Indo-UK News & Discussions- June 2017

[Kashi]

Regarding NRI supporting labor, i think it is time to prevent them from buying land in india till they return and settle for more than a year. Such cut in high return investment may win back support to india.

NRIs are Indian citizens. How and why you stop an Indian citizen from buying land in India?

[kvraghav]

^^ Land is for residence or with our ever growing population, we still want to treat it as a investment commodity?

[Kashi]

^^ Land is for residence or with our ever growing population, we still want to treat it as a investment commodity?

There's no law stopping the purchase of residential land anywhere in India by an Indian citizen (except where special statutory restrictions exist as such). So one cannot really deny NRIs from picking up land as investment, without substantial changes to the law. OCIs are not citizens of India, but are allowed purchase residential property.

[UlanBatori]

Reducing the population may be a better approach, hain?
Also, it would be counter-productive to have such rules because then other countries would prohibit land purchases there by RNIs such as RaGaji.

[BPSingh]

Not sure if this is the relevant forum for it but I recently heard a podcast about the new book by William Dalrymple called Anarchy. It's about the rise of East India Company and its exploitation of India. The links to the book and the podcasts are below. I haven't read the book yet.
Couple of things bothered me when I listened to the podcast.
- The author claims that until well after the 1857 mutiny, the British crown did not know much about what the company was doing in India. Meaning that while company policy was killing millions in India, particularly around Bengal, the British Crown and the public were either not aware or blissfully ignorant of the whole thing. During the reign of East India company, ridiculous amount of money was basically plundered from India and also China and transferred to England.I find it hard to believe that while all this money was showing up in the country, no body asked where it was coming from. Particularly since around 40% of the MPs were shareholders in the company.
- Second, the author speaks about essentially the merchant class of India being fully complicit in East India Company's looting of India. They supplied the capital to the company which helped the company recruit troops, take over more land and essentially made a lot of money themselves. The given reason behind this was the supposedly bad relationship between these lenders and the local rulers.

I am curious to hear from other better informed people than myself about these two points and the book in general.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07W952J1F/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1.

The podcast :https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/conversations/william-dalrymple-british-east-india/11648048

Thanks

[IndraD]

https://www.fundamal.org/campaigns/oper ... vote-2019/
outrage in UK after site asking M to vote tactically surfaces

Muslims have the power to decide the next UK Government. Help us to organise the community before the next General Election.

You Have The Power Decide The Next Government In The Coming General Election

[Peregrine]

Bagehot

Security questions for Jeremy Corbyn

A Labour government would present a radical challenge to Britain’s global alliances



Jeremy corbyn has the most radical views on national security of any leader in the Labour Party’s history. He is a long-standing opponent of both NATO and nuclear weapons. He has called Hamas and Hezbollah “friends”. Faced with overwhelming evidence of Russian state involvement in the poisoning of two people in Salisbury, he first obfuscated and then demanded that Russia should be involved in the investigation.

And yet the public has remained surprisingly indifferent to these brutal facts. In the election of 2017, the right-leaning press launched a fierce attack on Mr Corbyn’s foreign-policy views. Readers yawned. This time the bombardment has started again, but to no obvious effect. The only national-security question that has caught fire is the government’s refusal to publish a parliamentary report on alleged Russian meddling in British politics.

Mr Corbyn has been protected from proper scrutiny by three convenient assumptions: that his heart is in the right place; that he will drop his “ban the bomb” idealism when confronted with reality; and, third, that Labour moderates will be able to control him. Let’s examine each of these in turn.

Mr Corbyn is, in fact, very far from the cuddly pacifist of Glastonbury lore. The core of his beliefs is not opposition to war but opposition to “Western imperialism”. His hostility to “imperial powers” (most notably America and Israel) is so fierce that he is willing to make excuses for “anti-imperial powers” such as Russia and Syria, as well as terrorist organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas. His support for national liberation movements stops short of support for the people of Crimea, Georgia or Ukraine. His sympathy for victims of oppression turns cold when the countries doing the oppressing are Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela or, in the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia. In a speech in 2014 celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Iranian revolution, he praised the regime’s “tolerance and acceptance of other faiths, traditions and ethnic groupings”.

Mr Corbyn is no more likely to drop these views than he is to join the SAS. A geopolitics obsessive, he has been banging the same drums since the late 1970s, if not before (his parents were subscribers to the propaganda sheet, Soviet News). If anything, his views have hardened. In 1999 and 2000 he signed a number of parliamentary motions criticising Russia’s invasion of Chechnya. More recently he has bent over backwards to excuse Mr Putin’s adventures in his near abroad (and indeed in Salisbury). Since taking over as Labour leader in 2015 he has surrounded himself with advisers, such as Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, who have spent their lives on the farthest fringes of the far left.

What about the idea that all this is hot air? Labour moderates (who constitute the vast majority of the party’s MPS) will step in to prevent Mr Corbyn from wreaking havoc, the argument goes. And besides, he will probably be able to form a government only in alliance with other parties, most prominently the Scottish National Party (SNP). Mr Corbyn has abandoned his opposition to Britain’s trident missile system under pressure both from his MPS and from Len McCluskey, the head of the Unite trade union, who thinks that jobs trump geopolitics. And most of the day-to-day work of defence and security is a matter of long-established routine that goes on beyond the prime minister’s ken.

All that is wishful thinking. Foreign policy gives prime ministers more freedom from parliamentary scrutiny than domestic policy. Downing Street has been accumulating power over security policy for decades, even more so since the creation of the National Security Council in 2010. The SNP is sympathetic to Mr Corbyn’s views on foreign policy, adopting the toe-curling slogan “bairns [babies] not bombs” and campaigning for the removal of Britain’s nuclear submarines from their base in Scotland. As chancellor, John McDonnell would exercise even more control over domestic policy than Gordon Brown did. That would leave a notably vain prime minister looking for another way of making his mark. The Downing Street bully pulpit would give him the opportunity to opine to the world on things he cares about, such as Israeli foreign policy and Donald Trump’s failures. The next national-security review, due in 2020, offers a chance to revisit questions of hard power, such as Britain’s commitment to spend 2% of gdp on defence.

One-man army

A Corbyn-led government would quickly lead to the biggest change in Britain’s defence posture since the second world war. Even if the country stayed in NATO, as is likely, it would be a passive member, reluctant to push back against Russian expansionism and hostile to the idea of a nuclear deterrent. Given that NATO depends on confidence that it means what it says, this would be a severe blow to its credibility. Britain’s Middle East policy would be revolutionised, with a more hostile stance towards Israel and the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, and a friendlier one to Iran. America would almost certainly stop sharing critical intelligence with Downing Street, for fear that such secrets would find their way into Russian or Iranian hands. Given Britain’s membership of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, that would harm Europe’s ability to combat hostile states and non-state actors.

Such a revolution would come at a sensitive time. Mr Trump is already disrupting established security relations (for all their differences, he and Mr Corbyn share a common hostility to the multinational institutions that have kept the peace since 1945). Brexit is straining relations with Britain’s European allies, while gobbling up the political class’s available bandwidth. The Foreign Office is demoralised by decades of cuts, and the security establishment is still tainted by the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. All this is taking place at a time when Mr Putin is on the march and Islamic State is shifting its focus from state-building to global terror. A dangerous world may be about to become more dangerous.

Cheers

[UlanBatori]

Hilari-ous! And nothing 2 do with HiC

Curious: the role of pizza in Hysteric Events. "Pizza" was what was supposed to be going on inside the Oval Office during the Clinton Era. Now pizza is the alibi for UQ Prince Harry.

[Rsatchi]

BBC showing UK army brutality in Iraq and Afghanistan
Civilian killings
And the Britshits have the temerity to preach dharmic folks on cashmoore
Surely inviting trouble for pissfuls to light up londonistan
LOL

[Rsatchi]

ts high time that someone took down this entitled lootyens creep taseer


Aatish Taseer symbolizes the mothering evil of the Left


Aatish Taseer symbolizes the mothering evil of the Left

November 16, 2019,
Harbir Singh in Cogito Ergo Sum | India | TOI

I’ve never thought much of Aatish Taseer. His opinion pieces are all whingefests, with himself as the tragic suffering soul at the heart of them, beset and tortured by the inequities of the world that persecutes him, even as he labors on under the unbearable strain. The Strain of being the voice that speaks up in despair and rage about the receding utopia, the ideal world of tolerance and multiracial, multi-gender, multiculturalism, in which the evil White and Hindu nationalists cower in dark corners and shed tears that no one ever sees.

Aatish Taseer is both Indian and Pakistani and neither; neither Hindu nor Muslim, but also both; colored, immigrant in the West; an exotic dream of all the feminists; male and female; of every democracy where universities are factories for pumping out legions of Social Justice Warriors.

He is also a demonstration of a Left that has become deranged, self-obsessed, thoroughly corrupted, and flat wrong. The Left was an essential force when coal miners lived short miserable lives in inhuman conditions and factory owners hired muscle to beat their workers into submission, when the Industrial Revolution ended up with so much of humanity pushed as fuel into the Furnace of Industry. Today, the conditions in that birthed the Left are not to be found in Europe and North America. They pretty much ended with WWII.


In the newly prosperous post WWII era, the Left switched from the crushed working classes of the industrial revolution to racial equality, gender equality, gay rights, minority rights. And by 2010, the Left had won those wars too. A black man with a foreign father had risen to become the most powerful man in the world. Gay marriage was legalized and everyone came out of the closet.

And then it all went wrong. Having won most of everything it fought for, but unable to be in any state of mind except one of self-righteous outrage against the evil of the oppressor, decided that justice wouldn’t be achieved till the Evil White Man was be destroyed, along with his history, his culture, his place of honor in the fabric of the world. Bring on the immigrants. Bring on Muslims. Bring on every colored person from everywhere in the world, however they can make it. Fill the west with them, bury the White Man’s society and the world he built, bury it under the swarm of foreign cultures who will never agree on anything among themselves except to be allowed to keep coming, and to take whatever opportunities of money and power that can be taken from the white man.

Democracy has been turned into the ultimate weapon to destroy the societies that birth democracies. The strategy is simple, import so many people who’ll have the vote but will not subscribe to the White Man’s culture, history, or values, and will simply vote them out of existence.

While the White Man is the main enemy, he’s is not the only one. There is a hierarchy. White men are worse than white women. Brown Muslim men are equal to White women. Muslim women don’t exist unless they rage about social justice, Islamophobia, and racism. But they do have to be colored. White Muslim women are nowhere to be seen. Worse than the White men are the Hindu men, who are not only men, but also pits from third world. Jews are of course the worst. No, not Jews but Zionists, they’ll tell you. And of course, the Women of Iran and the Children of Balochistan don’t exist at all.

They’ve already succeeded in destroying Britain. Just flying the St George’s Cross, the flag of England, in England, will get you investigated by the police for hate speech. The Left, particularly thanks to Tony Blair, has been so successful that it is now a matter of shame for English people to feel pride in the history and achievement of Englishmen past, a shame to speak of English Pride, and every English politician has to obey if they don’t want to be expelled from politics, charged with hate crimes, and blacked out from the Media except as a Hitlerian evil.

Which brings us back to Aatish Taseer and his own tragic tale. Asiya Bibi was a poor village woman, unfortunate enough to be Christian in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. She got into an argument with other women who went and told their menfolk that Asiya Bibi had insulted the Prophet of Islam. This is not a rare occurrence. Recently a Pakistani boy, not having met his obligations as a pupil, thought to get out of it by accusing the Hindu principle of having insulted the Prophet. As always happens, the public went on a rampage, this time targeted at Hindus.

In the Asiya Bibi case, Aatish Taseer’s father, former governor of Punjab province and one of the most distinguished Pakistanis, dared to provide a voice of sanity despite the mobs filling the streets baying for Asiya Bibi’s blood and said deserved a fair trial. For this, his own official security man, Mumtaz Qadri, shot him dead. The killer was hailed and mobbed by lawyers as a hero during his trial.

In the end, after Asiya Bibi had spent 10 years in a jail, the Pakistani government was able to have the courts pass judgement exonerating her. But then it had to figure out how to get her out of the country, when the mob was planning to lynch her after her release from jail. In the end, she was spirited away to Canada.

But not to the UK.

The UK refused her asylum because the conservative government of Theresa May was afraid of the power of Pakistani Muslims within Britain. Because the fact is that the barbaric medieval realities of Pakistan have their grip around the throat of Great Britain, existing and powerful within Britain itself.

A recent political brouhaha in Pakistan saw a vast mob besieging the capital city of Islamabad. The man at the head of it, a senior Islamic cleric, Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, eulogized Mumtaz Qadri, the man who assassinated Aatish Taseer’s father. The mob chanted slogans about this “hero”.

Aatish Taseer isn’t pulling his hair out about the situation in Pakistan. He’s not seen worrying about how much of it has settled in Great Britain. He’s not demanding that Britain save itself from Pakistan and the thoroughly savage aspects of itself that have become entrenched in Britain. He’s not asking Britain to save other Asiya Bibis.

No, what he’s doing is raging about Narendra Modi and Hindutva. He is absolutely convinced that his struggle for good and civilization in the world is against the “fascists” of Hindutva.

Aatish Taseer, Arundhati Roy, these are all limousine Marxists. For whatever Marx got right, what he got wrong was that the working class has no identity, or should have no identity, other than an economic one: Labor. This lays the seed of a “secular” ideology that is different from the Secularism enshrined in the American Constitution.

American secularism is the separation of Church and State. But where it protects the state from Religious Law, it also protects freedom of belief and conscience from persecution or manipulation by the state. That is true secularism. Marxist secularism however does not seek a separation between belief and state. The Marxist ideal is an ideological state, and the ideology tolerates no rivals. While the Marxist working class rights origins of the Left have disappeared, Marxism has mutated and switched from economics to culture. Now the ideology is that the Christian White men, Hindu Nationalists and Zionists are the oppressors, and their victims are righteous in uniting in revolution.

Women, Muslims, gays, LGBTs, colored people everywhere (except Hindus), Unite!

The Marxist DNA of Oppressor and Oppressed has jumped from the soul of the Soviet Union over to the West following the fall of the Berlin Wall.

How Ironic.

Now the former Communist bloc countries are all right wing and returning to their inherent strength as powers of Eastern Christendom, and the Left, from the US to the EU is falling all over itself screaming “Russia Russia Russia!” as the existential enemy of the West. Why? Because Eastern Europe, including Russia, is become a bastion of the traditional White Christian Man. For the Left, China is not the threat, Saudi Arabia is not the threat. Radical Islam and Totalitarian communism are not enemies. No, the enemy is the bunch of white people who tried and escaped the hell that Marxism must inevitably produce.

And the same is true for India. Marxist secularism suppressed Hindu identity with a promise of just welfare state, that never came about, even as Pakistan continued an Islamic Jihad against Hindu India for 70 years and the Marxists did nothing except to empower islamists within India. Now India is shrugging off the choke hold of secular Marxism and exerting its Hindu identity.

And that’s what’s driving Aatish Taseer to fume.

English Nationalism also outrages him. Notice that all those opposed to nationalism have nothing to say about Scottish or Irish or Catalan nationalism. Its English Nationalism that they can’t tolerate. It is the English who are shamed for the imperial past, and the English alone. The Belgians, Spaniards and the French aren’t being constantly delegitimized as a people and a culture on the grounds of their imperial past. Only the English are. Because it’s the English as a people, a culture and a force in the world that have to be taken down.

Its Hindu nation feeling that the left can’t stand. It’s Make-America-Great-Again they can’t stand. Its Israel they can’t stand.

But that’s okay. The world of democracies if waking up to what the Left has done to them in the name of tolerance and liberalism. Now either Democracy dies or the Left dies. A revolution against the suffocating post-modern neo-Marxist Establishment Left is underway.
Aatish Taseer is fated to see Hindus and India prevail. My condolences in advance.

Chetakji
X-posting from 2019
https://twitter.com/i/status/1196558392279666691
Now this Jihadis openly calling for death of jews
This is what happening in UQ with political correctness
Anyone visiting Birmingham/large part of London/Bradford/parts of Manchester/Sheffield/Rotherham/Rochdale/Wigan/Burnley/Blackburn/Preston would feel that have come to a 'Pissful' country with 'post-box'wimmmen/mullah/jihadi/'greenhouses' galore
And they are not only from Napak but from North Africa/Eyerack/Sayriah/Turakiya/

[g.sarkar]

This is what happening in UQ with political correctness
Anyone visiting Birmingham/large part of London/Bradford/parts of Manchester/Sheffield/Rotherham/Rochdale/Wigan/Burnley/Blackburn/Preston would feel that have come to a 'Pissful' country with 'post-box'wimmmen/mullah/jihadi/'greenhouses' galore
And they are not only from Napak but from North Africa/Eyerack/Sayriah/Turakiya/

Gora man says "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine." We say it is Karma. I remember reading some Tibetan saying that pointed out just as men, nations too suffer from Karma and its effects. Bartanistan will feel the effect of that Karma.
Gautam

[pankajs]

Not sure how reliable the survey is

https://twitter.com/Iyervval/status/1197191286672904192

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra @Iyervval

Major decline in British Indian support for Labour. Good. But they don’t like Boris either, which means vote transference won’t take place entirely. Bad

[Rsatchi]

Not sure how reliable the survey is

https://twitter.com/Iyervval/status/1197191286672904192

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra @Iyervval

Major decline in British Indian support for Labour. Good. But they don’t like Boris either, which means vote transference won’t take place entirely. Bad

Pankajji
The Tories are bombarding the Indic folks with emails (Targeted emails)
Also twitter handles playing up the Labournomics and jihadi angle.
Its like 'Devil and Deep blue Sea'
Folks are accepting Boris for what he is but are scared of the JC-Jehadi combine!!!

[UlanBatori]

Boris is certainly a good actor. His Diwali message was so touching. Like Robert Clive speaking of Diwali

[mmasand]

Not sure how reliable the survey is

https://twitter.com/Iyervval/status/1197191286672904192

Pankajji
The Tories are bombarding the Indic folks with emails (Targeted emails)
Also twitter handles playing up the Labournomics and jihadi angle.
Its like 'Devil and Deep blue Sea'
Folks are accepting Boris for what he is but are scared of the JC-Jehadi combine!!!

Add the discontent of Leicester South against Labour for not propping up an Indian heritage candidate as a replacement for Vaz. Although, several interviews have pointed out that the Indians will not stray away from Labour over their foreign policy towards India as they are 'eternally' grateful for opening the door to them. PS, do look at the referendum voting patterns in these constituencies.

[ArjunPandit]

very bad way to decide voting..but still curious..i dont follow UK politics that much..but labor prima facie seems like just short of Jeehardys...inputs from fellow rakshaks would be valued

[mmasand]

very bad way to decide voting..but still curious..i dont follow UK politics that much..but labor prima facie seems like just short of Jeehardys...inputs from fellow rakshaks would be valued

I wouldn't go as far as branding the party as radical, this was the party that went into Iraq on the back of Colin Powell's infamous WMD evidence. What it did however was, create space for a more radical left-wing Corbyn to rise to the rank whilst the Miliband brothers were sparring it out.

In the event that we have a hung HoC and the LibDems + Labour + Greens + SNP can come up with a majority figure, he will have his hands to full to look at foreign policy apart from the occasional condemnation of Israel, Saudi, India on Kashmir etc. In their manifesto today, they have said they will tender an apology for Jalianwala Bagh, now we all know this is intended for the local electorate as it is unlikely JC will be extended an invite to India. He can then go onto claim that we were ready, but the Mudy government is anti-Sikh and stoke some Khalistani sentiment.

The tories have all to lose in this election, a rebellion in leave constituencies (vote share moves to Farage), and a transfer of vote share to the Lib Dems in remain constituencies.

[Peregrine]

The Tories Dodgy FactcheckUK Tweets are a Taste of Whats to Come

As BORIS JOHNSON and Jeremy Corbyn blustered their way through an unsatisfying televised debate on November 19th, a range of online fact-checking services helped sort the truth from the tosh. There was Full Fact, an established charity, FactCheck, run by Channel 4—and then there was factcheckuk, a new Twitter-based outfit which seemed particularly keen to pick holes in Mr Corbyn’s arguments. Closer inspection revealed that the account was in fact run by @CCHQPress, the Conservative Party press office.

This election offers plenty of scope for such dodges, for it will be the least-regulated in living memory. The principal political battlefield is the internet. Two-fifths of all ad spending was online in 2017; this year it is likely to be well over half. In the last election, though the Tories outspent Labour online, they badly underperformed, getting half as many Facebook engagements at three times the cost. That may help explain the desperation to get ahead, manifested by their factcheckuk wheeze.

Although campaigns are tightly regulated offline, the rules have not caught up with technology. Television advertising, for instance, is limited to a few dull party political broadcasts—but parties can broadcast as much as they like on YouTube. There are tight limits on election spending by candidates in their constituencies—but online ads can be bought centrally and targeted locally. Leaflets and posters that are produced by a political party must say so—but there is no such requirement for online content. And even where there are rules they are hard to apply online because, as the Twitter row shows, the origins of internet material can be obscure.

Targeting is a particular source of concern. As shown by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which people’s Facebook profiles were improperly used to send personalised pro-Brexit ads, this is an area of keen interest to politicians. Targeting allows them to send different messages to different constituencies. That makes online ads more efficient than others, but also means that, as Sam Jeffers of WhoTargetsMe, a lobby group, says, “We’re now in an era when no two people will see the same campaign. We’ve lost our shared political space.” A us Senate report last month into Russian interference in the American election in 2016 exposed a dangerous example: blacks were sent content designed to stir up anger and discourage voting.



These matters have been discussed at length by MPS, academics and campaigners, but nothing has changed. That is partly because online campaigning falls between several stools. The Electoral Commission regulates election finance but not advertising, the Advertising Standards Agency regulates advertising but not politics, and the Information Commissioner’s Office regulates personal data. None of these bodies wants to touch this particularly hot potato and politicians have been too Brexit-obsessed to legislate on anything else.

While the government has done nothing the tech companies, prodded by accusations that they are undermining democracy, have taken some action. Facebook, the main online election battleground, now labels political ads with their source and target. It took down some government ads early in the campaign that were targeted at marginal constituencies but not labelled as political. It maintains a library of ads, where anyone can see how much advertisers have spent and who has been seeing them. Google has a similar one.

Twitter has banned political advertising—which did not catch the factcheckuk tweets, for they were not paid posts. But the company has threatened that “any further attempts to mislead people by editing verified profile information—in a manner seen during the uk election debate—will result in decisive corrective action.”

It is good that tech giants are making efforts to keep things clean, but not ideal that it is left to them. As Katharine Dommett of Sheffield University says, “I’m concerned that the rules for our democracy are being set by commercial companies that do not necessarily have our interests at heart.”

Cheers

[UlanBatori]

Another victim of social media foot-in-mouth disease (actually that was not what is alleged 2 have been in some mouth, but let's not go there..)

"The sacking of Prince Andrew, as it is, is unprecedented. We have to go back to the abdication of Prince Edward VIII in 1936 to see anything vaguely comparable," said Hunt. "The position of the monarch is now up for question in 2019 which it wouldn't have been just a few weeks ago. It's being raised in debates during the British general election campaign. It's being raised in debates on phone-ins across the UK on British radio stations. That is pretty unusual and that is why the British monarchy has acted as it has done and acted so speedily in removing Prince Andrew from public life."

The British tabloids are convinced that Andrew was nudged before he was able to jump from his position in "the firm." On Thursday, "ANDREW SHAMED INTO STEPPING DOWN" was splashed across the front of the Daily Express while the Daily Mail's headline simply said "OUTCAST."

[Peregrine]

Election 2019: Labour’s manifesto is mere wishful thinking - Philip Collins

The opposition has ideas a sensible government might take up but they’re outnumbered by absurd promises of freebies

The Labour Party is much better understood through its defeats than through its victories, and not just because there are more of them. For a party that was founded to be the parliamentary wing of organised labour it has been signally unsuccessful. Of the 119 years that have elapsed since Labour issued its first manifesto, it has spent only 33 of them in office and 13 of those were won by the unperson Blair. There have been 31 elections and Labour has won a working majority just five times. Yesterday, with the publication of the Labour manifesto, we saw why.

The problem with It’s Time for Real Change is that the party doesn’t believe in its own title. It would be real change, but it’s not time. The Labour manifestos in 1964 and 1997, the prelude to victories, made modest promises precisely because the party leader expected them to have to be redeemed.

They have all described the NHS as being in crisis. Every manifesto since the 1950s has done so. They have all demanded vast investment in the public realm and reform of the House of Lords. The winning Labour manifestos had longer sections on defence and the importance of Nato. The losing ones not so much, apart from 1983 which led on nuclear disarmament.

There is not much about defence in Labour’s 2019 manifesto but there is everything about everything else. It is hard to avoid the thought that a document so packed with freebies as this one is not the programme of a party that expects to carry it out. Broadband, care for the elderly, tuition fees, childcare will all be provided free of charge. Benefits will go up across the board, including the winter fuel payment, free TV licences and free bus passes for pensioners. The living wage will be £10 an hour, maternity pay and childcare provision will be extended, schools and hospitals will be rebuilt and all public servants will be paid in suitcases of gold bullion.

In the words of the coda to Let Us Face The Future, the Labour manifesto of 1945, “These are the aims. In themselves they are no more than words. All parties may declare that in principle they agree with them. But the test of a political programme is whether it is sufficiently in earnest about the objectives to adopt the means needed to realise them.” The obvious objection to this impressive consolidation of all good things has been given by Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It is “simply not credible”, he said, that the £82.9 billion price tag can be met with a few extra taxes on corporate Britain and wealthy individuals.

Apart from its air of unreality, there is plenty of substance in the Labour manifesto to which the veteran of victorious Labour might well object. Problems in the supply of energy and water will be exacerbated rather than fixed by a costly nationalisation. I am always puzzled by why Labour wants the government (which is usually Tory) to run the trains. “Put Chris Grayling in charge,” said nobody, ever. The ideological assumption that all private sector activity in health and education is wrong has no basis in evidence. A state drug company is a rotten idea. Abolishing the successful academy schools programme would be foolish and so is scrapping the testing regime. In public services Labour has nothing at all to say beyond the desire to spend more.

Yet the more searching critique of the Labour manifesto is not that it contains plenty I do not like, but that it also contains a great deal that I do. The successful Labour manifestos (1945, 1964 and 1997) were all stories of modernisation. All three leant heavily on science and technology, which would provide the ingenuity to solve tomorrow the problems that worried the nation today. The 1964 manifesto referred to the state-of-the-art hovercraft and the Atlas computer.

The closest that It’s Time for Real Change gets to this is in its opening section on climate change. There is still, for my taste, far too much faith in infrastructure committees and state funding agencies, but this is the boldest and greenest set of proposals ever found in a British party manifesto. To cite just the one good idea, the Clean Air Act is a necessity. Thirty years from now I suspect that some of this first chapter will be standard public policy.

The manifesto also contains a very long list of new rights for workers. These will be summarily, and wrongly, dismissed as socialism run riot but while employment in Britain has remained high, this country has a serious problem with the quality of the jobs created. Work for too many people is unrewarding, measured both in satisfaction and in money. There is a case to be made for employee ownership, for a universal basic income and for the panoply of smaller but important rights proposed, such as proper notice for changes in hours, statutory bereavement leave and four bank holidays on the patron saints’ days.

It is, we should recall, the job of the party called Labour to protect the position of employees. It is a witless criticism to disparage them for seeking to do so. There has never been a Labour manifesto, including the landlside-winning one of 1997, that did not do the same.

Likewise, better housing, which first became a Labour priority in the 1923 manifesto, runs through 1945, 1964 and 1997 and finds its echo in 2019. A massive building programme, a revival of social housing, the power to purchase land more easily and the proper taxation of land are all welcome.

It is important to recognise, too, that private renting is going to grow as long as the market for ownership is locking out all but the really well off. Even if Labour has not yet found the right balance between landlord and tenant, its question is at least the right one, which cannot be said so far of the Tories.

There is more too, in a seemingly endless parade. The stress placed on increasing the terribly low conviction rate for rape is serious and welcome. More buses, much scepticism about arms sales, the cricket World Cup on the BBC, alternatives to custodial sentences and the hand of the leader himself in the sentence “we will establish a National Food Commission and review the Allotments Act”.

If I were running a radical think tank, with no responsibility for implementing a word of this, I might marvel at my handiwork. I might hope that, in due course, a serious government would carry some of it out. Maybe one will, if we ever have an election where a serious government is on offer.

The Labour manifesto of 1997 declared that “we will be a radical government. But the definition of radicalism will not be that of doctrine, whether of left or right, but of achievement.” It is not a sentence that Labour manifestos often contain, and with good reason.

Cheers

[chetak]

instead of some unwashed commie hack "apologizing", why not have the queen do it.

twitter

Labour Party UK pledges apology for Jallianwala Bagh massacre and public review into Britain's role in Amritsar massacres in it's election manifesto under 'Effective Diplomacy'. Imagine what politics makes people do. Why not begin by teaching brutal colonial history in schools?

[chetak]

And what of the large numbers of Indians supporting labour.



twitter

Shocking to see a terrorist organisation openly supporting @UKLabour and @jeremycorbyn! It is time PM @narendramodi @PMOIndia declare a travel advisory against U.K. for Indians owing to the hostility towards India in U.K. @HCI_London @CGI_Bghm

[vishvak]

The radicals are in the western countries also for legitimacy. How open it can be.

[Rony]

Several people stabbed in London Bridge incident

Police say several people have been stabbed close to London Bridge, and a man has been detained.

The Metropolitan Police force says officers were called Friday afternoon “to a stabbing at premises near to London Bridge.”

They say “a man has been detained by police. We believe a number of people have been injured.”

The news comes after witnesses reported hearing gunshots. Sky News reported that police had shot the apparent attacker.

[ArjunPandit]

^^just another day in london...hope they shot the right guy...

[mmasand]

^^just another day in london...hope they shot the right guy...

No10 has hinted he was released on terrorism charges due to a short judicial sentence. So a convicted terrorist with nothing to lose, committed his second crime - after early morning raids across the nation, his identity will be revealed. Wondering if Op Temperer will be initiated after the Cobra meeting.

[Rony]

As usual, a Paki

London Bridge attack: Convicted terrorist Usman Khan named as assailant

“This individual was known to authorities, having been convicted in 2012 for terrorism offences,” Metropolitan police counter-terrorism chief Neil Basu said in statement.

“He was released from prison in December 2018 on licence and clearly, a key line of enquiry now is to establish how he came to carry out this attack

The attacker had previous links to al-Muhajiroun, the group led by Anjem Choudry and dubbed Britain’s “most prolific and dangerous extremist group”, The Independent understands.

Police said that Khan had attended an event earlier on Friday afternoon at Fishmonger’s Hall called ‘Learning Together’.

The attack is believed to have began inside before he left the building and proceeded onto London Bridge, where he was detained and subsequently confronted and shot by armed officers.

[yensoy]

As usual, a Paki

I visited this thread to find his/her name
I was not disappointed
Neither was I surprised

[mmasand]

There is a Kashmir connection, he was busted for collecting funds to fund a terrorist training camp in POK. Here is the article from 2012.

Nine jailed over bomb plot and terror camp plan

Oh the irony, attacked a conference examining prisoner rehabilitation, hosted by CambridgeUni. He was out in December on license and was wearing a tag. So can I now skip the country if I'm wearing a tag and take the train to Paris?

[Cain Marko]

There is a Kashmir connection, he was busted for collecting funds to fund a terrorist training camp in POK. Here is the article from 2012.

Nine jailed over bomb plot and terror camp plan

Oh the irony, attacked a conference examining prisoner rehabilitation, hosted by CambridgeUni. He was out in December on license and was wearing a tag. So can I now skip the country if I'm wearing a tag and take the train to Paris?

Wtf what is pawam yindoo (Gurukanth Desai, 30, from Cardiff) doing amongst such august company

[mmasand]

Wtf what is pawam yindoo (Gurukanth Desai, 30, from Cardiff) doing amongst such august company

He desperately wanted out from Wales? Thought he would counter it with their own version of incest.

[chetak]

Our erstwhile white colonial masters, as considerate of muslims as they ever were.

twitter

Usman Khan's family owned land in PoK and he wanted to go fight in Indian Kashmir. He wanted to be a terrorist fighting India. All this is in his original sentencing. But British judiciary saw that as a lesser crime and let him out to do more damage. It came back to bite.

9:13 PM - 29 Nov 2019

[g.sarkar]

As usual, a Paki

London Bridge attack: Convicted terrorist Usman Khan named as assailant

“This individual was known to authorities, having been convicted in 2012 for terrorism offences,” Metropolitan police counter-terrorism chief Neil Basu said in statement.

“He was released from prison in December 2018 on licence and clearly, a key line of enquiry now is to establish how he came to carry out this attack

The attacker had previous links to al-Muhajiroun, the group led by Anjem Choudry and dubbed Britain’s “most prolific and dangerous extremist group”, The Independent understands.

Police said that Khan had attended an event earlier on Friday afternoon at Fishmonger’s Hall called ‘Learning Together’.

The attack is believed to have began inside before he left the building and proceeded onto London Bridge, where he was detained and subsequently confronted and shot by armed officers.

Not Paki. They call those people South Asian!
Gautam

[Rsatchi]

As usual, a Paki

London Bridge attack: Convicted terrorist Usman Khan named as assailant

Not Paki. They call those people South Asian!
Gautam

Sir
Wait for few weeks and all the worms will come of the wood-work and start the shit about police high handedness, unnecessarily shot could have been rehabilitated and brought into society shit!!!
JC and his gang of jihadi loving leftist gang sure going to use in there plea to the peaceful (bradforisthan, manchesteristhan, birmigisthn )

[mmasand]

Sir
Wait for few weeks and all the worms will come of the wood-work and start the shit about police high handedness, unnecessarily shot could have been rehabilitated and brought into society shit!!!
JC and his gang of jihadi loving leftist gang sure going to use in there plea to the peaceful (bradforisthan, manchesteristhan, birmigisthn )

I dare say Diane Abbott is already holding a placard in the vicinity with words such as love, say no to hate, we welcome all. Not kidding, but supposedly a Turkish community org was holding placards just outside the cordon hogging for media limelight.

[vishvak]

attacked a conference examining prisoner rehabilitation, hosted by CambridgeUni

An almost innocent south asian anti-brainwashed by commie because he wasn't allowed something ie jihad in Kashmir. So this is how hindoo is to blame.

He was in UK not in Afghanistan why would someone want to give excuses when he was in a progressive (one of rich countries actually) and still couldn't get his head out of his jihad mongering shyt.

[UlanBatori]

Sorry to ask if already answere above, but is the herror Mirpuri/POrKi by any chance? Or simply Pakjabi given Khan naam? Oh, sorry I see it was answered. "Family owned land" does not make him a Kashmiri: Must be a PakJabi who grabbed land in POrK?

[Bart S]

Not Paki. They call those people South Asian!
Gautam

Sir
Wait for few weeks and all the worms will come of the wood-work and start the shit about police high handedness, unnecessarily shot could have been rehabilitated and brought into society shit!!!
JC and his gang of jihadi loving leftist gang sure going to use in there plea to the peaceful (bradforisthan, manchesteristhan, birmigisthn )

What are the chances that the policeman/woman who shot him, did so (despite it not being absolutely necessary) in a moment of sanity/clarity realizing that the Labour/Gaurdianista turds and their judicial system would let him go with a slap on the wrist like it did before?

[Rsatchi]

Sir
Wait for few weeks and all the worms will come of the wood-work and start the shit about police high handedness, unnecessarily shot could have been rehabilitated and brought into society shit!!!
JC and his gang of jihadi loving leftist gang sure going to use in there plea to the peaceful (bradforisthan, manchesteristhan, birmigisthn )

What are the chances that the policeman/woman who shot him, did so (despite it not being absolutely necessary) in a moment of sanity/clarity realizing that the Labour/Gaurdianista turds and their judicial system would let him go with a slap on the wrist like it did before?

Bartji
Most certainly
But this is what will give jihadi/leftist rumour mills to go on the over drive
Hope this doesn't give the much needed oxygen for that turd JC's campaign

[vishvak]

Why would a progressive, not even rich but progressive, countries pay a single penny for criminals. Isn't being democracy and maintain ing it enough.

I think NATO should come up with plans to build large jails far off from civilization paid for by religiously rich where such jihadis can be tied to chair dressed as mediaeval kings till life. What more would he need.