SUPRIYO CHATTERJEERishi Sunak PM: Karma curry for white Britannia

Supriyo Chatterjee, Tlaxcala, 28/10/2022

Almost two centuries after Thomas Babington Macaulay, perhaps the most eloquent ideologue of the British empire, drafted his vision of crafting “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”, one of his products now governs Britain. This is not without significance, but neither is it a revenge of the peripheral natives on the metropolis. More a triumph of class interests over skin colour on all sides.

Rishi Sunak (or Rashid Sanook, as comedy gold Joe Biden called him) is young, rich, very rich, well-groomed as men of his class are,  and an unapologetic child of the Empire. His grandparents migrated to Africa from Punjab and his parents moved to Britain. In Africa, the Indians were skilled workers and clerks and supervised African labour. They played the part of colonial intermediaries that Macaulay had set out for them, this time in an alien continent.

The Africans largely detested these settler-colonial Indians. Most of them, as Orientalists of colour, followed their colonial masters back to Britain, preferring to face the racism of the white Britons to staying in independent Africa or returning to India. The African Indian contingent, like the Hong Kong Chinese brigade, is ferociously loyal to Britain and believes in the idea of its civilised empire .

Young Sunak, born in Britain, had privileged private education, worked for the financial sector, including at Goldman Sachs, as successful higher-caste Indian yuppies do since it does not involve manual labout and married the daughter of an Indian billionaire. Most of the Sunak family wealth comes from his wife's side, but now she gets to live in Downing Street, a privilege money can buy if cleverly invested.

As a loyal child of the empire, Sunak's political home is the Conservative Party where they believe in Thatcher's motto of greed is good. He is the richest member of Parliament, twice as rich as King Charles, and there are whispers that he has put away money in offshore bank accounts. His wife was found to be avoiding taxes in Britain and he was fined for violating Covid norms. In short, there can be no questions of his impeccable credentials for the party of law and order.

Sunak is an accidental Prime Minister. He has been in parliament for only seven years. As Chancellor during the Covid lockdown, his handling of the economy was somewhere between poor and disastrous. He was lucky that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss both stumbled in their jobs.  The opposition Labour Party has purged its Socialist wing and recast itself as an establishment B team. Brexit has radicalised the Conservative rank and file, so Sunak had to be appointed rather than elected by party members, who had have voted Boris in again.

Sunak's opponents withdrew from the race without saying why or who had persuaded them to and the men in the shadows annointed Sunak as their man. The British version of the deep state saw in him a safe pair of hands, their best bet in a mediocre field. Sunak is not the first ethnic Indian head of government in Europe: Ireland and Portugal have had them before. His position as a British Prime Minister of colour is nevertheless a novelty. Macaulay might have been a visionary, but it is difficult to believe that even he would have predicted that the British ruling class would one day need a “learned native” to keep the white population in check. Worse, Enoch Powell's threat of  rivers of blood has been reduced to a foaming torrent of tasteless curry.

 

 

 

SUPRIYO CHATTERJEEMediocre clowns ruin British political circus

, 27/7/2022

Supriyo Chatterjee, a post-graduate in Political Science from the University of Kolkata (Calcutta), worked as a journalist with a leading English-language newspaper in India before coming to the U.K. He is now a freelance writer who translates from and to Spanish. He has been published in various websites. Author of the book Blowback: Chavez, Oil and Revolution in Venezuela (The Glocal Workshop, 2022)

First came the scorching Indian summer as the temperature breached 40^oC in England. And in the summer haze appeared a seriously rich ethnic Indian who wants to be the next Prime Minister. Be as it may, he will probably be defeated by a home-grown Margaret Thatcher clone as dull and dreary as the regular English sky. In perfidious Albion, roast beef could still trump chicken tikka.

Boris (the malevolent clown) Johnson survived the scandal of breaking Covid rules he had imposed on others only to be taken down by the sexual escapade of one of his closest political enforcers. As Jose Steinsleger has observed, the end of Conservative governments in the United Kingdom is usually heralded  by the comet of a sex scandal. All the ministers who abandoned Boris at the very end, when it was clear that he had become a liability for the party, knew from the beginning that their boss, like them, was never hindered by ethics or personal morals. Nevertheless, they acted out their rehearsed surprise and outrage in television appearances and newspaper interviews. The ritual morality play, which everyone knows is as false as a Christmas pantomime, serves as an invisibility cloak for striking deals during a change of guard.

Rishi Sunak, whose Indian parents came to Britain from Africa, faces Liz Truss in the Conservative Party leadership race. Both are Oxford educated, both started their working life in the corporate world, both are millionaires, and both are Thatcherite believers in low taxes, a small state, privatisation of public assets, foreign military adventures and as little human rights and political freedoms at home as possible. In Sunak's case, his Indian wife, a billionaire's daughter and fabulously wealthy in her own right, does not even pay taxes in Britain. The couple are on the Sunday Times Rich List. Liz Truss, who has grown richer every year she has been in politics, thinks there is unacceptable envy of wealth in Britain. The glue that holds the ruling Conservative Party together is no longer so much white privilege as the worship of big money.

As with the economy, the two candidates appear equally blindfolded on Britain's place in the world. If Lizzie snorts that she will bring Russia and Putin to heel on Ukraine, Rishi exhales fire against China and the CPC, threatening to show them their place. All this with an army at their command that fits into a football stadium. Liz Truss has a particular talent for words: she will not rest till she makes British apple the top of the tree; with the Chinese she will wag her fingers and talk big on pig. She delivers these lines with a fierce scowl, pauses for the briefest of moments which still feels far too long, and then a thin crooked smile breaks out as she glances anxiously at the audience for applause which never comes. Sunak is smarter, but the voters are 160,000 or so Tory members, mostly old, almost all white, all Little Englanders whatever the colour of their skin and all comfortably off. Will Liz Truss actually get their vote because she is white and properly English, even if the Establishment is furiously telling them to vote Sunak because he's less dumb? We'll never know and who will ever admit to it?

JORGE MAJFUDBy sea and by air, and nothing more20 years since the only 9/11 that matters

Jorge Majfud, 6/9/2021
Translated by Andy Barton, Tlaxcala

Tony Blair, the former UK prime minister, has gone and done it again. In a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001, he insisted that “we need some ‘boots on the ground’” to fight against terrorism. Of course, this terrorism did not come out of nowhere; rather, it emerged from the historic interventions of the UK and USAmerica, and more recently, from the CIA’s funding of the Mujahadeen (which gave rise to Osama bin Laden and the founding members of the Taliban).

We will not go over those details now. However, this would be a good opportunity to remind the famous former prime minister of a few lessons from history. The same warning goes for Blair and all the other leaders who would qualify as war criminals were they not in charge of the world’s leading powers. London and Washington have only ever had a chance at success when unloading tonnes of bombs over “islands of Blacks” (as the beginning of the 20th century taught us); over “yellow villages” in the mid-20th century; over “communist hotbeds” decades after, and finally, over “caves of terrorists” at the beginning of the 21st century.

Eray Özbek, Turkey

When the British put boots on the ground in Argentina and Uruguay, things did not go well. They had better luck with their banks (generating internal conflicts with their fake news) than with their soldiers. Whenever they put boots on the ground, it did not at all go well. Neither did it go well for their proverbial sons and daughters, the protestant fanatics in Washington, although the latter always knew how to market themselves well, which is one thing they most certainly are: good salespeople.

Statement by Spokespersons of the Foreign Ministries of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom on Har Homa settlement in occupied West Bank

 Source

We urge the Government of Israel to reverse its decision to advance the construction of 540 settlement units in the Har Homa E area of the occupied West Bank, and to cease its policy of settlement expansion across the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Settlements are illegal under international law, and threaten prospects for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If implemented, the decision to advance settlements in Har Homa, between East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, will cause further damage to the prospects for a viable Palestinian State, with Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and a Palestinian State. This move, alongside settlement advancement in Givat HaMatos and continued evictions in East Jerusalem, including in Sheikh Jarrah, also undermines efforts to rebuild trust between the parties, following the positive resumption of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.

We call on both sides to refrain from any unilateral action and resume a credible and meaningful dialogue, to advance efforts for the two state solution and an end to the conflict.