowing all couples
to now have two.
The government, keen to

address a looming ageing
crisis, is concerned people
will choose not to exercise
that right over worries
about the cost of raising
two children.
The state-run China
News Agency said fathers
in Beijing will get 15 days
paternity leave, while
elsewhere they will get
three to 10 days.
Mothers in Beijing can
extend their leave to seven
months 30 days longer
than at present. R E U T ERS
32
World / Terror in Brussels
Belgian bungling
continues as police
chief admits mistakes
As arrests are now
made, questions
remain about how
terror operatives
were able to
remain at large
leo cendrowicz
in brussels
Belgian police missed further

opportunities to thwart both
the Brussels and Paris attacks,
it emerged yesterday, with one
possibly key lead about the
address of would-be bomber
Salah Abdeslam being ignored
by officials.
The lapses were revealed as
European police launched new
sweeps linked to the bombing
attacks, with one fleeing suspect shot and injured by commandoes in a Brussels street
after he attempted to hold a
woman and child hostage.
While Paris attacks suspect
Abdeslam was caught last week
after a four-month manhunt,
he could have been found far
earlier if a tip-off on his final
Molenbeek address had been
followed last December.
Instead it languished unread
in a provincial office.
A police officer from
Mechelen, about 10 miles
north of Brussels, recommended sending the address
to the federal polices antiterrorism unit, but his report
was never forwarded by his
superiors. The officer had suggested checking out the home
at 79 Rue des Quatre Vents of

Abid Aberkam, a close friend
of Abdeslam. After the police
finally caught Abdeslam at the
address, they also arrested
Aberkan, charging him with
terrorist activities and hiding
criminals. Unfortunately, a
mistake has been made within
my team, Mechelen police
chief Yves Bogaerts admitted
yesterday.
His admission follows
claims by Turkey on Wednesday that after it deported
suicide bomber Ibrahim ElBakraoui, Europe ignored
our warnings about the danger he posed. Although Belgian authorities knew him
as a gangster, Turkey flagged
David Dixon has
been confirmed
as one of 20
people killed in
the Maelbeek
metro attack
him as a foreign terrorist
fighter.
There were also indications
that the el-Bakraoui brothers,
who blew themselves up in
the Brussels attacks, may have
been plotting to make a dirty
bomb after it emerged that
they spied on a top nuclear
researcher. They planted a
hidden camera in bushes outside the researchers house,
producing more than 10 hours
of film.
Prosecutors confirmed
yesterday that a man shot
by police on the street in the
Schaerbeek district of Brussels after he attempted to
hold a woman and child hostage was linked to a further

planned attack in France. The
man, as yet unnamed by police,
was reportedly carrying a bag
of bombs; they evacuated the
area and a robot later blew up
the bag. He was detained with
two others, following other
raids and arrests in the districts of Forest, Saint-Gilles
and Schaerbeek.
The arrests were linked to
the French arrest of a man in
the northern Paris suburb of
Argenteuil, identified locally
as Reda Kriket, said by French
Interior Minister Bernard
Cazeneuve to be planning to
strike on French soil. Kriket
was convicted in absentia in
Belgium in July and sentenced
to 10 years in prison along
with Abdelhamid Abaaoud,
the assumed ringleader of
Paris attacks.
Separately, German police
raided an address in Dsseldorf, and arrested two men in
connection with the Brussels
attacks.
B e l g i a n i nve s t i g a to r s
have also confirmed that the
second suicide bomber at
Brussels airport was Najim
Zaachraoui, who allegedly
made the bombs for both the
Paris and Brussels attacks.
Meanwhile, David Dixon,
53, a British computer programmer, has been identified
as one of the 20 killed in Tuesdays bomb at the Maelbeek
metro stations. Based in the
Belgian capital, he contacted
an aunt moments after the initial bombs at Brussels Airport
to say he was safe.
Abdeslam: I pulled out of bombing

john lichfield
in paris
Salah Abdeslam, the captured

Paris attacker, has emerged in
his own words as a confused
and self-pitying young man,
who blames his brother for
embroiling him in terrorism.
In leaked extracts of his
interrogation by Belgian
police, Abdeslam, 26, minimised his role in the Paris
attacks and confirmed that he
had refused at the last moment
to blow himself up. In his
police statement, leaked to the
French newspaper Le Monde,
Abdeslam admitted renting
cars and flats for the attack and
driving three suicide bombers
to the Stade de France on 13

November last year. He was
also supposed to enter the
stadium and blow himself up
in the crowd, he said.
I pulled out of it as soon as I
had parked the car, he said. I
dropped my three passengers
and drove off again. I parked
somewhere. I dont know
where... I went on the Metro
for one or two stops.
Abdeslam said that one
of the presumed organisers
Salah Abdeslam,
who was supposed
to have blown
himself up, said his
organisers were
furious with him
of the Paris plot, Mohamed

Belkaid, was furious when
he returned to Brussels alive.
Abdel [Belkaid] wasnt happy
to see me come back, he told
Belgian police. I told him
I couldnt blow myself up.
He consoled me and said he
would hide me.
The statement was taken
last Saturday morning. Three
days earlier Belkaid was shot
dead by Belgian police while
protecting Abdeslams escape
from another safe house.
Of his role in the Paris
attacks, he said: I did it
because Brahim asked me.
His older brother Brahim
Abdeslam was one of the gunmen who attacked Paris restaurants on 13 November.
33
llll
Taxi driver who

drove bombers
to airport heard
tirade against US
ki m sengupta
Clockwise
from top:
a suspect
is shot and
wounded
by Belgian
police in
Schaerbeek
following
Tuesdays
bombings;
a member
of the
emergency
services
on patrol;
Belgians
gather at
a street
memorial
REUTERS/
V in cent
K ess l er /
A P/a l istair
g rant
hears the inside story of the fateful journey
The taxi driver who unwittingly took the Brussels

bombers to the scene of their
attack has revealed one of the
men raged during the journey
about what he saw as Americas
aggression towards Islam, The
Independent has learned.
The driver has been widely
praised for preventing greater
bloodshed. It can now be disclosed that he is a Muslim
of Moroccan descent. The
terrorists had left behind
not just one case packed
with explosives as had been
previously thought, but two.
The lethal devices could have
been used by their accomplices to carry out further
attacks had he not alerted
police to the location.
The cab had been called by
the three jihadists from the
flat on the fifth floor of a block
in Schaerbeek in northern
Brussels to go to the airport.
The men came down with
five cases which they refused
to allow the driver to touch.
However, only three of the
cases could be fitted into the
boot of the car, a black Skoda,
much to the annoyance of the
men. They briefly discussed
ordering a second car before
deciding to take two of the
cases back upstairs.
The driver is convinced,
after studying photographs
and video, that two of the
three passengers he drove to
the airport on Tuesday morning were brothers Brahim and
Khalid el-Bakraoui. He recalls
them sitting, hunched, in
silence in the back during the
25 minute ride to the citys
Zaventem airport. The voluble man in the front, decrying
the US, was, he believes, the
figure in a white jacket and
black hat who was seen at the
airport walking alongside Brahim el-Bakraoui and Najim
Laachraoui, an Isis bomb
maker, and then disappeared
dumping his suicide vest.
Brahim el-Bakraoui and
Nijam Laachraoui detonated
their explosive belts at an
American Airlines counter at
the airport, killing themselves
and 11 others.
Khalid el-Bakraoui blew
himself up at Maelbeek metro
station, taking 20 more lives.

After dropping off the three
men at the airport, the driver
picked up another passenger
on the way back to the city
centre. He called the police
after seeing CCTV footage of
the suspects on social media.
A married man with young
children, he has decided not
to reveal his identity after taking police advice.
Armed police arrived outside the block of flats, No 4
Rue Max Roos, late on Tuesday morning. Inside the flat
they found an Isis flag, a bomb
packed with nails and screws,
The men came down

with five cases which
they refused to allow
the driver to touch
detonators and enough chemicals to make 15kg of Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP) the
explosive used in last Novembers Paris attacks.
Outside, in a dustbin, was
a laptop which provided a
crucial insight into the mind
of one of the bombers. I
dont know what to do, I am
in a hurry, being searched for
everywhere, not being safe,
it drags on it could end up
me being in a prison cell next
to him, Brahim el-Bakraoui
had written.
The him in the note
is believed to be Salah
Abdeslam, a fugitive from the
Paris attacks who was arrested
in the district of Molenbeek
last Friday. Abdeslams lawyer, Sven Mary had claimed

his client was providing information and worth his weight
in gold. There have been
reports, unconfirmed, that
the man in the white coat
at the airport was Mohamed
Abrini, a childhood friend of
Abdeslam and also wanted
over the Paris murders.
Residents in surrounding
areas to Rue Max Roos were
told to leave their homes while
the bombs were defused.
Ragheb Masri, who took
his family away overnight,
recalled: The police told us
that buildings would collapse
if the bomb had gone off. Everyone must move out immediately, they said. It was good
that the taxi driver was quick to
let the police know about this
place, there could have been a
catastrophe otherwise.
A friend of the driver who
made the Rue Max Roos pickup, who is also a Muslim of
Moroccan descent, said: The
police have spoken to him lots
and they have asked him to be
careful, these are very dangerous times.
Of course my friend provided the necessary information and maybe that saved
lives. Some people, like that
man Donald Trump in America, says that Muslims are not
giving information about terrorists. That is not true at all.
We want to protect our
community just like anyone
else. We dont want to see
our families killed or injured
by bombs, or anyone elses
families. We know we need
to confront these very bad
people together.
Airport CCTV footage shows three of the suspects A F P/Gett y
34
World
World View
Peter Popham
Radovan Karadzic
led Bosnian Serbs
down an atavistic
path back into
the dark past
In late-1991 I spent
a few days under
bombardment in
Croatia reporting on
the civil war for The
Independent, then moved on to Sarajevo,
the Bosnian capital, to see if something
similar was brewing there.
The locals were expansive, charming,
bibulous and comprehensively reassuring.
What? Serbians, Bosniaks and Croatians
turning on each other and killing each
other? The idea was laughable, I was told.
This was a modern, sophisticated town full
of mixed couples and families, where the
bloody borders dividing Catholic, Orthodox
and Muslim which had scarred the Balkans
for centuries had been swallowed up and
forgotten in happy modernity: first Tito,
then European liberalism, had buried the
regions ugly history.
Yet within months the siege of Sarajevo
was under way. Europeans, raised to
believe that the age of European wars
was over, struggled to comprehend what
was happening. But the Bosnian Serbians
could not have picked up their guns and
trained them on their Muslim and Croatian
neighbours without believing they were
doing something right and necessary. The
man who provided that belief, Radovan
Karadzic, is now beginning the 40-year

sentence handed down this week in The
Hague. Charismatic, theatrical, a poet with
something of the prophet and much of the
charlatan about him, Karadzic was the right
man in the right place, infusing his Serbian
brethren with an intoxicating belief in their
high racial destiny, involving a millennial
conflict with the Muslims who, under the
banner of the Ottomans, had inflicted that
never-to-be-forgotten defeat at the Battle of
Kosovo Polje in 1389.
It was atavism pure and simple: a Serbian
version of the Fascist urge that produced
Mussolini and Hitler. And given the murder
of nearly 8,000 Bosniak men at Srebrenica
by soldiers infused with Karadzics beliefs,
who knows what genocidal atrocities might
have ensued if the West had not finally
intervened, and if the American diplomat
Richard Holbrooke had not bashed heads
together sufficiently hard at Dayton, Ohio,
to force the warlords into a reluctant peace?
Yet when Karadzic was finally arrested
in 2008, there was no jubilation among
the Bosniaks. Thats because, as a political
analyst in Sarajevo told me at the time:
Karadzic is no longer on the scene, but his
ideas and his life work are on the verge of
becoming reality.
The grandiose vision of a Greater Serbia
had been killed off, but the paranoia, narrow

pride and clannishness that Karadzic
embodied found miniature realisation in
Republika Srpska, the ethnic entity which,
along with the Muslim-Croat Federation,
survives to this day, jealously guarding
its enclaves, ensuring that the Bosnian
Republic, so prematurely recognised by
Europe in April 1992, never had a chance.
We make a mistake if we see Karadzic
as a unique monster. Figures like him are
springing up and prospering right across
the world, wherever the old state structures
nourished by the post-war order totter. The
viciousness of the historic divisions in the
southern Balkans lent a fire-and-brimstone
quality to the Karadzic rhetoric, just as
the medieval touchstone of fundamental
Islam justifies the barbarities promulgated
by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Isis. Frances
Marie le Pen, Hungarys Viktor Orban and
Matteo Salvini of Italys Lega Nord each
know how to apply the flame of rhetoric to
the blue touchpaper of atavism. Each is as
different as the clans to which they appeal,
but all appeal to blood and soil. Civilisation
as we know it was an
awakening from such
nightmares. These
people lead us back
into the dark.
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35
Lawyer for captured Russian

soldiers found dead in Ukraine
sam masters
deputy foreign editor
Shandling: a near-fatal car accident inspired him to pursue stand-up comedy
A lawyer representing two

Russian soldiers captured
during the war in Ukraines
east has been found dead,
apparently executed, as relations between the two nations
worsen over prisoners of a war
Moscow denies entering.
Yuriy Grabovsky was part of
a legal team representing two
Russians arrested last May on
terrorism charges. Authorities
in Kiev had hoped to swap the
Russians for Ukrainians held by
Moscow, including a helicopter pilot, Nadezhda Savcheko,
who was jailed for 22 years by a
Russian court this week.
Mr Grabovsky was reported
missing in early March. The
body was found at around 4am
yesterday. Anatoly Matios,
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Comedy world pays

tribute to genius of
Garry Shandling
tim walker
in los angeles
The comedian, writer and actor

Garry Shandling, who died in
Los Angeles on Thursday aged
66, had backed away from the
spotlight in the 18 years since
the final episode of The Larry
Sanders Show. But the influence of his most celebrated
creation is still deeply felt.
Figures from across the
comedy world paid tribute
after the news of his death,
among them Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who
described Larry Sanders as
the greatest single-camera
comedy of all time. The series,
which ran from 1992 to 1998,
was set behind the scenes at a
fictional talk show, and was the
forerunner to some of the eras
most celebrated comedies. It
pioneered the art of the cringe
years before Curb Your Enthusiasm, and featured real celebrities playing skewed versions
of themselves more than a decade ahead of Entourage.
It was also the first flagship
original series made by cable
channel HBO, before the
advent of The Sopranos or Sex
and the City. Just before his
death, it was announced yesterday, Shandling negotiated
a deal to bring reruns of Larry
Sanders back to the channel.
Shandlings impact was
transatlantic. Ricky Gervais,
who called him one of the most
influential comedians of a gen-
eration, mined Larry Sanders for The Office and Extras.

Stephen Merchant, Gervaiss
co-creator on both, tweeted:
The great Garry Shandlings
work is such a touchstone for
me that I was actually discussing him moments before I
heard the sad news.
Born in Chicago and raised
in Arizona, Shandling moved
to LA in the 1970s and got
his show-business break as a
writer for classic sitcoms such
as Sanford and Son. In 1977,
he was in a car accident that
he later described as a vivid
near-death experience. It
Ricky Gervais mined

The Larry Sanders
Show for The Office
and Extras
inspired him to pursue standup comedy, and to create the
comic persona that married
crippling insecurity to seething narcissism which carried
him through his TV career.
In 1985, he launched the
semi-autobiographical sitcom
Its Garry Shandlings Show,
about a neurotic stand-up
comedian, so self-aware that
he knows he is a TV character
and regularly shoots the breeze
with the audience. But it was
his experience as a stand-in
host for Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show that inspired

his next move. He was twice
offered a real late-night network talk show, but instead
chose to create a fictional one.
Among the talent to emerge
from the Larry Sanders stable
were actors Jeremy Piven and
Bob Odenkirk, stars of Entourage and Better Call Saul;
comedians Sarah Silverman
and Jon Stewart, who played
Larrys stand-in host long
before he was the real host of
The Daily Show; as well as Judd
Apatow and Jon Favreau, now
both Hollywood film-makers.
After Larry Sanders, Shandling withdrew from the public
eye, devoting much of his time
and energy to Buddhism, the
faith that had sustained him
ever since his car accident. He
reportedly hosted weekly basketball games attended by some
of the biggest names in contemporary comedy. He still made
rare appearances on screen,
including a cameo in Iron
Man 2, directed by Favreau.
TMZ reported that Shandling made an emergency call
from his home on Thursday
before falling unconscious. He
was taken to a hospital in Santa
Monica, where he later died of
suspected natural causes. As
recently as last weekend, he
retweeted a photograph of himself with Odenkirk and comedian Kathy Griffin. Garry was
a guiding voice of comedy,
Odenkirk said in a statement.
He set the standard, and were
all still trying to meet it.
Relations
worsen
over a war
Moscow
denies
even
entering
chief military prosecutor, said

that Mr Grabovsky had been
beaten and then shot. Two
suspects remain in custody.
While no motives were suggested, Mr Matios said it was
in Russians interest for the
servicemens trial in Ukraine
to be delayed. Russias Foreign
Ministry blamed Ukrainian
authorities for failing to protect Mr Grabovsky, who they
said had become a victim of
anti-Russian sentiment in
Ukraine because of his job.
The two Russians
Alexander Alexandrov and
his captain, Yevgeny Yerofeyev
are claimed by Russia to have
quit their unit to go to Ukraines
east independently.
Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko has said he would
be willing to hand over the men
in return for captured Ukrainians, including Savchenko.
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36
World
Human rights groups have decried a deal which

this week turned a Greek refugee registration
centre into something much more sinister.
em m a gatten reports from Lesbos
Hope turns
to despair as
refugee camp
becomes
open-air prison
Even before it became a holding
pen, Moria was a pretty poor
registration centre, unable
to provide basic facilities and
painfully slow to process the
thousands of refugees and
migrants who arrive on the
shores of Lesbos every week.
But since midnight on Sunday, when the new EU-Turkey
migrant deal came into force,
refugees have been picked up
by the coastguard and transported directly to Moria by the
Greek authorities.
The camp has become an
open-air prison, a compound
of temporary buildings on a hill
overlooking the coast of this
island, not far from Turkeys
Mediterranean coast. It is to
here that all arrivals must wait
for the news their long struggle to reach Europe will almost
certainly get them no further
than the Greek islands.
They will be returned to
Turkey, which the European
Union has now declared a safe
country, in its bid to stem the
biggest refugee crisis since the
Second World War.
The lightning fast implementation of the deal, signed
last Friday, has stretched to
the limit the capacity of the
Greek government, which
has no means to process the
asylum claims that everyone

who arrives has the right to
make. Those who came looking for peace and a better life
have instead found themselves
locked up, and handed detention papers. In response, aid
agencies have dropped out of
their involvement at the centre one by one, refusing to be
associated with the detention
of migrants among whom are
more than 100 unaccompanied
children. Oxfam this week
said the development was an
offence to Europes values.
They have told us nothing, says Naima Abdullah,
28, speaking through the chain
link fence, her four-year-old
daughter Mirna by her side. She
paid $2,000 for herself, Mirna,
and her one-month-old baby
to cross the sea from Turkey
after fleeing air strikes in rural
Damascus three months ago.
She arrived on Sunday, in the
first boats after the deal came
into force. But four days later,
she still hadnt been given an
opportunity to register a claim
for asylum.
And as the numbers grow,
observers worry the only possible outcome will be the mass
expulsions Europe has promised to avoid. Nadine Abuasil,
25, said she came to Lesbos
because life in Turkey since she

fled Deraa in Syria a month ago
was not worth living. Her family were blackmailed for money
by local gangs, and there was
no work in a country that is
expensive to live in. We cannot go back to Turkey, she says
simply. She and her 23-year-old
brother arrived on Sunday after
a five hour boat journey during
which two men died. They had
apparently suffocated.
She points to the ground
of the detention centre. We
would rather die here than in
Turkey. Her brother, Mohammed, was no less emphatic
when asked what hed do if he
was forced to return. I dont
speak English, he says. But:
kill myself, kill myself.
The deal has been decried by
human rights groups and legal
experts who question if Turkey
can be considered a safe third
country for the forcible return
of migrants, and if Greece,
which has floundered under
the pressure of more than one
million refugees arrivals in the
past year, is capable of processing asylum claims even with
promised outside help.
Greece has effectively
been asked to build an asylum
system in two weeks, says
Camino Mortera, a research
They treat
us like
animals
here. I
feel like
I am in
Syria
fellow for the Centre for European Reform and a specialist in

EU law. The EU claims there
wont be returns en masse but
if you are not able to process
people in a regulated fashion,
how else are they going to deal
with this?
As a detention centre Moria
is barely adequate, including to
the task of holding people in a
handful jump the fence at ease
and unnoticed, disappearing
into the woodland. They have
nowhere to go once theyre out
and often come back. People
have been forced to sleep on
the chalky gravel, wrapped in
blankets. Among them are a
frail elderly man, and Elham,
14, from Afghanistan who fled
along with her family from
threats from the Taliban.
We asked the police for
information, they just say
We dont know, said Elham.
Tensions are simmering, with
accusations some nationalities are receiving preferential
treatment over others.
Naima Abdullah, with her
two small children, wants to
reach Germany, where her husband is now claiming asylum.
Its not clear what will happen
to the many families that have
been separated this way. Much
about the deal is unclear, even
to the Greek authorities. Its

not clear how long people will
stay, said UNHCR spokesperson Boris Cheshirkov . Its
still not clear how the deal will
be implemented, how Greece
will be given capability to deal
with asylum claims.
Tove Ernst, a spokesperson
for migration at the European
Commission said the intention
was to have people moved from
the facilities swiftly, adding:
Detention in cases of returns
should always be limited.
Frontex border agency this
week called on EU member
states to step up and provide
extra personnel to help authorities on Lesbos manage the new
deal. So far, only 396 of 1,500
requested police officers have
been offered. There are plans
to send an extra 50 immigration experts, with five arriving
from Turkey this week.
Marios Andriotis, a senior
adviser to the Lesbos mayor,
is visibly strained. He said the
local government was doing its
best to provide for new arrivals. But, he added: We are a
small municipality and we do
not decide the unions policies. We are looking for a contingency plan, a waiting area
where we could accommodate
5,000 to 10,000 people. The
37
Turkeys closed-doors
trial of journalists
a travesty of justice
Supporters of defendants protest loudly in court as
judge says charges of espionage will be heard in private
laura pitel
in istanbul
deals success relies on people

like Ms Abdullah deciding to
wait their turn under the onefor-one scheme, under which
Europe has agreed to take a
Syrian refugee directly from
Turkey, in exchange for each
Syrian Turkey accepts back
from Greece.
The numbers have shown
some signs of slowing. Coast
guards heading out for a patrol
on Thursday said they didnt
expect to pick up anyone.
Fadi, 23, who declined to
give his family name, arrived in
Lesbos after fleeing army conscription in Syria. He escaped
to Turkey at the end of last
year, paying bribes along the
way to the regime and to Isis.
When he left Turkey, he had no
idea an effective prison would
be awaiting him in Greece.
He says he wouldnt have
come if he had known. They
treat us like animals here, he
said, shouting across a ditch
that runs along one side of
Morias chainlink fence. I
feel like I am in Syria. Still,
he doesnt think the deal will
contain the refugees for long.
People are fleeing a war. They
will find a way, he said
In any case, Europe agreed to
take only 72,000 Syrians under
the plan; more than twice that
Children at
Moria camp,
which is
guarded by
police (top
left). Since
the deal
refugees
are picked
up by the
coastguard
and taken
to the site
Gui l laum e
Pino n/
N ur Ph oto
number arrived in Greece last

October alone. And there is
doubt that member states will
hold up their end of the bargain
in taking in refugees; previous
attempts to impose a quota system to share the burden have
swiftly fallen apart
Europe hopes, too, many can
be persuaded to stay in Turkey.
It has promised an extra 3bn
to Ankara to help provide aid to
its 2.7 million Syrian refugees.
But with little work and education for Syrians in Turkey, many
are on the point of destitution
and may take some convincing
that they have a future there.
If people come anyway, the
Greek islands will be swiftly
overwhelmed. Their combined
facilities have a capacity of just
7,490, already more than half
full. And in the first five days
since the deal came into effect,
more than 1,400 had made the
journey to the islands.
In the midst of all this, as
ever, are those who hoped to
arrive to a Europe that would
welcome them with open
walls, even if not with open
arms. I want to tell Europe: I
do not want to go to Turkey. I
want to see my husband in Germany, said Ms Abuasil. Syria
is awful. If it was not awful, we
would not have left.
The trial of two prominent

Turkish newspaper journalists accused of espionage
will take place behind closed
doors after a court decision
described by critics as a travesty of justice.
Can Dundar, editor of Cumhuriyet, and Erdem Gul, the
newspapers Ankara bureau
chief, face life in prison for a
front-page story claiming that
Turkish intelligence services
were helping to send weapons
to Syria.
Their trial, which began yesterday, is being held up as a test
case on the health of the countrys democracy amid warnings
that accountability, freedom of
expression and the rule of law
are all under attack.
Day one did little to dispel claims that the prevailing winds in Turkey, a Nato
member that aspires to join the
European Union, are blowing
in the wrong direction.
There was almost a party
atmosphere as the two journalists arrived at Istanbuls Palace
of Justice yesterday morning.
Clutching a copy of the front
page that led to accusations
of divulging state secrets,
Mr Dundar, 54, and Mr Gul,
49, grinned and waved at the
huge crowd of reporters and
well-wishers. As they entered
the packed, rowdy courtroom,
they were met with cheering
and applause.
The mood took a darker turn
when a judge ruled that their
trial would be held in private,
prompting jeers and shouts
from the scores of supporters
crammed into the hot court-
room. Emma Sinclair-Webb, a

researcher with Human Rights
Watch who attended the hearing, described the decision to
bar the public as a travesty of
justice.
She said: Not only does the
government prevent journalists from scrutinising stories
of public interest The court
now prevents the public scrutinising the trial. The trial
was later adjourned until next
month after opposition MPs
refused to leave in protest at
the decision.
The journalists story, published last May, centred on a
video that allegedly showed
Turkeys state intelligence
We will defend
journalism and the
right of the public
to be told the truth
agency helping to send weapons to Syria in 2014.
Turkeys President, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, acknowledged the trucks belonged to
the secret service but claimed
they were taking aid to members of the Turkmen ethnic
minority. He said that police
who stopped and searched the
truck had no right to do so and
accused them of trying to overthrow the government.
Mr Erdogan, a skilful but
deeply divisive politician, has
made clear that he views the
story as a personal affront,
warning the journalists that
they would pay a heavy
price.
When the constitutional
court decided last month to

free the pair after three months
of pre-trial detention, the President declared that he would
not abide by the decision.
Yesterday, the judge agreed
to make Mr Erdogan himself
a complainant in the case.
Mr Dundar, meanwhile, has
vowed to use the trial to focus
on the story itself to expose
what he said was illegal action
by the state. Speaking on his
way into court, he said: We
will defend journalism and the
right of the public to be told
the truth.
The Turkish government
insists that the case is about
national security, not press
freedom, but its European
allies disagree. Leigh Turner,
the British consul general, was
one of more than half a dozen
foreign diplomats to attend the
hearing. However, Turkeys
role in both counterterrorism
efforts and the refugee crisis
mean that EU leaders have
hitherto proved reluctant to
respond too harshly to crackdowns on the media as well as
the judiciary, academia and
civil society.
Dozens of ordinary Turkish citizens were also among
those who turned up to support the journalists. Speaking outside the courtroom,
Mustafa Koprulu, a retired
businessman, and Mehmet
Ozturk, a former bank manager, described the case as an
important moment for Turkish
democracy.
Mr Ozturk, 54, argued that
in Turkey they want to stop
us learning the truth. He said:
It is not just Can Dundar who
is being victimised. It is also a
normal citizen who reads a
newspaper.
Accused
editor Can
Dundar, with
his papers
controversial
front page,
outside
the court
in Istanbul
yesterday AP
39
Rosie Millard
Howard Jacobson
Profile
Janet Street-Porter
41
43
44
45
Yes, life is moving more quickly. All the

more reason to join an Easter Egg hunt
Just when I had decided I was up

to writing a weekly column ...
Sarday
How do you generalise readers who

do not want to be generalised?
The tyranny of the bicycle is ruining our

great capital for anyone not on two wheels
26.03.16
Voices
Even in the twisted
universe of Isis, they
dream of Utopia
boyd tonkin
How can we imagine an end to terrorism, and

to the hatred and injury that stoke it? This
Easter weekend, such an outcome feels
immeasurably distant. Add, in the past fort
night alone, the 31 victims in Brussels to the
five on Istiklal street in Istanbul, the 37 in
Ankara, and 60plusmurdered by a petrol
tanker blown up by Isis at Hilla south of Bagh
dad. Meanwhile, in The Hague, the Bosnian
Serb psychiatrist turned psychopath Radovan
Karadzic has received a 40-year sentence for
the genocidal crimes against his Muslim
neighbours that, in the mid-1990s, did so much
to reboot Islamist jihad.
A decade before the invasion of Iraq, Western
apathy as Sarajevo burned and Srebrenica
bled coupled with Russias two pitiless wars
in Chechnya gave the zealots their war cry.
The two most battle-hardened 9/11 hijackers,
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were
veterans of the Bosnian Muslim counter-attack
on Karadzic and his mass-murdering thugs.
Osama bin Laden rated them highly for their
Balkan stripes.
After 9/11, our state of endless war began. We
avert horror-sated eyes and pray that the next
bomb will detonate in the adjoining carriage or
the other terminal. Interminable combat with
ever-evolving enemies stretches beyond the

Continued on P.40 >
40
Voices

horizon. In a time of random massacres, who
dares to think of a route into hope?
This week, I remembered a visit I paid to
an extraordinary figure who, in the bleakest
of conditions, tries to do just that. On a brisk
May morning in the Judaean hills, I crossed
from Jerusalem into the West Bank through
the Qalandiya checkpoint and went up to
breezy Ramallah: a bustling city perched on
healthy heights, but now encircled by Israeli
settlements. Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinian
author and lawyer, built a house for himself
here, where Swiss chard and tomatoes, roses
and delphiniums flourish in the garden.
Shehadeh has not only pursued countless
human rights cases in the courts. He has also
borne witness to the cruelties and absurdities
of occupation in a string of lyrical, humane and
quietly fervent books. Also an eminent lawyer,
Shehadehs father took the first secret steps
towards a two-state solution in the region,
along with the Israeli diplomat (and undercover agent) David Kimche. The Shehadehs
had come from east of the Jordan to settle in
Jaffa. Their family history belongs to a world
without the barriers and borders of today.
After we had driven and walked around his
beloved hills, now criss-crossed by the concrete
and barbed-wire geometry of settlement and
occupation, Shehadeh told me about a short
work he had just finished. Not a journal or essay,
it took the form not just of fiction but of the
wildest fantasy. In 2037: the Great Upheaval,
he had envisaged a Middle East at peace. I got
so tired of living in the present, he said. So he
fantasised a better place.
In it, the humming trade and busy traffic
of the lost Ottoman Empire now reconnect
Baghdad with Beirut, Damascus to Cairo.
High-speed trains whizz every half hour from
(say) Istanbul to Jerusalem. Steel fences have
fallen and mental boundaries crumbled, but
every people and faith has a secure and stable
home. In the tormented present, rather than
the Utopian future, Shehadeh still believes
against the odds in twin independent states
for Israel and (unoccupied) Palestine. Hemmed
in on all sides by military hardware and the
settlers fortress-like estates, he walked these
biblical pathways and had his vision of hope.
Fix the Middle East, and you will not banish the impulses of violent self-assertion and
revenge from every deprived kid with a Muslim
background fuming silently in Paddington or
Molenbeek. Dogma-driven resentment has
its own twisted logic. Home-grown burdens
of joblessness, poverty and discrimination
amplify the voices of the website warriors.
Back in Bosnia, where the new-wave jihadis
of the Mujahideen Battalion first established
a European foothold, Isis recruiters have again
found fertile ground. More than 200 young

Bosniaks have recently joined the self-styled
caliphate of Isis. And Bosnia has a youth
unemployment rate that tops 60 per cent: the
highest in the record-keeping world.
Fix the Middle East, though, and the patrons
of bedroom zealots lose their phoney cloak of
righteousness. The push factors of penury
or prejudice at home must meet the pull of a
greater cause under some brave, black banner.
We can seek to shrink the former by social inclusion in fairer and mutually respectful cities.
But leave Syria and Iraq, Palestine and Yemen
in agony and the lure of violence at home or
abroad edges up a notch each year.
Diplomacy has failed the regions people.
True, Barack Obama will leave office with an
Iranian nuclear deal under his belt. That took
years and may yet prove fragile. Elsewhere,
Saudi autocrats and Israeli hardliners carry on
repressive business as usual with the blessing
of their friends in the West. As do the uniformed killers in Egypt and the Gulf who dug
the grave of the Arab Spring and stuffed it with
innocent cadavers. Even Bashar al-Assad finds
himself, with help from Putin and his grovelling apologists in the Western media, sliding
back into favour. He should be in the dock in
The Hague. Outrage or adversity can never
force anyone to slip over the Syrian border to
fight or (worse) strap on a suicide belt in the
metro. But those who contemplate such crimes
seldom forget to pack idealism in their knapsack of excuses.
So why not resort, as Raja Shehadeh did, to
science fiction for a chink of light? For anyone
who wants to drain the pools of injustice and
misrule where sympathy for terrorism breeds,
his vision of peace and unity in 2037 has a hairraising prelude. In this future, apocalypse precedes reform. An earthquake triggers a nuclear
accident that lays parts of the region waste. Dire
emergency compels sworn foes to co-operate
or perish. Lets hope it never comes to that,
with some collapsed reactor as the last-ditch
vehicle of agreement.
You might, however, conceive of some subdoomsday scenario that would force mutually
suspicious players from Jeddah to Erbil to line
up on the same team. Climate change and the
depletion of resources, for instance, may not
only exacerbate regional strife but cause it. Serious studies have correlated seasons of severe
drought with the rise of Isis. Could harmony as
well as conflict flow from the worsening water
crisis of the Middle East?
Shehadeh is hardly the first author to dream
of these lands as a haven of togetherness rather
than a hellhole of division. The intellectual
architect of Zionism, Theodor Herzl himself,
fondly planned for multicultural harmony in
his Jewish homeland. He too wrote a Utopian
novel about this territory: Altneuland,
il l us t r ati o n by m a r k lo n g
For bedroom zealots the

push factors of penury or
prejudice at home must meet
the pull of a greater cause
under some black banner
ublished in 1902. In Herzls future Palestine,

p
the old newland, Jewish migrants from
Europe build a modern, progressive welfare
state as a joint venture with their Arab, Armenian and Greek neighbours. Yes, it sounds like
the patronising fantasy of a frock-coated Viennese journalist who knew everything about
cafs on the Ringstrasse and nothing about
smallholdings in Samaria. But Herzl makes
tolerant pluralism the cornerstone of his state.
His ploteven pivots on the electoral defeat of
a racist rabbi who wishes to strip non-Jews of
equal rights.
These Levantine pipe dreams matter
because Isis itself has grown into the twisted
flipside of a Utopian dreamland. Accounts of
its propaganda output confirm that it diffuses
uplifting images of community, welfare and
civic provision more often than torture-anddecapitation porn. In an investigation on behalf
of Nato, Professor Shahira Fahmy found that
only 5 per cent of propaganda items from the
caliphate depicted bloodshed, as opposed
to street-cleaning, garbage collection, clinics,
blood donation and so on.
For the Quilliam Foundation, Charlie Winter identified 53 per cent of Isis reports as
Utopian, with only 2 per cent pure gore.
Its recruits kill, and die, for the mirage of a
holy state. It offers the twin gratifications of
supportive solidarity among believers and
savage violence against all infidels. We rail
at the sadism of terrorists. We should gasp at
their sentimentality as well.
Back on the contested ground of the Middle East, the postponement of Utopia leaves
limitless pain in its wake, both near at hand at
far away. On the ground and in the mind, the
walls and barriers remain. For my journey back
from Ramallah, Raja Shehadeh advised me to
cross Qalandiya as a pedestrian. I would have a
small taste of the daily frustration and belittlement of Palestinians who need to move across
these lines for family and work. Strewn with
cigarette butts, the wire-walled passageways
and cattle-pen holding areas looked squalid
as much as sinister. It turned out to be a quiet
afternoon at Qalandiya, but waits here can easily stretch to five or six hours. Fights and riots
sometimes break out.
Beyond the lines of tall turnstiles and the
battered scanners, three young women soldiers, national-service age, slowly processed
the queue. It all felt very Wizard of Oz-ish: that
fearsome architecture of control and surveillance hid a trio of bored time-servers.
After they had checked my documents,
somevague memory of a training session
kicked in, and one of them merrily chirruped:
Have a nice day! As this shadowed spring
begins, people from Brussels to Bethlehem
who dream of peace will be hoping against
hope for that.
41
Dave Brown Rogues Gallery
Another
Voice
rosie millard
Its official: life really

is speeding up to
the benefit ofus all
Its a clich of ageing. Everything seems to

speed up, they say. We say. Our childhood
seemed to go on for ever; our teens took a
glorious age to spin out. Then the decades
get faster your thirties and forties go past
in a blur, and thus it continues.
Rather annoyingly, this phenomenon has
now been found to have some factual truth to
it, at least since the digital age began. Life in
the 21st century has actually got quicker. In
part, this is obviously about the technology
which has transformed so much of our work
and life. I look back at my cuttings files (dont
believe any journalist who says they never
keep cuttings; we all do), and in File Number
One I find a yellowing piece dated July 1991
about a crazy performance-art festival in the
Lakes. I remember pitching the article on
an analogue phone, driving to the festival,
writing the piece (with a lot of Tipp-Ex) by
typewriter, then faxing the final copy to the
paper. Or maybe I painstakingly dictated it
to a copytaker.
Anyway, between event and published
report, the whole cycle took four days.
Last Wednesday, however, I attended the
premiere of Jackie the Musical, and read an
enthusiastic review online within an hour of
the cheesecloth-draped cast dancing off the
stage in their wedge shoes.
Its more profound than merely
digital magic, says Robert Colvile, in his
forthcoming book The Great Acceleration;
we operate swifter nowadays across the
board. We eat faster and we walk faster,
running to catch the bus which we pay for by
simply tapping in. No more faffing around

to look for cash in our pockets or collecting
tickets. Thats all yesterdays behaviour.
In our yearning for convenience, the
market itself has quickened. We digest stuff
quicker. Fashion arrives and is replaced
by a new look when that delivery sells out.
Films open on a Friday and can close a week
later. Our computers used to take minutes
to crank up; they now take milliseconds and
are connected online 24/7.
Predictive text guesses what you want
to say before you have thought of it for
yourself. Meanwhile, the majority of
humanity chooses to live in cities where
speed is of the essence rather than
the countryside where life can be still
frustratingly tied to the pace of the seasons.
Colvile thinks this is all rather good
stuffwhich will make us lots of money.
Andwhen I figure that I can achieve a
weekly food shop for a
family of six in 12minutes,
so do I. As I send an email
We must
or a WhatsApp message, I
sometimes imagine living
develop
in Georgian Britain, when
new skills. everyone, from boss to lover,
obliged to communicate
The first is was
by snail mail. Did that make
self-control the sentiments any more
Probably not.
an ability profound?
(Anyway, Georgians and
to pause
Victorians, in London at
least, enjoyed about six mail
deliveries a day.)
Yet, if we are not going to be mown down

or left out by inexorable acceleration, we
must acquire new skills. The first is selfcontrol. This means the ability to pause
whether by reading a novel, looking at a
Botticelli painting, or the simple pleasure of
an Easter egg hunt with your children.
The second is flexibility. If the world
is changing, we have to go with it. That
article on performance art published
25years ago was the first I ever wrote for
TheIndependent; this one will be the last,
in print at least. A quarter century feels
likeit has passed by in a flash. Now, at least,
I know it probably has.
Journalists are at the sharp end of this
velocity, but everyone is affected profoundly
by the need for speed, convenience and the
achievement of immediacy, from doctors to
train drivers and teachers. We should marvel
at the fact that news and communication
can cross the world at the touch of a button,
relish the accessibility of, well, everything,
and delight in the fact that children living
in remote parts of the world can now learn
maths online via solar-powered tablets. And
not resent the fact that time, in some things,
is immutable.
It took me less than a minute yesterday
to order the official violin grade seven
syllabus for my daughter. Oh God!
she said dramatically when the book and
its attendant joys by Bach, Handel and
Stravinsky turned up this morning. This
will take me a year to master.
Twitter: @Rosiemillard
42
Letters to the Editor

Make Muslims welcome and defeat terrorism
Got so m et h i n g to say?
Email: letters@independent.co.uk
Post: Letters to the Editor,
The Independent, 2 Derry Street,
London. W8 5HF
Please include your address
and daytime phone number.
Letters may be edited.
Follow us on twitter
@independent
Like or comment on Facebook
There have been many

reasons put forward as to
why the atrocities in Paris,
Brussels, London and
elsewhere took place. But to
me the reason is obvious.
The aim of the so-called
Islamic State is to establish
a worldwide caliphate
with the Islamic flag flying
over the White House,
Downing Street, and the
Palace of Versailles. But this
is unlikely to be achieved
by acts of terror, however
distressing these are to
the families immediately
affected and to the wider
population. They have
killed hundreds; to achieve
worldwide domination they
need to subjugate millions.

With this in mind, we need
to reassess their aims.
Im sure the real aim of
these acts of terror is to get
the non-Islamic population
to turn against the Muslims
and thus convert hundreds
of young men and women
to their diabolic cause.
So the siren voices in the
west the Donald Trumps,
Nigel Farages, Marine Le
Pens and the rest have to
be made aware that they
are the recruiting sergeants
for Isis. The leaders of
the Western democracies
need an immediate charm
offensive among all Muslim
communities, making sure
they feel totally included.

Only thus can the
enlightened world attain
the unity that will ensure
that all attempts to destroy
our values are pathetic
failures.
Stuart Russell
Cirencester
C hang e money at a
ban k? You re jok ing
fit in with school routines.

One was a boy who was
agonisingly shy and gauche,
with low self-esteem, but
methodical and intelligent.
He went into further
education but work was
hard to get around 2010.
Three years ago he got a
basic job on the check-out
at a large local supermarket.
Now it is a joy to see
him amiable and chatty,
initiating conversation with
customers. Staff training
may not be perfect, but
it has enabled one very
shrinking violet to flourish.
S Lawton
Kirtlinton, Oxfordshire
element of business to make

digital services available,
creating fears that robots
will take our jobs.
As we develop digital
services, businesses should
remember that automation
software should enhance
human interaction, not
replace it. Improvements in
efficiency and profitability
are only likely if AI is used
to enhance human-tohuman interaction. Passing
the Turing test is great, but
not if it fails to enhance
relationships between
people.
Stephen Parker
CEO, Parker Software
Knypersley, Staffordshire
After a successful
fundraising, I asked a local
branch of a leading highstreet bank to change 370
of coin into notes, as in
previous years. This service
was refused.
I was told that this
was because It wouldnt
show up as activity in
their records, You dont
have an account and
You dont have a credit
slip for another bank.
Astonishingly I was also
asked Why do you want
the money changed? as my
arms lengthened under the
weight of coins.
It seems that the idea of
a local bank doing a simple
service for someone local is
now dead. Thats company
policy.
I then spent half an hour
vainly trying to get the
North Yorkshire regional
managers address from
what is laughingly called
Customer Service, a call
centre in Mumbai. I was
eventually given a number
but it turned out to be
unrecognised.
So I went to the Post
Office, who did the job in 10
minutes.
Allan Friswell
Cowling, North Yorkshire
The idea of a local

bank doing a
simple service for
someone local is
now dead
It is easy to mock the

current platitudes used in
customer service (letters, 25
March), but please dont be
too harsh.
Ten years ago, I worked in
a special unit teaching what
I called misfits (excuse
non-PC terminology), 15- to
16-year-olds who could not
S of t ware w ith th e
h uman touch
When Alan Turing, father

of modern computing,
invented the Turing test in
1950, to test a machines
ability to exhibit intelligent
behaviour indistinguishable
from a human, he probably
didnt envisage an artificial
intelligence (AI) chat robot
being taught to swear and
espouse racist propaganda
by millions of Twitter users
within 24 hours of going
live.
Thats what happened
when Tay, a robot
developed by Microsoft,
had to be taken down
because the software firm
said it was, making some
adjustments. Tay is a small
part of the wider growth
in the trend for business
automation software.
Digital transformation
is increasingly putting
pressure on companies
to sacrifice the human
Stan Labovitch (letter, 24

March) asks, if western
foreign policy is thought
to be the cause of Islamic
terrorism, what has Belgium
done to deserve the recent
bombs in Brussels?
Well, perhaps Daesh
(Isis) dont mind which bit
of Western Europe they
attack, and Belgium is an
easy target. But whatever

the cause, we have to begin
from where we are now.
There is much discussion
about the extent to which
our freedom should be
sacrificed in the interest of
security. That, presumably,
is what the terrorists want,
and is precisely not what we
should do.
Its tempting to regard
the bombers as mindless
louts who deserve no
sympathy, though many of
them may be the victims
of brain-washing. Either
way, the extensive coverage
given to them is probably
a source of satisfaction,
and may aid recruitment
should it not be reduced?

But if we really want
to get to the root of the
problem, surely the
solution is to talk to them,
unpalatable as that might
be. The Northern Ireland
situation didnt improve
until discussions took place.
Unfortunately this might
not sit well with some
politicians, who appear to
prefer macho pomposity.
We can only hope that they
are holding talks behind
the scenes, as John Major
is alleged to have done with
IRA members.
Susan Alexander
Frampton Cotterell,
Gloucestershire
African apartheid regimes

right to exist.
It surely is antisemitic to
equate Jewish and Zionist
identities. This racist
stereotype silences many
Jews and makes us more
vulnerable to blame for
Israels systemic war crimes.
The true racists are those
who blur the distinction
between antisemitism and
anti-Zionism in order to
protect the Israeli regime
from the BDS campaign.
Les Levidow
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
Jews for Boycotting Israeli
Goods, London
Hail and
farew ell
Wrong ti me f or a
Eu rope re f ere ndum
A smea r to sile nce
cr itics of Israe l
What can explain the furore

over alleged antisemitism
in the Labour Party?
There seem to have
been a few reprehensible
instances of individual
party members expressing
racist stereotypes of Jews.
But these are not the main
target of the attacks against
Jeremy Corbyns leadership.
The true motivation is to
discredit the party and
its many pro-Palestine
activists with a smear of
antisemitism.
It is not antisemitic to
support the international
Palestinian campaign of
Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS), nor to
denounce the Israeli regime
as an apartheid system. It
is not even antisemitic to
question the regimes right
to exist, just as it was not
racist to deny the South
It is absurd to have a
referendum on whether to
stay in the European Union
at this time. Europe is in
turmoil, our political parties
are in turmoil, and we have
an appalling refugee crisis
on our doorstep. It is not
the moment to be making
really long-lasting decisions.
How much more sensible
to postpone it, save the
expense and use the money
to relieve the plight of those
desperate refugees.
L Grant
Burwell, Cambridgeshire
The so-called in-out
referendum is no such
thing. The choice is
between the United
Kingdom being out of
the European Union and
being half out. A dismal
dilemma for anyone who is
thoroughly pro-EU.
Andrew Belsey
Whitstable, Kent
I was worried about going

the way of the app, but as
I read it today for the first
time on my iPad I realised
this really is progress. I
hadnt realised Id get more
detail than in the paper,
such as additional photos on
the German destroyers in
Portsmouth Harbour.
Phew! I have read The
Independent since day one,
so this is a great relief.
Sean OHara
Robertsbridge, East Sussex
Ive decided I like the app:
it arrives before breakfast; I
can read it while eating my
toast; my wife can also read
it on her iPad so we dont
argue about dismantling the
paper; and finally I can wipe
the marmalade off it and its
still readable.
David Wallis
Cirencester
While you may disappear in
paper form, one edition will
live for ever in our hearts:
20 November 1993. We
found each other through
your original Independent
Hearts column, and were
married in 1995. Thank you.
Guy and Caroline
Carmichael
London W1
It is difficult to understand
how The Independent,
which took such a
principled stand against
Britains illegal invasion of
Iraq, will be out of print
before the inquiry into that
invasion goes into print.
J Samuel
Reading
43
Howard Jacobson
Errors &
Omissions
guy keleny
Mistakes weve made a few,

but not too few to mention
The best columns

take the reader,
and the writer, to
places least expected
It was Simon Kelner

who offered me a
column on this paper.
I told him I wasnt
sure I was up to the
job of writing 1,000 words every week. Id
done a stint reviewing television for The
Correspondent, but reviewing is different
its not just you and the inside of your head.
Simon suggested I try for a few months and
see how I felt. That was 18 years ago. When
I saw him recently, he asked if Id made my
mind up. I told him I hadnt.
I wrote my early columns in a camper
van travelling from Perth to Broome. I
recall composing one while sitting on a
collapsible stool by a billabong that had
been a smudge of dry dirt the day before
but was now home to pelicans, wading
birds and a single black swan. Another,
I phoned in from a rowing boat on the
heartbreak-blue waters of Shark Bay,
1,000 miles from anywhere. Bottlenosed
dolphins tried to nudge the phone out
of my hand. In Broome itself, I wrote
about watching an Aboriginal musical
under a broiling night sky from which
a succession of shooting stars fled like
sparks from the fires of hell. In the heat,
the moon rolled red like a drunkard.
Six months later I was back in London,
still writing the column, but without
the Australian wildlife. It changed
days, changed length, changed format,
and little by little I changed with it.
The anecdotal mode gave way to the
discursive, the ironical to the ireful,
until I decided I was going in the wrong
direction and changed back again.
I hadnt signed on to write opinion
pieces about war and famine I am a
novelist and novelists arent meant to have
opinions but nor did I want to dance
inconsequentially upon a pinhead every
week. Making something out of nothing
is a challenge to a writer; do it too often,
though, and nothing comes of nothing.
Whats worse, ponderousness or levity?
My first responsibility, I believed, was to
entertain in a spirit of high seriousness.
Glide seamlessly between Rabelais and
George Eliot.
But no one entertains all of the people
all of the time. Kelner stopped being
entertained when I began savaging
other writers on the paper. And those
other writers werent much entertained
either. But readers who didnt share the
indurated anti-Zionism I was attacking
declared themselves grateful.
In other circumstances, I might have
written fewer articles on the subject. I
didnt come on to the paper a polemical
Zionist. If I have sometimes sounded
like one, thats the papers fault. Im
not saying I cared nothing for Israel
beforehand, but there was a new
orthodoxy of anti-Zionism in the air and
this paper inhaled its poisons freely. Had
there been fewer Anti-Zionists writing,
and had their hostility to Israel been less
a thing of myth and rhetoric, I might not
have felt the call to buckle up as often
as I did. But when I did buckle up, it
was as a critic of their psychology, not
their politics. The deep, self-deluding
irrationality of hatred will always give

itself away in language first.
We all learn on the job, and writing is
no exception. It is said of novels that if
you know what youre going to say before
you say it, you wont produce a good
novel. The same, to my mind, is true of
writing acolumn.
You need to snake your way to meaning,
find out whats true, or at least more true
than false, in the course of saying it, allow
the words to discover the passion, not
the passion dictate the words. The reason
ideology leads us astray is that it is the
expression of made-up minds. The best
novels surprise their authors and the best
columns end up somewhere the columnist
never expected to go.
Online, the made-up mind
characterises much that passes for
comment. Wise columnists dont read the
threads that follow their words, but once
in a while it is instructive to do so. It is
a jungle in which the combatants are so
befuddled they forget it was you they set
You need to snake your way to whats

true, allow the words to discover
passion, not passion dictate the words
out to attack and end up tearing at one
another. Once upon a time, the ignorant,
the froward and the vain vented their
spleen in letters written in green ink and
sealed with a little sticker showing a dove
of peace. Now theres no need for the
pretence. You can revile and say so at the
press of a button. This too has come to be
a subject Ive returned to reluctantly, but
often: the gadarene swine effect of the
social media.
Whats wrong with the social media
can be simply stated. In the heat of
violent exchange, everything but opinion
gets lost. A generation has grown up
that online, at least is deaf to tone,
impervious to irony, incapable of
grasping that thought can be tentative
and argument exploratory. Theirs is a
battleground of stated positions. One
view lowers its head and charges its
antlers at another. All we can hope is
that in time they will all have butted
themselves into unconsciousness.
I am asked whether writing columns
has interfered with writing fiction. My
answer is no, because I have approached
both in a similar spirit. It might sound
fanciful to claim that my columns have
been little novels, but that was how I
saw them. Essays into rather than about,
dramatic pieces in which I didnt have to
say what I believed, because I didnt know,
or didnt want to know, or hoped that in
the interactive play of images and ideas a
way of looking at the world would emerge
that wasnt trite, that might surprise and
energise, and would give pleasure.
Pleasure to me too. For 18 years of
which,now I have
finally made my mind
up, I owe Simon
Kelner thanks. And so
Ileaveyou.
We have had our successes. You dont

see as many hanging participles in this
newspaper as you did a few years ago. And
the pernicious label moderate Muslims
doesnt seem to have appeared for a while.
But I cant help being struck, as I survey
the last week of the printed Independent,
by the bad habits we have failed to root out
in the nearly 16 years this column has run.
(Yes, it first appeared in 2000, in the dying
weeks of the old millennium, commissioned
by the then editor, Simon Kelner my
thanks to him. I thought it would last six
months before I ran out of things to say.
That I didnt is due in no small measure to
those eagle-eyed readers who have written
in with things they have spotted in the
paper my heartfelt thanks to them also.)
Who would have thought, for example,
that we would still be having trouble with
that slippery little word both? This is from
an analysis piece published on Wednesday:
In the course of the debate, both sides
have used the highly emotive question of
security to further their view.
No, both is plural, whereas each is
singular. So, each side may have a view,
but both sides have views. Of course the
waters are muddied here by something that
has definitely changed since 2000 the
use of they/them/their as a gender-neutral
singular pronoun has become normal.
It is a huge improvement on he or
she, the appallingly clumsy term we were
all using in the immediate wake of the
second-wave feminist revolution, but has
undoubtedly added to the general confusion
about number agreement a confusion that
shows no sign of abating.
What about who and whom? The
long death-agony continues, Im afraid. Last
Saturdays profile contained this: Gawker
published a post about a married media
executive from a rival firm, whom it alleged
had solicited a gay porn star for sex.
Whom had solicited a gay porn star? No,
of course not and the interposition of it
alleged makes no difference. The relative
pronoun remains the subject of the verb
solicited; it does not become the object of
alleged, so it should be who.
And the same old malapropisms keep
turning up. Rowan Atkinson, according
to a news story last Saturday, hopes to
challenge the reticence of audiences to
accept an older comic persona. The word
the writer was looking for is reluctance,
which means struggling against doing
something. Reticence is the unwillingness
to speak freely.
Atkinson popped up again in an arts piece
on Monday about his portrayal of Inspector
Maigret. Apparently Georges Simenons
novels about the detective have sold an
eye-watering 853 million copies worldwide.
No. We have seen too much eye-watering.
Of course, good old-fashioned journalese
will always be with us. Refugee deal
sparks chaos on Greek islands, said a news
headline on Monday. William Boot would
feel at home.
44
Voices
Profile
The Independent reader
If theres one thing that people alighting on this page hate, its
being generalised. But here goes anyway. By IAN BUR RE L L
You are...
illus tratio n by lauren c r ow
The blood had hardly dried on the streets ofParis

w h e n t h e p o s t m a n a r r i v e d a t
The Independents original offices in LondonsCity Road with a mailbag which took
Andreas Whittam Smith by surprise.
The papers founding editor was only weeks
into his role but had formed a clear picture of his
clientele. The Independent reader was young
(reflecting the average age of 31 of the editorial
staff), fascinated by foreign affairs and ready to
be challenged by photography. Whittam Smith
would show this reader exactly how the world
had become in 1986, by publishing a large frontpage image of the corpse of Renault chief executive Georges Besse, gunned down outside his
home by Maoist terrorists.
But the Independent reader, at that point in
its young life, was not quite who the editor imagined. I was saying, This is what life is like now
in a place like Paris or London; people get shot
in the street and blood pours across the pavement, he recalls. Hundreds of critical letters
flooded in. I knew Id made a big mistake. The
response was: Dont you understand we look
at this paper at breakfast?
Nearly 30 years later, in a world where terror
is a constant menace, the Independent print
reader now accepts and applauds the papers
scenes of modern atrocities on Pariss streets.
It fully understood the motives for publication
of a front page picture of a dead little boy, Alan
Kurdi, drowned on a Turkish shore.
Amol Rajan, the current and last editor of the

printed paper, says such coverage went down
well with a readership that has grown deeply
sensitive to injustice. Research found that 79
per cent of readers thought the coverage of
Alans death was the right thing to do.
Despite this apparent evolution, many character traits of the Independent reader have never
wavered. Certainly, the defining gene has been
there throughout a 30-year life span.
Introduced during the papers gestation by
the brilliant advertising creative Paul Arden,
the launch slogan It Is. Are You? represented
an irresistible challenge to 1980s newspaper
readers frustrated by powerful media owners
and the confines of two-party politics.
The first Independent readers wore the slogan on badges. The paper became almost a
fashion garment. You would see young people
carrying The Independent. It was a statement
about them that they wanted other people to
know, says Stephen Glover, another of the
papers founders. What seemed to unite those
readers was that they were reading a paper that
wasnt going to shove a line down their
throats.
But that youthful self-confidence became
challenged by harsh economic realities. The
open-mindedness of the Independent reader was
misrepresented by jealous competitors as eccentricity and inconsistency. When Mirror Group
bought a stake in the paper, it found the Indy
reader an enigma, offering ill-thought-out

enticements of sports cars as prizes.
But Ian Hargreaves, who took the editors
chair in 1994, admires how this reader moved
with the times, supporting writers in pushing
boundaries in the growing debate on sexuality.
There was also great interest in technological
advances. The emergence of the internet then
a relatively geeky thing was of growing fascination, he says.
When Andrew Marr became editor in 1996,
he was struck by reader engagement with the
groundbreaking coverage of the roots of Islamic
terrorism. It got very fast and strong reactions,
often from people who had been Foreign Office
employees in the Middle East, who were scholars of Islam, he says. I was learning more from
the readers than I was telling them.
It was at this time that the Indy reader showed
another defining quality: loyalty. With Rupert
Murdoch using predatory pricing of The Times
to threaten the young papers existence, Indy
readers working in the City and in senior civil
service roles wrote to Marr to express solidarity.
We may not have had the big guns or the lowest
price but we had the best readers, he recalls.
They understood exactly what was going on.
To Rosie Boycott, editor in 1998, the Indy
reader had the incredibly curious openmindedness that she saw in visitors to the Hay
Festival. (Hargreaves, formerly head of BBC
News, identified a shared culture between Indy
readers and BBC Radio 4 listeners.)

Jon ODonnell, the commercial director, saw
that advertisers were draw in by the chance to
talk to readers who are strong opinion formers
and highly influential among their peer group.
As youd expect they are well educated and
almost all are in full time employment. However,
theyre also more likely to spend more money
on fashion than the UK average .... When the
world zigs, they zag, he said.
Simon Kelner, the longest-serving editor,
learned to avoid single characterisation of the
readers after taking the paper to a compact format in 2003. One arthritis sufferer wrote to
complain that turning all these pages is painful
for me. Another with the same condition wrote
to offer congratulations, adding that a tabloid
paper is much easier to handle.
Kelner made the paper known for eye-catching
front pages, which helped to dispel the myth
that the Indy reader was a dullard. The original
Indy reader was regarded as quite grey, and
Private Eye called the paper The Indescribablyboring, but some people thought our paper
was too lively, he says. Independent readers
had a conscience about what they would buy but
it wouldnt stop them enjoying themselves.
Tony Blairs feral beast attack in 2007, when
he accused the paper of merging news and views,
was another slur on the Indy reader, says Kelner.
I dont think I ever had more than half a dozen
letters complaining about that
because our readers were intelligent enough to work out what
I was
was news and what was comment.
learning
papers opposition to the
more from IraqThe
War and its coverage of envithe readers ronmental issues had a profound
effect on the readership, says
than I
Roger Alton, who became editor
wastelling in 2008. He says the audience
became more polarised to a spethem
cific agenda as the paper fought
for identity. By 2011, when Chris
Blackhurst became editor, his
reader was extremely well read, well travelled
in a literary way and had a well-developed world
view. If you contradicted that, theywerent afraid
of letting you know, he says. They were also disparaging about bling and celebrity, which meant
they embraced the papers disinterest in the monarchy, he says.
The modern Indy reader lists climate change
as a major concern, is overwhelmingly against
Brexit and backs Hillary Clinton for the US
presidency. A hefty 38 per cent support the
Labour Party, although there is also strong sympathy with Liberal Democrat values.
But Andrew Mullins, a former managing
director of The Independent, warns that they
werent as obsessed about Europe, the environment or liberal issues as some of the classic Indy
front pages or promotions would have suggested. Creators of their own wealth, theyre
less likely than Guardian readers to be dependent on government spending, he says. They
also hated being generalised.
So this attempt to describe the Indy person
should be treated with the same healthy scepticism which all editors have come to recognise.
Marr had to recalibrate his opinion after attending a readers focus group. One shaven-headed
and tattooed figure with a career in the prison
service was regarded by Marr as a probable fan
of the Daily Express, but shocked him with the
words: Im an Independent reader myself. I
really like their views on social affairs.
As Whittam Smith observes, there has been
only one qualification for admission. You can
be any age you can be any profile but the key
is that you are independent minded.
45
Janet Street-Porter
Cyclists and their
powerful backers are
destroying London
for the rest of us
Sometimes its time

to stand up and speak
out, at the risk of
causing offence and
attracting sneers.
Sod being politically correct this brave
newspaper has a fine tradition of allowing
free speech, no matter how unpalatable.
Ive finally had enough of Boris Johnson
the man who has brought a wonderful
city to its knees in the name of cycling.
Theres a modern assumption that
cycling is fantastic, that we should all want
to do it, that people who cycle are the
salt of the earth, closer to God or a higher
power. I dont doubt that cycling (in the
countryside, away from fumes) is a great
way to keep fit. I do it myself sometimes.
In North Korea and Kazakhstan,
loyal subjects build ludicrous follies to
celebrate their leaders. Were doing the
same. London has been turned into a
gridlocked building site as roads are dug
up and rebuilt to create Boriss follies, a
network of cycling superhighways. These
segregated routes that run north-south and
east-west are part of the outgoing Mayors
cyclingrevolution.
When he opened the first one in
Vauxhall in 2015, Boris proudly trumpeted
that they were vital if we are to get people
out of their cars, ease congestion and
encourage fitness, walking and cycling.
Boris loves cycling, ergo, so should the
restof us.
Walking in London, one of my favourite
pastimes, is now a vile activity as the level
of pollution from traffic fumes has soared.
Soon, pedestrians will be following their
counterparts in Tokyo, wearing antismog masks. Building cycle lanes has not
deterred car use. It means that traffic has
to fit into a much smaller space and so it is
reduced to a crawl.
Why should cyclists get preferential
treatment over pedestrians? What about
the young, the elderly and the disabled
who may not want or be able to cycle
and who cannot use public transport? By
championing bikes to such a ludicrous
level, as his legacy project, Boris is as
blinkered as the car lobby and lorrydrivers.
The consultation period for even more
cycle superhighways (and a proposal to
close Regents Park to traffic in favour of
cyclists) was rushed through City Hall
and ended this week, in time for the
nextmayoral election. If approved, the
superhighway will extend from Actonin
west London taking up a whole traffic
lane right through to Barking in the east.
It seems extraordinary that riding a bike
(unlike driving) is subject to so few rules.
You are not legally compelled to wear a
helmet and, most extraordinary of all,
when these cycle superhighways have been
built, cyclists dont even have to use them.
It will be a matter of choice. Theres
not even a legal requirement for bikes to
undergo MOTs. Millions and millions
of pounds is being spent on a totally
unregulated activity, and anyone who has
been in the city of London in the evening
can witness the insanity of completely
inexperienced cyclists wobbling around
without any head protection or knowledge
Off camera,
Johnny
Rotten
(Lydon) and
the rest
of the Sex
Pistols were
friendly when
I interviewed
them in 1976
of the Highway Code. You can rent a bike

and potentially kill pedestrians or other
road users, with no checks whatsoever. You
dont need to take a driving test to work as
a cyclemessenger.
The number of cyclists on pavements
is lethal, and they are rarely prosecuted.
The cycle lobby is extremely powerful,
but its about time other citizens started
to stand up for their rights. The London
Cycling Campaign claims that thousands
of Londoners would like to cycle, but
I wonder on what evidence it bases its
claim.Whether cyclists like it or not,
roadsare also for buses, cars, lorries and
taxis, but I suspect that cyclists wont be
happy until all other forms of transport
areeradicated.
On 30 and 31 July this year, hundreds
of roads will be closed in London for the
Prudential RideLondon cycling festival.
Is it too optimistic to hope that one day
all traffic (two and four wheel) might be
banned to allow pedestrians the chance to
walk around London in peace? I thought
we lived in a democracy, but cyclists have
more clout than anyone else. If Boris
becomes Prime Minister, God help us.
Do we really need a
punkpilgrims route?
Back in 1976, I interviewed the Sex Pistols
in a filthy workshop off Denmark Street
in London. The footage of that historic
encounter has been shown many times
on television. Its not one of my finest
moments, as I attempt to drag articulate
comment out of three men slumped in
sleeping bags and who studiously ignore me.
John Lydon the most articulate, actually
sits nearest the camera, picking his nails
while intoning I aint got no heroes and
a stuffed rat gets chucked at my head.
Off camera, the boys were pleasant and
friendly, and Lydon and I have stayed
in touch ever since. I contributed to his
interview with Piers Morgan last year and
he came to one of my birthdays. In public,
though, the Sex Pistols were careful to
always appear snotty and foul, true to the
punk ethos.
Forty years later, that anarchic moment
in British culture is being turned into

a major event with backing from the
Heritage Lottery Fund and (inevitably)
Boris Johnson. I am certain John is
howlingwith laughter at the news that
the flophouse where I filmed (where they
recorded the demos for Anarchy in the
UK and God Save the Queen) is being
turned into a listed building by Historic
England because of its cultural significance.
John Lydons graffito slagging off
Malcolm McLaren is to be preserved
for tourists andmusic fans to revere. A
spokesman from Historic England said:
Punk can teach us a lot in our modern
lives, in terms of freedom of expression
andnotconforming.
In the Middle Ages, pilgrims walked
for days to gaze at caskets containing a
nail from the cross or a hair from Mary
Magdalenes head. We havent progressed
much, have we? To get the most from punk,
listen to the music.
Plenty of histrionics, but too

few questions answered
Is there anything new to say about
addiction? Its become one of the most overexplored themes in modern culture. Ive had
first-hand experience, and so I approached
the idea of a night at the theatre set in a
rehab clinic with a heavyheart.
Denise Gough, in People, Places and
Things (which has just transferred to the
West End after a sell out run at the National
Theatre), plays an actress who has hit rock
bottom, self-medicating and lost, reluctant
to come to terms with her situation.
Goughs performance is electrifying, but in
the end shes a rather dislikeable character,
one whose journey I cant careabout.
Her bad trips are heightened with
flashing lights and grating music which add
nothing, as does the use of doubles when
shes stoned.
The play doesnt really address why
someone becomes an addict. Is it a result
of background or their own narcissism? Do
they have low self-esteem, in which case why
arent more of us addicts? Those questions
remain unanswered admid all the histrionics.
Twitter: @The_Real_JSP
46
Obituaries
He went ballistic at
Thatchers declaration
that there is no such
thing as society
Priest and broadcaster. Born: 1937
Very Reverend
Sandy McDonald
McDonald:
he was a
wonderful
and caring
parish
minister pa
Moderator of the Church of

Scotland who had a cameo
role in Dr Who alongside
his son, David Tennant
One of my most poignant memories of Parliament is bumping into my friend and political
opponent, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, in the corridor. He told me with a tinge of melancholy, I
was MP for Peterborough for 25 years, a minister with important responsibilities in Min Ag
and the Ministry of Works, and later a Member of the European Parliament. Ive just come
through the Central Lobby and heard a lady say
to her friend, Oh, that man is Sue Nicholls
dad. Half a century of public service was as
nothing compared to Coronation Street.
Equally, Lord David Steel of Aikwoods
father, often described as such, was a distinguished Moderator of the Church of Scotland.
And, alas, to many people the Very Reverend
Sandy McDonald, another Moderator of the
Church of Scotland (1997-98), will be remembered as the father of David Tennant, Dr Who
and much else besides.
I have never met Tennant in the flesh, other
than at a distance on the stage at Stratfordupon-Avon, but Sandy McDonald I knew well,
as he was the Minister of St Davids Bathgate,
West Lothian. And he was much, much more
than David Tennants father. For 14 years he
was Secretary of the Board of Ministry, a pivotal position in the epicentre of the Church of
Scotlands affairs. McDonald was a wonderful
and caring parish minister.
He was born, as he would remind his parishioners when he wished to make any changes at
St Davids Church, on Guy Fawkes Night in
1937. He went from Whitehill Senior Secondary School to a management traineeship in the
timber trade, based at Stow College and the
Scottish College of Commerce in Glasgow.
In 1956 he was called up for National Service
and chose the RAF. Resentful at first to what he
saw as a disruption in his life, he came to value
his experience of Service life, not least because
it was the RAF Chaplaincy which sowed the
seeds, he told me, of his eventual call to the
ministry. Certainly, to this day, he is remembered with affection by the elderly members of
the British Legion in Bathgate for the attention
that he paid to any problems of soldiers, sailors
and airmen on their return to civvy street.
From 1958 until 1962 he worked successfully in the timber trade. He told me that he
felt much more comfortable as a priest, having
worked in industry, than if he had simply done
his six years of study at Glasgow University.
As the local MP, at close quarters I witnessed
his involvement in the turbulent affairs of the
British Motor Corporations truck and tractor
division at Bathgate, at that time the biggest
concentration of machine tools in Europe,
employing 7,000 people. Every month he made
it his duty to walk up and down the assembly
Hell-raising bassist with

Rainbow who became
tabloid fodder when he
married into the aristocracy
Musician. Born: 1947
Jimmy Bain
Bain, right,
with the
Rainbow
drummer
Cozy Powell
in 1976
r ed fe r n s
The bassist Jimmy Bain was a stalwart of the

heavy metal scene of the late 1970s and early
80s, an engaging character whose hedonism
and love of the rocknroll lifestyle made him a
favourite with fans, if not always his fellow band
mates in Rainbow and Dio. Touring was always
a blast, he said. I was famous for being lit up
and still being able to play. I even fell over a few
times. It was like it was part of the show.
More self-awareness might have made Bain
realise that in summer 1976 he had nearly failed
the audition to join the second version of Rainbow, the group assembled by the mercurial
Deep Purple lead guitarist Ritchie Blackmore
alongside Dio, drummer Cozy Powell and
keyboard-player Tony Carey. Having recorded
Rising, the bands seminal exemplar of Blackmores post-Purple work, the bassist toured
line at BMC talking to the operators. Councillor Jim Swan, convenor of the joint shop stewards committee at the time, remembers him as
A constructive conciliator who on occasions
urged the Birmingham-based management to
see our point of view.
Etched into my memory is being invited in
the spring of 1971 to speak to the St Davids
Church of Scotland Womens Guild. The chairperson leant over and said, Mrs McDonald
cant be with us. Pity. She is such fun. Shes
heavily pregnant. (With David Tennant.)
McDonald owed a lot to his wife, who was
immensely popular in Church circles.
In 1974 McDonald moved on (or was it back,
since he was very much a West of Scotland person?) to St Marks, one of the vibrant congregations of Paisley, where he made a friend of
John Robertson, the prickly AUEW-sponsored
MP. McDonald was careful not to parade his
politics, whatever they were; he did go ballistic, however, about Margaret Thatchers Sermon on the Mound to the General Assembly
of Kirk, in which the Prime Minister opined
that there is no such thing as society.
In February 2015 McDonald issued a statement that he was suffering from the lung condition pulmonary fibrosis. He made a moving
call on Church leaders to back proposed laws
to give terminally ill people assistance towards
a peaceful death. It was time, he said, to give

dying people more rights over end-of-life care.
He thought that many legislators have the
wrong slant, since assisted suicide has criminal
overtones in the minds of many people.
McDonald, characteristically thinking of others, concluded, We have got so many people
in our nursing homes, in our care homes and
in our bed-blocked hospitals, whether elderly
or seriously ill, saying, It is time for me to die.
I sympathise hugely with them. The doctors
and nurses have their hands tied because they
are liable to end up in court.
McDonald had been a regular on television
in the 1980s, co-presenting the religiousaffairs programme Thats The Spirit! In 2006
he appeared alongside his son David in Ready
Steady Cook, and two years later he had a cameo
role in Doctor Who. I think they must have
been short of someone, he said. They very
kindly invited me to play the part of a footman.
When Tennant received a National Television
Award in 2015 he dedicated it to his father an
inspiration and a role model. TAM DALYELL
with Rainbow throughout the last four months

of 1976. Yet, he failed to notice the writing was
on the wall and was edged out and replaced
by Roger Glover, the former Purple bassist;
Dio also fell foul of Blackmores musical chairs
policy, replaced by vocalist Graham Bonnet
coming in 1979.
Drafted into Black Sabbath to replace Ozzy
Osbourne for a brace of albums, Dio subsequently formed his own eponymous outfit
comprising drummer Vinny Appice, future Def
Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell, and Bain,
whose songwriting prowess came in handy on
several of the groups singles, particularly the
no-holds-barred Rainbow In The Dark, the
infectious rocker Mystery and the anthemic

Hungry For Heaven.
Born in 1947, Bain played in various Scottish
bands before following his parents to Canada.
Between 1979 and 1988, he was married to Lady
Sophia Crichton-Stuart, elder sister of the Marquess of Bute. The couple became regulars not
only of the heavy metal bible Kerrang! but also
the gossip columns. A close friend of the Thin
Lizzy bassist Phil Lynott, Bain co-wrote several
of the best tracks on his Solo In Soho (1980) and
The Philip Lynott Album (1982).
Bain kicked a heroin habit but died of lung
cancer in his cabin on Def Leppards Hysteria
on the High Seas cruise where he had been
due to perform with his group Last In Line. He
had been suffering from pneumonia. PIERRE
Falling victim to the

revolving-door policy of
Ritchie Blackmore, he was
replaced by Roger Glover
Alexander McDonald, priest and

broadcaster: born Bishopbriggs 5 November
1937; married 1962 Essdale Helen (ne
McLeod) (died 2007; one daughter, two sons);
died 17 March 2016.
PERRONE
James Stewart Bain, musician: born

Newtonmore, Scotland 19 December 1947;
married 1979 Lady Sophia Crichton-Stuart
(divorced 1988; one daughter) died 23
January 2016.
Pierre Perrone died in February 2016.
47
Birthdays
BIRTHDAYS
Comedian, actor, writer and producer. Born: 1949
Garry Shandling
Entertainer acclaimed for his metafictional sitcoms Its

Garry Shandlings Show and The Larry Sanders Show
Garry Shandling created and starred in two
innovative television shows that spoofed his
painfully insecure persona and the conventions of television itself. Beginning his career
as a writer for sitcoms in the 1970s, Shandling
turned to stand-up and had a major break on
NBCs Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in
1981. He eventually became a guest host during
Carsons absences.
Shandling transformed his experiences into
Its Garry Shandlings Show and The Larry
Sanders Show, in which he played versions of
himself a comic actor and talk-show host beset
by anxieties, romantic problems and constant
fears about his appearance. The shows became
models for other inside-showbiz comedies such
as Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, 30 Rock
and Episodes.
Its Garry Shandlings Show, which aired
from 1986 to 1990, was a parody of sitcoms.
Playing a character in a sitcom named Garry
Shandling, he often addressed the audience
directly. The practice was used in Marx Brothers films, but Shandling approached his camera
interactions with a confessional openness.
Were the TV generation, he said in 1988.
So come on, we know its a show, were not
fooling anybody any more. So why not do one
where you just say, Its a show, and its my life.
He asked his audiences what they thought of
women he was dating, used stage monitors to
spy on the shows other characters, beseeched
his viewers to laugh more at his jokes. Even the

shows theme song was a self-conscious joke:
This is the theme to Garrys show / The opening theme to Garrys show / This is the music
that you hear / As you watch the credits. The
series defies comparison with any other programme on the air, wrote Larry Gelbart, the
comedy writer who helped create M.A.S.H.. It
is audacious, satirical, hip, sophisticated and
wonderfully silly, and, often, miraculously, all
of the above at the same time.
Shandling used his experience as a Tonight
Show host to create The Larry Sanders Show,
which ran on HBO from 1992 to 1998. He
played a temperamental, egotistical talk-show
host named Larry Sanders who required constant reassurance from everyone else at the
fictional late-night show. The rich cast of
characters included Sanders dimwitted sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor), with his
catchphrase, Hey, now! Rip Torn portrayed
Sanderss unflappable producer Arthur.
A parade of celebrities from Alec Baldwin to
Robin Williams played themselves as guests.
Shandling showed the stars bickering in dressing rooms, then cursing and snarling during the
fictitious shows advertising breaks. Shandling
shared an Emmy Award for writing in 1998, the
shows final season. The Larry Sanders Show
was all tension, cynicism, profound shallowness, and naughty-boy bonding, critic Ken
Tucker wrote in Entertainment Weekly. Its
just the way you imagine life behind a big-time

TV talk show to be, except infinitely funnier.
Garry Emmanuel Shandling was born in
1949 in Chicago, where his parents were shopkeepers. The family moved to the dry climate
of Tucson for their oldest son, Barry, who had
cystic fibrosis. His death when Garry was 10
was a traumatic experience, but he described
himself as otherwise well adjusted, except for
watching 17 hours of TV a day.
He studied electrical engineering and marketing at the University of Arizona, graduating
in 1972. Always drawn to comedy, he showed
some of his writing to the already famous comedian George Carlin, who encouraged him to
give it a try. He moved to Hollywood in 1973
and contributed to such sitcoms as the Steptoe
and Son-inspired Sanford and Son, Welcome
Back, Kotter and the Man About The Houseinspired Threes Company. After a near-fatal
car accident in 1977, he decided to focus on
stand-up comedy, achieving his breakthrough
on The Tonight Show.
Shandling was generally the butt of his own
humour as he winced at the absurd failures of
his hapless love life. Im dating a girl now...
whos unaware of it, evidently, he said. Carson became a fan, inviting Shandling back as a
frequent guest and substitute host.
He also appeared in several films, doing voice
work as a pigeon in the Eddie Murphy remake
of Doctor Dolittle (1988). He had a small role
in Iron Man 2 (2010) and played himself in
the 2001 Ben Stiller farce Zoolander. He also
co-wrote and starred in Which Planet Are You
From? (2000), a romantic comedy about an
alien, directed by Mike Nichols.
Shandling, who died of an apparent heart
attack, kept his personal life private. He was
the partner from 1987 to 1994 of Linda Doucett,
who played a secretary on The Larry Sanders
Show. After they broke up, Shandling fired her.
Doucett filed a wrongful-dismissal and sexualharassment suit that was eventually settled.
Before Carson retired from The Tonight
Show in 1992, Shandling had been rumoured
as a possible successor. By then, however, he
had already begun producing and starring in
The Larry Sanders Show. He was offered $5m
to take over NBCs 12.30am talk-show slot,
but turned it down. I would rather do a series
about a talk show, he said, than a talk show.
MATT SCHUDEL AND ADAM BERNSTEIN
Garry Emmanuel Shandling, comedian,
actor and writer: born Chicago 29 November
1949; died Los Angeles 24 March 2016.
The Washington Post
Shandling
in 2007 at
the launch
of his DVD
Not Just
the Best of
The Larry
Sanders
Show
R e uters
Mahmoud Abbas, President,

Palestinian National Authority,
81; Alan Arkin, actor, 82;
Graham Barlow, former
England cricketer, 66; James
Caan, actor, 76; Kyung-Wha
Chung, violinist, 68; Rev
Richard Coles, broadcaster.
54; Sheena Cruickshank,
former Lord-Lieutenant
of Clackmannanshire,
80; Professor Richard
Dawkins, evolutionary
biologist and writer, 75; Lord
Graham of Edmonton,
former MP, 91; Lillian
Greenwood MP, 50;
Shirley Harrison, former
Chair, Human Tissue
Authority, 67; Baroness
Hayman, former Lord
Speaker, House of Lords,
67; Erica Jong, writer, 74;
Barbara Keeley MP, 64;
Keira Knightley, actress,
31; Kerry McCarthy MP,
51; Patrick McFadden MP,
51; Paul Morley, journalist
and broadcaster, 59; Nancy
Pelosi, Minority Leader, US
House of Representatives,
76; Harry Rabinowitz,
conductor and composer,
100; Diana Ross, singer,
72; Lucy-Ann ScottMoncrieff, former President,
Law Society of England and
Wales, 62; Patrick Sskind,
writer, 67; Stephen Tyler,
singer, 68; Bob Woodward,
journalist, 73.
Keira Knightley, actress, 31

getty im ag es
Deaths
He had
roles in
Iron Man
II and Dr
Dolittle,
as well as
Zoolander
FROSDICK: Thelma Lilian (ne

Tagg). On the 23rd March 2016
was able to slip away with the
gentle dignity that exemplified
her life. A life filled with integrity,
achievement, generosity and
curiosity. The 20 years spent
with her husband Peter perhaps
the happiest. Always a loving and
generous support to her family
and friends, who will remember
her with the deepest affection.
Thelmas wish was for a simple,
private family service.

23
48
Weather
ILLUSTRATIONS BY SA RAH M CME NEMY/ THE A RTWORKS
Belfast
10 Wind direction
11 | 4
Max Min
Celsius
Today
A wet day
A lot of cloud through today with rain
turning more showery later.
Sun
Mon
Tue
Outlook
Edinburgh
A generally cloudy and windy day with spells of heavy rain,

these already in the north and far west, spreading south-east
across much of the UK. However, East Anglia and south-east
England will stay drier until evening.
11 | 4
Wed
Outlook
Outlook
Max/Min
Celsius
9|3
10 | 4
NW 11
S 15
10 | 2
W8
Max Min
Celsius
Grey and wet

Cloudy skies and spells of rain
throughout today. Breezy too.
Max | Min
Celsius
Wind direction
and speed/mph
Aberdeen
9|2
SW 8
Wind direction
and speed/mph
15
15
25 Wind dire
ection
Today
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
10 | 4
9|4
10 | 2
9|2
SW 18
N 14
W 12
W9
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
10 | 4
8|2
9|1
10 | 0
SW 20
S 19
W 11
SW 8
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Glasgow
Manchester
Newcastle
25
Today
12 | 4
12 | 3
Belfast
Rain arriving
A rather windy day with rain spreading
in, turning heavy later.
Sun
Blustery and wet

Mostly cloudy with rain edging in from
the west. Fresh winds too.
Hull
Manchester
Mon
Tue
Liverpool
Wed
Outlook
10 | 6
Wind direction
and speed/mph
10 | 2
SW 18
S 23
10 | 1
W 12
10 | 1
London
Bristol
SW 9
15
13 | 4
Yesterdays
high in The UK
Mon
Tue
Wed
10 | 7
S 19
10 | 2
S 17
10 | 1
SW 10
10 | 1
SW 8
20
12 | 5
Dull and wet

A windy day with cloudy skies and
spells of rain, more so later.
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
Outlook
Wind direction
and speed/mph
Moon
Phase
-1
City
Alicante
Amsterdam
Athens
Bangkok
Barbados
Barcelona
Berlin
Bucharest
Buenos Aires
Cairo
Cape Town
Copenhagen
Corfu
Dubai
Hong Kong
Istanbul
Johannesburg
Los Angeles
SW 21
Plymouth
10 | 6
W 23
10 | 5
W 15
10 | 4
SW 11
s
c
sh
f
dr
s
dr
dr
f
f
s
dr
s
s
f
r
f
s
Avonmouth
Cork
Dover
Greenock
Harwich
Holyhead
8.48
6.05
12.27
2.08
1.10
11.57
12.9 9.04 12.8

4.2 6.18 4.2
6.6 12.39 6.4
3.3 2.08 3.4
4.0 1.26 3.9
5.4
-
Portsmouth
25
Today
City
Majorca
Melbourne
Miami
Moscow
New York
Nice
Paris
Reykjavik
Rome
Seychelles
Singapore
Sydney
Tenerife
Tokyo
Vancouver
Venice
Warsaw
Wellington
c
c
dr
c
f
f
dr
s
s
c
dr
sh
c
f
c
f
f
c
C
17
20
27
0
10
15
10
3
15
33
32
23
20
12
10
12
7
15
F
63
68
81
32
50
59
50
37
59
91
90
73
68
54
50
54
45
59
Hull (Albert Dk)

Liverpool
London
Milford Haven
Portsmouth
Pwllheli
7.52
12.39
3.25
7.47
12.42
9.37
7.3
9.1
7.1
6.8
4.6
4.9
11 | 6
Sun
7.4
9.1
6.9
6.7
4.5
4.9
Wed
Sun
11 | 5
10 | 3
11 | 1
10 | 2
Wind direction
and speed/mph
S 24
S 20
W 14
SW 9
Norwich
25
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
12 | 7
11 | 4
12 | 2
12 | 2
SW 20
S 25
SW 14
SW 11
Sun
Mon
Tue
Wed
12 | 8
12 | 5
13 | 4
12 | 4
SW 18
SW 21
SW 12
SW 10
Today
13 | 5
Mostly dry
Dry for much of today, but rather
cloudy and windy. A wet evening.
Max | Min
Celsius
Wind direction
and speed/mph
14 | 5
Windy and grey

A generally cloudy and windy day with
patchy rain likely later.
Mon
Tue
Wed
Outlook
Outlook
Outlook
Max | Min
Celsius
Max/Min
Celsius
Max | Min
Celsius
Wind direction
and speed/mph
10 | 8
SW 26
10 | 5
W 28
10 | 5
SW 19
11 | 4
SW 13
Wind direction
and speed/mph
10 | 8
SW 28
15
Today
Windy and wet

Initially patchy rain will turn heavy later.
Windy throughout.
Tue
Max | Min
Celsius
London
35
11 | 6
Mon
Turning wet
A good deal of cloud around with rain
spreading in. Windy too.
Outlook
8.06
12.54
3.39
8.02
12.56
9.52
Today
Wet and windy

Unsettled with cloudy skies, spells of
heavy and strong winds.
13 | 4
Outlook
F
75
48
59
95
86
61
46
43
75
82
79
45
59
77
59
46
75
70
Key: c = Cloudy, dr = Drizzle, f = Fair, fg = Fog, h = Hail, m = Mist, r = Rain, s = Sunny,

sh = Showers, sl = Sleet, sn = Snow, ss = Sandstorm, th = Thunderstorm
High tides
10 | 8
C
24
9
15
35
30
16
8
6
24
28
26
7
15
25
15
8
24
21
25
Today
Sunrise
& Sunsets
Rises
05:48
Sets
18:24
Katesbridge
Pershore
Around the world
Today
Max | Min
Celsius
Yesterdays
low in The UK
15
Outlook
Wind direction
and speed/mph
Leeds
30
Quite windy
A cloudy and blustery day with rain
edging in from the north-west.
Max | Min
Celsius
Wind direction
and speed/mph
Brighton
Today
Sun
Max | Min
Celsius
40
Exeter
Birmingham
Cardiff
Outlook
Cambridge
Max | Min
Celsius
15
Today
Carlisle
11 | 6
SW 32
11 | 4
SW 19
11 | 4
SW 14
Wind direction
and speed/mph
49
Box-office smash
Chris Blackhurst
Playing hardball
Andrew Dewson
50
51
53
54
Founder of luxury giant LVMH

double-crossed in French film
The Independents reputation as a fearless

business journal will live on in digital
Business Committee chairman Iain Wright

on why hes going head on with Mike Ashley
Yahoo is one of the great survivors of the

internet age but times up for its board
The future
of Hinkley
Point is still
unclear but
a document
points to
dangers
posed by
terrorism
and cyberattacks
FTSE100

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17,515.73
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+0.65%
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FTSE Eurofirst 300 1,317.16

[closed]

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oil

Nuclear watchdog warns of

terrorist threat to UK reactors
As Hinkley Point
hangs in balance,
strategic plan
acknowledges
security risks
exclusive
mark leftly
associate business editor
Britains nuclear industry

is under threat from cyberattacks, terrorism and statesponsored espionage, regulators have warned.
Buried in the Office for
Nuclear Regulations 2016-20
strategic plan are bleak references to the growing threat of
attack on Britains 15 operational reactors, which account
for nearly a fifth of the countrys electricity. The Independent has established this is the
first time that the ONR has
explicitly acknowledged the
growing terrorist threat to the

nuclear industry.
The document states: The
threat of terrorism in the
nuclear sector will continue to
be managed proportionately
and effectively through
national and international
capabilities. The capabilities
of potential adversaries to
operate in cyberspace will continue to grow.
At the top of a list of the
industrys corporate risks, the
ONR writes: Failure to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of sensitive
information and assets from
both known and emerging
security threats to the UK
nuclear infrastructure (eg,
cyber-attacks, terrorist activity,
state-sponsored espionage).
In another reference, it says:
We recognise the world is
increasingly globalised and
digitised, where both the terrorist threat and the risks from
cyberspace are changing. The
Government and duty-holders
have well-developed security

capabilities to deter and defend
against organisations and individuals that might conspire to
attack or exploit the nuclear
estate. ONR will continue to
work with the Government to
ensure that security-focused
regulations evolve to remain fit
for purpose and align with
safety regulation.
The news comes at a sensitive time, with French giant
EDF weighing up whether to
risk its balance sheet on building a 24.5bn reactor at Hinkley Point on the Somerset
coast. This is supposed to herald a new generation of nuclear
power plants, which are needed
to bridge the UKs yawning
energy gap, but EDF has
delayed a final investment decision until May. There are also
reports that the Isis terrorists
who attacked Brussels might
have planned to steal radioactive materials from a Belgian
nuclear plant to build a bomb.
John Large, the nuclear
expert who warned in a 2014

report for the French authorities that reactors are highly
vulnerable to drone attacks,
said the admission was a step
forward, but warned: It might
be too late. The problem is that
the plants were designed in the
1950s and 1960s and those
designs ignored terrorism.
Shadow Energy
minister Clive
Lewis said cutting
police numbers
has left the door
open for terrorists
Thats one of the problems they
[the nuclear industry] face.
Terrorism is an intentional,
intelligent event that seeks out
the vulnerabilities of the plant
but an accident, which they
are designed to guard against,
is an unintelligent event.
Nuclear plants are primarily
built on an accident basis. But
this [admission] does make the
regulator more accountable.
Clive Lewis, a shadow Energy

minister, pointed out that the
ONRs admission comes shortly
after news that the Civil Nuclear
Constabulary will be cut by
about 200 officers by 2020,
despite government promises
to protect police funding.
Just as the nuclear regulator
is acknowledging the all-too
real threat from terrorism, the
Government is cutting back on
the police we need to prevent
it, Mr Lewis said. We need
investment to ensure energy
security in every sense.
A spokeswoman for the ONR
said: ONRs strategy plan is
deliberately outward-facing.
Now we are in the third year of
our operation as a public body,
we are committed to openness
and transparency and focused
on ensuring the public are
kept informed and reassured
about our regulation of nuclear
safety and security.
The ONR was separated
from the Health and Safety
Executive in 2014.
$40.44
[closed]
THE FTSE on
YESTERDAY
thursday
,
,
,
,
,
.
James Moore on the fight

to combat phishing P.52
A startling 49 per cent
of business leaders never
restrict who can see their
profiles on social media
50
Business
LVMH is suckered
and its a box-office
smash in France
John lichfield
in Paris
An unlikely new big-screen

genre is filling cinemas in
France the comedy-documentary-thriller.
Merci Patron follows two
unemployed textile workers as
they successfully blackmail
Frances wealthiest man, Bernard Arnault, the founder and
executive chairman of the
worlds biggest luxury goods
conglomerate, LVMH.
By an astute double doublecross organised by a far-left
journalist and film maker they
More than
150,000 people
have seen the
film, mostly
through word
of mouth
bag 35,000 (28,000) to save

their house and simultaneously
make it impossible for Mr
Arnault to sue or bring criminal charges.
The film has the convoluted,
feelgood plot of The Sting and
the in-your-face, faux good
humour of the documentaries
of US film maker Michael
Moore. Despite the mysterious cancellation of a government subsidy and its banishment from the main
distribution networks, the
low-to-no-budget movie has
been packing out French cinemas this month, especially in
the provinces. More than
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Where is
the tape
recorder? I
hope this is
not being
recorded.
Bernard
Arnault was
the victim
of a sting
AF P/G ett y
150,000 people have seen the

film, mostly through word of
mouth. Its success means that
it will be shown on nine times
more screens across France
from next week.
Jocelyne and Serge Klur,
two unemployed, impoverished 50-something workers
from a village near the Belgian
border, are the unlikely stars.
So, against his will, is the 67year old Mr Arnault.
LVMH delocalised the
Klurs small suit-making factory from northern France to
Poland. When they threatened to cause a stink about the
threatened loss of their small
house, Mr Arnault and LVMH
agreed to help them, so long
as they signed a contract to
keep the deal quiet.
Much fun follows, involving
a video camera hidden in a
soft toy cat and a jolly exintelligence agent dispatched
to negotiate in secret by
LVMH. Where is the tape
recorder? I hope this is not
being recorded, he says. In
the end, the film maker and
the Klurs manoeuvre LVMH
into breaking their own confidentiality agreement.
The movies theme song
has become the ironic battle
anthem of workers and students who have demonstrated
in recent days against the centre-left governments proposal
to reform Frances hiring-andfiring laws.
The film has, however, also
annoyed some people on the
hard left. At a launch party
in Paris, there were scuffles

after a handful of activists
accused the director, Franois
Ruffin, of being a self-publicist who had patronised two
distressed workers without
endangering capitalism.
You only see that kind of
thing in Paris, said Mr Ruffin,
who runs a small left-wing
newspaper called Faqir. It
was just two or three pitbulls
of the ultra-left. People who
are in the same fix as the Klurs
come out of the film with tears
in their eyes. That is what is
important to me.
Mr Ruffin believes that the
film is successful because it
plays with two of the most
powerful forces in the modern
world public image and the
moving image.
He argues that Mr Arnault
and LVMH were easily manipulated because they feared
that bad publicity would damage their brands. To tell a
story today, to reach people,
he said, the most effective
medium is film.
LVMH and Mr Arnault have
resolutely refused to comment
on the movie even though the
billionaire comes out of it reasonably well. He appears
image-obsessed and naive
rather than brutal or hardhearted. How many bosses
would have agreed to give
redundant ex-workers 35,000
to save their house?
All the same, LVMH would
like the film to go away. Journalists at two newspapers
owned by Mr Arnault say that
People who
are in the
same fix
leave the
film with
tears in
their eyes
they have been banned from

writing about Merci Patron.
There are allegations, but no
proof, that LVMH intervened
to have the films small state
subsidy withdrawn.
In fact, the company, if it
bothered, has a good riposte to
the films anti-globalist and
anti-capitalist arguments.
Although Mr Arnaults early
career as a tycoon was troubled
by accusations of asset-stripping, he has built LVMH into
the worlds most successful
luxury goods company, with
brands such as Louis Vuitton,
Mot & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Hennessy, Guerlain,
Christian Dior, Givenchy,
Kenzo, Cline and Berluti. It
employs more than 120,000
people around the world,
including 22,000 in France.
Although much work has
been sent abroad including
the Kenzo suits once made
by the Klurs factory near
Va l e n c i e n n e s LV M H
remains an important source
of innovation, skilled jobs and
apprenticeships for luxury
trades in France.
Mr Ruffin does not see
things that way. He describes
himself as anti-capitalist, antiEuropean and anti-free trade
and in favour of taxes at frontiers, border controls and
import quotas.
Does he fear a legal attack
by LVMH to get the Klurs
money back? No. Can you
imagine what effect it would
have on their image, if they did
that? They wont risk it.
Return flights
Dont exploit end of tampon tax, firms told
Seven nights five-star staying at the

Avra Imperial
Mark Leftly
Baggage and transfers

Free upgrade to full-board
Call: quoting BW
or visit independent.co.uk/traveloffers
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- October departures available at a supplement. Prices are per person, based on two sharing and subject to availability.
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Retailers and manufacturers

are under pressure to reduce
the prices of feminine hygiene
products following the EU deal
to scrap the tampon tax.
The Government said last
week that it will legislate to
exempt sanitary products
from VAT after an EU agreement to give member states
more control over the levy.
These products are currently taxed at 5 per cent,
the lowest rate allowed under

European law.
The Labour MP Paula Sherriff is now worried that the
scrapping of the tax at a cost
to the Exchequer of 17m
will not change the price
charged to women. France
recently cut VAT on tampons
and sanitary towels from 20 per
cent to 5.5 per cent, but prices
have remained broadly similar
meaning the move has simply
boosted company profits.
Ms Sherriff has written to
big retailers and suppliers this
weekend, urging them to cut

prices in line with the VAT.
She told The Independent: I
hope that they will agree not
only to the price cut but also
to support some of the womens charities that provide
vital services. It will be simply unacceptable if they try to
pocket a 17m windfall.
Tracy Stewart at the trade
body the Absorbent Hygiene
Products Manufacturers Association, warned: France has
dropped its rate, but the price
has not dropped accordingly.
51
Chris Blackhurst
The journalism
that keeps business
people awake
at night
Given the antecedents

of The Independents
founding editor,
Andreas Whittam
Smith, it was hardly a
surprise that so much effort went into the
fledgling papers City coverage.
Andreas, a distinguished City editor of
The Daily Telegraph, made sure that from
the outset his new newspaper gained a
reputation for the breadth and depth of
its business journalism. For a paper that
occupied a liberal centre-ground politically,
this might have seemed strange only the
rightist titles paid detailed attention to
finance and the markets.
But The Independent has always
brought its own take to the subject. It was
questioning and sceptical, preferring to do
its own digging into stories and not relying
on the say-so of the company concerned.
This approach was laid down by Andreas
and was quickly encapsulated in the
treatment of the Guinness scandal which
by happy timing coincided with the papers
early days.
Jeremy Warner left the rest of Fleet
Street trailing with a series of exclusives
that rivals could not match. The
Independent quickly established itself as
an alternative to the Financial Times. The
positioning was further strengthened by
the quality of its reporting and analysis of
the second big scandal of the era, that of
Robert Maxwells plundering of the Mirror
Group pension fund.
Again, the papers business section led
from the front. There was not just Jeremy
The Independent had assembled a starstudded roster of financial journalists. For
that reason, when I had the opportunity of
joining the organisation in 1992, I jumped
at the chance. Three papers had been
interested in me: the FT, Mail on Sunday
and Independent on Sunday. Like its daily
sibling, the latter was also carving out a
place for itself as a fearless business journal,
not afraid to shine a light on more nefarious
activities, readily prepared to stand up to
threats of libel from mighty corporations
and their wealthy bosses. Even though it
meant working for a paper that was still
a newcomer relative to the others and
therefore less secure, and taking a cut in
salary, I chose the IoS.
There was something about the spirit,
lan and approach of the Indy and IoS City
pages that appealed (I soon found myself
writing for both titles). The standpoint that
saw the Indy eschew the lobby briefings
in Parliament and not indulge in royalty
reporting or celebrity tittle-tattle spilled
over into business. It was in the DNA. So
no, we did not accept corporate junkets
the paper paid its own fares. We did not
write up just what was on the press release
but scrutinised between the lines. We were
encouraged to study original documents
to not take the spin doctors word but to
look for ourselves and form our own view.
I arrived, literally at the highest point
in the Indys history. On my first day, we
were called together, all the staff, to the
newsroom to raise a glass to the fact that in
the just-finished 1992 election the Indy had
overtaken The Times with sales of more than
The courtroom at the Guinness trial, where The Independent put down a marker
440,000. We did not know so at the time but
that tally was never to be seen again.
It was also a different age. Compliance
was an unheard of word; companies were
run by buccaneers who made good copy and
liked to do things their way titans such
as Lord Weinstock at GEC, Tiny Rowland
at Lonrho and his foe Mohamed Fayed at
Harrods, Lords Hanson and White, Sir
Richard Branson, Lord Sugar, Sir Owen
Green at BTR, and Sir James Goldsmith.
Takeover bids were often hostile, frequently
involving the chucking of mud dug up by
corporate sleuths, and the taking out of
adverts attacking the other side. Politicians
were sometimes delighted to please asking
a loaded question in return, it transpired
later, for a bung.
Gradually, however, things changed. The
Guinness affair and the subsequent jailing
of some of those involved, all of them star
City names, shocked a financial community
that until then had seen itself as relatively
impervious to the law and scrutiny of others.
In 1991 a retail cavalier, Gerald Ratner,
in an off-guarded moment, described one
of his products as crap. His comment
was reported, and his world caved in. His
standing and that of the Ratners jewellery
chain were damaged beyond repair. Ratners
peers saw what had occurred and vowed
not to be similarly caught out the heavy,
controlling hand of the public relations
adviser was in the ascendant.
But the spirit of The Independents
business coverage has sustained. We
were never nor ever will be respecters of
reputations and apparent success. Anyone
in business seeking our praise has to earn
it. Other papers opinions are easy to
b ri an h a r r i s
call, but not The Independents. Its lineup of columnists and writers has always
maintained a waspish, disbelieving stance.
It always comes as a surprise to learn that
a City establishment figure takes The
Independent and loves its business pages.
They are meant to read The Daily
Telegraph, Times or FT not The
Independent. But those with more of a
social conscience liked it for pursuing
overpaid bankers, rapacious commodities
traders, shameless tax avoiders and
short-term fund managers. In a strange way,
perhaps, reading the Indys business pages
made them feel better about themselves.
While other papers indulge in mutual
back-slapping and celebratory high fives with
billionaires and other capitalist kings, the
Indy holds a jaundiced view. As others host
grand parties for business leaders or publish
rich lists or accompanied them on press
trips, The Independent keeps its distance.
The print product is no more but its
business journalism will live on online and
on the app (thanks to writers of the calibre
of Hamish McRae, James Moore, Ben Chu
and Jim Armitage). The neer do wells of
finance will still be
unable to sleep easy at
night, knowing that
The Independent is on
their case.
Chris Blackhurst was Senior Business
Writer, Independent on Sunday, 1992-93;
Westminster Correspondent, Independent
and Independent on Sunday, 199396; Deputy Editor, Independent and
Independent on Sunday, 1997-98; Editor,
The Independent, 2011-13
52
Business
Supermarket watchdog
faces review amid fears
it is failing farmers
Business View
James Moore
Enter the scammers as executives ignore
their inner cynics on social media
The chief executive
was a cricket lover
one of those people
who go into
rhapsodies when
talking about Alastair Cooks latest
century, dissecting his technique and
eulogising about the perfectly timed cover
drive that sailed to the boundary.
So of course he opened the email and
downloaded the details when a business
associate sent him an invitation to the Test
match at the Oval.
Except it wasnt from the associate. It
was a carefully targeted phishing scam.
And one that worked spectacularly well.
Hackers had discovered his interest in
cricket from his Facebook page an open
one with almost no privacy blocks on it.
Theyd got the name of the associate from
his friends list, also open. Their program
lurked in the companys system for 90 days.
I picked up the above story from Digitalis,
an online reputation-management company.
It has been doctored slightly to protect the
confidentiality of those involved, but the
events described happen more regularly
than you might think.
To get an idea of how common it is,
Digitalis commissioned a YouGov poll
which found that a startling 49 per cent of
business leaders never adjust their privacy
settings to restrict who can see their
profiles on sites like Facebook.
Even if they do, that might not be true
for close colleagues, or even personal
assistants. Or, perhaps, LinkedIn. Even if
you keep Facebook to pre-screened
friends, you might be more inclined to
make LinkedIn publicly available because
it can be to your advantage to do so,
because it says hey, this is me, Im great
hire me.
Corporate espionage operatives used to
deploy similar techniques to those
employed by national spy agencies (which
is where many of the people employed in
these activities came from). They
conducted painstaking research on their
targets over many weeks, before striking.
These days, they can get the same results
via the click of a mouse.
Companies spend millions on software
engineers and companies to maintain
their firewalls and keep their security
software up to date at least most do.
We have become accustomed to seeing
the mega-hack perpetrated by gangs of
criminal geeks using hi-tech kit to batter
down companies defences. Cyber-punk
whizz kids armed with electronic
battering rams have taken down the likes
of Target, Sony and in this country,
infamously TalkTalk.
The reality is that hacking can be a lot
simpler than is commonly realised, and
a lot sneakier. The vast majority of
attacks go unreported, and no wonder. If
a hacker has snuck in through the adroit
use of the information on someones
Facebook page, it could prove very
embarrassing to the company and the
executive concerned.
exclusive
Mark Leftly
Associate Business Editor
The remit of the supermarket ombudsman is set to be

reviewed by the Government,
following criticisms that it
does not have the power to
protect farmers from unfair
trading practices.
The Groceries Code Adjudicator was set up three years
ago to help suppliers squeezed
on their profits and terms by
powerful supermarkets.
Christine Tacon is the first
adjudicator, but her office
has been criticised for being
under-resourced and toothless. She was unable to fine
Tesco for delaying millions of
pounds worth of payments to
suppliers because the breaches
occurred before the watchdog
was granted the power to levy
a 1 per cent penalty of UK revenue last April.
Farmers have also complained that much of their
industry is not protected
by the adjudicator, as her
remit only extends to direct
suppliers. The products of
most players in the industry
reach supermarket shelves
through middlemen.
Limiting the remit to direct
suppliers to the 10 biggest
supermarkets and retailers has
in effect excluded dairy farmers that produce milk on a small
scale. Drops in the milk price
recently took the number of
British dairy farmers to below
10,000 for the first time.
Small wonder, then, that this subject

isnt being talked about much.
The internet has introduced a whole
range of new services, and ways of
communicating. It is only 20 years old.
Twitter has just celebrated its 10th
anniversary. Facebook isnt much older.
Yet the impact it has had on business has
been vast. It has changed the world.
It hasnt changed people.
Most of us are basically trusting. Even
apparently sophisticated executives are
urged on to Facebook by their kids or
their colleagues. Those who then use it to
look at people doing daft things are lulled
into thinking that its basically harmless
maintaining public profiles and public
friends lists that provide a wealth of
information which it might otherwise be
challenging to access.
Its all too easy for people to forget their
inner cynic, no matter how sophisticated
Many teachers have already left

Facebook and Twitter. Ditto those
working for the prison service
they might be. Just read some of things all
those clever, sophisticated, crooked
bankers involved in Libor and foreign
exchange fixing put up in public chat
rooms. Or sent in emails.
Idiots? Or just lulled into a false sense of
security by modern technology?
So how to combat a growing scourge?
Ban chief executives from social media?
Many teachers have already left Facebook
and Twitter. Ditto those working, for
example, for the prison service.
The trouble is, that would be stripping
business people of an invaluable tool for
communicating with clients, or with
potential clients, or with customers. The
value of social media to commerce is
incalculable.
Even if you can cure the executive team
of their Facebook addictions, the
necessary clues might still be out there.
Got the name of the top dogs PA? What
nuggets might be gleaned from their
Facebook musings? Are they fed up with
being pestered to book those cricket
tickets? Are they cock-a-hoop at being
handed the bosss tickets to a show?
Digitalis has dubbed this digital
espionage. Perhaps a latter day retelling
of Smileys People could be dubbed
Smileys Pixels?
Except its no laughing matter.
Digitalis thinks people need to talk
about this issue more, and its easy to see
why. It isnt just executives and senior
business people who need to do this its
their PAs or any other members of staff in
key positions.
Social media is free to use but there is
a cost. That cost can be huge if business
people, usually so
aware of potential
issues in other parts of
their businesses, fail
to wise up to it.
Christine Tacons
Groceries Code
Adjudicator, it
is said, lacks the
power to protect
suppliers
A source close to the Business Secretary Sajid Javid told

The Independent he is open
to altering the remit. The
source added: He has had a
meeting with a few colleagues
and said he will go with the evidence either way.
Ben Reynolds, deputy
co-ordinator at the food and
farming charity Sustain, said:
We applaud the work of
the adjudicator to date, but
would welcome an extension
to its remit to better protect
smaller farmers and producers
from unfair trading practices.
We would also like to see the
strengthening of the adjudicators investigative powers,
and power to fine companies
breaching the code.
Tim Farron, the Liberal
Democrat leader who represents rural Westmorland and
Lonsdale, said: The adjudicator must include farmers
I will be asking Business
and [Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs] ministers to do that
as soon as possible. Consumers can play a supporting role
too, by buying milk from producers directly or from shops
that are not treating it as a
loss leader.
Ms Tacon will also be called
to appear before the Business
Committee later this year to
discuss her role.
A Department for Business
spokeswoman said: A review
into the Grocery Code Adjudicator is due shortly and we
will look at how this can help
the farming industry.
in sp ort
Can Spurs
boys drive
England to
beat one
of Europes
big guns?
P.2
Chris Wood
eyes Masters
success as
part of new
Brit pack
P.16
Economy
drive in US
The US economy was stronger than thought at the end of

last year. Fourth-quarter growth came in at an annualised
rate of 1.4 per cent, up from estimates of 0.7 per cent G etty
53
Business / Feature
A smile comes easily to the face of Business Committee chairman Iain Wright, and yet he has set himself on a collision course
with the founder of Sports Direct that could culminate in a vicious parliamentary confrontation. M a r k L eftly meets him.
The style is softly, softly but hes

playing hardball with Mike Ashley
Iain Wright is glued to his
smartphone and has a huge
grin on his face.
The smiley 43-year-old MP
for Hartlepool might have the
look of a middle-aged member
of The Monkees, but hes a
massive Stone Roses fan. Word
had just spread on the internet
that the Madchester band are
recording a third studio album
22 years after their last effort,
Second Coming.
Mr Wright says he has been
to loads of Stone Roses gigs,
but these days he has swapped
the mosh pit for the snake pit
that is the House of Commons. The former Deloitte
accountant is the chairman of
the Business, Innovation and
Skills Committee, having
beaten the incumbent, his
Labour colleague Adrian Bailey, to the role after the general election last year.
Select committees have
become increasingly prominent, influential and powerful
in recent years. For example,
it was while chairing the Public Accounts Committee in
2013 that Margaret Hodge
infamously scolded Googles
northern Europe boss over
tax: You are a company that
says you do no evil. And I
think that you do do evil.
Mr Wrights growing fame
is a result of a confrontation
with another big boss, albeit
one where the pair have yet to
come face-to-face. He wants
Mike Ashley, the billionaire
founder of Sports Direct, to
answer questions from the
committee on 7 June over allegations about his companys
treatment of workers.
Mr Ashley has refused and
instead extended an invitation
to Mr Wright and the 10 other
MPs on the cross-party committee to visit the companys
headquarters and warehouse
in Shirebrook, Derbyshire.
The Unite union launched a
campaign last year claiming
Sports Direct is a workhouse,
not a workplace, alleging that
staff at Shirebrook have been
sacked for talking too much,
spending a long time in the
toilet, or being absent because
of illness in a six strikes and
youre out policy.
A newspaper investigation
in December alleged that temporary workers were paid
effective hourly rates below
the minimum wage, and Mr
Ashley then pledged to 10m
to raise wages.
Beyo nd wes tm i ni st er
how he sp ends his t im e
Favourite band: It has to

be the Beatles. Id also give
mentions to the Stone Roses,
New Order, Joy Division, the
Smiths and Arctic Monkeys.
Basically four lads with guitars [or in New Orders case,
Gillian on keyboards].
Best book: I love political
biographies. The John Campbell one on Roy Jenkins was
great. I did appreciate the immense Robert Caro volumes
on Lyndon Johnson. I like the
modern history of Britain
books by David Kynaston.
Best business: Theres a
company in my constituency,
Hart Biologicals a medtech
business focused on blood
coagulation products. Run by
a great man, Alby Pattison, it
is scaling up fast, exporting
across the world and training
an increasing number of apprentices. Its the very model
of a modern company that I
want to see more of in Hartlepool, the North-east and the
rest of the UK.
For his part, Mr Ashley has

written to Mr Wright to tell
him he is disgusted at the
committees deliberately
antagonistic behaviour,
accusing him of abusing
parliamentary procedure in an
attempt to create a media circus in Westminster.
Leaning forward, Mr
Wright claims he wants to be
as conciliatory as possible
and avoid an escalation of
tension. Thats as maybe, but
there is no doubt that he is
playing hardball here; he
makes what he says is not, yet
clearly is, a threat of whistleblowers taking Mr Ashleys
place should he not turn up.
Its almost like an empty
chair thing on the 7th of June,
but we hope that he comes,
sighs Mr Wright. We hope he
sees sense, we really do. I
dont understand why hes trying to do this. If he hasnt got
anything to be ashamed of,
cant he answer questions?
There are serious reports
about working practices in the
warehouse in Shirebrook.
The 7th of June is tabled for
If he has
nothing
to be
ashamed
of, cant
he answer
questions?
looking at working practices

at Sports Direct, and if he
doesnt come, whistleblowers
might. Thats all Im going to
say on that. Theres a session
to which he has been invited,
and if he doesnt want to talk
about Sports Direct, some
other people might.
A Sports Direct spokesman
says the invitation to Shirebrook remains open and a visit
would be the best way for Mr
Wright to see things for his own
eyes in order to gain a balanced
understanding of the facts.
But Mr Wright claims the
visit is problematic, for the
logistical reason of diary
clashes for 11 busy MPs. He
also says the issue is greater
than just one warehouse
because he has also been
tipped off about working practice problems in the companys shops. He also points out
Sports Directs plunging share
price while this saga is playing
out; it was recently relegated
from the FTSE 100.
He argues noticeably, he
never refers to Mr Ashley by
name that 99.9 per cent of
witnesses come to all select

committees. It could be uncomfortable but they come voluntarily. Why is he different?
Mr Wright thinks the Sports
Direct allegations might be
symptomatic of a broader shift
in employment attitudes that
has emerged since the 2007
credit crunch that became a
financial crisis. He says: The
thing were interested in is
what does employment look
like in 2016? Are working practices changing? Theres automation, so are people losing
their jobs? There will be a need
to upskill. There are zerohours contracts, theres an
increasing amount of insecurity at work. Is this the economic model in which Britain
wants to work in the future?
Should Mr Ashley decide to
turn up, the hearing could be
one of the most vicious standoffs in the first full year of this
Parliament. It would certainly
be remarkable if Mr Wright
adopted the conciliatory tone
he promises, while Mr Ashley
would surely be intent on wiping that smile off his face.
Iain Wright:
He wants
Mike Ashley
to testify
before his
committee
on 7 June.
Teri Pengilley
54
Business
Andrew Dewson
US Outlook
Yahoo, the internet
dinosaur, is finally
running out of its
borrowed time
Yahoo is still one of

the great survivors of
the internet age. But
for how much longer?
What began life in a
Stanford University dorm as Jerry and
Davids Guide to the World Wide Web
has been around for 22 years in internet
terms roughly the geological equivalent
of the early Jurassic and is now living on
borrowed time. For it to have any chance of
survival, shareholders should bite the bullet
and give in to demands from the activist
investor Starboard Value.
Starboard has been agitating for change
since it became a shareholder two years ago,
and has never made any secret of its desire
to shake things up. Meanwhile Yahoos
board members have dithered and delivered
one disappointment after another a policy
that has kept their own gravy train full but
done investors no favours.
On Thursday, Starboard appeared to have
come to the end of its tether, writing to other
investors to demand that Yahoo replace its
entire board with Starboards hand-picked
team. Yahoos board appears to be willing to
fight now, but any chance of getting serious
support from investors is surely long gone.
The board should have fought harder and
made brave decisions before their own cushy
jobs were on the line.
Starboards letter, addressed to fellow
shareholders, is about as harsh as these
things get: We have been extremely
disappointed with Yahoos dismal financial
performance, poor management execution,
egregious compensation and hiring
practices, and general lack of accountability
and oversight by the board. We believe the
board clearly lacks the leadership,
objectivity and perspective needed to make
decisions that are in the best interests of
shareholders. Ouch.
Its hard not to have some degree of
sympathy for Marissa Mayer, the chief
executive, who took on a Herculean if
incredibly well-paid task when she left
Google for the top job at Yahoo in 2012. Not
only was she tasked with turning an
outdated, ailing brand around but, as a
female chief executive, the spotlight has
always shone a little brighter on her than on
many of her male peers.
Even so, there is no getting around it: her
leadership at Yahoo has failed. Multimilliondollar investments in content, including
paying top dollar to hire a handful of big US
media names, have not brought the desired
results. The market wrote off Yahoos core
business a long time ago.
But not only has the core brand remained
in the doldrums, Yahoos board has been
unable or unwilling to make tough decisions
on its multibillion-dollar stakes in online
wholesaler Alibaba and Yahoo Japan (a
separate, profitable business). Even if
partially listing or selling those stakes would
have given the company a hefty tax bill, at
least it would have been proof of decisive
leadership. Doing nothing with them is
proof of the opposite.
My suspicion is that Yahoos directors
have been hoping that someone will do
their work for them, and rid them of
Starboards attention into the bargain, by
Apples chief Tim Cook launched the iWatch to great fanfare, but time has not been kind to it reuters
bidding for the company. The trouble is, the
core digital business is moribund and, as
Starboard noted, there has been one
disappointment after another. Why anyone
in their right mind would pay billions for
such a business is beyond me, so far beyond
any potential white knight too.
While there is no guarantee that Yahoo
investors would be rewarded by taking
Starboard up on its offer, its hard to see
how new blood at Yahoo will actually make
things worse. The board, including Ms
Mayer, has been living on borrowed time.
Times up now.
For smartwatch makers, the

clock is already ticking
Not so long ago wearable technology
specifically smart watches that are linked to
our mobile phones were all the rage.
Were all going to be wearing them sooner
rather than later, we were told. Apples
iWatch was launched to the usual fanfare
just 10 months ago, and although the
company has not yet released any sales
figures, we can reasonably assume the
recent price cut is a sign it isnt working out
like that, at least not yet.
So news that the lesser-known
smartwatch maker Pebble this week gave
a quarter of its staff their notice cannot
have good implications for the wearable
tech industry.
Pebbles watches actually get good
reviews and are a far cheaper entry point
into the market, but the writing has been on

the wall since it stopped raising cash and
instead turned to bank credit lines in May
last year. Its chief executive Eric
Migicovsky blamed the Silicon Valley
venture capital crowd for failing to back it
for the job cuts, but even Silicon Valley
venture capitalists sometimes know when
to stop writing cheques.
If Pebble is failing to get the sales traction
it hoped for at a price point of under $100,
it is unlikely that Apples far more expensive
offering is setting the world alight.
Competition from Samsung and Xiaomi,
the Chinese mobile phone maker, isnt
helping. Fitbit recently reported
encouraging results, but those were based
on a period in which it cut its prices. Apple
is still not giving out sales figures for its
watch, and if Pebbles problems are any
indication, that is unlikely to change any
time soon.
This column has been bearish on
wearable technology from the start. Its not
just watches sales of GoPro video cameras
have slumped too, and it looks like everyone
who wants one already has one. Apple can
afford to play the long game its not
exactly running out of money but for
smaller players the outlook appears bleak.
There are thousands of beautiful, real
watches on the market. Having another
thing to charge every night is not a
convenience, and until
we see some real sales
numbers from Apple,
there is no reason to
change that opinion.
55
The Peoples Champion
The Analyst
Questions of Cash
In the Red
56
57
59
59
Simon Read: youve been the driving force

behind our successful campaigning
Mark Dampier: thanks for the memories.

Now its time to make some new ones
Paul Gosling: will laundering rules mean

banks stop us paying into our accounts?
Donald MacInnes: the sum of all my views

on money both the good and the bad
Your Money
The future
of finance
is great
if youre
plugged in
The way we manage money is about to

be transformed. Forget PINs and
passwords, welcome to a world of
wearable technology. By sim o n r ead
What does the future hold for
us as spenders and savers? In
the past 30 years, the way in
which we bank and use money
has changed dramatically. But
while the pace of change has
started to slow, there are still
exciting times ahead, reckon
future-gazers .
In 1986, when The Independent was launched, few could
have anticipated that in paying for goods and services, we
would one day be able to tap
and go simply by brandishing
a piece of plastic or, even more
outlandishly, something called
a mobile phone.
The internet has changed
the way in which most of us
bank and spend, and the millennial generation takes such
convenience for granted. But
that wont do for people coming of age in Generation Z;
born in the mid 1990s, they
will almost certainly soon be
embracing the internet of
things a technology that will
let gadgets talk to each other.
Sounds frightening? Im
assured they wont be plotting to overthrow humans but
will talk to each other with
the sole aim of making our
lives easier. So our fridges
will tell our phones to order

fresh groceries when stocks
are low, and our cars will tell
our heating systems to warm
up the home when were a few
minutes away.
I experienced a little of this
in Dublin this week when I
visited MasterCard Labs. The
centre is one of the companys
eight innovation hubs across
the world, focusing, MasterCard says, on fresh ideas to
improve customers lives or
at least make it easier for them
to spend money.
Garry Lyons, the companys chief innovation officer,
is very enthusiastic about the
changes ahead. When we met,
he had three items of wearable
technology on his person and
soon produced a fourth a
garish ring that is linked to a
phone and glows in different
colours according to whos
calling. It can also be used to
tap and pay and is one of thousands of ideas considered by
the lab every year.
This isnt actually my style,
he said of the ring, but he
beamed proudly when displaying his wristband. It uses the
throb of his own heartbeat as
an identifier, rather than mak-
ing him remember passwords

or PINs. That certainly piques
my interest remembering
passwords is a pain.
Its part of a range of new
wearables were looking at,
Mr Lyons said. We know that
people have trouble remembering passwords, and using
biometrics can help avoid
needing to remember a complicated series of letters and
numbers.
The wristband uses electrocardiograms to measure your
heart rate, and when you pay,
it transmits a signal to a till
to verify your identity. Your
electrocardiogram reading
is unique, so if someone else
takes your wristband, they
wont be able to use it
This summer the company
is also launching selfie pay in
the UK; it will allow you to take
a picture of yourself to verify
your identity. Fingerprints are
already being used for the same
purpose and further ahead is
iris technology.
All the big financial companies are striving to use
biometrics to make banking
easier. Anthony Thompson,
the man behind Metro Bank
and the soon-to-launch online
Spending money on tap:

hi-tech innovations such as
Apple Pay were beyond our
imaginations 30 years ago
g etty i mag e s
You wont have to

remember your name to
bank with us. Youll be
your own PIN code
the way we w er e 30 y ears of chan ge
The year in which The

Independent was launched,
1986, marked a revolution in
high-street finance as well
as the newspaper industry.
For the first time banks were
allowed to sell mortgages,
which revolutionised the way
in which home loans were
sold as real competition
entered the equation for the
first time.
Back then incredibly, it
seems now we were still
three years away from the
launch of the UKs first telephone bank, First Direct.
And then 1990 marked
the peak year of cheque use,
with more than 11 million
written each day. Remember
cheques? Most millennials

wont even have any idea
where their chequebook is
now. In fact, cheque use has
slumped by more than 75 per
cent since 1990.
Meanwhile debit cards
are, surprisingly, younger
than The Independent. The
first didnt appear until 1987
when Barclays launched
its Connect card. The new
breed of flexible plastic soon
swallowed up the old cheque
guarantee cards.
By 1997 the Nationwide
was offering the first internet banking service and
in 2003 came chip and pin
cards, followed in 2007 by
contactless.
bank Atom, said: In the future

you wont have to remember
your own name to bank with
us. Youll be your own unique
PIN code.
The future is digital, with
technology driving better ways
to manage our money and even
financial advice increasingly
being delivered by artificial
intelligence. The drawback

is that if youre not plugged
in, youll miss out, raising the
prospect of a two-tier economy
of digital haves and have
nots. Except its not just a
prospect: millions already
have to pay a premium if they
cant or wont pay bills automatically.
56
Your Money
Simon Read
The People's Champion
The fight for
financial justice
goes on into the
digital world
s.read@independent.co.uk
twitter: @simonnread
Ive mentioned before

that everything I
write about on these
pages is driven by the
financial concerns of
individuals. My view has always been that
personal finance journalism should start
with the personal.
Over the years youve responded
magnificently, given me plenty of stories
to cover or follow up, and helped build and
back the many campaigns weve run. So
it seems timely to turn things over to you
once more to help me fill this column.
Lets start with this question from
Joseph Murray. I have never heard of the
banks listed in your newspaper, he said,
referring to our weekly best-buy tables.
Can you recommend a high-street bank
for decent savings, given that I have no
access to the internet at home?
This really is a modern problem. The
traditional high-street names you know
and some of you still trust are not likely
to be the savings institutions that give you
the best deals. The leading rates come
from the challenger banks and building
societies often small institutions, with
no branches, that are keen to attract
customers.
That you havent heard of them
shouldnt put you off. As long as they have
a banking licence and are fully authorised,
your money should be just as safe with
them as it is with the traditional names. If
you dont have access to the internet and
have no family or friends who can help you
get a decent savings account, try walking
a little further up the high street to find
a decent deal rather than accepting the
paltry rates at your existing bank.
A quick check on this weeks bestbuy easy access accounts reveals the
presence of Virgin Money and Yorkshire
building society, both of which have a
high-street presence. Virgin Money has 75
stores, some even offering free coffee,
while Yorkshire building society has 230
branches across the country.
My advice to Joseph, and others in his
position, is spread your search beyond the
usual high-street banks.
On the subject of savings, I was
interested to hear this week from Bobby
Bimks. I was in Isas for many years and
still am to a small extent, but the interest
rates are absolute rubbish you might as
well use you mattress as a savings tool,
he wrote. Lets face it, after seven years of
ultra low rates coincidentally, the length
of time I have served as personal finance
editor of this newspaper Bobby was
making an excellent point.
He continued: Even if you tie your
money up for at least a year, its still not
worth it. You use these banks for years and
still get treated badly.
Thats a view most of us would concur
with. But are the banks to blame for the
low interest rates? Not really. The fault
lies at the door of the Government, which
has consistently concentrated on helping
borrowers rather than savers.
Regular contributor Robert Johnson has
been one of my touchstones in the past
few years, with reports from the front-line.
He recently told me: On Thursday I made
one of my occasional trips to Glasgow to
go round the various banks and building
societies to get a feel for what is happening
High-street fixtures such as Barclays may have history on their side but not the best deals getty
on savings interest rates. And the story is
that they are declining.
The many other insights Ive received
from readers have been equally valuable
over the years in ensuring Ive been aware
of your concerns and that this section has
reflected your interests rather than the
profit-driven interests of big business.
I have also had many touching messages
from you in recent weeks. I hope youll bear
with me as I share just one.
Gary Waldron wrote: I would like to
thank you and say that I have very much
enjoyed reading your weekly column
and following the campaigns you have
championed on behalf of your readers
over the years. There is nothing like the
intervention and exposure offered by a
major newspaper to focus the attention
of multi-site corporate organisations and
encourage these conglomerates to improve
the service they offer to the public.
Thank you, Gary. And thank you all. Ill
continue to tilt at the corporate giants and
attempt to make them play fair with us. And
watch out for me on BBC One in July when
Ill be helping people make sense of their
finances in the show Right On The Money.
The epic struggle to lift the

curse of debt managers
Finally, and fittingly perhaps, back to debt
managers yet again. Complaints about
fee-charging debt-management firms
are some of the most upsetting cases I
see, said Juliana Francis of the Financial
Ombudsman Service this week.
Poor debt advice can leave struggling
people trying to make repayments that
they cannot afford. And rather than helping
them, bad advice can push people into a

cycle of problem debt.
On top of that, these problems can lead
to mental health issues such as depression.
Put together, that can leave responsible
people who have done what they can to
try and deal with their debt (rather than
simply running away from it) being unfairly
penalised for their own actions.
Last year the Financial Conduct Authority
warned that many debt managers do not
follow the rules meaning that customers,
including many vulnerable people, are
treated unfairly. The City watchdog
concluded that the standard of paid-for debt
advice was unacceptably low.
The ombudsmans recent experiences
reflect that. Weve seen debt managers
making false promises such as telling
people their debt will be cleared in an
unrealistically short time, said Ms Francis.
And weve found debt managers dont
always explain the impact that setting up a
debt-management arrangement will have on
peoples credit files.
She advises people to contact a free
debt-management service instead such as
StepChange or Citizens Advice. But earlier
this month 16,000 people were hit when the
rogue debt-management firm PDHL was
closed down.
With more debt managers expected to fail
to get a licence to continue in business, the
strain on the free debt services will tell. It
means theyll need more support, warned
campaigning Labour MP Yvonne Fovargue.
The Treasury needs to ensure that free
debt advisers are sufficiently funded to cope
with the sudden influx of all these extra
people needing help, she told me.
Its a warning the Treasury should heed,
to avoid adding further woe to those trying
to deal with debt.
57
Thanks for the memories.

Now make some new ones
The Analyst
mark dampier
It is time to say a fond farewell.

I hope I have guided readers
to some strongly performing
funds over the years.
After all this time I still
believe the main problem for
investors is the sheer number
of funds available both active
and passive. This column has
been criticised in the past for
not focusing on passive funds,
yet there is little I can say
about a fund simply tracking
a particular benchmark.
The idea that active fund
managers cant add value
through stock picking, but
passive portfolios can successfully allocate assets, is
an absurd one. I see little
evidence of many investors
mastering asset allocation,
yet I see plenty of evidence
of good stock picking from a
number of active managers.
That is not to say asset allocation should be ignored completely. However, constantly
tinkering with a portfolio can
mean you ultimately lose more
than you gain. Instead, I feel
it is far better to keep a foot in
both camps and let the fund
managers make the underlying decisions on your behalf.
A lot of people are scared
out of their investments at
exactly the wrong time. This is
perhaps not surprising given
the exhaustive coverage of
finance and economics in the
media, most of which turns
Stay on the road: many people quit their investments too early
out to be wrong. This has certainly been the case over the
past five or six years, when we
have been confronted with
worries over a break-up of the
eurozone, slowing growth in
China and the end of the commodity super-cycle. Yet markets have generally performed
well over this time.
Clearly some economic
issues will influence markets,
but it is usually impossible to
know exactly what the outcome will be. I can think of
only a few souls who, at the
markets low point in early
2009, suggested it was a great
time to invest. On the other
hand, countless commentators were queuing up to suggest greater falls.
One thing you might find
helpful is to ask whether these
commentators actually man-
getty
age any money. You will find

that many do not. Recently I
attended a presentation by the
economist and author Harry
Dent; it was fascinating to hear
him talk about demographics
and the untold misery it will
have on markets. Of course he
might be correct, but the thing
is that Mr Dent sells books; he
doesnt manage money.
So, let me end on some of
my favourite funds. Most, if
not all, have been covered in
this column at some point.
For those looking for an allweather fund, I suggest looking at RIT Capital Partners a
multi-asset portfolio aiming
to shelter investors wealth in
difficult markets. Placing your
money alongside the trusts
chairman, Jacob Rothschild,
can surely not be a bad thing.
In Europe, Richard Pease
is part-owner of the boutique

fund manager Crux Asset
Management. He has done
a tremendous job managing
European equities for investors over his career.
In Asia, Angus Tulloch
and his team at First State
have served investors well
and I see no reason why they
shouldnt continue to do so. In
Japan I would suggest Stephen
Harker at Man GLG, and, for
a good international income
fund, the Murray International Trust.
In the UK, my perennial
favourites include Neil Woodford, Nick Train, Giles Hargreave and Harry Nimmo, to
name a few.
You will probably note I
havent mentioned America,
which has been a source of
some frustration over the
years; it has been impossible
to find the Neil Woodford of
the US.
To conclude, remember that
patience and infrequent trading are an investors friend. I
would also suggest not focusing too heavily on specialist
areas of investment, where
investors often get burnt.
Instead, maintain a healthy
level of diversification.
I wish you many happy years
of prosperous investing.
Mark Dampier is head of
research at Hargreaves
Lansdown, the asset manager,
financial adviser and
stockbroker. For more details
about the funds in this
column, visit hl.co.uk
Beat the rise in prescription charges

Medicine
for rising
costs: a
prepayment
certificate
can save you
money at the
pharmacy
Bargain Hunter
simon read
NHS prescription charges

go up to 8.40 each on
1 April, but if you need a lot
of prescriptions then you
can beat the rise by buying
a prepayment certificate. It
costs 104 a year, or 29.10
for three months.
If youre going to need at
least four prescriptions in
the next three months or
13 in the next 12 months, a
prepayment certificate will
save you money. Full details
at Nhs.uk/nhsengland/
healthcosts/pages/ppc.aspx.
White Company strips prices
You can get 20 per cent off
at The White Company until
next Saturday by using the
g etty
code AL306 at the checkout

when you buy online.
The home and clothing
retailers online store is at
Thewhitecompany.com. For
a range of other discounts
and vouchers check out
Vouchercloud.com.
Tu deals at Sainsburys
Sainsburys is offering 25
per cent off across its whole
range of Tu clothing until
this Monday. The offer is
available in-branch or at
Tuclothing.sainsburys.co.uk.
In the Nectar 1,000 club?
Next week you will have
a chance to double your
money at Sainsburys if
you have at least 1,000
Nectar points. You will be
able to exchange points for
vouchers at the customer
service desk in Sainsburys
stores from 30 March to
5 April. You will need at
least 1,000 points which

will double up from 5 to
10 and the maximum
you can double is 4,000
which will turn 20
into 40. State your
chosen department for the
vouchers and use them by
5 April.
DIY discounts at Wickes
Wickes is offering 15 per
cent off everything bought
in store, online or over the
phone until Monday.
Hot on the bargain trail
For a wide range of other
Easter deals discovered by
bargain hunters, check out
HotUKdeals.com.
Got any deals or discounts to
share with readers? Send
details and deadlines to your
money@independent.co.uk
No Pain, No Gain
DE R E K PA I N
Dont fret about the downs. In the

long term, it can all turn around
The No Pain, No Gain portfolio has experienced an up
and down existence since
its launch in February 1999.
It has suffered two stock
market slumps and some
believe that another is on
the way as well as benefiting from some highs on the
Footsie.
Last week I produced a
portfolio update. It did not
make inspiring reading.
The overall profit was well
belowwhat I had hoped and,
to pile on the agony, some
considerable distance from
the all-time peak.
But thats life in the stock
market. Very often a calculation day occurs at an awkward time as shares suffer
one of their retreats.
I would like to reiterate
that I regard the long-term
potential of the portfolio as
encouraging.
True, some of my constituents, as I explained in last
weeks column, are looking
forlorn but their fundamentals are sound and their
prospects excellent.
In a portfolio seeking capital appreciation as opposed
to dividend income, there
are bound to be misses. I
have raided AIM, the junior stock market, and even
the fringe ISDX market, in
the quest for aspiring young
companies.
SometimesI have hit the
jackpot, with former AIM
constituent the Booker
cash-and-carry chain still
my star performer. On other
occasions I have had to run
for cover.
One disaster has been
SnackTime the vending
machine group that once
promised so much. I subscribed at 119p for the shares
and they went on to almost
hit 200p.
And then they went into
free fall. Suspended at 8p,
dealings resumed this week
at around 5p.
The shares are probably a
bet on Boris Belotserkovsky,
a rich Russian who controls
the business. He is well
versed in vending, running
Russias biggest player.
A number of other constituents have yet to show
their merits. One is Safestay,
an upmarket hostel group;
another is Peel Hotels.
My latest portfolio recruit,
Eclectic, a bars chain,
has moved above my buying price, having turned
interim losses into profits.
The shares are 61.5p against
a 58.5p enlistment.
SNA C KTIM E
SHARE PRICE, PENCE
9.5
9.0
8.5
8.0
7.5
7.0
A M J J A S O N D J F M
SOURCE: DIGITAL LOOK
I started writing about

shares in the 1950s. My first
venture was the forgotten
Masseys Burnley Brewery. It
was a success and prompted
a lifetime of investment.
I do occasionally wonder
whether, had Masseys been
a disaster, I would have been
so enraptured by the City.
In this, my valedictory column, I wish all readers happy
and successful investing. I
am a long-term shareholder
and believe that very often it
is best for small shareholders
to ignore the short-term tribulations of the stock market.
Private investors are on

their own in a hostile
setting. Their safeguard
is paper share certificates
Let the professionals jump
in and out.
I end with a plea to the
ruling Stock Exchange
whether it be British, German or American to offer
much more protection and
support to private shareholders. They are on their own in
a hostile environment. Their
safeguard is paper share certificates. With certification
they are on a companys
share register and get the
full benefits of being a shareholder.
Yet certificates are due to
be abolished, leaving us little unsat the mercy of electronic dealing, through the
Crest system.
In many cases, Crest strips
away the advantages of being
a shareholder as the nominee
Crest account, usually run by
a stockbroker, is regarded as
the real beneficiary, leaving
the true shareholder in the
cold.
They may well be old fashioned, but certificates should
be retained.
Yourmoney@independent.co.uk
58
Your Money
Top Savings Accounts
mo ne y a lert
Watc h o ut for fraudsters
ea sy acc e ss
Provider
Account
Notice/Term
Deposit
% AER
RCI Bank UK
Freedom Savings
None
100
1.65%
ICICI Bank UK
SuperSaver Savings
Virgin Money Defined Acc E-Saver 5
None
1.40%
None
1.31%
Yorkshire BS
Single Access Saver
Instant
100
1.30%*
Shawbrook Bank
Easy Access - Issue 3
None
1,000
1.30%
Financial fraud is soaring as cyber crooks

cash in with sophisticated scams.
Financial Fraud Action UK has reported
that losses surged by 26 per cent year-onyear in 2015 as around 755m worth of
losses were recorded across payment cards,
cheques and remote banking applications
on the internet and mobile phones.
But the good news is that the big banks
are fighting back. They say that last year
their security systems detected a massive
1.76bn worth of fraud and stopped it from
happening. That means they stopped 7 of
every 10 of potential fraud.
Criminals often trick people into handing
over personal details by cold calling, texting
or emailing; they make themselves plausible
by claiming to be from a trusted organisation,
such as a bank, the police, a utility company
or a government department.
However, such organisations will never
ask for personal details over the phone or
online. If you are contacted by someone
claiming to be an official, never give
out personal or financial information
such as passwords, PINs, ID numbers or
memorable phrases.
For advice and guidance on how to spot
scams, go to getsafeonline.org/scams.
All rates and terms are subject to change without notice. * Introductory rate for a limited period
1 ye ar f ix e d r at es
Provider
Account
Notice/Term
Deposit
% AER
Al Rayan Bank
Fixed Term Deposit
18 Mnth Bnd
1,000
2.17%
1.91%
Charter Savings Bank
Fixed Rate Bond
1 Yr Bnd
1,000
Fidor Bank
Savings Bond
18 Mnth Bnd
100
1.90%
Al Rayan Bank
Fixed Term Deposit
12 Mnth Bnd
1,000
1.90%
1 Yr Bnd
10,000
1.85%
Union Bank of India (UK) Fixed Rate Bond

All rates and terms are subject to change without notice.
4 ye ar an d ove r fix ed r at es
Provider
Account
Notice/Term
Deposit
% AER
United Bank UK
Fixed Deposit
7 Yr Bnd
2,000
2.94%
State Bank of India
Online Fixed Term Deposit 5 Yr Bond
10,000
2.90%
United Bank UK
Fixed Deposit
2,000
2.80%
5 Yr Bnd
Milestone Savings
Fixed Term Deposit
5 Yr Bnd
10,000
2.80%
FirstSave
Fixed Rate Bd 5th
7 Yr Bnd
1,000
2.75%
Notice/Term
Deposit
% AER
va ri abl e i sas
Provider
Account
Al Rayan Bank
Notice Cash ISA
120 Day
250
2.02%
90 Day
100
1.50%
Yorkshire Bank Cash Isa - 40 Day Notice
40 Day
9,000
1.50%
Clydesdale Bank Cash Isa - 40 Day Notice
40 Day
9,000
1.50%
National Counties BS
45 Day
15,000
1.45%
c r e d i t i n t er est payi ng c ur r ent account s

Provider
Notice/Term
Deposit % Gross 1K
Halifax Reward Current
Account
Instant
TSB Classic Plus
Instant
4.89%
Nationwide BS
Instant
4.89%*
Tesco Bank Current Account
Instant
2.96%
Yorkshire Bank Current Account Direct
Instant
1.98%
FlexDirect
6.25pm
All rates and terms are subject to change without notice. * Introductory rate for a limited period
Top Borrowing Accounts

f i x ed rat e mo rtgages
Provider
Period
Max LTV
Norwich & Peterborough BS 1.49%
Rate
for two years
65%
195
HSBC
to 30.4.18
90%
2.49%
Fee
Hanley Economic BS
2.29%
to 31.3.19
80%
250
HSBC
1.99%
to 30.4.21
65%
1,499
Leek United BS
2.95%
to 30.6.21
90%
995
All rates are subject to change. Mortgages shown are based on true cost and may include incentives. For full details visit Moneyfacts.co.uk
VARIABLE r at e mo r tgage s
Provider
Rate
Period
Max LTV
Fee
Coventry BS
1.75%
for term
65%
999
Coventry BS
1.89%
for term
75%
999
Coventry BS
1.99%
for term
85%
999
Coventry BS
2.19%
for term
85%
499
Coventry BS
2.35%
for term
90%
999
All rates are subject to change. Mortgages shown are based on true cost and may include incentives. For full details visit Moneyfacts.co.uk
c ur re n t acco unt ov erdr a ft selection

Provider
Account
Auth EAR
Unauth EAR
First Direct
1st Account
15.9%
15.9%
NIL
M&S Bank
M&S Current
15.9%
15.9%
NIL
Post Office Money
Standard Current
14.9%
14.9%
NIL
Ulster Bank
Standard Current
15.94%
23.14%
NIL
18.9%
18.9%
NIL
Min Income
The Co-operative Bank Current Account Plus
Buffer
All rates are subject to change without notice.
c re d i t c a rds standa rd rate

Provider
Card type
Rate PM
PA/APR
Lloyds Bank
Platinum Low Rate MC
0.522%
6.4%
Virgin Money
Low Rate MC
0.5222%
6.4%
The Co-operative Bank 3 Yr Fixed Rate Visa
0.561%
6.9%
10K
AA
Low Rate CC MC
0.561%
6.9%
8k
MBNA
Low Rate MC
0.6005%
7.4%
All rates are subject to change without notice.
This information was provided by Moneyfacts.co.uk on 24 March in good faith: neither

that company nor The Independent can be responsible for its accuracy. It should not
be relied upon in any investment decision, for which you should consider professional
advice. The price of investments can go up as well as down and past performance
cannot be relied upon as a guide to future performance.
g etty
How to go about
switching banks
Money Insider
andrew hagger
Teachers BS Cash ISA Notice 90 (5)
45 Day Notice NISA 3
Shuffle the pack: not every bank account will suit you
Figures from the payments

service BACS reveal that
more than a quarter of a million people moved banks in
the last three months of 2015.
This means that 2.5 million
customers have now used
the official Current Account
Switch Service.
Santander, Halifax and
Nationwide building society
are still winning the biggest
share of current account
movers, while Barclays and
NatWest are losing the most
customers to rival providers.
However, even with a
switch guarantee in place,
people dont always know
which account to choose.
Although each bank and
building society has its own
tariff and rate details clearly
displayed on its website and in
marketing literature, working
out which account is best can
be a headache.
The dilemma for consumers is that no two accounts are
the same, and the difficulty of
comparing different rates and
charging structures is probably one of the main reasons
why customers put up with a
below-average service.
There is not one bank
account that is the perfect fit
for everybody; its more about
weighing up the individual
elements that are most important to you. For some people
a low-cost overdraft will be
the priority, while for others
interest payable on credit balances will the key or a debit
card offering low-cost transactions abroad.
Heres what my research
shows: if a cheap overdraft
is most important, its worth
considering First Direct (first
250 interest free) or M&S
Bank (first 100 free).
For those seeking interest
on credit balances or reward
for their custom, then for balances of 2,000 or less consider Halifax Reward or TSB
Classic Plus; and for 3,000

take a look at Tesco Bank.
Lloyds and Santander 123
are tops for those with balances of 3,000-plus, with
the latter being the market
leader for balances of more
than 5,000 paying a very
competitive 3 per cent gross,
up to balances of 20,000.
While some people may
be put off the Santander 123
account because of the 5
monthly fee, remember it
also pays cashback on your
utilities direct debits, which
in many cases will more than
offset the cost.
If you want a cheap debit
card for use overseas then
Norwich & Peterborough
building society offers this
facility free worldwide, while
Nationwide and Metro Bank
are much cheaper than the
main banks in this area.
Picking the wrong bank
when it comes to debit card
costs overseas can cost a
lot more than youd imagine. There is more money
to be saved in this area than
any other element of a bank
account. Bank customers
could easily shell out an extra
50 or more in charges on
their two-week summer holiday; for many, thats far more
than the interest they will
earn on their bank account in
a whole year.
Yet for others its not the
nuts and bolts of the account
that concerns them all they
want is the ability to be able
to talk to a human being at a
UK call centre 24/7, and to
receive a good level of customer service, day in, day
out. First Direct and the Coop continue to be the top performers for service.
If its time you gave your
bank the elbow, pick an
account that reflects the way
you run your finances rather
than being swayed by a cash
sweetener, or a free meerkat.
Andrew Hagger is an
independent personal
financeanalyst from
www.money comms.co.uk
Simon Read
fiv e que stio ns ON

I sa de ad lin e
Ah, is the end of the tax year approaching?

Yes. And it means you have until midnight on
Tuesday 5 April to make the most of your
2015-16 tax allowance.
Theres no rush is there? I can simply do it
online at the last minute
People do that. Despite having the whole
of the financial year to add to their tax-free
savings, many leave it to the very last minute.
We saw the final Isa subscription last year
come in at 11.54pm, just six minutes ahead
of the new tax year, said Jason Hollands,
managing director of Tilney Bestinvest.
But thats not a good idea?
Youll be fine as long as your laptop or PC
doesnt crash and your broadband holds up.
If thats the case, youll be able to make your
tax-free investment at a couple of minutes to
midnight if you want. But any problems could
mean not using your allowance.
What is my allowance?
You can put up to 15,240 into an Isa in the
current tax year. And if youre part of a couple,
your partner can do too in other words,
you could lock away more than 30,000 in
tax-free savings in the next couple of weeks.
Then again you have another, similar allowance
starting on 6 April. Investing early in the new
tax year will give your investments a headstart
and avoid the potential misery of rushing to
meet the deadline next year.
There is
notone
account
thats the
perfect
fitfor
everybody
If Im going to do this online, what information

will I need to have to hand to open an Isa?
Opening an Isa online can take just five
minutes as long as you have planned ahead
and have all the information you need.
When investing in Isas, youll need
your national insurance number. If you
cant remember it, you can either find it in
correspondence from the taxman or get it
from your company payroll department.
On top of that, youll need to have sufficient
cleared funds in your bank account to make
the payment. You cant use a credit card to
fund an Isa and the payment must come from
the British bank or building society account of
the person applying.
Simon Read
59
Questions of Cash
Paul Gosling
In the Red
Will money laundering rules mean banks

stop us paying 15,000 into our accounts?
The sum of all my

views on money both
the good and the bad
Q | We have held current

accounts with HSBC,
Barclays and Lloyds for more
than 30 years.
We sold some possessions
for cash and have around
15,000 to pay into our
accounts. But we are
concerned that the banks
may not accept this because
of money laundering
regulations. We do not
have any records for the
transactions. GE, by email
At this time of year, our thoughts invariably

and quite naturally turn to rebirth; warm,
vibrant change to bring an end to the long,
funereal nights, with their cold vestments
and bitter melancholy. Its time to stamp the
snow from our boots and stride out, whistling
the theme from Beverly Hills Cop and
smiling at the thought of our knapsack full of
ham sandwiches and Quavers.
This feeling of optimism extends, of
course, to our money and the choices we
make. A time of change can also invite us to
look back; to stocktake. So I have decided to
collate my best and worst aspects of having,
spending, earning and craving money. This
will not take the form of structured prose
(Does it ever? I picture my six detractors
grumbling), but it will rather be two lists:
Money Good and Money Bad.
DON A LD Ma cINNE S
A | The Financial Conduct
Authority (FCA) requires

banks to have adequate
policies and procedures
sufficient to counter the
risk that they might be
used to further financial
crime. In addition, banks
must identify and monitor
customer relationships.
In effect, this is a
requirement for banks to
know their customers and
be confident they are not
using accounts to receive
the proceeds of crime.
There is no specific limit
on cash receipts imposed
by the FCA. So the attitude
of the banks will depend
on their prior knowledge of
you. We spoke to Barclays,
which indicated that
its response would vary
according to the type of
account you hold and your
history in relation to the
receipt of large sums. It
confirmed that your lack
of records to explain the
cash receipts is a potential
problem. It was unable
to provide clear guidance
specifically because that
could assist criminals who
are trying to money launder.
HSBC said simply: We
dont have restrictions for
how much customers can
deposit in their accounts.
A spokesman for Lloyds
said that while it had no
set limit on cash deposits,
it may ask customers for
information on how the
cash was obtained and
seek proof of this. If the
customer wasnt able to
provide this information,
then it is possible that
further controls could be
triggered, he added.
w h y t h e s u rc harg e
for pay i ng by c ar d?
Q | A 3 per cent surcharge has

been levied on me for using
a debit card when paying a
holiday deposit. I thought
new EU legislation prevented
Destination Lanzarote: but a reader is worried about confusion in the flight arrangements
traders imposing surcharges.
ZG, by email
A | The new rules banning
surcharges on debit and

credit cards do not come
into effect in the UK until
January 2018. Visa Europe
told us that the current
position in the UK is that all
cards can be surcharged, so
long as this is in accordance
with the Consumer Rights
(Payment Surcharges)
Regulations 2012, which
prohibit merchants from
charging more than their
direct costs for using
cards. The Interchange Fee
Regulations 2015 cap the
fees paid between banks for
the acceptance of debit and
credit card transactions.
The revised Payment
Services Directive will,
from 2018 in the UK,
prohibit surcharges on
cards regulated under the
Interchange Fee Regulations;
this does not cover some
commercial cards.
weve been left up in
the air by thomas cook
Q | In January I bought two

tickets from Thomas Cook to
fly to Lanzarote in June. The
flight was 379.96 and the
total cost including extras
for selected seats, food and
luggage was 527.96. But
when the paperwork came
through, the extras, though
shown as all paid, were on

a separate invoice. And the
only payment taken from my
account was 379.96 for the
flights. We are afraid that
when we get to the airport,
we will be told that no extras
have been booked.
We have tried to contact
Thomas Cook, but have got
nowhere. AH, by email
A | Thomas Cook said the
extras have been booked
and apologised for a systems
error. Its spokeswoman
added: As [the reader] is a
repeat customer, we offered
a 150 discount from the
[next] flight booking and
she was delighted.
f li gh t de lays a nd th e
q u es t fo r a r efu nd
Q | Im trying to obtain
compensation for a delayed
flight. My partner and I
returned from holiday in
Sarajevo to Manchester last
September with Austrian
Airlines, with a connection
at Vienna. The departure
from Sarajevo was delayed
three hours, we missed our
connection, got diverted
via Heathrow and arrived at
Manchester seven hours late.
I emailed a complaint to the
airline but have heard nothing.
AW, Stockport
A | As you booked through
Lufthansa, we took the
Money Bad
1) The feeling of ornate ennui one
experiences while standing in front of a 2p
waterfall game in the amusement arcade. The
fact that they have made a TV quiz show out
of this makes me want to move to Neptune.
2) Supermarket loyalty cards. Swipe this,
you grotesque monoliths of bad advertising
and Terylene body warmers
strained too tight. I shop here
because you are closest to my
I want a house. Thats it. Dont read
flash car, any more into our relationship.
3) People who pointedly ask
but dont for a coffee ... just a coffee
Starbucks or Caff Nero,
want to be in
as if their anti-latte Luddism,
like the their opting out of what they
as being the Great
men who regard
Cappuccino Deception, will
have one somehow one day return us to
a simpler time when coffee cost
25p and you put sugar in it, not
hazelnut cordial and a handful
of cinnamon. 4) Big flash cars. I want one but
Idont want to be like the men who have one.
So I stare and long. 5) Scratchcards. I hate
that you excite me so.
getty
matter up with the German

company it referred the
issue to Austrian Airlines.
You have now received
compensation of nearly
600 which was more
than you paid for the flights.
we wan t to c la im ai r
pa ss enger dut y bac k
Q | I went through Expedia in

November to book flights to
Mauritius, leaving at the end
of this month. My children
are 12 and 14 and the airline,
Emirates, is now refunding
the air passenger duty [APD]
on these flights. But if youve
booked through a travel
company then Emirates says
this is where you should go to
claim a refund.
I have emailed Expedia
and it seems to have no idea
what I am talking about. LM,
Hampshire
A | The Government
removed APD on flights

for children aged over
12 but under 16 from the
beginning of March.
An Expedia spokesman
said it will arrange for
you to be refunded. He
added: We are aware of
the changes... and we
are working with our air
partners in order to support
customers who are eligible
for an APD refund. We will
ensure our customer service
agents are fully briefed.
NUMBERS OF
THE week
2.9%
foreign usage
fee on cards
15%
independent
firms share
of dual-fuel
market
15.24
we waste
every month
on useless
subscriptions
Money Good
1) Student grant day. Every term wed get a
cheque, which wed immediately take to the
bank and cash, before crossing the road to
the pub. For a delicious few hours I would be
Johnny Champagne, darling of the Argentine
underworld and king of the Tuxedo People.
2) Rich lists: they most definitely fly in the
face of my socialist upbringing, but my
goodness, theyre beguiling. Harry Styles
is worth how much? 3) Buying your wife
something shiny from Tiffanys. Preferably
on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I strode out of
there feeling like Foghorn Leghorn, I say,
Foghorn Leghorn. 4) First Class air travel.
Never done it. Totally crave it. My wife says
its lovely. 5) If someone asks you how much
you are worth, being able to say, bashfully:
Oh, I dont know. Its all tied up in stocks
and property. Wouldnt have a clue.
So there you have it. All that remains for
me now is to wish you good fortune, until
next time. This is Donald MacInnes, signing
off. May your wad go with you.
Twitter.com/DonaldAMacInnes
60
Games&Puzzles
Kakuro
Bridges
Sudoku #4740
Fill the white squares so that the total in each across or

down run of cells matches the total at the start of that
run. You must use the numbers from 1-9 only and cannot
repeat a number in a run. Solution: minurl.co.uk/indy
Connect all the circles (which represent islands) into a single interconnected
group. The number in a circle represents the number of bridges that connect
that island to other islands. Bridges can be created horizontally and vertically,
with no more than two bridges between any pair of islands. Bridges cannot
cross the path of any other bridges. Solution: minurl.co.uk/indy
Elementary
20
14
11
28
11
10
12
24
13
2
1
2
2
20
15
24
27
17
17
27
11
3
12
16
1
2
1
2
13
2
5
6
14
13
10
18
5
21
8
9
10
11
12
19
10
11
11
<
13
12
x
-
+
+
14
x
-
7
-21
-16
>
22
<
10
+
+
x
+
17
8
6
x
-
16
8
24
Rating: Moderate
6 2
2
4
7
3
7 9
9 3 2 7
Mark Huckvale's Su Doku Puzzle Generator
6
Rating: Tricky
ABC Logic
Place the letters A, B and C exactly once

in each row and column. Each row and
column has two blank cells. The letters at
the edge of a row/column indicate which of
the letters is the first/last to appear in that
row/column. Solution: minurl.co.uk/indy
B
B
47
9
5
Advanced
+
5
2 3 8
>
5 9
4 6
+
x
Advanced
Rating: Easy
2 <
Elementary
2 9
Maths Puzzle
Fill the empty squares with numbers
that will make the across and down
calculations produce the results shown
in the grey squares. Each numeral
from 1 to 9 must only appear once.
The calculations should be performed
from left to right and top to bottom,
rather than in strict mathematical order.
Solution: minurl.co.uk/indy
6 4
6 7 9
13
16
11
5 1
9 8
>
14
14
14
22
2
4
Place the numbers from 1-5 exactly once in each row and
column. The greater than and less than signs (> and <)
indicate where one cell is greater/less than the adjacent cell
indicated. Solution: minurl.co.uk/indy
19
2
9
Intermediate
2
4
3 1
Futoshiki
1
1
6 8 3 1
2
4
Killer Sudoku
Each row, column
and 3 by 3 box
must contain
each number
(1 to 9) only
once. The sum
of all numbers
contained in
a dotted area
must match the
number printed in
its top-left corner.
No number can
appear more than
once in a dotted
area. Solution:
minurl.co.uk/
indy
1
5
2
2 6 8
4
9
4 6
6 8
4
3
6
1
6
17
3 1
1 5 9
1
1
11
11
7 6 1
8
1
2
24
12
15
17
29
11
13
4 5
A
C
A
B
61
Chess Jon Speelman
Concise crossword #9187

1
4
6
Across
1 Twisting force (6)
4 Lack of difficulty (4)
8 Stupid (5)
9 Be adequate (7)
10 Back complaint (7)
11 Period of darkness (5)
12 Loyalties (11)
16 Mistaken (5)
18 Relating to the liver (7)
20 We, for example (7)
21 Urge (5)
22 Astound (4)
23 Bordeaux wine (6)
5
7
10
11
12
13
14
Down
1 Grapple with (6)
2 Kingdom (5)
3 Steal the show from (7)
4 Small and delicate (5)
5 Beach pebbles (7)
6 Greatly surprising (11)
7 Nuisance (4)
13 Concern (Informal) (7)
14 Conjugal (7)
15 Shape or carve (6)
16 Rub with a cloth (4)
17 Cry of pain (5)
19 Become narrower (5)
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Solution to YESTERdays Concise Crossword
The solution will be available

online on Monday 28 March
at independent.co.uk/solutions
winners26March and in the i
newspaper.
Across: 1 Know, 3 Wear (Nowhere), 8 Thunderstruck, 9 Inkling, 11 Add-on,

12 On edge, 13 Bikini, 16 Mitre, 18 Chennai, 19 Diplomatic bag, 21 Zika,
22 Skye. Down: 1 Knuckle, 2 Odd, 4 Extra time, 5 Round, 6 Dregs, 7 Skin
diving, 8 Tailor-made, 10 Inglenook, 14 Ignoble, 15 Ocean, 17 Topaz, 20 Irk.
Stuck on a word? Use your mobile phone to to find possible solutu-
tions. Just replace uknown letters with a full stop, start the message
with IND SOLVE and send it to 85100. Eg. IND SOLVE pu..le. Texts
cost 50p plus your standard network charge. If no suggestions are
found, you wont be charged. For multi-word answers, leave a space
between the words. If you are having trouble using this service, please
call our helpdesk on 0800 839 174
Stuck on the concise

crossword? Then call our solutions line
on 0906 751 0240. Calls cost 80p per

minute plus your telephone companys
network access charge. If you are having
trouble accessing the number, please call
our helpdesk on 0800 839 174
Codeword #1177
13
11
16
16
16
23
22
15
22
13
11
15
11
16
26
20
23
25
21
13
11
11
11
11
13
11
22
13
17
2
18
25
13
15
19
11
11
15
14
15
16
17
10
23
13
13
11
15
15
11
11
15
25
2
11
11
3
13
6
25
11
26
26
26
23
26
16
14
8
11
25
11
16
16
24
23
12
15
25
23
11
15
16
11
13
10
11
12
13
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Solution to YESTERdays CoDEWORD
14
15
16
17
10
11
12
13
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
X B U R Y W L
V
D O S
A K E H
P G N C Q M
GX , va,
, , ,h,h
,F, ,h,
, xh, ,f
, , , ,
, ,HN ,H
, c NH,
, , , Z
In the opening, 7...Nbd7

weakened c6 I thought 7...
e6 might be better. Still I
had very little till he played
14...Qe7?! he should take
on f3 first. Instead of 18...
a5?, 18...Nb8 wouldnt have
been too bad.
After 20.Nxd5! hed
missed that if 20...Rxc1+
21.Bxc1 exd5 22.Nc6!
wins. 21...Bxd2 was the
best chance for if 21...Bxa5
22.Rxf8+ Nxf8 23.Bxa5;
or 21...Rxc8 22.Qxb4 Rc1+
23.Kh2.
22...g6! was the only
move. If 22...Nhf6 23.Nf5
Qb4 24.Rxf8+ Nxf8 25.Rb8
Qc5 26.Qb6! Qa3 (Black
cant exchange queens
because of Ne7+ and
Rxf8 mate) 27.Qb2! Qa7!
28.Qe5! wins.
The rest was very sharp.
One of the many beautiful
lines that disturbed my
sleep that night goes 25...
Nf6 26.d4 Qc1+ 27.Kh2
Nd7 28.Qd6 (todays chess
engines prefer 28.Qc7!) Be1!
29.Rc8! when: (a) 29...Qb1
30.Rxf8+!! Nxf8 31.Ne7+
Kg7 32.Qe5+ f6 33.Qc7
Kh8 34.Qd8 Kg7 35.Nxd5
Kg8 36.Qe7 Qb8+ 37.Kg1!;
(b) 29...Kg7 30.Rxf8! Bxf2
31.Rxf7+ Kxf7 32.Qxd7+
Kf8 33.Qd6+ Kg7! 34.Qe5+
Kh6 35.Qf4+ Kg7 36.Qxf2
Qxc6 and White has good
winning chances.
need a little help getting

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Hed missed 29.Nd8!

and should have taken
my knight on c6 either
with or without checking
on c1 though my initiative
should be decisive in
either case. At the end,
34..Qxa3 35.Qh6+ Nh5
36.Qg5 is mate.
Jon Speelman vs
Alexei Shirov
Salamanca 1998
Reti
1.Nf3 d5
2.c4 c6
3.e3 Nf6
4.Nc3 a6
5.b3 b5
6.Be2 Bg4
7.00 Nbd7
8.h3 Bh5
9.cxd5 cxd5
10.b4 e6 11.Qb3
Rb8 12.d3 Bd6
13.Bd2 00
14.Rfc1 Qe7
15.Nd4 Rbc8
16.Bxh5 Nxh5
17.a4! bxa4
18.Rxa4 a5?
19.Rxa5 Bxb4
20.Nxd5 exd5
21.Rxc8 Bxd2
22.Raa8 g6
23.Nc6 Qc5
24.Rxf8+ Nxf8
25.Qb8
(see diagram)
25...Kg7
26.d4 Qc1+
27.Kh2 Nd7
28.Qg8+ Kh6
29.Nd8! Nhf6
30.Nxf7+ Kh5
31.Qg7 Bxe3
32.fxe3 Qxe3
33.Ra2! Kh4
34.Ra3
10
Although Im not moving

online with Independent
digital, I am now
expanding my activities
both at ChessBase (http://
en.chessbase.com) and
the ICC (chessclub.com)
with commentary and
online tuition; or face-toface tuition in London.
Please feel free to contact
me on jonathan@speelman.
demon.co.uk.
Bridge Maureen Hiron

What happens at trick
one determines whether
declarer will bring the
contract home successfully;
what happens at trick two
may determine whether the
defence will prevail.
South opened the bidding
with Two No-Trumps and
North bid Three Diamonds,
a transfer to hearts. Opener
duly obliged with Three
Hearts and with only a
doubleton heart, passed

Norths rebid of Three NoTrumps. West led the seven
of spades; five from dummy,
two from East and South
won with the nine.
Declarer continued with
the queen of hearts and
East unkindly allowed this
to hold. Then the nine
of hearts, overtaken in
dummy, lost to the king.
South won the club return
Game all; dealer South
The numbers in the

grid correspond to
the letters of the
alphabet. Solve the
puzzle and fill in
the letters in the
key as you discover
them. Three letters
are provided to
give you a start.
The solution will be
available online on
Monday 28 March
at independent.
co.uk/solutions
winners26March and
in the i newspaper.
Since September 1998,

this column has become
central to my life. When
it began I was still a very
active player and member
of the English Olympiad
team. The first few columns
were actually written
from the Spanish Team
Championship where
I won a nice game against
Alexei Shirov. Now I play
much less.
Some thank-yous
are in order. First to
The Independent for
hosting me for all these
years and to the editors
who have made sense
of what to some of them
(though there have also
been many exceptions)
was little more than
Chinese. Above all to
the readers who have
been its life blood.
To play us out, what
would certainly be close to
being one of my Desert
Island games (choosing
from my own, obviously).
West
Q 10 8 7
5 4
Q 9 7 6
J 7 5
North
K J 5
J 10 8 7 3
4 3 2
8 3
South
A 9 6
Q 9
A K J 5
A K 4 2
East
4 3 2
A K 6 2
10 8
Q 10 9 6
and suddenly realised his

earlier error. With SA6 in
hand, and SKJ in dummy,
there was only one entry
to the table, and although
declarer could set up the
hearts, he lacked the entry
to enjoy them.
Third hand plays high
and when all East could play
to the first trick was the
lowly deuce, surely West
was favourite to have the
queen. So the first trick
should have been won with
the ace of spades, and now
when South continues
with the queen of hearts, it
matters not whether East
ducks or takes the trick.
Say he ducks. Declarer
continues by overtaking the
nine of hearts. East wins
and returns a club, South
winning. Now declarer can
finesse the spade jack and
continue hearts, until East
takes the ace. The king of
spades is the entry to the
established hearts.
62
Section2
Games&Puzzles
Backgammon
Chris Bray

Londons Leading
Independent
Hotel Group:
www.grangehotels.com;
@grangehotels
Super Sudoku
A 1
9 7 4
Quo Vadis Backgammon?

On the 21 February 1994
The Independent published
a one-off article by myself
with the same title as
todays final column. That
first article very quickly led
to the weekly column that
has graced this newspaper
ever since.
In 1994 the future of the
game was uncertain but
coincidentally the first
neural-net backgammon
programs (bots) had just
appeared and the game
was about to undergo huge
changes in theory which
are still going on today. The
bots together with online
play reinvigorated the game
and in 2016 backgammon in
rude good health.
The United Kingdom
Backgammon Federation
(ukbgf.com) is in place
and a formal ratings
system is being introduced
worldwide thanks to the
work of Rick Janowski and
others. Extreme Gammon,
the strongest of the current
bots, continues to improve
and crucially, gives us
the ability to analyse
matches and learn from our
mistakes.
To get a better
understanding of the
games development
over the past 20 years
I suggest downloading
Out of the Box from
my website www.
chrisbraybackgammon.
com. The website also has
a new problem posted
each day and a wealth of
educational material.
It only remains for me
to thank the editors of The
Independent for having the
courage to initially publish
the column and most
importantly of all for me to
thank you, the readers, for
supporting the column over
the years and providing a
stream of useful feedback.
Todays problem would
have been insoluble in 1994.
Manual rollouts would just
not have been accurate
enough. It is Double Match
Point how should Black
play 61? The solution will be
posted on my website today.
4 2 8 6
6
8 F
0 B
A 7
4 9
9 2 0 5 4 1 C
4
4 0 9
6 0 5 2
0 5 B 8 6 F 4 E D 9 3 C 2 A 7 1
F 2 5
B D E 1 C 4 0 9 A 8 6 3 7 F 2 5
5
1
9 2 0 5 4 1 C E 8 A 6 B 7 3 D F
3 4 9 A 1 6 2 7 B D F 5 8 0 E C
Rating: Moderate
Tue Mar 08 19:36:33 2016
4 F 8 7 B 3 D 0 1 5 2 C A 9 6 E
F 3 D 1 0 E 9 6 7 2 4 A C 5 B 8
5 C 6 E A 2 B 7 D 8 F 9 3 0 1 4
A 7 2
B 4 9 0 D C 8 F 5 6 3 1 E A 7 2
8 7 A 2 3 4 5 1 C B E 0 6 D F 9
6 9 4 C F 7 2 A E 1 8 3 0 B 5 D
E 7
2 is 0the final
5 print
3 edition
C of6The Independent,
4 9 Abut the
F cryptic
B and
D concise
1 crosswords,
8 E 7
This
the codewords and many other puzzles are available online at
7 B F 8 E D 1 3 0 4 9 5 2 6 A C
independent.co.uk/games
and on the Daily Edition app at
1 A E D 8 5 0 B 6 7 C 2 9 F 4 3
independent.co.uk/apps
C
7
7 8 C F 5 B 3 D 0 4 E 2 1 6 A 9
C 5
B D
3 6 1 A 7 8 F 2 4 9 D E B C 0 5
6 0 5 2 8 E A F C 1 7 9 3 D B 4
9
B D F
D 1 3 0
E D C B 9 A 6 5 3 0 7 F 8 4 2 1
C 1 A 3 D 5 7 8 E 6 2 B 0 4 9 F
1
B E 0 6 D F
9
Essex; Graham Morrison, Aberdeen
C 8 2 4 1 F 3 D B E A 6 5 7 9 0
9 6 2 D A 0 1 C F 5 4 7 B 8 3 E
4
B
5 9 1 C 2 3 8 4 6 A B E D 7 F 0
8 3
4 A D B E 1 6 0 5 7 8 F 9 2 C 3
F 7 4 E 9 2 B 3 8 0 1 A 5 C 6 D
8 6
E
Dorset;8Mrs Chris
D 5 7 9 6 0 A
2 Greenfield,
C 1Handcross,
4 West
F Sussex;
E Mrs
3 EJ Martin,
B Ilford,
8 F 3 0 B 7 D 5 2 C 9 4 A E 1 6
E 2 6 7 F 9 C A 1 3 D 0 4 5 8 B
Guernsey; A Essex-Cater, Northallerton, N Yorks; Steve Standere, Ipswich;

A 1 3 F 5 B E
C 9 D 0 7 4 2 8 6
Dave Dickens, Longridge, Preston, Lancashire; Rocky Lee, Ashley Heath,
D B 8 5 4 C F 6 3 2 A 1 E 9 0 7
8 B
C 1
5 C 6 E A 2
2
2 3 7 6 0 8 9 1 4 E C D F B 5 A
1 E F 4 7 A 5 2 9 B 0 6 C 3 D 8
5 C 6 D
5 2 C
E 9
3 D
4
9
C 1 A
5 B
8
0
5 3 0 7 F 8
9
A C 0 9 3 D E B 7 F 5 8 6 1 4 2
A B E D 7
0 E B 6 2 9 7Carmarthenshire;
4 F Andrea
3 Brancaccio,
5 8 Bristol;
D J.J.1Selvidge,
CSt Andrew,
A
C 9 4 A E
A D
E A 6
C D
A 1
5 9 1 C 2 3 8
4 7 A 5 2
8 2 C
7 F
Last weeks winners Hugh Vaughan, Penygroes, Llanelli,
Last weeks solution
3
0
F 5 B
5 7
2 9 F
Cryptic crossword #9188
Rating: Moderate
Mon Mar 21 13:35:18 2016
By monk
1
10
11
12
14
13
15
16
18
19
17
20
23
22
24
25
26
Fridays solution
J OK E SM
E
I
H
E N T R E P
R
T
R
S I E S T A
N O
D I S AGR
E
E
N I P I N
A
I
B
T UGBOA
U
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S
R E I NCO
E
C
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DU K E
21
I T H
N
A
B
R E N E U
E
D
C
N E C K
H
D
E
E E D
T
A O A
R OWA N
T
N
D
T S
A S
H
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P
R POR A
O
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D
B U T T E
Last Saturdays solution

L I MB
M E
R I A L
T
L
L A C E
T
A
H E RM
I
T R E E
E
L A N T
L
E
T I ON
G E
RNU T
S T A I N P
W L
O
S I T U A T E
S M B
S H A ND YG
A
A
C E R E A L
L
O
DOOR K NO
Q H G
E URO CO
E
D
H
A NGE L A
T
S
L
S K Y
ROO F
E
N
A
S
D
E N T R E E
T
A
E M
A F F
OB I T
P
T
U
T
E L E C T I ON
R
N
B
A NG L E D
A
N
Y
N F ORM I T Y
A
T
S
A
N I H I L I S T
A
E
I
E
S CR A P E R
Last weeks winners
Judith Brown,
Sheffield, Mr G W
Duthie, Morecambe,
Lancashire; G W
Price, Burton-inLonsdale, Carnforth;
Geoffrey Telfer,
Baildon, West Yorks;
Peter Steggle,
London
Across
8 Threatening players
getting a hole in one (8)
9 Drew extremely unusual
running head for
circulation (6)
10 Victim of roller breaking
part of harbour (6)
11 Focus, say, on backing
Monks freedom (8)
12 Society relieved to
welcome working
veteran (8)
13 Republican figure of
speech rejected in
statement (6)
14 What might provide
incredibly close images
taken by half of TV
crew (10,5)
18 French exchange
students finally getting
into British or French
study of beliefs? (6)
20 Give too much time to
cut excessive demand (8)
23 Tradesman endlessly
encouraged to stop
dad (8)
24 Foreign cheeses
reportedly causing
a little wind (6)
25 A fellow setter coming
back from French idyllic
place (6)
26 A Kennedy in motorcade
takes Ford by surprise?
(8)
SOLUTION TO 9188
Down
1 Almost stagger when
inspiring stale air in
shelter (6)
2 Man perhaps following
clean type of design (4,4)
3 Jewish guys appearing in
Eeny, Meeny, Miny and
Mo (6)
4 Contest wherein one
carries over broadcast
(3-3-5,4)
5 Verbal ornamentation
using thrice or
alternative (8)
6 Bosn initially excited
to enter vessel for fast
race (4-2)
7 Damage tree with
intermittently smashed
up interior (8)
15 Bomber returned
unaccompanied over
camp (5,3)
16 Bust head in tree (8)
17 Naked good to leave
nightwear off (2,3,3)
19 Yank baby from grass
under blanket (3,3)
21 Touring our island,
maybe spruce up old
king (6)
22 Violin teacher busks
regularly to feed bassist
rock chick (6)
The solution to 9188 will be available online on Monday at

independent.co.uk/solutionswinners26March
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word? Use
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63
The prize: Two luxury Hotel Chocolat

Sleeksters, each containing 28 chocolates.
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www.hotelchocolat.com/@hotelchocolat
Prize jumbo general knowledge crossword #358
Prize jumbo
general
knowledge
crossword
winners and
solutions
Will be published
on independent.
co.uk/solutions
winners26March
on Monday 4
April
By eimi
Across
8/21 The fourth book of
the Hitchhikers Guide
to the Galaxy trilogy
by Douglas Adams
(2,4,3,6,3,3,3,4)
12 See 18 Down
13 English singersongwriter whose
albums include Goodbye
Yellow Brick Road (5,4)
14 Franois ___, French
Renaissance writer whose
best known work is
Gargantua
and Pantagruel (8)
15 John ___, British music
publisher, best known
today for his publication
of The English Dancing
Master in 1651 (8)
16 American architect
murdered by millionaire
Harry Kendall Thaw in
1906, leading to a court
case dubbed The Trial of
the Century (8,5)
19 See 33
21 See 8
23 The capital of Venezuela
(7)
27 One of the most famous
songs of the First World
War, written by R P
Weston and Bert Lee (43-2)
29 The founder of The Body
Shop (5,7)
30 Dutch football team
based in Amsterdam (4)
32 Italian equivalent of
Mister (6)
33/19 Orator and statesman
who served as the US
Secretary of State under
presidents William Henry
Harrison, John Tyler and
Millard Fillmore (6,7)
34 Any large brown
seaweed, especially any
species of Laminaria (4)
36 Americas City of
Brotherly Love (12)
38 Massive herbivorous
long-tailed bipedal
dinosaur common in
Jurassic and Cretaceous
times (9)
40 In the New Testament,
a Jewish Christian of
Jerusalem who was struck
dead for lying (7)
41 A hypersensitivity to a
substance that causes
the body to react to any
contact (7)
42 City in Iowa proclaimed
the Video Game Capital
of the World by a 1982
mayoral decree (7)
45 One of the most famous
songs of the Second
World War, written by
Ross Parker and Hughie
Charles, made famous by
Vera Lynn (4,4,5)
48 Michael ___, Scottish
swimmer who won the
mens 200m breaststroke
silver medal at the 2012
Olympics (8)
50 Another name for
Calvary (8)
51 Korean martial art that
became a full medal sport
at the 2000 Olympics (9)
12
10
13
16
20
21
17
30
28
31
32
11
22
23
24
33
34
Bonus Prize
38
40
39
41
42
43
44
46
47
50
51
48
52
49
Name
Address

Daytime contact number
Email address
G
T UR
A
A NG
T
A B
N
F A B
M
L OM
B
MA R
Y
B
D
ME A
S
MA
O
P I T
N
E L
S
53
Down
1 The state capital of New
York (6)
2 A typically graceful bovid
mammal of Africa and
Asia with long legs and
horns (8)
3 Handsome youth in
Greek mythology loved
by Aphrodite (6)
4 US State, nicknamed the
Buckeye State (4)
5 A faint arc of light also
known as a seadog and a
white rainbow (6)
6 French creator of an
eponymous pastis brand
10
11
17
terror of ordinary people

(6)
18/12 British comedy singing
group founded in 1983 by
Dillie Keane (11,4)
20 Native American people
whose chiefs included
Sitting Bull and Crazy
Horse (5)
22 Inheritable disease
characterised by loss
or impairment of the
normal clotting ability
of blood (11)
24 Formula One team
formed by racing driver
Loris Kessel that failed
to qualify for the 1977
Italian Grand Prix (7)
25 See 51
26 Type of fish for which
Eric Praline attempts
to obtain a licence in a
classic Monty Python
sketch (7)
28 Microscopic,
spore-producing
O
C
BOCH A R
O
L
S
E V I N S
N
A
E RGA V E
S
F
E
B R I
T H
J
L
E
E ME S S
R
GA R E T
O A
A D E NWU
S
D
E
S L E S
S
I
E O
N F R I D A
I
E
B U L L T E
O E
T
I Z A B E T
A
D
G
E R
J O
I
E
MP I R E
E
N Y MA
O Y
B UR B S
W E
AGE I N A
D
A
T
MA RCH
I
I
A
R T T EMB
A W
L E E P E R
T
L
S
Y
L I T T
A
O
RR I E R
C
S
I
H
B I L L
N
G
L
E
N
N
I
E
S M B
S E P H I N E
C
I
K
A
O F T H E S U
R
P G
I D S T ON E
A
E W S
L A C E R T
A
T
L
E
BO T T L E
B
L
C
AME R I C A
B
T
E RG RUH
L
O A
E
S
L A HOR
A
D
I
I
L EWOM E N
V
A
E
A U T OMA T
D
E
A
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O F R I GH T
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I
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S
Answer to bonus question

Josephine, Margaret and Elizabeth
are formal names of March sisters
in Little Women
Postcode
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which merged in 1975
with its competitor
Pernod (4,6)
French philosopher,
mathematician and
physicist who developed
the theory of probability
with Fermat (6,6)
Steven ___, US film
director who won Oscars
for Schindlers List and
Saving Private Ryan (9)
Michael ___, British TV
and film director whose
films include The World
Is Not Enough (5)
Name by which Joannie
Taylor is known in The
Catherine Tate Show (3)
Jean-Paul ___, French
philosopher, novelist and
dramatist whose works
include Nausea (6)
Public order offence
consisting of the fighting
of two or more persons
in a public place to the
Spot the Connection

What connects 13 Across, 29 Across
and 53 Across? For a chance to
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revolutionary new low-sugar,
high cocoa #Supermilk, send
your answer to: competitions@
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Solution to Jumbo #357
54
53 U2 member born Paul

Hewson (4)
54 Best-selling
autobiography by Ron
Kovic, adapted into a
1989 film of the same
name starring Tom
Cruise (4,2,3,6,2,4)
Jumbo Crossword 358,

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18
25
27
14
15
19
Jumbo Prize
Crossword winner
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BONUS PRIZE winner
Mrs Pauline A Gough, Malmesbury
31
34
35
37
39
43
structures found on
the hymenophore of
fruiting bodies of fungi
such as mushrooms and
toadstools (7)
Australian tennis player
who won seven Grand
Slam singles titles and an
all-time record 17 doubles
titles (4,8)
A hairy leguminous
climbing plant, Pueraria
thunbergiana, of China
and Japan (5)
Grey mineral that is the
chief source of lead (6)
1956 album by Julie
London whose title track
was written by future
husband Bobby Troup
(6,4)
Small town in Kent, one
of the original Cinque
Ports, but now over a
mile from the sea (3,6)
American author and
journalist whose best-
selling books include The

Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test and The Bonfire of the
Vanities (3,5)
44 Worldwide brand of tools
named after the inventor
of the radial arm saw who
started the company in
1924 (6)
46 Another word for an em
in printing (6)
47 Market town in
Nottinghamshire
on the River Trent (6)
48 In the Old Testament, a
Hebrew prophet who was
swallowed by a great fish
(5)
49 Metallic element whose
atomic number is 68 (6)
51/25 Anton Chekhov play
first performed in 1896
(3,7)
52 Greek god of love whose
Roman counterpart was
Cupid (4)

The Independent - 26 March 2016

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The Independent - 26 March 2016

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ISSUE NO.

SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016

Inside today Four special edition magazines

Unforgettable photographs from our archive IN THE MAGAZ INE

City on the edge: another day of fear in Brussels

Revealed: British connection

a hit ordered by the ex-Libyan

he vehemently denies. The

has lived in London since 1994.

the Saudis, who are controversial allies of Britain in tackling

SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016 THE INDEPENDENT

New generation turned

Queen of Pop has become a

The Thirty Years War

For three decades we have combated hypocrisy, ignorance,

Damage wrought by the

Iraqis step up protests

Why I love working with

Munich takes spring

Hodgson turns to the

The Lib Dems saved the

Other Karadzics are thriving

Life is speeding up. Time to

PLUS Voices 39 Weather 48 Business 49 Games & Puzzles 60 Prize Crossword 63

They were mad to do it reckless, even. As

The clue is in the name

PUBLISHED BY INDEPENDENT PRINT LIMITED

Making friends of heresies

humanity and the precious Earth we inhabit.

Truth not tribe

THE INDEPENDENT SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016

Record for monthly unique

Cost of subscribing to the

This is the most exciting time

the last time you hear this

SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016 THE INDEPENDENT

< Continued from P.1

Scotland Yard which placed

Dear Professor Doctor

tion. A few months later the

revenge following the summit

EX PLAINER ROW THAT

Muammar Gaddafi ordered

Ismael, who fled to Egypt,

THE INDEPENDENT SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT THE MA I N PL AYE R S

assassination plot. Arrested

SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016 THE INDEPENDENT

Muslim murdered hours after Easter message

A devout Muslim shopkeeper

him but he died in hospital.

venience store close to where

Madonnas many incarnations and reinventions have

seen by The Independent

THE INDEPENDENT SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016

Ageism affects applicants

join her in the United States.

her Rebel Heart album. Diplo,

likely to choose those

Teachers turn to alcohol

SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016 THE INDEPENDENT

There but for the grace of God

The first edition

in fact was of a Dutch teammate, Rob Rensenbrink.

When Alan and Gary Keery

range from 2.50 for a small

SATURDAY 26 MARCH 2016 THE INDEPENDENT

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