Indo-UK News and Discussion - April 2013

[Philip]

Great new UK Home Minister.Shinde,you've got tough competition for the Nobel looney prize!

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damia ... -find-out/

Did the Freemasons stage the moon landings? If so, new Home Office minister Norman Baker will find out…

By Damian Thompson Politics Last updated: October 8th, 2013

Careful, Norman. They're everywhere…

Here’s a piece of news to set the eyes of every conspiracy theorist swivelling under their tin-foil trilbies. The British government has been infiltrated… by conspiracy theorists!

It happened on Monday afternoon, in the full glare of the cameras. Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP who believes that MI5 covered up the murder of Dr David Kelly by Iraqi agents, has been promoted to Home Office minister in the reshuffle. Which means, presumably, that he is now in a position to unearth the “truth” about Dr Kelly, the government weapons expert who was found with his wrist slashed in July 2003, after being named as the source of news stories questioning the government’s Iraq dossier.

The Hutton inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death found it to be a simple case of suicide; the post-mortem report, released after pressure from sceptics, reached the same conclusion.

But Norman Baker, author of a book called The Strange Death of David Kelly, knows better. The scientist was probably “bumped off”, as he diplomatically put it in the Daily Mail – prompting an indignant response from Dr Kelly’s sister, Sarah Pape, a surgeon. Mr Baker didn’t know what he was talking about, she said.

Her protest fell on deaf ears. Norman Baker spent many years working for Our Price records and as a teacher of English as a foreign language, jobs that afforded him plenty of time for researching The Truth About… whatever. Like most conspiracy theorists, he has a beady eye for cover‑ups wherever they occur, whether in real life or his well-stocked imagination.

No one has asked him, but I bet he detected the hand of the Bilderberg Group in mysterious changes to stock-taking procedures at Our Price in 1981. What we do know is that he smells a rat over the death of former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who had a heart attack while hill-walking in Scotland. As Mr Baker told the Brighton Argus: “Robin Cook was on Ministry of Defence land, I believe, when he died and certainly I have doubts over what happened.” MoD land? Aha!

The ability to detect more than one plot simultaneously is the mark of the true enthusiast. The key point is that a conspiracy theory is rarely a single strand of suspicion. It is the product of a frame of mind – a worldview, indeed – in which nothing is as it seems. The MMR injection causes autism. Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Supermarket bar codes are the Mark of the Beast.

The conspiracy theorist unearths information that “they” don’t want us to know. And, since knowledge is power, this invests him or her with almost religious authority. Even if, like Norman Baker, they possess all the charisma of a nosy neighbour in a Seventies sitcom.

It’s significant that the oldest conspiracy theory on record is in the Bible – the Book of Daniel, an apocalyptic, paranoid postscript to the Old Testament probably written between 167 and 164 BC, when the Temple in Jerusalem was occupied and desecrated by the Greek tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes.

The second half of Daniel features a menagerie of beasts, including a winged lion, a four-headed leopard and a creature with 10 horns. Hidden among this dense imagery is a secret portrait of Antiochus, together with bewildering numerical clues as to how long his reign will last: there are references to 70 weeks, divided into one, seven and 62 weeks… though the weeks may actually be years and, depending on how you add them up, they can take you to the defeat of Antiochus, the Second Coming of Jesus, or anything else you fancy.

Likewise, the Book of Revelation, borrowing grotesque imagery from Daniel, announced that the Number of the Beast was 666 – probably a coded insult directed at the Emperor Nero, whose name makes 666 if you assign the right numbers to each letter of his name. Mind you, you can make anyone’s name equal the Number of the Beast. The persecuted Jewish and Christian authors of these biblical texts needed to write their message in code; by doing so, they unwittingly empowered generations of propagandists and fruitloops to play their own number games.

“Relax those busy fingers,” implored St Augustine, who was sick of people counting days until the appearance of the Antichrist (or whatever). No one paid the slightest attention. Protestants used Revelation to uncover papal plots; American revolutionaries turned George III into the Antichrist. Poor old Henry Kissinger was a particular target of conspiracy theorists, who had no problem finding the three sixes in his name.

Conspiracy panic reached a peak in early 19th-century America, where Freemasons were accused of plotting to initiate a New World Order. In Europe, meanwhile, conspiracy theorists drew on inexhaustibly deep wells of Christian anti‑Semitism. Would the Holocaust have happened without a 1,500-year-old tradition of detecting the “hidden hand” of the Jew behind every misfortune? It seems unlikely.

Today, European anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been customised by Arab and Muslim activists. Their reach is deep and wide, thanks in part to state television stations that take it for granted that Jews plotted 9/11. Russians, too, have a hearty appetite for such lies. And here we observe one of the creepiest features of conspiracy narratives – their ability to morph into any shape (like David Icke’s lizards).

A decade ago, American campuses were infested with 9/11 “Truthers” who peddled theories about the atrocity that were almost identical to the Islamic ones – just minus the obvious anti-Semitism. Bookstores were awash with speculation by self-taught “investigators” who had drawn their own conclusions using the conspiracy theorists’ indispensable new tool – the internet search engine.

Post-Wikileaks, even the most dedicated nutjobs are struggling to keep up. So many genuine secrets are being revealed online that it’s difficult to distinguish between investigation, spying and conspiracy theory. Today, Julian Assange cuts such a weird figure that we wouldn’t be surprised to hear him reveal that the Moon landings were staged by Freemasons (a theory already aired on Icke’s website). But not long ago we took him very seriously indeed. There’s a new tolerance in Western society for self-obsessed “truth-tellers”, who appeal to the postmodern Left by undermining official narratives and to big business by spinning yarns that can be turned into bestsellers.

Twenty years ago, Norman Baker would have been piecing together cuttings in his local library, rather than sitting on the front benches of the House of Commons as a minister of state. To be fair, many MPs are horrified by this bizarre promotion: Theresa May, who wasn’t consulted, apparently, reacted as if she had been seated next to a garrulous Jehovah’s Witness on a long-haul flight. But the reality is that, in a world where sources of authority have been fragmented by technology, holding bonkers opinions is no longer a bar to political advancement.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will Mr Baker develop a degree of intellectual maturity and form policy on the basis of empirical data, rather than his own hunches? Don’t hold your breath. Not only does he hail from the cranky wing of the Lib Dems (which is saying something) but he also fronts a geriatric rock band, Always Tomorrow. Rumour has it that he’s hoping to sign up Elvis Presley, as soon as he reveals himself.

A word of advice, then, for civil servants at the Home Office. If you spot a funny little man rooting through your waste-paper basket for “secrets”, don’t panic. It’s not a spy. It’s the Minister.

Here is a comment on the piece by a blogger.Incidentally,the Dr. Kelly death has had a number of serious Qs still unanswered.

Baker is spot on. It was a French controlled Iraqi team that killed Kelly. Well known that MI6 call in favours from other countries' equivalent secret intelligences and vice versa.

Dick Cheney would have been in charge of the planned 911 “exercise”, since on May 8, 2001 he was named to head the Office of Domestic Preparedness (ODP), which would identify US vulnerabilities to domestic terrorism. Cheney’s ODP was running four different exercises on 911: Operation Northern Guardian, Operation Vigilant Guardian, Operation Vigilant Warrior and Operation Northern Vigilance.
The latter removed most fighter jets from the East Coast and sent them to Canada and Alaska. The first two simulated hijackings of commercial airliners in the Northeast. The third may have been the strike component. NORAD was briefed to expect these exercises. That morning their radars showed twenty-two hijacked planes. [11] They didn’t know which ones were hijacked and which ones were part of the “exercise”.
On September 10, 2001 members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees leaked a memo alleged lead hijacker Mohammed Atta sent to the man US intelligence deems the mastermind of 911- Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. The memo used language which one would associate with a military exercise, stating that “the match is about to begin. Tomorrow is ‘zero hour’.” Cheney was outraged that the memo was leaked and ordered the FBI to investigate members of the Congressional committees. All information regarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad remains classified .A group of commercial airline pilots, many of them Vietnam veterans, met in the aftermath of 911 to discuss the logistical aspects of the tragedy. They concluded overwhelmingly that the three Arabs who supposedly flew the jumbo jets into the WTC and the Pentagon could absolutely not have done so with the limited flight simulator experience they received at US flight schools. The group found it odd that the transponders on the planes had all been turned off, since this would serve no purpose if the Arabs were in control of the planes. The group came to believe that the planes’ flight paths were programmed by AWAC surveillance planes flying off the Atlantic coast.
This fly by wire technology has existed for decades and is employed on drone CIA Predator spy planesThe commercial pilots said this accounts for the transponders being turned off, since this is necessary to hand over manual control of an aircraft to computerized AWACS, which then fly the plane by remote control. This would also account for the pinpoint accuracy of the attacks, which had to have been calibrated using engineering specifications to have brought down the WTC towers, in tandem with pre-set explosives attached to the elevator shafts.

[Philip]

More on the Hess mystery.In earlier posts it was explained how Churchill sabotaged the peace offer that Hess brought from Hitler as he desperately wanted the US to enter the war.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/1033 ... -USSR.html

Nazis ‘offered to leave western Europe in exchange for free hand to attack USSR’
It was one of the most perplexing episodes of the Second World War which, more than 70 years on, remains shrouded in mystery.

Who was Rudolf Hess?
Adolf Hitler and his personal representative Rudolf Hess (right) Photo: AP photo
Jasper Copping

By Jasper Copping

26 Sep 2013

But a new book claims to have solved the riddle of the flight to Britain in 1941 of Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy.

Hess’s journey to Britain by fighter aircraft to Scotland has traditionally been dismissed as the deranged solo mission of a madman.

But Peter Padfield, an historian, has uncovered evidence he says shows that, Hess, the deputy Fuhrer, brought with him from Hitler, a detailed peace treaty, under which the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe, in exchange for British neutrality over the imminent attack on Russia.

The existence of such a document was revealed to him by an informant who claims that he and other German speakers were called in by MI6 to translate the treaty for Churchill.

The figure, who is not named by Mr Padfield, was an academic who later worked at a leading university. He has since died. Before his death, he passed on an account of how the group were assembled at the BBC headquarters, in Portland Place, London, to carry out the task.

The academic said Hess had brought with him the proposed peace treaty, expressed in numbered clauses and typed on paper from the German Chancellery. An English translation was also included, but the British also wanted the original German translated.

The informant said the first two pages of the treaty detailed Hitler’s precise aims in Russia, followed by sections detailing how Britain could keep its independence, Empire and armed services, and how the Nazis would withdraw from western Europe. The treaty proposed a state of “wohlwollende Neutralitat” – rendered as “well wishing neutrality”, between Britain and Germany, for the latter’s offensive against the USSR. The informant even said the date of the Hitler’s coming attack on the east was disclosed.

Mr Padfield, who makes the claims in a new book, Hess, Hitler and Churchill, said: “This was not a renegade plot. Hitler had sent Hess and he brought over a fully developed peace treaty for Germany to evacuate all the occupied countries in the West.”

Mr Padfield, who has previously written a biography of Hess as well as ones of Karl Dönitz and Heinrich Himmler, believes the treaty was suppressed at the time, because it would have scuppered Churchill’s efforts to get the USA into the war, destroyed his coalition of exiled European governments, and weakened his position domestically, as it would have been seized on by what the author believes was a sizeable “negotiated peace” faction in Britain at that time. At the same time, since the mission had failed, it also suited Hitler to dismiss Hess as a rogue agent.

There is no mention of the treaty in any of the official archives which have since been made public, but Mr Padfield believes this is because there has been an ongoing cover-up to protect the reputations of powerful figures. The author says that his informant broke off contact with him after approaching his former masters in the security services.

Mr Padfield added: “If the Royal Family was seriously involved in compromise peace plans, that would be very damaging, though I think it more likely that Hess brought news to Churchill of the coming Holocaust. It could damage perceptions of his and Britain’s wartime record if that were released.

“This was a turning point of the war. Churchill could have accepted the offer, but he made a very moral choice. He was determined that Hitler, who could not be trusted, would not get away with it. He wanted the US in the war, and to defeat Hitler.”

Mr Padfield has also assembled other evidence to support the existence of the treaty and its contents – as well as the subsequent cover-up.

He has established that two inventories were taken of items carried by Hess when he was arrested after parachuting out of his aircraft, a Messerschmitt 110, on the evening of May 10 1941, near Eaglesham, outside of Glasgow. Neither has ever been released.

He has found witness statements from a woman living near where Hess had landed, which indicate that police were “ordered to search for a valuable document which was missing”. The item, according to the witness, was found “over near the wee burn in the park”.

Mr Padfield also points out that Hess had used a specialist translator from the German Foreign Ministry – even though he had the use of another, fluent English speaker – when drawing up documents for his negotiations with the British, before his flight. This suggests, Mr Padfield claims, that approved wording was required for the documents.

Hess was kept captive in Britain until the end of the war when he was returned to Germany to stand trial at Nuremberg. He was sent to Spandau Prison where he died in 1987. The authorities said he had committed suicide, although his son and some historians have claimed the British state had him murdered to protect secrets.

An enlightening comment.

Mittymo

09/30/2013 01:53 PM

If people would examine the details of history, they'd see that Padfield's claim is consistent with other events. First, Hitler didn't destroy the British forces at Dunkirk when he had an opportunity to do so. Secondly, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that he wanted Britain & the other European countries to help him stop the fast approaching Russian bear, whose proclaimed goal was to spread communism throughout the world, either through open revolution or through subversion.

Stalin planned to subvert eastern & parts of central Europe. The only obstacle to achievement of his goals was Germany. Plus, Germany aligned with another of Russia's long-standing foes, Japan.

Stalin couldn't risk a two front war with both Germany & Japan. As a consequence, he designed a cunning plan to involve the U.S. in the war. First, Stalin's agents got Britain to make a foolish pledge to defend Poland. Then, he plotted with Hitler to jointly invade Poland. But instead of invading simultaneously according to their plan, Stalin delayed his invasion by 2-weeks. Britain then declared war on Germany. However, when Russia invaded Poland 2-weeks later, Britain ignored the attack. (Were Russian agents helping to shape British policy?)

http://educationforum.ipbhost....

Later, Britain & France welcomed Russia as an ally in a supposed grand & just war to protect & preserve freedom in Europe (see the Atlantic Charter). But Russia had taken over Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, & parts of Poland & Finland prior to the war and Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, & all of Poland after the war. (That's how economically backward Russia became the powerful Soviet Union.)

http://linnamuuseum.tartu.ee/?...

Next, Stalin's agents within the U.S. government got FDR to goad Japan into war.

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." ~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the U.S.

"How can we maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." Diary of Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War under FDR.

FDR told Churchill he would get the U.S. into the War by becoming progressively more provocative until either the Germans or the Japanese made a fatal mistake that would give him the opportunity. See "Cruise of the Lanikai," by Kemp Tolley, p-274, quoting from British documents declassified in 1971.

Britain's most respected military analyst, Sir Liddell Hart pointed out that Hitler's logical route of expansion was to the east, against her natural enemy, Russia. Hart also believed Britain should let Germany and Russia fight it out to the point of exhaustion and bring about the downfall of both dictators.

Interested persons should also read Buchanan's, "The Unnecessary War."

PS:Russia already had its circle of Cambridge spies (Philby,Burgess,MacLean,Blunt) embedded in the British establishment to provide it with intel as well as help determine policy wherever possible.

[brihaspati]

Philip,
both sides could have had double agents in each other's camp. From the Brit side the communist groups, including perhaps the Communist Party of Great Britain served to protect British "national interests" through their contacts and representatives in Russia - especially through the Comintern factions.

For example there appears to be communications trail running from UK communists to Indian Comintern members in Russia to see to it that Bose did not get Stalin's support.

The Brit intel had good penetration into pro-Russia lobbies within the UK, and could even claim to have intercepted communications from Zinoviev [still in power before the Purges of 37] into UK. Or, even if they did not have actual such "conspiracy" letters from the Russian communists, the Brits had enough inside information to have convincingly forged such communications [forgery was common place - in "national interests"]. A twist to this is of course the theory that Zinoviev letter "leak" controversy was a result of Stalinist long-term subtle planning to discredit Zinoviev in the future - which would need deep and high level contacts between the Stalinist apparatus and the Brit one.

Communist movements in UK and Russia, and their respective roles as interactive interfaces for common interests of the two states globally, has long been speculated on. But the trail is of course rather scattered and elaborate. Tracking and referencing this is not easy.

One fallout that can be verified - is of course the role of the communist party of India during the volte-face of the party centre in jail in August 42. It appears that the primary task of "communistification" in India for the susceptible was left into the hands of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its initiates/recruits from India. While, comintern/Russia returned Indians were sidelined - after the "people's war" theory of subverting national anti-British movements began to be circulated by the Stalinists between 28-34.

[Philip]

Bri,was Netaji's disappearance (few now believe the air crash story) into Russia never to return,a deliberate act on the part of Stalin & co. to see that the nationalist spirit in Bengal was thus transferred/captured by the Commies in the absence of Netaji? Had he returned,he would've been a huge political magnet as being the only major Indian leader who actually fought for freedom and a decided threat to the monopoly of the Congress party.Netaji's mysterious disappearance led to the Commie's capturing Bengal,where they squatted for decades destroying industry and development.The anti-national connivance with the Brits was exposed in the infamous Dange letter.There is a fascinating insight in this article on the QI movement,Nehru and the Commie split. (http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/thscrip/p ... &prd=fline&)
It served the interests of Stalin,the Brits and Nehru's as well to see that Bose never returned to India.

http://www.newsanalysisindia.com/post/W ... liptid0uW8
Xcpt:

Nehru's shocking role in betraying Netaji

Shyamlal jain, the confidential steno of the INA Defense Committee, in the course of his deposition, made a shocking revelation about Nehru's attitude toward Netaji,”Later Nehru asked me to type a letter on his letterhead. Mr.Nehru addressed that letter to Mr.Clamment Attlee the then PM of Britain, in which Mr.Attlee was informed about the contents of that hand written note regarding Mr.Subhash entry into Russian territory.

"I solemnly affirm and state on oath that thereafter Shri Jawaharlal Nehru gave me four papers from his writing pad to make four copies of a letter, which he would dictate to me on typewriter, which I also complied. The contents of the letter, as far as I could remember, were as follows

Dear Mr. Attlee:
I understand from a reliable source that Subhas Chandra Bose, your war criminal, has been allowed to enter Russian territory by Stalin. This is a clear treachery and betrayal of faith by the Russians. As Russia has been an ally of the British-Americans, it should not have been done. Please take note of it and do what you consider proper and fit.

Yours sincerely,
Jawaharlal Nehru.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... -gag-press

The secret state is just itching to gag the press

Get regulation wrong, and it won't be tales of Cheryl Cole that are censored, but revelations like those of Edward Snowden

It's the readers I feel sorry for. How, one wonders, are those who follow Britain's noisiest newspapers of the right to make sense of what they have been told? For nearly a year the Telegraph, Times, Sun and Daily Mail have warned that the hard-fought freedom of the press is in danger, that soon there could exist in this land a menace that has not existed in three centuries: state control of the written word, thanks to last year's Leveson report and the new regime of interference it mandated.

In this grim new world a newspaper editor could face the threat of jail simply for doing what journalists are meant to do, probing into those corners of public life the powerful would prefer stayed hidden. The readers' only comfort has been the knowledge that at least the right-leaning press is ready to stand firm in the defence of free expression.

What a shock, then, to open those papers this week. "Guardian treason helping terrorists," thundered Rod Liddle in the Sun. "Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists," announced the front page of Wednesday's Daily Mail, quoting the head of MI5, Andrew Parker, who had condemned this newspaper for revealing that pretty well anyone who uses the internet is monitored by a mass surveillance programme conducted by the NSA and GCHQ. Helpfully, the Mail found a professor at Buckingham University to call for the Guardian to be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.

Its editorial was clear. The Guardian had acted with "lethal irresponsibility". If the head of MI5 says something should not be published, then it should not be published. When it comes to reporting on such matters, an editor cannot possibly be allowed to decide for himself what to print. After all, as the Mail put it, "He's a journalist, not an expert on security." Put another way, in an ideal world a newspaper editor could face the threat of jail simply for doing what journalists are meant to do, probing into those corners of public life the powerful would prefer stayed hidden. Readers will surely be forgiven their confusion. One minute the papers are fighting to their last breath the threat of state control, the next they are cheering the secret state as it seeks to gag a newspaper. Those who study the media closely believe the motive is obvious. The Mail and others loathe the Guardian, they say, blaming it both for the entire Leveson process through its revelation of the phone-hacking scandal, and for subsequently insisting that any regulation be genuinely independent. The current attack is payback. In other words, so desperate are the rightwing papers to avoid state interference in the press, they'll demand more state interference in the press. They are bombing the village to save it.

In this thicket of confusion, there are two questions that should be answered. Was the Guardian right to publish the NSA revelations? The head of MI5 says no, but the editors of the most prestigious news organisations in the world disagree, describing such reporting – uncovering a pattern of global surveillance, rather than unmasking individual agents – as nothing less than the duty of journalism in a democracy, allowing voters to know what the state is doing with their money and in their name.

Perhaps that's what journalists would say (though not all journalists, we now discover). Perhaps it's equally predictable that Lib Dem Vince Cable would say, as he did on Friday that the Guardian had performed a "considerable public service". But more unexpected are the words of James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, who has said of the NSA revelations: "I think it's clear that … some of the debate, actually needed to happen." That's rather hard to square with MI5's claim that the Guardian is guilty of dangerous treachery.

The second question relates to the link between the NSA story and press regulation. For if the threat of state control of the press is real, what kind of story do we think the state would want to control? Would it punish a red-top editor for rifling through, say, Cheryl Cole's dustbins; or would it hound Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian editor, for revealing that all of us are watched around the clock?

This should give everyone pause, especially those who, after seeing the slime Leveson found under various stones, became the loudest enthusiasts for regulation. There has been much focus on ensuring any new regulator is truly independent of the newspapers, on a genuine break from the Press Complaints Commission that was the wholly owned creature of Fleet Street. The Guardian has been adamant on this point.

But a new regulator must be just as independent of the state and, on this point, all the papers, including the most hawkish, may have made a fateful error. In their determination to keep politicians' hands off the press, they insisted MPs stay well away, passing no statute that would establish the new regulation system. In its place came a wonderfully Ruritanian ruse, the use of a royal charter. Politicians and press alike have embraced this medieval device, believing that a body magicked from the air by the Queen neatly dodges the threat of state control.

But they're wrong – and this week has proved why. For the body that oversees a royal charter, and can unpick its terms on a whim, is the Privy Council – an entity packed by ministers drawn from the government of the day, and which is deployed to do the state's most secret business, under the extensive, unchecked powers of the royal prerogative. It is the very last bit of government any believer in free speech would want anywhere near the press. Yet the newspapers' own proposal, rejected by ministers on Tuesday, called for just such a royal charter.

After this week, we don't have to imagine how such a system would work. The head of MI5 would no longer be confined to speechifying against the Guardian. It would need only a word in the right ear and, with the privy council and the charter as its weapons, the state could decide the Guardian had crossed the line and had to be silenced, leaving the public where it was before: in the dark.

There is not much time. Late on Friday the three main Westminster parties announced they had agreed a new regulatory set-up, centred once again on a royal charter, albeit one that cannot be altered by secret ministerial whim, but would require two-thirds majorities in both houses of parliament. That provides little reassurance: the requirement itself could be overturned by a simple Commons majority.

Ministers hope to have their new charter "sealed" by 30 October. Between now and then editors need to agree on an alternative. They might look for a new overseer, perhaps located in the judiciary rather than parliament. Or they could construct a new regulator whose members are truly independent but which is overseen by no part of the state, even if that means giving up the legal protections and reduced court costs Leveson envisaged. Such a move could be combined with a tougher law against the kind of violations of privacy that sparked the current fury, as well as reformed libel rules and new limits on media ownership, to ensure greater plurality.

Whatever the solution, it must not involve a royal charter and the privy council. Otherwise it will hand a gag to the most secretive elements of the British state. And, as we saw this week, they are itching to use it.

[Haresh]

"The Indian civil service still rests on a frame built by the British"

May be that's the problem!!!!!!!

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... me-british

[anupmisra]

"The Indian civil service still rests on a frame built by the British"

May be that's the problem!!!!!!! http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... me-british

Read the comments from the latter-day colonialists who missed out on all the fun their 100,000 ancestors had while ruling and managing the land of the million coolies. Amazing how the nostalgia is still alive and kicking.

[vishvak]

Wasn't pakistani civil service set by UK?

After all pakis and UK are allies in war on terror, with UK a fourfather backing pakis as front line allies.

Credit for excellent paki civil cervice goes to UK and pakis deserve all praise for adapting UK . How cozy and romantic.

[Sagar G]

Indian woman in UK forced to carry dead fetus in womb for two days

CHENNAI: An Indian woman in the UK was forced to carry a dead fetus in her womb for two days after doctors at the hospital ignored signs of its death and sent her back home.

Niranjana Kumaresan, a 33-year-old woman hailing from Chennai, filed a complaint with UK's National Health Service (NHS) alleging that doctors and staff at Barnet and Chase Farm hospital in north London ignored her plea for help even after she repeatedly told them she had stopped feeling the baby's movement and doctors themselves confirmed the baby's heart beats were not detected.

"I first felt the baby had become still on September 18, three days after my due date. The previous day I felt my water had broken and reported to the hospital with intense pain. The midwife examined the baby's heart and felt its head position before sending me back home," Niranjana told TOI over phone from their house in Middlesex.

Doctors say considering Niranjana's fetus was in oblique position and she underwent a caesarean for her first child, the delay risked not just the baby's life, but the mother's as well. "When a patient with history of C-section with oblique transverse lie comes with pain, show and leak, an emergency C-section should be done to save the baby and the mother," said noted obstetrician-gynaecologist Dr Kamala Selvaraj.

When Niranjana reported she couldn't feel the baby's movement, doctors allegedly tried to allay her fears saying it was because of the fever she had overnight. "She was advised to take a paracetamol without any examination," said Niranjana's husband Karthikeyan Kumaresan, a software engineer.

Twelve hours later the couple called for the antenatal team which found traces of blood in her urine. "We were moved to a ward, but Niranjana wasn't examined until three hours later," said Karthikeyan, who along with Niranjana moved to the UK from Chennai six years ago.

The midwife who came to examine Niranjana couldn't detect the baby's heart beat with the hospital's mobile scan and the couple were asked to return the next morning. "We were so hassled and upset by then. They so casually asked us to return the next day even after realising the baby's heart beat was missing. They tried downplaying our fear stating that the scan had probably stopped working which is why it failed to pick up the heart beat," said Niranjana, who has a 6-year-old daughter.

On September 19, by which time Niranjana was overdue by four days, she was moved to the delivery room. "I was in a lot of pain by then. But even then, the staff kept saying I wasn't ready as yet. When I went to the washroom the next day to relieve myself, I saw the baby's head. I quickly alerted my husband, who in turn rushed in the staff," said Niranjana. The stillborn baby was delivered.

According to Karthikeyan, the baby's head was squashed and broken. "When I asked the staff, I was told that the head usually becomes like that when babies die in the womb," he said. Struggling to come to terms with her baby's death, Niranjana realised her ordeal was far from over. "After my delivery when my husband was in the room I wanted to go to the toilet and called for help. The midwife told me I had to help myself. I was bleeding. When I came back from the toilet I found the midwife had gone. I couldn't return to the bed, barely managing to stand on my own and I had blood around me," she said.

The couple to their shock also discovered later that the baby's post-mortem was done four days after it was delivered. "When I inquired I was told that the delay was because the body can only be moved by an undertaker and they couldn't arrange for one immediately," said Karthikeyan. On September 24, the couple approached the metropolitan police and lodged a complaint and simultaneously filed a complaint with the NHS.

While the hospital administration wasn't available for comment, NHS acknowledged they had received the complaint. "We are looking into the complaint," said Alex Greenwood who is the facilitator between the couple and the national body. "Senior members of the staff will be involved in investigating the complaint," said Alex, who is part of patient advice and liaison service, a NHS body created to provide advise and support to NHS patients.

In December last year, a woman of Indian origin has died after doctors in Ireland refused to perform an abortion, telling her that "this is a Catholic country", sparking widespread outrage.

For Niranjana, it will take sometime before she musters the courage to step into a hospital again. "The story of my pregnancy has been marred with horror episodes of lack of proper care. My trust on midwives is completely shaken and I have doubts on the level of skills possessed to handle situations that are not quite the usual and need intervention. I may never bring myself to step into the hospital again," Niranjana said in her complaint.

[Singha]

a nurse-midwife in UK nearly killed my nephew by repeatedly sending back my SIL who felt she was about to deliver. ultimately the baby ingested its own stool and was in ICU after a emergency delivery.
I think they dont have enough gynae's in the NHS to ensure a MD doctor is seeing every case...its pushed down the line to nurse midwifes as the primary care provider with docs only stepping in for serious cases and surgeries.

[vishvak]

Western civilization boasts of compassion as guideline no? Medical care is what the most civilized good at lecturing others about. The case of Indian married lady dying due to refusal of medical care in Ireland because of archaic religious laws is a case in point that this boasting and even medical set up are not outside prejudices of religious dogma. Negligence of medical care when its due seems to have reached UK too. Isn't it obvious that incorrect diagnosis and totally misjudging childbirth can lead to complications and risks child and mother too besides mistreatment side effects and horrid experience.

[eklavya]

a nurse-midwife in UK nearly killed my nephew by repeatedly sending back my SIL who felt she was about to deliver. ultimately the baby ingested its own stool and was in ICU after a emergency delivery.
I think they dont have enough gynae's in the NHS to ensure a MD doctor is seeing every case...its pushed down the line to nurse midwifes as the primary care provider with docs only stepping in for serious cases and surgeries.

I too have heard many childbirth related NHS horror stories. Some NHS run hospitals / wards are good, but others need to be avoided like the plague (but only if there is an alternative, and often there is not).

Going private is an option, but boy is it expensive.

With the NHS, the doctors are limited in number, and most of the service proviers are mid-wives, of which some are naturally less able / less experienced than others, and may have difficulty in coping with complications.

I hope the couple in the story above get justice; they appear to have been treated in the most appalling, unprofessional, inhumane and disgraceful manner.

[eklavya]

Indian doctors in legal action over UK exam bias

The failure rate for first CSA attempts was found to be 4.5 per cent for white UK candidates and 17.1 per cent for black and minority ethnic (BME) trainees.

For international medical graduates, including Indians, the failure rate is 47.7 per cent for white candidates and for 65.2 per cent for BMEs.

[Philip]

Let's face facts.When economies crash,scapegoats are looked for.Hitler made the Jews the scapegoats for Germany's eco woes and humiliation post WW1.In the UK the ethnic minorities being "firang" and the majority of whom (esp.the Pak/Islamic community) do not integrate into British society (just look at the number of headscarfs and veils in Britain these days) and espouse "British" values,etc. ,get looked upon as aliens.Remember Norman Tebbit and his "cricket" test? Whom do you cheer for? Europe is seeing a huge surge towards the Far Right and left too,which I posted in the geo td.Ultra nationalism is rearing its head yet again.Only to be expected.Colour prejudice which may have been hidden earlier in better times,has surfaced again .

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10 ... r-o14.html

Edward Snowden and Guardian witch-hunted by UK government, MI5 and media
By Robert Stevens
14 October 2013

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and Britain’s intelligence chiefs have launched a counter-offensive against whistleblower Edward Snowden in an effort to legitimise and continue their spying on the UK population and much of the world.

Last week, Britain’s new head of MI5, Sir Andrew Parker, used his first public address to make a veiled attack on the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Snowden and to insinuate that the Guardian was assisting terrorism in making public his revelations.

While not mentioning either by name, Parker asserted that “It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques.” “Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists”, he continued. “It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will.”
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Such claims are a fraud. Snowden made public documents from the US NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) showing programmes designed to spy on virtually every man, woman and child with Internet access or a telephone.

Parker made a feeble attempt to deny this. “In some quarters there seems to be a vague notion that we monitor everyone and all their communications, browsing at will through peoples’ private lives for anything that looks interesting,” he said. “That is, of course, utter nonsense.”

Parker’s speech was the signal for a concerted attack on Snowden from the highest echelons of the state, including Prime Minister David Cameron, along with barely concealed threats against the Guardian.

Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ and intelligence and security coordinator for the prime minister, stated, “The assumption the experts are working on is that all that information, or almost all of it, will now be in the hands of Moscow and Beijing. It’s the most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever, much worse than [Guy] Burgess and [Donald] MacLean in the Fifties”.

Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of MI6, told BBC Radio 4 that the Snowden leaks were “comparable” to those by the Cambridge spies, “only worse”.

Burgess and MacLean were intelligence operatives for the Soviet Union, part of a spy ring at Cambridge University.

Cameron said, “When you get newspapers who get hold of vast amounts of data and information that is effectively stolen information and they think it is they think it’s OK to reveal this, I think they have to think about their responsibilities and are they helping to keep our country safe.”

The prime minister boasted of his personal responsibility for the unprecedented attack on press freedom of July 20, when computers owned by the Guardian containing files originating from Snowden were destroyed. “I sent the cabinet secretary and the national security adviser to go and see them to tell them about how dangerous it was for them to hold this information,” he said, and “they agreed to have a whole lot of it destroyed”.

Deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg said, “I’ve got no doubt that there were some parts of what were published, which would have passed most Guardian readers completely by because they were very technical, but would have been immensely interesting for people who want to do us harm.”

Fellow Liberal Democrat and Business Secretary Vince Cable made a pose of defending the Guardian’s right to publish material, but then asserted that “a very substantial amount of really quite important highly sensitive intelligence seems to have got to people who shouldn’t have got it, i.e. in Russia and China and elsewhere.”

There is not a shred of evidence that Snowden’s revelations, or the Guardian’s reportage, have “aided terrorism”. They have exposed criminality on a mass scale being conducted by the US and British governments, as well as other imperialist powers.

The moves against the Guardian reached a crescendo with the calls by Tory backbencher Julian Smith to have its actions in “sending detailed family and personal information about security agents across borders…illegal, it’s threatening our agents and their families. Can we have a statement from the Home Secretary to clarify that the law will be upheld whether or not the organisation involved is hiding behind the fig leaf of journalism?” Sun newspaper columnist Rod Liddle wrote a piece accusing the Guardian of “treason”.

In a comment, “The paper that helps Britain’s enemies”, the Daily Mail stated, “We believe the Guardian, with lethal irresponsibility, has crossed that line by printing tens of thousands of words describing the secret techniques used to monitor terrorists.”

Former Labour Party home secretary Jack Straw supported the government, accusing the Guardian of “extraordinary naivety and arrogance”.

It was the BBC that launched this counter-offensive by the state on its flagship Newsnight programme. Presenter Kirsty Wark conducted an interview with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on October 4, four days before Parker’s speech. Throughout, she parroted the government and intelligence agencies’ claims, asserting without substantiation that 58,000 unsecured documents were seized by UK border officials from Greenwald’s partner David Miranda in August when he was illegally detained.

Greenwald said Walk’s claim “was a lie,” before telling her, “As a journalist you should be aware that simply because a government makes a claim, especially when they are making that claim in the middle of a lawsuit, while they are being sued for violating the law, one should not go around assuming that claim to be factually true.”

Wark was wholly indifferent to such basic journalistic standards, asking Greenwald at one point, “Do you actually think it’s a shock that spies do spy and that for a majority of the population perhaps, it might be quite reassuring. They might actually feel quite safe?”

The latest moves by the UK government and spy agencies are a pre-emptive strike in an attempt to silence any further reportage, based on material passed on by Snowden to journalists. They are a blatant attempt to criminalise any media coverage, even slightly critical of the spy agencies, as a part of overall plans to clamp down on press freedoms.

The move to restrict coverage of the Snowden revelations takes place against a background of the ongoing attempts to introduce press regulation in the UK. Last week, the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour parties agreed on the terms of a final draft of a Royal Charter, which could become law by the end of this month.

Playing soft cop for the government, Cable has called for “proper political oversight” of the security and intelligence agencies. But this is a hollow pose. The spy agencies do not need regulating, but must be opposed, exposed and disbanded.

Former cabinet member Chris Huhne has stated publicly that cabinet ministers and even members of the National Security Council were kept in “utter ignorance” regarding the Prism and Tempora spy programmes.

“The cabinet was told nothing about GCHQ’s Tempora or its US counterpart, the NSA’s Prism, nor about their extraordinary capability to hoover up and store personal emails, voice contact, social networking activity and even internet searches,” he said.

“I was also on the national security council, attended by ministers and the heads of the Secret [Intelligence Service, MI6] and Security Service [MI5], GCHQ and the military. If anyone should have been briefed on Prism and Tempora, it should have been the NSC.

“I do not know whether the prime minister or the foreign secretary (who has oversight of GCHQ) were briefed, but the NSC was not.”

After making these extraordinary statements, Huhne too merely urged, “the supervisory arrangements for our intelligence services” need “updating”.

For years, GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and their US counterparts operated outside the law—and apparently without even a shred of parliamentary oversight. Now, Cable and Huhne respond by urging that the people directly implicated in this criminal behaviour, such as Cameron, be entrusted once more with the task of regulating the activities of the secret state.

[panduranghari]

Indian doctors in legal action over UK exam bias

The failure rate for first CSA attempts was found to be 4.5 per cent for white UK candidates and 17.1 per cent for black and minority ethnic (BME) trainees.

For international medical graduates, including Indians, the failure rate is 47.7 per cent for white candidates and for 65.2 per cent for BMEs.

What a waste of time. Legal action or not, no god damned difference. The Brits still think they are better than us. The case to the point is the number of cases in front of General Medical/Dental/Pharmacy/Podiatry etc. Councils. Overwhelming number is people from Indian sub continent. Not even eastern Europe. Indian subcontinent. Eastern European training is abysmal.

Another issue is the long term funding for NHS. I survive in running my practice thanks to NHS. Take NHS away I would be struggling a lot. Most people choose not to pay for healthcare. They always have got it free, they still want everything free. The problem is the NHS budget cannot cater to 22nd century healthcare. Ombaba thinks NHS is a way forward for USA. I dont understand how.

Coming back to legal action by doctors, the passing failing is decided by the needs of workforce. My wife when she was doing her speciality training, she was told the next day that she had failed 1 viva. The results were not expected for another 6 weeks. And the person who told her she had failed was not even the examiner. The people staying in speciality training are forced to pay the subscriptions for the Royal colleges. This keeps the gravy train running for a while.

NHS is hopeless. There are good and bad everywhere.

Indian government should plan for accommodating the highly trained Indian doctors who will INEVITABLY return to India once NHS becomes a rationed service. It will be foolish to loose the trained Indian doctors who would naturally move to India when things in UK are not good. Its not far IMO.

[abhishek_sharma]

Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

[kish]

Britanistan needs Mr. Shushil Kumar shinde as its home secretary, it has jailed innocent muslims for celebrating EID.

Muslim gang jailed for kidnapping and raping two girls as part of their Eid celebrations

A group of Muslim men who abducted and raped two teenage girls as part of their Eid celebrations laughed in court yesterday as they were jailed for a total of 38 years.

The girls, aged 15 and 16, were lured miles from their home to a dingy hostel.

In a horrifying weekend-long ordeal, they were plied with alcohol and repeatedly raped by two men, Shamrez Rashid and Amar Hussain, before being offered to a number of others who also ‘used them for sex’.

The 16-year old was forced to have sex six times with four different men.
The younger victim was raped by one man and then sexually assaulted by another.

One defendant, Rashid, 20, was said to have claimed the girls had enjoyed the sex, which he said had taken place as they celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid.

‘It was Eid,’ he said. ‘We treated them as our guests. OK, so they gave us [sex] but we were buying them food and drink.

India should condemn this religious repression in Briton. It should advice the British to "open up" more for muslim religious celebrations.

The five defendants laughed and smirked as the horrifying details of their offences were described in court yesterday.

Rashid – who had already been found guilty of two rapes, an attempted rape, child abduction and an attempted sexual assault – grinned, laughed and made gun gestures in the dock.

His supporters in the public gallery hurled abuse at the judge as he passed sentence later.(See this is why muslims ask for shariah law everywhere in earth. These innocent muslims would have been set free under shariah law)

The court heard how Rashid and Hussain drove the girls from their home in Telford in Shropshire to a Birmingham probation hostel on the evening of Saturday November 28 2009.

'Subjected to constant abuse'


They took them to an unfamiliar environment so they ‘would be disorientated and reliant on them,’ prosecutors said.

After raping the girls, they ‘in effect offered them up to their friends, introducing a string of young men into the house’.

Over the following 36 hours, the girls were subjected to almost constant abuse, despite begging their attackers to stop.

The 16-year-old was left with bruising all over her face and neck after she was forced to perform a sex act on Hussain.

She was then forced to have sex with Rashid and a third man, Adil Saleem, while others watched.

The court heard how she held on to a doorframe to try to stop her attacker dragging her into a bedroom, but was pushed inside and the door locked behind her. (Poor girl she had to go through all this because of her countries islam pasand foreign policy)

She was warned that her attackers were in a gang known as the B9 Crew, and that ‘when someone pressed charges against them, they went to their mother’s house, put a gun to her face and broke her jaw’.

[Lalmohan]

Manchester sex attacks by boy, 12, 'may escalate'

He was described as being of Asian heritage, aged 12 to 13, of slim build and wearing baggy trousers and carrying a rucksack.

given that its manchester... the heritage points towards the ROP community

[eklavya]

The Economist: The new Islamophobes

A far-right outfit is dying. The views it holds dear are not
Oct 19th 2013 |From the print edition

“I’M NOT going to lie to you mate, some of the people here are drunken fooking hooligans,” said Jamie, a gravedigger from Leeds and regional administrator of the English Defence League. “They don’t even have a fooking clue why we’re here.”

Bagehot was having the same thought. Forsaking wife and offspring, he was spending his Saturday among several hundred EDL “infidels”, as they call themselves, outside the Queen pub in Bradford. It was rowdy. It was cold. It was hard, as droplets of lager and rainwater fell through a fug of cannabis smoke, to recall what the point of it was. “Get the fook outta it!” Jamie snarled, shoulder-barging a pair of wrestling thugs who were endangering his pint glass. “But that doesn’t mean,” he continued, as a man wearing a pig mask pushed past, “that the EDL isn’t a serious street movement.”

Since its formation in Luton in 2009, the EDL has emerged as Europe’s fastest-growing Islamophobic group and, following the more recent slide of the British National Party (BNP), the most popular on the British far right. With a grasp of social media and nationwide organisation, it has held rallies of up to 5,000 infidels, about twice the BNP’s active membership. Its Facebook page has more “likes” than the Conservative Party’s.

The group was started by a 26-year-old solarium-keeper—who uses the pseudonym Tommy Robinson—on a single issue: opposing Islamist protests in Luton against soldiers returning from Iraq. Mr Robinson built this into a broader campaign against what he describes as the Islamisation of British society—citing as evidence a proliferation of mosques and Muslim faith schools, honour killings, the rise of the burka and much else.

It proved serendipitous. A couple of child sex scandals, involving Muslim gangs in Rochdale and Oxford and vulnerable white girls, was a powerful recruiting-sergeant for the group. The murder of a British squaddie, Drummer Lee Rigby, by jihadists in London in May gave it another excuse to rally, often violently. More alarmingly, it turns out, Mr Robinson’s views are popular.

Polling by YouGov suggests that, contrary to the usual characterisation of the far-right as a preserve of jobless young white men, many EDL supporters are middle-aged and industrious. That makes them more representative of British society—indeed, up to a quarter of Britons are thought to sympathise with their views, though not with their violence. Matthew Goodwin of Nottingham University suggests several reasons for this rising Islamophobia, from the war on terror to a general xenophobia, exacerbated by the economic slump. In this fertile terrain, some feared Mr Robinson could become the first far-rightist to navigate Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system into the political mainstream. And he may yet—but not with the infidels.

On October 8th Mr Robinson announced that he and his right-hand man, Kevin Caroll, were quitting the EDL. It had been overrun, he said, by “Nazi” extremists. And he was fed up with the opprobrium this brought him. “When some moron lifts up his top and he’s got the picture of a mosque saying ‘boom!’ and it’s all over the national newspaper, it’s me,” he whined. “When I pick up my kids from school the parents are looking at me, judging me.” As conversions go, it was not damascene. Mr Robinson reiterated his commitment to fighting the Islamist takeover. But he will now do so, he says, by democratic means.

This is good news, suggestive of one of Britain’s great strengths: its people’s fundamental dislike of rabble-rousers. Fears of an EDL breakthrough now seem exaggerated. If even Mr Robinson was made to feel uneasy by the ugly reputation he saw reflected in the eyes of his fellow parents, how many Britons could ever have flocked to his group’s crusader-themed banner? Even before Mr Robinson’s exit, the EDL had probably peaked, as signalled by the rise of the extremist fringe he complained about.

Outside the Queen pub, the infidels put on a brave face. With a sudden blast of heavy guitar chords, they surged towards a small dais, while belting out their theme-song (“We’re the infidels of the EDL and we’re coming down the road…”). It was briefly thrilling, a call to arms in the drizzle. Yet in the speeches that followed there was no disguising the calamity that has befallen the group.

The speakers praised the turnout. But all knew it was wretchedly low—and the EDL’s next rallies will be smaller. Many of those in Bradford had already paid up their bus money before Mr Robinson’s announcement deprived the group of its two biggest strengths: a charismatic leader and a semblance, however flaky, of legitimacy. It was indeed this element of Mr Robinson’s betrayal that most bothered the infidels. “Whatever you write,” said Jamie, “don’t say we’re a racist organisation, because we’re not.”

Hanging up the jackboots
He really meant it. And this, despite the boozing and brawling (“You here for a fight?” a beaming Geordie inquired of Bagehot chattily), was the most alarming thing about the infidels gathered in Bradford. Strip away the Muslim-baiting, and it was remarkable how unthreatening, or normal, the rally felt. There were even signs of the general tolerance in British society, of which an aversion to racism—the main cause of the BNP’s demise—is an important element. A rainbow-coloured flag, brandished by a large infidel in a burka, represented the EDL’s gay, lesbian and bisexual division. Another, who described himself as a “Judeo-Christian”, waved an Israeli flag—“I haven’t heard a single anti-Semitic comment,” he protested, “so how can we be Nazis?” The EDL’s Sikh division had been expected, but failed to show, possibly because its leader was recently convicted of armed robbery. The infidels are ignorant, riotous and horribly wrong. A minority, as Mr Robinson said, are even worse. Yet they are not nearly as out of step with mainstream Britain as their opponents like to believe.

So Mr Robinson’s vow to quit the streets is ominous as well as heartening. His cause is not dying. It is becoming respectable.

[Prem]

http://zeenews.india.com/business/news/ ... 87172.html
Raise UK visa bond issue with Prince Charles: Assocham to Govt

Emphasising that the visa bond policy for Indians must be discarded, the chamber said India must demand treatment at par with China and also make it clear to the UK that the move would be challenged in the WTO as it impairs fair international trade."We want the controversial visa bond policy, by which visitors to the UK from six Commonwealth countries including India will be required to furnish a bond for 3,000 pounds for a six-month visa, to be abandoned," Assocham said.Earlier this week, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne unveiled a liberal visa policy for the Chinese visiting Britain in a bid to woo Chinese investment.Pointing out that there was no merit in the argument that visa bond policy would be implemented on pilot for so-called 'high-risk visitors,' Assocham said: "It is bound to be misused, and create confusion"."In fact, India should make it clear to British authorities that the move would even be challenged in the World Trade Organisation as it impairs fair international trade," it added.Osborne announced relaxed visa rules for visitors from China during his ongoing trade mission to the country."As an economy, we are as important as China, both in terms of trade and investment as also exchange of tourists. Students from India and China not only fund their education abroad but also pump in hard currency into the British universities which are starved of funds," Assocham said.Under the plan, Chinese nationals visiting the European Union will not need to submit separate UK visa applications if they book with selected travel agents."As its economic clout increases, India must seek a treatment from the UK which is no less different and inferior to the one meted out to China," the chamber said.
At present, Chinese visitors can apply for a single visa to visit much of Europe but a separate visa is required to travel to the UK. A mobile visa scheme has been made operational for the Chinese tourists."Several Indian companies, notably the Tatas have invested billions of dollars in Britain creating and saving jobs in that country," the chamber pointed out.Prince Charles and his wife Camilla Parker-Bowles will make a nine-day visit to India next month on their way to Sri Lanka for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.This will be the royal couple's third official visit to India together. The trip, from November 6 to 14, will take them to Dehradun, New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Kochi.

[anmol]

src: http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/racis ... -arrested/

[Philip]

A notorious Indian arms dealer Sudhir Choudhrie may become a British "Lord" as he has donated allegedly lots of moolah to the Liberal Democratic Party,sponsored by none other than the Dy.PM Nick Clegg! Lord-hopefully Chou,has been linked with the Barak missile scandal,AW VVIP helo scam,reportedly Finmeccanica's middleman for doing the business. The CBI in aother case closed it saying that there was "no evidence",even though he is on a list of 23 "undesirable men",with whom govt. depts. are expected not to have any contacts with.Chou has donated more than 640,000 pounds to the Lib-Dems since 2004.He has extensive contacts in several nations including Israel,where he is suspected to "partially control defence firms at least in Israel"(?)!

Lord-hopefully Chou's rise was due to an uncle who was a senior exec. with HAL,well,well,well! Through extensive use of tax havens,powerful politico-babu and military contacts,he is suspected of having swung major defence contracts in India.

TOI report.

[Haresh]

Horrific Whitechapel bottle attack caught on CCTV

http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/n ... _1_2914323

Note the repeated use of the word "Asian"
There were no Chinese or Japanese involved in this incident!!!!

[devesh]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/906 ... -gone-mad/

They used to catch crooks - now they trawl Twitter. Are our police turning into spies?

Just before the hacking scandal broke, the Sun sent a young and by all accounts decent reporter to meet a woman who said she had a story — a ‘walk-in’ as we call them in the trade.

The walk-in produced a phone and said the Sun would want to take a look. One picture on it showed the face of a much-loved TV presenter. The rest of the celeb’s body was more lustful than lovable, however, as he was exposing his member in triumphant fashion. Accompanying the picture was a lot of explicit sex talk. The phone looked as if it belonged to the star’s mistress, and the very famous and very married presenter had been sending her ***** ‘selfies’ and sex texts to remind her of the joys that awaited her when they next met.

The reporter took the phone. Contrary to received wisdom, tabloid hacks are not all monsters. He told the Sun’s lawyer he suspected his contact had stolen the phone. He and the lawyers killed the story. He gave the phone back to the walk-in. Later the police arrested and cautioned her under the Theft Act, and returned the phone to its rightful owner.

That seemed to be that. The reporter moved on to another job as a foreign correspondent in the States. The petty thief had only a tiny mark on her criminal record that hardly anyone would know about. The celebrity continued to keep his sex life private.

It was as if nothing had happened, until three years later in 2012 the police arrested the reporter for possession of criminal property and a catch-all offence that could trap every investigative journalist — ‘computer misuse’ — a charge without a public interest defence. He lost his job and his new life in America. Like scores of other journalists and confidential sources — more now than ever before in British history — he is waiting to see if the Crown Prosecution Service will send him to the dock.

If it does, it will show how stupid Britain’s forces of law and order have become. I hear that the CPS is trying to keep the celeb’s name secret, but there is no guarantee that it can. If it fails, the state, which accuses the tabloids of invading the privacy of the famous, will be invading his privacy itself. The reporter, meanwhile, will face a full criminal hearing, even though the police let off the actual thief with a caution. In the 1990s, I published a collection of essays called Cruel Britannia on the early Blair years. I chose as my subtitle ‘Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous’. What applied then, applies now — only doubly so.

Britain’s authorities are sinister because they are turning on fundamental liberties, without which a free society cannot function: freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to protest. They are preposterous because they are wasting their time and our money on crimes that turn out not to be crimes on closer examination. Instead of keeping a steady head, they pander to popular hysteria and round up despised minorities: left-wing demonstrators, tabloid journalists and the politically incorrect users of social media. It is as if the criminal justice system has become a vast job creation scheme for cops and briefs. Or perhaps the better comparison is with the Aztec gods, who needed a steady flow of sacrificial victims to satiate their hunger. It certainly feels that way when I talk to honest men and women caught in the law’s maw.

‘Don’t they have anything better to do?’ used to be the question when the police were caught wasting their own time. The surprising answer today is that often they do not.

Crime is falling across the developed world. Sociologists cannot say why. Tougher punishments do not explain the trend. The punitive United States has two million in custody, and has seen its crime rate collapse. But so have the soft-liberal states of northern Europe. The authors of the best-selling Freakonomics claimed that freely available abortion had led to poor women aborting boys, who would otherwise have grown up to be criminals. Their eugenic fantasy had no basis in fact either — crime rates were lower when abortion was illegal. The right’s warning that ‘the collapse of the family’ would lead to social breakdown has proved to be as false — crime has fallen as single parenthood has grown. The left’s warning that inequality and poverty will bring disorder on the streets has turned out to be nonsense too — the crime figures keep going down despite the worst recession in a century. Better car immobilisers, security cameras and burglar alarms are probably part of the explanation, as are an ageing population and more humane treatments for the mentally ill and disabled.

For whatever reason — and even the pacifying effects of unleaded petrol have been suggested — the developed world is going through a cultural change as dramatic as the shift in the mid-19th century when the Victorians rejected the licentiousness of the Georgians and embraced respectability. The ‘young people of today’, so often condemned, are less likely to get drunk or stoned than their parents were, and much less likely to burgle your home or rob you in the street. Saffy, Jennifer Saunders’s puritanical daughter in Absolutely Fabulous, is as much a sign of the times as a comic character.

There are two ways to respond to the news that crime has halved in England and Wales since 1995. The public could rejoice that last year we enjoyed the largest fall in violent crime in Europe over the last decade. A safer society is a society worth having, after all. For the police, however, a safer society is a clear and present danger. Crime may have halved since 1995, but police numbers are up: from 127,222 to 129,584 in 2012 in England and Wales; and from 14,323 in to 17,436 in Scotland. How can these officers justify their salaries and pensions, when so many are surplus to requirements? The answer the police have found is to criminalise behaviour that was never criminal in the past and should not be criminal now.

We will have to wait until the trials are over, but from what I am hearing the phone hacking cases stand a good chance of being remembered as the most vexatious litigation in English legal history. They are already the largest and most expensive police investigation ever. That on its own is an astonishing fact. Britain’s largest police investigation — costing £19.5 million as of June this year, the last month for which we have figures — was not into murder or paedophilia or terrorism but into journalism. Detectives have arrested more than 100 journalists and their sources to date. Only countries like Iran and Turkey arrest reporters in such number, and for this reason alone the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service will be as much on trial as the defendants.

I urge you to keep your eyes open for two tricks they may have pulled when the hearings begin. Off the record, I am told that many reporters charged with paying for stories — of ‘procuring misconduct in public office’ as the archaic wording of the common law has it — will say, ‘Yes, I paid for information but the story I received was in the public interest.’ If they do, they will tell us that the authorities took advantage of an outbreak of moral hysteria — which, as Lord Macaulay noted, periodically make the British so ridiculous — to punish whistle-blowers and send a chilling message to all state servants that they will receive the same treatment if they speak out.

You should watch out too for cases so trivial and pointless that you wonder about the mentality of the prosecutor who approved them. A reporter I know has been kept on bail for months for an off-the-cuff remark he made in an email and because he worked near a man who was an alleged hacker. If they come to court, these prosecutions will send journalists rather than sources a message. ‘We can make your lives hell, for years,’ they will say. ‘Are you sure you want to go through all of that?’

Too few realise that the police have every-thing they need, because, to save his worthless skin, and the skin of his equally worthless son James, Rupert Murdoch handed over all the evidence, however flimsy, for detectives to use against his own journalists and supposedly confidential sources.

Despite promises from the Director of Public Prosecutions to the contrary, the web remains an equally profitable source of material for underemployed officers. Kent police, for instance, investigated their own youth commissioner — a luckless 17-year-old called Paris Brown — for making allegedly racist and homophobic tweets. In this, as in so many other investigations into ‘hate speech’, the fundamental principle of free societies was forgotten. It is not enough for the state to say that speech is hateful: it should have to show that the offending words would incite violence before our underemployed cops can investigate. If a religious fanatic is inciting a mob outside a gay bar, arrest him, of course. If he is expressing an obnoxious opinion, argue with him.

Just in case you are thinking it is only Sun reporters, ‘bigots’ and other traditional objects of leftish antipathy who are suffering, notice how the police boast of mass arrests at left-wing demonstrations and only months later admit sotto voce that they have made a mistake. The most notable climbdown came from protests against the G20 in 2009, when the Met had to accept that its arrests were unlawful. More often, they just quietly release innocent protestors without charge.

We should be enjoying a peace dividend as crime falls. We should be a happier country, freed from fear. Instead we are becoming a frightened and cautious people. The devil has found work for the police’s idle hands, and they are meddling with the freedoms that make democratic life worth living.

[eklavya]

The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj by Anne de Courcy – review

Bella Bathurst
The Observer, Saturday 2 November 2013 14.04 GMT

For a middle-class Victorian family overburdened with daughters, the colonies were a godsend. Out there in India, a mere six months away by boat, were potential husbands by the score. The men ruling the empire were posh, often rich and almost universally frustrated. The best catches (the "turbot and halibut of the matrimonial nets") worked for the Indian civil service, or ICS, which insisted that all staff remain bachelors until after the age of 30. The huge distances, both geographical and ideological, between governors and governed meant that Raj-wallahs were expected to live more like secular monks than young men in a hot country.

On the other hand, British girls were considered to be "on the shelf" if they were still unmarried by their mid-20s. Since the best an unmarried woman could hope for was to work as a governess, they were packed off by the boatload to hunt for husbands and then breed for Britain.

Too intelligent, too poor or too plain to make good matches at home, the "fishing fleet" were trawled round the balls and clubs of Calcutta and Delhi as soon as they arrived. If that didn't do the trick, they were dispatched up country for a further round of speed dating and tiger shooting. Those few left unwed at the end of the process were usually made to pay their own sorrowful passage back to Britain.

Some of those who did stick to the rules of the Raj adapted well and made genuine love matches, but far more settled for "you'll do" arrangements based more on pragmatism than affection. Fraternising with Indians was out of the question, whatever their caste. When the maharajah of Patiala eloped with a fishing fleet girl called Florrie Bryan, she was spurned by both English and Indian society and her son was poisoned.

Anne de Courcy's girl's-eye view of the Raj makes clear the damage imperialism did not just to India but to the imperialists themselves. ICS men had no home leave for eight years, so the offspring of those marriages might not see their fathers for many years in a row. De Courcy includes the accounts of several miserable offspring born in India and incarcerated at boarding schools in England. As an account of husband-hunting, The Fishing Fleet is thorough and serviceable. As an account of how to screw up two societies at once, it's unparalleled.

[brihaspati]

What the English wives could not provide and the small case of British honour and integrity about non-British women....

http://bora.cmi.no/dspace/bitstream/102 ... 2007_1.pdf

Within the context of a colonial rule the Indian prostitute was defined as a criminal through the discourse of the Contagious Diseases Act. The Acts were passed in 1864 and amended with a view towards greater effectiveness between 1866-1869. In an immediate sense the legislation developed in response to the growing pressures on doctors and officers after the Crimean War, when the alaring numbers of British soldiers suffering from venereal disease were publicised.

The military logic for the working of the Contagious Diseases Act in India was made clear by the Quarer Master general's memorandum of 14th June 1886: "In the regimental bazaars it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women, to care that they are sufficiently attractive, to provide them with proper houses. If young soldiers are carefully advised with regard to the advantages of ablution and recognize that convenient arangements exist in the regimental bazaar, they may be expected to avoid the risks involved in association with women who are not recognized by the regimental authorities. ,,14
[...]
The official demand for defining a "common prostitute" continued. Though it was also clear from their constant pleas for extensions of police power, the British administration also wanted the definition to remain flexible so that any Indian woman whom the soldiers desired could be brought under the category...
[..]
Often soldiers pointed to some local women as the cause of their infection, and embarrassed officials on examinations found the women to be healthy....
[...]
Through the final act of coercive legislation the colonial state completed the process of commodification of native women. This process of branding was resurrected in the reports of two American women missionaries, Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katherine Bushnell:

Imagine yourself as the one apprehended and the case assumes a different aspect. A policeman comes to your door and reads a warrant of your arrest as a common prostitute; you ask on what authority. You are informed that the name of the informant is not to be made public - if a man can be induced to help trace out disease it being disregarded as a "point of honour" to inform other men where danger lies - his confession must not be made known, it could injure his reputation.

you contend that you have a right to your good name and that it is a principle of justice that no one can be punished on secret and unproved evidence, and that it is a punishment of the worst sort to be taken by a policeman through the street in a hospital where only a disorder of a certain sort are treated. Y ou are then informed that if you do not go, you will be taken out of the town in which you live, set down as a common vagrant by the roadside, and if ever again found within the limits of the city in which your parents, brothers and sisters live, you will be arrested and put in jaii.20

These harrowing details were yielded by the officials themselves and relate
the same story:

The official demand for defining a "common prostitute" continued. Though it was also clear from their constant pleas for extensions of police power, the British administration also wanted the definition to remain flexible so that any Indian woman whom the soldiers desired could be brought under the category...

[brihaspati]

In June 17, 1886, a military order, known as the “Circular Memorandum, 21A”, was sent to all the Cantonments of India by Quartermaster-General Chapman, in the name of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India (Lord Roberts), officially sanctioning capture of native Indian women for enforced prostitution by the regimental commanding-officers of the various British regiments.

The previously mentioned missionaries write: “The orders specified were faithfully carried out, under the supervision of Commanding Officers. The Commanding Officer gave orders to his Quartermaster to arrange with the regimental kotwal to take two policemen (without uniform), and go into the villages and take from the homes of these poor people their daughters from fourteen years and upwards, about twelve or fifteen girls at a time. They were to select the best-looking. Next morning, these were all put in front of the Colonel and Quartermaster. The former made his selection of the number required. They were then presented with a pass or licence, and then made over to the old woman in charge of this house of vice under the Government. The women already there, who were examined by the doctor, and found diseased, had their passes taken away from them, and were then removed by the police out of the Cantonment, and these fresh, innocent girls put in their places.”2 One such Commanding Officer of a British Regiment stationed at Solan followed the rules laid down in the Circular memorandum to the hilt, and wrote the following application to the Magistrate of the Umballa (Ambala) Cantonment: “Requisition for extra attractive women for regimental bazaar, in accordance with Circular Memorandum 21a. These women’s fares by one-horse conveyances, from Umballa to Solan, will be paid by the Cheshire Regiment on arrival. Please send young and attractive women, as laid down in Quartermaster-General’s Circular, No 21a. Application has been made to the Cantonment Magistrate of Umballa for others, but up to date none has arrived; therefore, it is presumed a great difficulty exists in procuring the class of young women asked for.”

Thus amidst a regiment of one thousand European soldiers around fifteen of these Indian girls were placed for the exclusive use of the Lal-Kurti (English Soldiers). Thus, when patronised to such an extent by their own officers, at least, eight hundred to nine hundred of the young English soldiers would have availed of their services, and the number which would have to be served daily can well be imagined because even at a minimum estimate of only a quarter of the total regimental-demand asking for sex daily, each of the regimental prostitutes would have to serve from fifteen to twentyfive soldiers at the very minimum. Thus, when these sons of the English working class would have satiated their lust to perfection, and impregnated them with the whole range of STDs which could possibly be spread, he would then have the double luxury of first defiling and diseasing the poor unfortunate girl, and, thereafter, informing about her diseased body (in which he and his fellow comrade-in-arms were culprits) to the military physician-surgeon. The result of which would be her being summoned by the Cantonment Magistrate to appear before the regimental physician for a physical inspection.
http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article2142.html

Even before the 1886 memorandum, which had generated such a political storm in England and India, the Quartermaster-General had issued a circular memorandum in 1883 to the following effect: “Reliable matrons be appointed to supervise the registered women, and who should ensure that those under their charge should consort with none other than Europeans. They should only entertain the men in their own houses which should be duly numbered, as it was known that men were reluctant to point out the woman who had infected them.” In another observation the following year, the same authority says: “Their houses should not be too pretentious for prostitutes delight in dark little-dens and there is merit in simplicity. Inexpensively built mud-walls with tiled roofs of a village character would best suit the occasion.”3

Bhandari further points out quoting from Chatterji's article which I referred to :

The remarkable hypocrisy of the British, who considered most of the Indian women as always prone to an innate desire for sex as soon as they reached puberty, and which they considered as the reason for the child marriages in India, can be seen from this statement highlighted by Ratnabali Chatterjee:

“It may perhaps be supposed that the seclusion in which native women are kept effectually prevents their forming intrigues beyond the circle of their own home. This is a mistake. Old women go between persons who are strangers to each other, and in our large towns there are regular meeting houses where men and outwardly respectable women are brought together. The majority of these women who visit these houses I am told are married women.”5

This view of Indian girls and married women appears all the more remarkable when one realises the remarkable degree of rampant prostitution amongst all classes in England itself, and all the more amongst the upper aristocratic-class whose female-folks, tied down by the Church and the Victorian male’s notion of the chaste wife, had no way to vent out their repressed sexuality than in the infamous ‘Houses of Assignation’.

[vishvak]

Wonder how the British view young girls within UK even these days who tend to get pregnant earlier and give birth outside marriage.

[JE Menon]

The Camerons at Diwali...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/artic ... emple.html

Somebody paste this in a Paki forum - drone strike won't be needed half the Pak terrorists overseas will die of apoplectic fits

[member_22733]

^^^ JEMji,

I was just going through the comments. Looks like some brits are already dying due to the fits you mentioned above. Brits and Bakis are bhai bhai, I am sure Cameron does the same thing for Eid etc.

[Karan M]

bji, that shows what colonialism was all about. makes for harrowing reading.

[habal]

I think British aid to India is an informal agreement between British and Indian govt to repay British debts due to India a the time of independence.

[Lalmohan]

Wonder how the British view young girls within UK even these days who tend to get pregnant earlier and give birth outside marriage.

amongst the lower classes this has been the norm for a long long time - they are used to it, and the welfare state effectively encourages it. it is the easiest way for an uneducated girl from the lower strata to have her life funded by the government. these women live in maternal clans, with boyfriends drifting in and out, leaving behind more and more offspring and half siblings. no one works, but government will give them free medical, housing, unemployment benefit, child benefit, etc., etc. - the threshold for having to work for a living is quite high, many manage just fine on this model. and the boys grow up into an alienated world of more benefits and crime - and so the cycle continues

[SwamyG]

Anybody knows why India receives aid from UK?

Is GoI asking for it? Or is it some NGOs asking for it?

Or is UK forcing it down India's throat because of their 'white man's burden' ?

[Lilo]

Anybody knows why India receives aid from UK?

Is GoI asking for it? Or is it some NGOs asking for it?

Or is UK forcing it down India's throat because of their 'white man's burden' ?

A previous discussion...
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 9#p1334269

[Rahul M]

Swamy saar, NGO's themselves don't want brit aid.
see http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 7#p1032897

[brihaspati]

http://www.news.com.au/technology/scien ... 6754751124

A NEW breed of poison-resistant "super rat" is spreading across the UK.

The rats look like normal rats but cannot be killed by regular poison pellets and eat them "like feed".
The disease-carrying rats are taking over other rat populations, experts say.

They have been spotted in Kent and Sussex in the southeast of the country and the West Country in the southwest, the International Business Times reports. The rats have also reportedly been sighted further north in Oxford and Berkshire, sparking fears that they are spreading. Pest controllers want to use more lethal poisons in order to stop the rats travelling further but are facing resistance from authorities.

Richard Moseley from the British Pest Control Association said: "Normal rats are being killed off by poison, so these resistant species are taking their place - it's only natural that their numbers are expanding.

"But they're being found further afield than previously anticipated.
"They eat poison like feed, you might as well be leaving out grain for them."

Dr Dougie Clarke, from the University of Huddersfield, said even poisons used by pest control experts were not strong enough to kill them."There are obviously health concerns and worries about the bacteria they carry, such as salmonella," Dr Clarke said.

"They carry a lot of diseases, including Weil's, which has been linked to deaths. They also chew on electrical cables." But pest controllers' bids to use stronger poisons have so far been denied by the Health and Safety Executive because there are fears they will damage the environment and kill other wildlife.

These must be immigrant rats of the wrong race and colour. They satisfy all the supposed characteristics of the hated types of immigrants anyway - they are immune to regular "poisons" (anti-immigration measures), they are spreading to areas they were not initially found, and they are taking over locals. They also seem to thrive on what is garbage and poisonous for natives.

[Cosmo_R]

"A NEW breed of poison-resistant "super rat" is spreading across the UK."

Merchant Bankers?

[SwamyG]

Swamy saar, NGO's themselves don't want brit aid.
see http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 7#p1032897

Can't india refuse?

[eklavya]

The Economist: We misremember them

Bagehot
We misremember them
Britain’s memorial ceremonies would be improved by a history lesson

Nov 9th 2013 |From the print edition

SURVEYING the pathetic stump of a gravestone in the tiny British cemetery in Miranshah, Susan Farrington noticed its similarity to another broken lump amid the rubble. Her companions, bearded tribesmen in what is now the headquarters of al-Qaeda on Pakistan’s north-west frontier, lugged the boulders together. With a satisfying clunk, they matched, restoring the stone’s inscription: “Captain Eustace Jotham, VC. 51st Sikhs and North Waziristan Militia. Killed in action 7 January 1915 at Khaisora”.

This was a prize for Ms Farrington, a historian of British colonial graves, known to her friends as “Cemetery Sue”. One of 47 British soldiers buried in the capital of North Waziristan, 31-year-old Jotham was awarded the Victoria Cross after being shot dead—possibly by ancestors of Ms Farrington’s companions—while trying to rescue an Indian comrade during an ambush. He was one of 17 men awarded Britain’s highest award for gallantry on the north-west frontier between 1877 and 1936—14 more than during a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Their stories are not well-known. Fighting to perpetuate an imperial regime, the memory of which Britons are increasingly unlikely to celebrate, those who fought and fell in Britain’s colonial wars have never been solemnly remembered, unlike those who died in the two world wars. Yet their sacrifice was no less. The same might be said for those who perished on colonial service, of exhaustion or disease; a million are said to be buried on the Indian subcontinent alone. Yet they, too, have no place in Britain’s public mourning. Until Ms Farrington traced their resting places, from the wild Afghan border region to silted and jungly riverbanks in Bangladesh, most were unrecorded and forgotten.

The disparity raises the question of what remembrance is for. On November 10th, as on every second Sunday of November, Britain will commemorate those who fell in the first world war and later conflicts. Led by the queen, politicians and foreign ambassadors will lay wreaths of paper poppies at the Cenotaph in London; more will be placed at memorials across the country. This year’s ceremonies will have a special significance, in anticipation of the centenary, next year, of the start of the first world war. It will be marked by the biggest war commemoration ever; Britain has pledged £50m ($80m) to it. Yet it is tempting to wonder what is being remembered and what commemorated.

When Britons first stood silent for two minutes, in November 1919, their mourning was acutely personal. The next day’s Manchester Guardian described “a silence which was almost pain”. As that grief faded, the particular ceded to the universal. Since 1945 Britain and most other Commonwealth countries have dedicated Remembrance Day to all their recent war dead. In the public mind, it is also meant for all those who have fallen in war and, by extension, to denounce war’s horrors. Its official refrain is “We will remember them”; its popular one is “Never again”. As Hew Strachan of Oxford University puts it bluntly: “On Remembrance Day we’re not actually remembering anything.”

The uniquely depersonalising nature of the 1914-18 slaughter lends itself to this distillation: what response can there be to the first day of the Somme offensive, when 60,000 British soldiers were wounded or killed, except horror? Even so, there was more to the war than death—not least because nearly 90% of British soldiers made it home.

Those who fought in the trenches are popularly seen as naive victims, whose early enthusiasm for the war quickly turned to despair. The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, which British schoolchildren learn, encourages this. Yet many, as their letters show, continued to support the war strongly. Nor, in the outpouring of grief that followed it, did many question whether it had been necessary. Over-simplifying history makes it less interesting. It also makes it harder to learn its lessons: including on when to fight and when to stop fighting, especially—as in Iraq and Afghanistan—after blood has been spilt.

This is why Ms Farrington’s work, far from the glare of public attention, is so compelling: it mixes remembrance with memorial. She began it in 1980, when Ms Farrington happened upon the gently decaying British graveyard in Peshawar, capital of north-west Pakistan. “And there I saw the whole history of the frontier written on gravestones,” she recalls. “There was the master of the Peshawar Vale Hunt and the nurse from the army hospital.” She took up a pen, began to record them, and has not stopped. Over the past three decades she has recorded over 20,000 colonial graves in Pakistan and over 60,000 in all: in India, Sri Lanka, Bermuda, the Maldives, St Helena and elsewhere.

More memento mori

Her travels reveal much about the people who live among these long-forgotten “ghora kabrestan”, or “white men’s graveyards”. Most were dilapidated and overgrown; few had been defaced or built upon, even on the frontier, where the Taliban roam. Some were even revered; in Jacobabad, a town in Sindh founded in 1847 by an administrator famed for his rectitude, General John Jacob, locals still meet at his tomb to shake on a deal.

Yet her research says more about the interred. Not least because the more remote the burial place, the more fulsome were their epitaphs. That is partly because British colonials often died colourfully—armed dacoits, hungry tigers and clumsy-footed elephants are among the thousands of causes of death in Ms Farrington’s files. It is also, their incongruous, valiant memorials suggest, because of a frail determination to leave a mark in a hostile world—for the bereaved as well as the deceased. “She had no fault,” reads a gravestone placed by a British officer for his wife, in the Murree Hills above Rawalpindi, “Save that she left me.”

These were ordinary Britons, as all the British war dead were, albeit that they lived in violent times. To honour their memory, and learn from their example, we must remember that.

[eklavya]

Telegraph: The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall in India