Sunday Posts

So the date is near and the signs are unmistakable. House sales have stagnated along with house prices. The Sterling is forever stuck in a zone of weakness. Shoppers are staying home. Supermarket shelves are showing the inflation and the Bank of England is trying hard not to see it. Unemployment is at an all-time low and too many shops are displaying 'Now Hiring' signs on the door, but none of that looks like good news. Though everyone has gone on holiday, and newspapers are living off the anti-semitism of Corbyn and Islamophobia of Boris Johnson, this is a summer of waiting in Britain: The Brexit curtain is about to - and inevitably - fall soon. But there are people in Britain for whom this is a summer of hope. For Theresa May, who loves the limbo, and indeed is its creator, knows that this is the best state to live in. For the two people who would want to see her gone, it is a time for optimism: For Boris Johnson, this would be the time to be unhinged and get back to em...

There are two reasons why I am writing this post, which is really a retake of an earlier post - Should Britain Apologise? - which I recently shared on Social Media.  The first is that there is a renewal of this debate. The recent political twists and turns - Brexit and emergence of Hindu Nationalist India most importantly - have brought the question of British imperial folly to the forefront, engaged in animated debates and denials ( see here ). The second is a renewal of interest in history itself, made possible by the deliberate wrecking of the Post-War world system by Conservatives in America and Britain. After being presumed dead, history has been regularly invoked in claims, particularly by British and American politicians who are good at pointing follies of other nations. Hollywood made a film about Holocaust denial, though the question of American imperialism in the Pacific was never deemed worthy of retelling. The British Secretary of International Trade, Dr Liam...

Or, 20 days that shook Britain, one could say! With the Prime Minister moving out, and the most xenophobic and incompetent Minister of his Cabinet earning the job by an astonishing double-default - first failing to campaign for the side she was backing and then by a House-of-Cards show with her potential challengers killing each other off - this is surely an extra-ordinary time. If only this was all! Across the aisle, Labour MPs have set themselves up for a farce, as a befitting aftermath of the tragedy of Brexit. They first bring a 'no confidence' motion on their leader, ignoring one of the most crucial distinction - that Labour leader is chosen by the party members and not the MPs - between Labour and the Tory party. Then, they try to trigger a 'leadership challenge' and keep the current leader off the ballot, with an extra-ordinary excuse that this leader fails to connect with Labour voters and therefore, if he is on the ballot, he may win! In all, Brit...

If Marx missed the mark with the Proletariat achieving a deep political consciousness, he was prescient about how history happens: First as a tragedy, then as a farce! So, the recent history of Britain, recent as in the space of an week, is this spectacle in fast forward. Since an overall, though slender, majority voted to force the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, the political news has become sexy again. It would have been comical if the consequences were not so far reaching: Declaration of UK's independence (as John Oliver rightly puts it - the United Kingdom was an independent country before last week, and in fact lots of countries celebrate their independence from IT!), sudden volte face about taking the real legal step to start the process of leaving EU on both sides of the divide, the abnadoned promises as soon as the vote count is over and all the accompanying political fatricide, we have now seen it all.  But, apart from all the fast-developing stories...

Evocation of Hamlet is intended: The choice Britain faces on 23rd June needs deliberation of a solemn kind, involves an existential question and yet, not acting and letting evil carry the day will be a tragedy. Hence, despite my reluctance to add to what has been a nasty and misleading debate on both sides, I have to write this post. At the outset, perhaps it is best to show my hand and declare that I will be voting to remain. This is not because the calculations of the Remain side has convinced me: Rather, It is a matter of principle, as I see Britain as an open country engaged with the rest of the world, and not a xenophobic little island trying to hide behind the seas. This, for me, is a matter of British identity, and pride, that its strength came from engagement with the world and shaping, for good or worse, its affairs. At the core, Britain is also an European country, as it has always been, with all the Saxon enterprise and Norman heritage making the country what it is, always i...

Of the life's two great certainties - death and taxes - we have not been doing very well with the latter. For an increasingly squeezed Middle Classes, facing declining real income, uncertain job prospects, costlier health-care and education and the very real possibility of never being able to retire, the fact that the rich does not pay much taxes may occasionally shock, but not paying taxes has indeed become one of the key signals of being rich. The newest metaphor of business - the cloud - is not just about technology, but of de-materialisation of taxes too. Obscure as it may be, the fate of taxes, and its consequence, may be one of the best ways to understand the global economy. Consider the two seemingly opposite conversations trending in the news in the last few weeks. One is that the Indian cabinet is considering imposition of a 'Google Tax', or, more correctly, an 'Equalisation Levy', an uniform charge on revenues made in India for all corporations not h...

Or should I say Lost Labour? Labour loses, Ed Miliband blames the surge of nationalism. All that is predictable. David Cameron and Tories warned that Labour will benefit from a divided country. It is they who obviously are the great beneficiaries. That too is predictable. Conservatives, everywhere, are the parties of fear. They gain from uncertainty. But what about the loss? Is there a lesson in it more than just a shrugging acknowledgement of surge of nationalism, and an unspoken belief that all this is temporary?  The point missed, I believe, is that the Centrist politics is bunk. People want the political parties to stand for something. It is easier to be crafty and get away with rhetoric when you are playing on fear, as do the Tories, because our fears are almost always of unknown. It is harder if you are trying to give people hope, because we want our hopes to be certain, visible.  The problem of New Labour is just that. Their new politics is about b...

Speechwriters never get the credit they deserve, but they have changed the course of history more than once. The metaphor of an 'iron curtain' or the uncertain promise of a 'tryst with destiny' etched in people's minds a concept that would become permanent by the power of imagery, even if the reality may have suggested otherwise. Fast forward to the society of ours where sound bites and TRP points trump any real experience, the speech writers are enjoying unprecedented powers to change destinies of nations: This comes with a huge responsibility that most are not even aware of.  So, for the future speechwriters, following the case of the person who would have made the Leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, David Cameron, promise to bring down immigration to 'tens of thousands' might be beneficial. Exploiting the resentment about immigration when an open-door policy had resulted in a surge of migration to Britain and the economy had just turned sou...

The earthquake in British Politics is here and UKIP has indeed become the lion that roared, at least once.  Though the party spokeswoman, Suzanne Evans, tried hard to distance UKIP from the 'extremist' parties, such as National Front of Marine Le Pen in France, their anti-immigration rhetoric did it for them. This may be either be about plain nastiness or calculated cynicism, but UKIP's earthquake is all about shifting the political tectonic plate to an extreme position, or soon will be. This is a point worth pondering about. UKIP isn't the same as the English Defence League, and it has no record of violence. Led by its showman leader, who employs the typical city bluster to make mountains out of everything, it is perhaps even slightly comical, but an usual political party. But its opportunistic rhetoric, shaped by suave thoughts about political positioning, tries to play on people's fears, their aversion of globalisation, their discomfort of breaking of c...

There is talk of reviving the commonwealth, particularly among the British Tories, as they drift away from Europe. William Hague talks about putting the C back in FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and various advantages of doing business with commonwealth countries are mused about. There are sceptics, such as The Economist, who highlights the various roadblocks, and particularly laments that various commonwealth members are not compliant followers of the British, or Western, view of the world. [Read the article here ] The point, however, is not whether commonwealth is relevant from the point of view of Britain, but from its other members, particularly the old colonies. Unlike what the modern British citizens would like to believe (and a comment to that effect was made on The Economist article), Commonwealth was set up much before the liquidation of colonies, and not to assuage the post-colonial 'guilt'. Commonwealth was extended, after India's independence, with mo...

We are all consumers now. That's the mantra of the market: You are what you consume! And, we consume everything. The new keyword of our age is 'Taxpayers' money': It is not just the newspapers, but even the politicians, whose primary task is to squander it, use the term. The greatest public service we can all do is to buy stuff - as we are told by various pundits on TV shows - and not buying will mean recession and job losses. Our identities are shaped by brands we wear, indeed we shape our identities around the brands we wear - that's how the things are.  This is everywhere. The fastest growing nation, not a 'city', is Facebook. Such notions just come to us naturally: Nations are just a community which one can join and leave at will. Most people believe that nations don't matter anymore: Budgets and other pompous exercises have lost their magic. When in college, I listened to budget speeches and then went to hear various experts speaking about it i...

David Cameron is now enjoying a bit of a popularity wave at home because of his veto on an EU-wide agreement on deeper fiscal union between the Euro countries. English press is trying to project this as a Cameron versus Sarkozy game, and quite explicitly equating Sarkozy, who isn't a very tall man, with Napoleon, the other French who had a poor opinion about the Brits. The British public feels good about staring down the French, and sees this as cheap politicking by nasty Sarkozy, which has put our dear David into a corner. In a sense, Cameron's articulation skills may have saved him one more time. However, while it is easy to mistake articulation for achievement, the drift away from Europe, which is now manifesting itself into cross-channel rivalry yet again, is a disaster for Britain. For a start, we don't live in the age of Napoleon, and a global financial crisis is indeed gathering momentum. Once this happens, it will indeed spare no one. What Cameron has effectively ...

We have been here before, we are at it again. Edmund Burke should stand corrected: However much one reads history, one is doomed to repeat it. The Great Depression was caused by financial excesses followed by protectionism and government inaction: The next one, which is looming around the corner, will be exactly the same.  David Cameron saved his job, for the moment. He, who wanted to be the hero, walked out of an Europe-wide deal to save the Euro. By doing so, he showed not just the 'bulldog spirit' that he was to show, but 'bulldog brain', but then bulldogs may be offended. He sunk into protectionism, a sort of desperate politics to keep some of his loony backbenchers and out-of-touch colleagues pleased. And, by doing so, he risked two things: First, if the Euro ends up collapsing, a long and potentially bloody depression all over the world; and, second, if the Eurozone countries manage to pull together, a final setting of sun of any British influence over the wo...

BBC Wales claims that they have discovered that students can buy their University of Wales degree. They ran the documentary last Wednesday in their Week In Week Out programme on BBC Wales, claiming that students can just pay their way through. In the programme, the reporter made many bold comments, and claimed that Wales' national institution has brought the entire nation, presumably Welsh nation, to shame. BBC was fortunate in its timing, as they broke the story just as a new Vice Chancellor was starting at the university. He was apparently unprepared for such a breaking news, and when confronted with the claims made by the reporter, he immediately ordered that University of Wales will stop validating other colleges' programmes, as it did earlier. His stance looked like the admission of defeat even before a single shot was fired. Admittedly, this may have come not prompted by the BBC documentary at all, but from soul-searching and other usual stuff that happens when new Vice...

British Higher Education is set to change beyond recognition in 2012, not just in terms of rising student fees, but also in terms of the structure and offering of the sector. It is fair to argue that as the country moves from public funding of higher education to a tuition fee led provision, one inescapable consequence is to broaden the scope of participation of the private sector Higher Education. This, despite the resistance from the certain sections of the academic community, is already accepted as a policy direction and new players are set to position themselves to gain a share of the newly opened up market. This is also a time when what constituted British For-Profit Education industry is at a crisis. The government has introduced significant changes in the student visa regime, limiting the access and the privileges that the Non-EU students had to education in Britain. Introduced with a clearly protective slant, these policies are designed to be temporary,...

London has been burning, quite literally, for the last few days. A mob took over its roads and attacked its shops and people. Police, stretched thin across the city, rushed from place to place, ineffective in the face of the new generation rioting coordinated on Twitter. Fire Services, struggling with a number of major fires in the city and the suburbs, were out-manned and out-witted. Politicians, London's Mayor and Britain's Prime Minister among them, had to cancel holidays and fly back to London. Strange images of burning houses and littered streets emerged in the world media. The usual bliss of London life disappeared: An unusual unease reigned. This may turn out to be an inflection point of sorts in history. The riots are unexpected, because this was not prompted, despite what was initially claimed, by anger of a particular community. Yes, this started from the shooting an armed black young man in North London, but the violence elsewhere was crowd-driven, coordinated thr...

The economic crisis, that we lived with for the last few years, is finally changing the intellectual landscape: After years of conformity, radicalism is again back in fashion. It is no longer daft not to be at the centre, no longer funny to believe in some sort of world's end theorem - grand narratives are back in fashion. Is this a neo -modern turn then, in our history? The post-modern thinking, the grand narrative that established the absence of grand narratives, robbed us of beliefs to live for. The fragmentation of working class - every man as an island bounded by mortgage - was complemented by a theory of doing so. The pursuit of happiness, the grand narrative that it is possible to be happy by winning a lottery ticket, took over the mantle of the struggle for rights that the earlier generations waged. Indeed, there was nothing to fight for. The shopping malls were there, the bewildering choice of objects as a proof of existence of happiness: The TV laid out the perfect life a...

The Economist explores the two sides of David Cameron's leadership: He is self-assured and confident in the matters of High Politics (read, making speeches), but radar-less and weak when faced with the raw politics of mass fury and indignation. Examples abound: His approach to the crisis in Libya and war in Afghanistan is markedly dissimilar to his handling of NHS reform and now, the News of The World saga. It is possibly easy to see why. David Cameron is a showman rather than a politician. His skills of communication, something akin to Tony Blair and far ahead of Gordon Brown, hides an important weakness: He is indeed out of touch. His government has so far done a good job painting a grim picture of economic crisis and unveiling the Welfare State under the cover, but the success of this depended more on 'selling' the story to gullible public than taking thoughtful action. The great flaw in Cameron's governance style is that his publicist instincts make him follow th...

So, shutters down at the News of The World, and welcome, probably, to Sun on Sunday. It is not just the saddest moment of British journalism, a trade that sustained the world's oldest surviving democracy and helped, I shall argue, to make the case for free speech all over the world. It is an epiphany about what happens when a trade, a profession loses its purpose, and becomes a tool of production of profit and power. Lessons have to be learned, not just by the Murdoch mafia and their cronies, but by the man on the street perhaps: That the freedoms we take for granted are hard-earned and must be protected every day, and such. But, first the bad news. News of the World paints an astonishing picture of a business at its worst, when responsibility was thrown out of the window in pursuit of profit and power, and little people, sadly and cynically engaged in keeping their jobs, carried out heinous crimes, no less serious and offensive than sex abuses and murders they reported, at the be...

A Great British Institution This essay is about the creation of The Open University [OU]. Bill Bryson, an American living in England, lists OU among the great, uniquely British contributions to the World, along with William Shakespeare, Christopher Wren, Chocolate Digestive biscuits and Pork Pies (Bryson, 1996). David L Kirp, a modern American commentator on Higher Education, compares the founding of OU with the opening of the land grant universities in the United States a century earlier, as “both developments provided serious and sustained learning opportunities for large number of people for whom Higher Education had never previously been available”. He also concedes, quoting Walter Perry, the first Vice Chancellor of the OU, that of the two events, OU’s story was more remarkable, as the land grant schools “took at least seventy five years to achieve a fully established place in the American society, while [OU] had to be brought into full-scale operation almost instantaneo...