EU Referendum


Politics: of left and right


16/05/2021




It is easy to tell the difference between a spontaneous demonstration and one which is highly organised, pursuing a defined political agenda. All one has to do it look at the banners and placards.

The former tends to have few placards and often even fewer banners. Those we do see tend to be crude, with many hand-written. Very few are the same. In the latter case, the banners and placards are most often professionally produced, colour co-ordinated and with printed lettering, straight off the press. Many have identical slogans and there are many more of them.

It is no great task, therefore, to guess that Saturday's pro-Palestinian demonstration in London was planned and highly organised (pictured). And nor was it hard to work out that this was the work of left-orientated groups, supported by elements of the Labour Party and the unions.

The pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli rhetoric very easily takes on an antisemitic tint, cloaked in the threadbare guise of anti-Zionism which typifies the modern Left. This also translates into pro-Moslem and pro-immigration sentiment, and extends, almost by proxy, to supporting Pakistan, and its position on Kashmir.

While not quite so overt, this actually puts the Right – as represented by the Conservative Party – on the other side of the divide, more supportive of India. And where there is a religious divide, the Tories lean towards the Hindu faith, albeit trying to keep a foot in both camps in order to garner Moslem votes.

Nevertheless, there is evidence in the UK of national politics beginning to polarise more firmly on Moslem/Hindu lines, with Labour making a pitch for the Moslems while the Tories increasingly regard voters of Indian origin as their own.

This I picked up in two pieces during the 2019 general election campaign, in this one and, particularly, this, where I openly suggested that the Labour and Tory leaders – Corbyn and Johnson – were playing the race card.

In the case of the Conservatives, I pointed to a piece in the Times of India which suggested that the British Indian vote "could swing up to 40 seats and affect the outcome of the election".

At that time, the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP) was for the first time in its history extending open support to the Conservatives, having identified 48 Labour-Conservative marginal seats as potential targets for the Indian electorate.

OFBJP UK president, Kuldeep Singh Shekhawat, gave three reasons for extending support to the Tories. Firstly, some Labour MPs had joined the violent protests outside India House on 15 August and 3 September 2019, over the Indian action in revoking part of the constitution in Indian occupied Kashmir and Jammu.

Secondly, no Labour MPs spoke in favour of India in the House of Commons on Kashmir, and thirdly because of a Labour motion on Kashmir passed at their party conference. This prompted first Sky News and then The Times to comment on the issue, the latter remarking that "Labour’s Kashmir stance drives Indians into arms of Tories". The paper noted that an estimated 900,000 Hindu and Sikh voters of British-Indian origin could play a "decisive role" in the coming election.

In fact, there are estimated to be about 1.5 million voters of Indian origin in the UK, against about 1.1 million mainly Moslem Pakistanis, of which one million hail from the Mirpur region in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. And given that these groups tend to aggregate in specific areas, with very little integration, their block votes give these ethnic groups disproportionate electoral power.

To an extent, this might explain the extraordinary actions of prime minister Johnson, where The Sunday Times is reporting that he allowed into the UK at least 20,000 passengers from the Indian sub-continent, who could have been infected with a virulent strain of Covid-19, after he delayed imposing a travel ban from India.

So far, attempts to explain Johnson's actions have focused on whether the prime minister delayed putting India on the red list because he was hoping to fly to Delhi on 25 April to discuss a post-Brexit trade deal with India's prime minister, Narendra Modi.

It is possibly instructive though that Pakistan and Bangladesh were both put on the red list on 2 April, a measure that came into force on 9 April. Only on 19 April was 19 Johnson was forced to cancel the trip and India was put on the red list, giving travellers from India four days to get home, with the listing coming into force on 23 April.

To support the Modi/trade deal thesis, the ST cites an anonymous source who attended a Whitehall war gaming exercise last Thursday. This source tells the newspaper: "It's very clear that we should have closed the border to India earlier and that Boris did not do so because he didn't want to offend Modi".

Whether or not that is true, we will probably never know. Predictably, Downing Street denies that relations with India played any role in the red list decision. And a government spokesman has points out that there are three strains of the virus from India, now dubbed "Vindaflu", and that the one now dominant was identified as a concern only six days after India was put on the red list.

That is a somewhat specious argument as the variants were identified a month earlier and linked with the explosion of Covid cases in India. This is borne out by the Sunday Telegraph which has a piece headlined: "How three days of inaction let the Indian variant take hold of Britain".

It points out that "alarming reports" of the spread of a new highly infectious variant of Covid on the Indian subcontinent first emerged early last month, when the government acted by adding Pakistan and Bangladesh – India's direct neighbours – to its "red list" on 2 April, barring foreign travellers and forcing 10-day hotel quarantines on returning UK citizens.

This decision, we are told, led to concerns among epidemiologists, who questioned why India was not included, especially as UK health officials had started to detect an increase in the arrival of Covid cases from India. Public Health England (PHE) data now show that of the 3,345 people arriving from India between 25 March and 7 April, 4.8 percent tested positive, compared to 0.1 percent of people in England.

Then, contrary to government claims, PHE was quite early in detecting the arrival of three Indian variants around the UK. The most worrying of these, B1.617.2, was initially detected in tests carried out on travellers arriving from India during the week ending 29 March. According to PHE, at least 122 passengers arriving from Delhi and Mumbai between late March and April 26 were carrying this "variant of concern".

So the story continues, much on the lines of the report by The Sunday Times. With India not on the "red list", all but a handful of the travellers would have been allowed to leave the airport and travel home, as well as being asked to self-isolate.

But Johnson, the paper says, was determined to press ahead with a planned visit to India on 25 April. Only as more and more data from India began to ring alarm bells did he come under pressure to call off the trip.

Downing Street eventually pulled the plug on 19 April, on the same day that Hancock told the House of Commons that India would also be added to the red list – but only from 4am on 23 April. This was despite Downing Street having briefed journalists when the scheme was first unveiled that countries could be added "at a few hours' notice".

The result of the three-day delay was inevitable. Demand for flights between India and the UK rocketed amid a "desperate frenzy" as families tried to beat the deadline and avoid having to quarantine in a hotel. Thousands of extra passengers travelled into Britain from the subcontinent.

Furthermore, there is evidence that the delay in implementing the travel ban had an effect on the numbers of cases in the UK. Between 4 April and 2 May, the B 1.617.2 variant rose from 4.9 percent of all cases detected among travellers, to 40.9 percent. The single biggest increase came in the week which included the three and a half days between the afternoon of 19 April and the early morning of 23 April.

But, even if Johnson's planned trip to see Modi may have been a factor, it wasn't necessarily the only one. On 6 May, there were nationwide local elections, and the election for the London mayor – and others. Given the reliance of the Tories on the Indian vote, it can have done no harm to have allowed travellers from India more leeway than their counterparts from neighbouring countries.

Either way, there is now a strong suspicion that Johnson, in taking Covid-related measures against India, was motivated by other than public health considerations, which not only favoured one ethnic community but disadvantaged others.

If this is more evidence of the ethnicity of immigrant groups affecting British electoral politics, then we have a lot more than new variants of Covid-19 to worry about.

Also published on Turbulent Times.