Both main parties are taking their own positions on various issues. Economy, the national budget, international relations, employment, the gap between the rich and the poor are some of the major issues. In a way both Tory and Labour are moving, in their own ways, to the middle ground. Perhaps that is how it should be. The Conservative's have an easier target to curry favours with some voters on the issue of immigrants. This has happened since the Labour's victory of 1997.
Conservative leaders like William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard gambled on the issue of immigration and they lost. Sadly the message has not yet registered in the minds of some Tory bigwigs. David Cameron has been hyperactive on the immigration issue in the aftermath of the UKIP “rise”. Off late he appears to be somewhat more sensible.
Home Secretary Theresa May has rising ambition to succeed David Cameron as Conservative leader. She cannot disguise it. She has been moving rapidly and dangerously towards the Tory right. Her most recent proposal to curb on foreign students do not square with Britain's economic interests. The Financial Times in the editorial on 23.12.14 describe Mrs May's curbs as “misguided'. David Willetts who was up until July this year, the minister for Universities is now a visiting professor of Kings College – London. He, in his opinion column in the Times dated 23.12.14 described, “May's mean - spirited plan will damage Britain” How?
Education is a ver big business worldwide. Some four million students leave their home countries for overseas studies – almost half a million of them used to come to UK mainly from China, India and Middle East. In the last three years this inflow has reduced dramatically – especially from India. The condition for post study work is very onerous indeed. A graduate can only stay to work for up to two years if it is “graduate job with licensed sponsor and paid a minimum of £20,000 per annum”
This condition encourages or compels more internal migration from Manchester or Newcastle to work in London for obvious reasons. Perhaps the Government should set lower minimum rates for post study work outside London. Mrs May and some other Tory politician are unable to think, such avenues more intelligently.
In several cities education is a very important economic activity. Britain's second biggest export to China is education. There are cities and towns in U.K where the biggest export industry is their local university. Cities like Lincoln, Worcester have been transformed through their Universities and overseas student's financial inputs.
USA is the main attraction for overseas studies. When U.K is tightening the noose Canada, Australia are giving better incentives for students from India and China especially.
Some 10 years back Theresa May, as the then Chairman of the Conservative party, described it as a 'nasty party'. The same lady today is proposing totally misguided and mean spirited ideas about foreign students. Theresa May's intervention is a piece of low politics. In the past such approach did not help the Conservative party. The business, the academic world and the man on the Clapham Omnibus do not like such division and disadvantageous tactics.
With nearly five million so called immigrants and their mixed race children and the tight race between the two main parties, perhaps there is some advantage towards the Labour stand.
Trevor Shonk, a UKIP County Counsellor from Ramsgate in Kent, has claimed that the influx of immigrants had made Britain a racist country. Such brazen, provocative and damaging statements are perhaps the follow up to the Tory leaders bigwigs. Great Britain does not need it; it does not support such attitude.
Peshawar outrage: India’s security challenges
The horrific massacre of 142 children and staff at the Pakistani army school in Peshawar, in the north-west border region of Pakistan, by a suicide unit of the country’s Taliban has traumatised a nation and sent shock waves across the civilized world. The barbarity of the deed and the sheer savagery of the perpetrators are an indecent exposure of the terrorism that has taken hold in vast swathes of Pakistan including within the very seat of power, which is the military and its cloned intelligence services. Jihadi terrorism has long been a primary Pakistani export, especially to it’s neighbours India and Afghanistan. The US and its Western allies indulged their Pakistani client with a cornucopia of financial and military aid [which continues unabated] during the period of incubating terrorist cells. The notorious Hafiz Saeed, one of the masterminds behind the Mumbai attack of 26/11/2008 has the freedom of Lahore and other cities to preach his message of hate against India without let or hindrance. Ritual breast-beating is the name of the game.
Following the heinous Mumbai attack, the [London] Times published a ferocious denunciation of Indian policy on Kashmir, and India’s allegedly hostile attitude towards its Muslim population, by the Oxford University don, Maria Misra. The piece jelled with the attitude of the newspaper, the BBC and the British establishment at the time. The US approach was no different. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on her visit to stricken Mumbai, denounced terrorism in ringing tones but said not a word about its source. With the spread of these jihadi tentacles to the West there is visible discomfort at Pakistani behavior, not least, one suspects, because it imperils the effectiveness of Pakistan as strategic partner in the region and beyond. Sections of the Pakistani media, who like their government and the political class, clung stubbornly to the officially prescribed state of denial on the export of terrorism across the border to India in the south, and into Afghanistan in the north-west, are expressing alarm with a new raised voice.
The English-language newspaper, The Nation, wrote: “Not just terrorists, but everyone, from the wider population to the civil and military leadership is responsible for the barbarity our children were subjected to. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, your government has contributed absolutely nothing towards building a narrative against extremism. Operation Zarb-e-Azb [in Northern Waziristan by the military] started without your permission, and it continues … You have refused to act against seminaries funded through Saudi money, which are poisoning the minds of our youth.” The next broadside targeted the opposition: “Chairman Imran Khan, you are the most mainstream politician and consistent Taliban sympathizer in the country … you couldn’t muster the courage to name the Taliban.” The Army was taken to task for its ambivalence towards terror groups, using some, attacking others. “The country is reaping what it [the Army] has sown over decades,” pronounced The Nation. The Dawn newspaper censured the government in similar vein, dismissing its search for a national consensus in the aftermath of the Peshawar massacre as “quite meaningless.”
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Army chief, General Raheel Sharif, accompanied by the Director General of the Inter Services Intelligence directorate, General Rizwan Akhtar, rushed to Kabul to demand that Afghanistan expedite the extradition of the Taliban leader Mullah Fazaullah. Similar Indian requests for the extradition of Pakistani suspects behind the Mumbai killing spree have been ignored. Hafiz Saeed and General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s erstwhile military dictator, have accused India of planning the Peshawar carnage. Thousands of Pakistanis on Twitter and Facebook expressed a similar opinion. India is on red alert.
The recent Burdwan bomb blasts in West Bengal, and the subsequent trail traversed by Indian counter-terrorism sleuths have revealed a complex jihadi terror network across the country and the subcontinent’s borders. The arrests of leading suspects have unearthed an array of sleeper cells in different regions of India. The guardians of India’s territorial integrity and the safety of its citizens are faced with an existential challenge more daunting than any since the country’s Independence in August 1947. Unity of purpose on the jihadi menace is very much the need of the hour. Of this there should be no doubt.
