I am Simon Kerrigan

There can be few arenas more intimidating for a young cricketer to start their international career than the Oval in Kennington. The ground has been home to generations of Surrey cricketers since the early years of Queen Victoria's reign. In that time, it has been host to the first international cricket match in England, the first ever FA Cup Final, and a battery of anti-aircraft guns during World War II. The giant four-tiered pavilion looms over the strip and will be chock-full for every moment of the final Ashes test of the summer.

The huge crowds seen this summer are a far cry from the patchy attendances that mark the midweek games in Division 2 of the County Championship. It's in those low-impact surroundings that Simon Kerrigan has built a reputation for taking wickets under the radar.

In his breakthrough season, Kerrigan came from nowhere to take 5 for 7 on a disintegrating surface in the Midlands, and then topped it with a match-winning 9 for 51 against Hampshire at the end of 2011. However, as Kerrigan learned so cruelly this week, it's one thing to face down county players on helpful surfaces, and another entirely to step into an Ashes series that has seen more tension off the pitch than on it.

Kerrigan was presented with his first test cap by English cricket's most successful test bowler, Ian Botham, and waited patiently for his chance. Finally, Cook tossed him a buffed cherry and the torture began.

A succession of floating invitations were cruelly dispatched by Australia's Shane Watson, a man who is himself seen as something of an underachiever at the crease. However, in this match, he was finding the middle of the blade with everything. Kerrigan tried to vary his delivery, but Watson read him at every turn and creamed him repeatedly to the boundery rope. The nadir of a torrid day for the young left-armer came when he was no-balled for a neck-high full toss at eventual centurion Steve Smith. Predictably, that ball too ended up being smashed away for four.

Kerrigan's figures (8-0-53-0) might have been more reminiscent of Twenty-20 stats than a test debut, but he is known for being a resilient character. He bit back the frustration he must have felt, prowled the boundary rope fruitlessly for the remainder of the day and would have told himself that the next day would be better.

Except it wasn't. While Australia went on to score nearly 500 runs, Kerrigan was overlooked for the skiddy part-time medium pace of batsman Jonathan Trott, who then piled on the agony for the young spinner by taking the wicket that he couldn't. In the commentary after the game, Geoffrey Boycott remarked that if he'd got out to Kerrigan, he would have set himself up a noose in the dressing room.

If there is something positive for the young spinner to take away from this game, it is that you only get one debut, and not all stages will be as prominent as this one. Other illustrious names, such as Shane Warne, took time to bed in at international level before going on to become legends of the game. At just 24 years old, there is plenty of time for Kerrigan to make a name for himself with England.

Most of all, I feel for him today. Which of us hasn't started something new and been embarrassingly poor at it, or proven to be talented at something in low-pressure surroundings only to choke when we are suddenly the centre of attention? I know only too well how awful it feels to fail to deliver under pressure. It takes strength of character to bounce back and prove your doubters wrong; I really hope that Kerrigan will do exactly that.

So I'm looking forward to a moment in the not too distant future when I see a young English spinner uproot the middle stump of a world class batsman. When he does, I'll smile, because I know he's taking that journey for me too.

The £10m Gesture

I have to admit, I've never met a banker socially, but I like to think that despite their current position as collective national pariahs and convenient scapegoat for neoliberal politics, bankers are human somewhere. I watched Stephen Hester at Royal Bank of Scotland reluctantly forego millions of pounds in bonuses with a degree of grim satisfaction but while seeing Fred 'the Shred' Goodwin stripped of his knighthood is mildly amusing, seeing him occupying press columns next to luminaries who have suffered a similar fate - Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceasescu are two prominent ones - is slightly disturbing. Odious they may be, and indirectly responsible for much misery, but bankers are not in the same category as those responsible for genocide.

So put yourself in a banker's shoes - do you take the bonus, or not? I serve the public and so in my current role, bonuses are not an option. If they were, I would snap them off at the wrist. But then, I don't receive a six-figure salary offered, so maybe I would feel differently if I did. I'm tempted to suggest that enough is now enough - the triumphalism surrounding the humbling of individual bankers sickens me as much as the bankers themselves, and I feel the time has come to stop focusing on individuals and start dismantling the culture that surrounds executive pay in this country.

Fortunately, there are still others out there who very much believe in sharing the wealth, and Australian transport tycoon Ken Grenda is clearly one of those.

Mr Grenda sold his bus company to rival outfit Ventura this week for an unspecified sum. Immediately following the sale, the company announced that its employees would each receive a share of the proceeds based on length of service. According to the Australian news outlet Herald Sun, the total sum of payouts is worth £10 million, with some individual payments worth over £100,000.

So here's an idea that would put the cat among the media pigeons - rather than shelling out £2m to Stephen Hester, who clearly won't be losing sleep over it - how about dispensing it instead to the low-paid employees at RBS, where it might actually go to use stimulating our economy?

My Message to the 1%...

I'm struggling a bit this week, used as I am to my daily diet of Facebook, blogs and tweets from UKUncut about whichever Vodafone branch they have occupied today. My beautiful desktop computer, which is without doubt my closest friend bar none, failed me on Monday this week when the hard drive pitched out and I am now surviving by borrowing laptops for an hour here and there and licking batteries whenever I get bored - which is often.

On my rare forays onto the internet, there is a Facebook group I have seen this week which has made me sad. It is titled as follows: "Doesn't make sense does it?? Homeless go without eating. Elderly go without needed medicines. Mentally ill go without treatment. Troops go without proper equipment. Veterans go without the benefits they were promised. Yet we donate billions to other countries before helping our own first. 1% will re-post and 99% wont. Have... the guts to re-post this. I KNOW I'm in the 1%"

Now, there are a whole host of reasons why this upsets me. I'm going to go through them quickly, because I could rant about this for days, but here goes. Firstly, homeless people may go without eating, but primarily they go without a home. This is a simple inequality and true frustration should be aimed at people who have obtained obscene wealth and multiple homes through self-interest and duplicitous behaviour. Alternatively, you could pick on foreign aid organisations, who are only wasting money on such worthless projects as supplying clean water to fellow human beings. Choose the targets of your anger carefully.

Secondly, elderly people generally don't go without much needed medicines - in fact, quite the opposite. Many are abandoned in uncaring residential homes and medicated as an alternative to being socially stimulated. They are also given antibiotics by the bucketload that they simply don't need - this is why we have superbugs such as MRSA popping up in our hospitals. If you really care about the elderly, do something positive and write to your MP and David Cameron and demand that they increase spending in real terms on the NHS and social care. Believe me, this is a cause that really needs your support. Now, I'll be truly amazed if the '1% who post this message' actually strive to do something constructive.

The mentally-ill do sometimes go without treatment, it's true, but the argument for the increase in real-terms NHS-funding covers this as well, so I'm satisfied that we're all reading from the same hymnsheet. Let's move onto soldiers.

I struggle to see why the UK needs a standing army. We have no resources worth seizing and no enemies who would regard invasion as worth the effort. We continue to kid ourselves that the UK has a role to play in policing the world's fragile democracies, with the irony being that the money we waste on sending young men to be pointlessly killed would be far better spent on social projects to help those in need, increasing our diplomatic standing with the countries in question. Every pound we spend on trying to secure a supply of oil for the next decade could surely be better spent on developing alternative energy sources that could free us from our dependence on the whims of other countries.

This does not change the fact that our soldiers should expect high-quality equipment. However, the UK is no longer a major military player on the world stage, and with the stakes so high, intelligent youngsters considering joining the army should wonder if the country really has their best interests at heart.

This leads me onto the final point I would like to make - the group does not offer any mathematical basis for removing foreign aid. Billions of pounds were indeed spent on foreign aid last year - six billion, in fact. Consider the fact that the UK spends over £700 billion every year - and somehow found £800 billion more to bail out the banking system.

In the context of the world at large, will the six billion we spent on foreign aid last year make any difference? This does not even consider the ridiculous sums the UK makes from third world countries, providing loans and receiving debt interest through the World Bank and IMF, and without considering the social consequences thereof. Haiti is still suffering from the after-effects of the devastating earthquake there last year. Australia, Brazil and Sri Lanka have suffered hundreds of deaths due to flooding in the past few weeks alone. Are we truly saying that we are happy to spend £800 billion on compensating for the auspices of the world's wealthiest and least-deserving, but that we begrudge the £6 billion we give to the entire rest of the human race? Because if we are, we should truly be ashamed.

Cameron's Glass is Half-Empty

I must begin this post with a simple acknowledgement: there has been so much to write about this week and I have been lapse. Large swathes of Australia, Sri Lanka and Brazil are underwater thanks to flash flooding, with hundreds of lives being lost and entire communities disappearing into the swell. In Tunisia, discontent among the population, inflamed by politically-motivated violence, has seen the loss of many lives and the fall of the government. These are the things that International Officers should write about. The outcome of the Oldham and Saddleworth by-election looks a little unimportant in comparison.

My mind is stuck firmly in the domestic however, as both Red Ed and David Macaroon have put the boot firmly into trade unions this week. Ed Miliband (who, lets not forget, is only in his current role thanks to trade union support) has said that he is 'appalled' at the idea of strikes upsetting the Royal Wedding celebrations. Implicit within that comment is the suggestion that he is happy for downtrodden workers to continue to be treated appallingly by uncaring employers as long as one of the richest institutions in Britain is allowed to continue its activities unimpeded. But enough of Ed, who is a dull, uninspiring and hopefully short-lived alternative to our current unpalatable coalition leaders.

More intriguingly, David Cameron has indicated that he would like to change the law making it even harder for unions to take strike action. The prime minister has suggested he could look at the law on industrial action, amid calls for strike ballots to be unlawful if under half of a union's membership takes part.

There is a mischievous, nay evil, part of me that thinks maybe this wouldn't be so bad. It might make currently disaffected workers more militant, make complacent union officials work harder and generally inspire more activity than it suppresses. But it is still an attack on trade union institutions, and it is worth drawing a parallel with our current democratic process.

In that same Oldham and Saddleworth by-election mentioned earlier, the turnout was 48%, a huge reduction from the last time it was polled. I suspect this has a lot to do with local people becoming disenfranchised from the tie-wearing, public-school toffs who claim to represent them in government. The political parties cited 'rain' as being the reason behind the reduction. Seriously? Do they even live in the same climate as the rest of the UK?

The keen-eyed observer will note that 48% by-election turnout is below the minimum-required 50% turnout that a trade union ballot would need to be legal under the proposed changes. If we take Cameron's suggestion to its logical conclusion, why not make the outcome of the by-election illegal too? Local voters are clearly too disaffected to desire any involvement in our democracy or be able to make reasoned decisions about who should represent them. It would be a deserving punishment for failing to engage with any of the increasingly homogenous cardboard cut-outs that pass for political leaders in the modern UK.

Or maybe the rain is to blame for that, too.