UK must now prove it’s ‘better off together’

Victory for the No campaign in the Scottish referendum was not unexpected. While media commentators love to trot out the ‘too close to call’ cliché, the fact is that apart from a couple of hiccups about a week out, No was always in the lead and this was mirrored in the final result.

However, while the margin of around 10 per cent is substantial, that other cliché about a ‘comfortable victory’ should also be avoided. This is no time for triumphalism. More than 1.5 million Scots did cast their vote for independence and that should be exercising some minds back at Westminster.

Among the mass of tweets and comments on the result was one from Canada which decried the fact that ‘Scotland has voted to stay subject to its English overlords’. While North Americans have a habit of poking their noses into United Kingdom affairs, usually with a breathtaking amount of ignorance, this statement is worth noting.

Do many Scots really consider themselves to be second-class citizens in relation to the English? The sheer imbalance of population means that democracy works against them. It had been hoped the granting of limited self-government and a Parliament at Edinburgh would go a long way to satisfying the inevitable frustrations north of the border, but for a significant proportion of the population apparently not.

In the last few days of the campaign, when it seemed the momentum might be shifting towards Yes, British Prime Minister David Cameron made some hasty commitments to grant further powers to Edinburgh. He will now be held to that promise.

The question for the Government – and for the Parliament at Westminster - is now what form those powers will take and how it will affect the United Kingdom as a whole.

There has been discontent among English MPs over their Scottish colleagues voting on English matters while the English no longer have a say over much of what goes on in Scotland. It is fair to surmise that if further powers head north that discontent would increase.

There have even been suggestions of an ‘English Parliament’, perhaps based in Birmingham. Where that would leave Westminster one can only guess.

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has conceded defeat. But is this defeat in the battle or the war? One thing is certain: a Yes vote would have sundered Scotland from the UK forever. The permanency of a No victory…? Well, I am not so sure.

Salmond and his Nationalist colleagues know there is a wellspring of discontent with the status quo among many Scots. Independence has been beaten back today, but what is to stop him or his successors maintaining in a decade or so that ‘that was then and this is now’ and calling for another referendum?

The weed of instability may have been cut down for now, but there is more work to be done on both sides of the border if it is to be finally pulled out by the roots.              

 

Xi’s visit major test for Indian PM

In the days leading up to the State visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India, Beijing has been up to its usual games.

Xi will come bearing the promise of Chinese largesse. Apparently he is ready to make investments worth $100 billion which, his diplomats have noted, will be three times that which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi obtained from his recent visit to Japan and probably a fair bit more than he will get in his forthcoming visit to the United States.

Money like this will always be at a price, whatever country you are dealing with. Mostly it comes in areas such as the promise to buy things the donor country wishes to sell, or special concessions to set up industries that can produce goods cheaper than is possible in the donor’s homeland.

This is a quite normal part of the give and take of international dealing and is well understood by all parties.

But with China there are always the hidden concessions. In this case they were set up a few days ago when Chinese troops violated the Line of Actual Control between the countries in Jammu and Kashmir and penetrated two kilometres into Indian territory.

Around 200 members of the People’s Liberation Army, complete with bulldozers and other equipment, were seen constructing a road which Indian officials said was an attempt to link with outposts on the Chinese side of the border.

Indian troops confronted the incursion and the Chinese eventually withdrew.

The incident was serious – as Beijing claims large areas of Jammu and Kashmir as well as most of the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh - but not serious enough to halt Xi’s visit. He will be greeted with all the usual honours accorded to a foreign Head of State, and Beijing will claim this as proof that India is not committed to the current border and is ready to accept China’s claims.

The same goes for a recent agreement between New Delhi and Hanoi for a joint oil exploration project off the Vietnamese coast – intruding into the South China Sea which Beijing claims as its private lake. China has criticised the deal, describing its sovereignty over the area as “undeniable”.

So will Modi be forced into concessions in order to promote the massive infrastructure projects that are so dear to his heart and on the promise of which he was elected in May?

New Delhi says the borders will be discussed during the visit, but most commentators suggest there will be little or no movement on an issue which has dragged on since the 1962 war between the two countries.  

In many ways this is a visit for the Chinese to sound out the new Indian PM and to see how far he will buckle under the inducements of support for high speed rail, industrial parks, highways, ports etc.   

They will find the Indian leader a far different proposition from his quietly-spoken predecessor, Manmohan Singh - a man who is prepared to call a spade a spade, ready to take as much as they are prepared to give, while offering as little as possible in return.

Ian Paisley’s legacy in Northern Ireland

The recent death of Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland sent me thinking of my meetings with the man during his campaign for the United Kingdom Parliament in June 1970.

I was working as a reporter in the province and covered much of his campaign. It was the beginning of what became to be known as the “Troubles”, with the long-dormant Irish Republican Army (IRA) finding new life on the back of the Catholic community’s legitimate demand for civil rights.

Paisley led the Protestant resistance to the Catholics’ campaign and the subsequent crackdown, first by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, then supplemented by the Protestant-dominated ‘B Specials’ began the spiral into violence.

At the time of his campaign for Westminster, Paisley was already a member of the Northern Ireland Parliament, having won a by-election for the Bannside constituency a couple of months earlier, but he had set his sights on Westminster.

It was a warm night when the result was declared and the atmosphere in the crowded hall in Ballymena in the North Antrim constituency he was seeking to capture, was stifling. Paisley won by less than 3000 votes, upsetting the sitting Ulster Unionist candidate Henry Clark who had previously held the seat with an almost 30,000 majority.

Despite the relative closeness of the final result Paisley was undaunted and in typical fashion told his cheering supporters that “the hand of God had been at work” in the Province to ensure his election.

Paisley was never again seriously challenged for the seat and held it for 40 years; standing down in 2010 when his son, also called Ian, was elected in his place. At one point he was a member of three Parliaments – the Northern Ireland Assembly, Westminster and the European Union in Strasbourg (although he opposed the United Kingdom’s EU membership).

It was in Strasbourg that he caused outrage when he interrupted an address by Pope Paul II to the Parliament, calling him the “antichrist” — in the subsequent uproar he was ejected.

But Paisley mellowed as he aged, and in 2005 agreed that his Democratic Unionist Party should share power with Sinn Fein, in the past referred to as the political wing of the IRA. He became First Minister, with Martin McGuinness, a man he had once denounced as a terrorist, as his deputy.

The two worked well together and at news of Paisley’s death last week, McGuinness described him as a friend.

While I knew Paisley only in his early days, I had always thought there were two sides to his character. The firebrand orator, denouncing the Pope as “old red-socks” and the Dublin administration as “that priest-ridden banana republic” was, in personal conversation, quiet-spoken, reflective and witty.

That he loved Northern Ireland there is no doubt. But it was always to be a Protestant Ulster, tied to the British Crown forever.

For that reason there will be many who have celebrated his death, but in the end perhaps his most important legacy will be his pragmatic decision to lead the fierce ultra-loyalist Protestants he represented into mainstream politics, giving reasonable hope that the bitter antagonisms that have plagued the province for so long will gradually fade into history.    

    

Modi taps into Tokyo’s treasure

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on safe ground during his recent visit to Japan. For a start he was meeting his counterpart, Shinzo Abe, a declared Indophile who is on record as saying he wants closer links between the countries.

The coincidence of two essentially conservative administrations meant there were few ideological differences. Finally cultural and religious ties that have their origins in the spread of Buddhism from India to Japan mean that the nations have usually been on good terms. Modi must have known from the outset that he was among friends.

The two men have one more thing in common – distrust of the expansionist aims of their big neighbour, China. Japan is in dispute with Beijing over ownership of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, while China lays claim to 90,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in the State of Arunachal Pradesh and another 38,000 square kilometres in Jammu and Kashmir.

Modi made no secret of his position when, in a speech to Japanese businesspeople, he deplored the “expansionist tendencies among some countries which encroach upon the seas of others”.

At about the same time he was giving this address, the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi announced that a scheduled meeting in Beijing between its Minister, Sushma Swaraj and her Russian and Chinese counterparts would not now take place.

It may well be that Modi did not want India involved in a high-level meeting with Russia while most of the rest of the world was condemning its military adventures in Ukraine; more likely he did not want to place Ms Swaraj in the position of possibly having to defend his remarks in the capital of the country they were so obviously aimed at.

Meanwhile the Indian PM got what he came for – some $35 billion in Japanese investment and financing over the next five years for infrastructure projects such as smart cities and the cleaning of the River Ganga.

Japan will participate in the establishment of India’s first bullet train network, while New Delhi has agreed to buy Japan’s US-2 amphibious rescue and reconnaissance planes in a deal which may eventually see a plant to manufacture the aircraft set up in India. 

Both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are due to make visits to New Delhi over the next few months. Both will receive cordial welcomes – but by now both will also understand they will be visiting an active player in Asia’s diplomatic games.

 

 

Palmer’s ignorance – China’s arrogance

The recent outburst of Palmer United Party leader Clive Palmer against China was boorish, disgraceful and deserving of censure. The mining magnate had no right to use his position as a Member of the Australian Parliament to launch an attack on another nation, simply because he is having business difficulties with a company based there.

Having said that, the response of China’s Ambassador to Australia, Ma Zhaouxu also deserves some examination. In more or less refusing to accept Mr Palmer’s belated apology, Mr Ma stated: “the Chinese people are never to be insulted”.

What he really means by this is that the Chinese people are never to be criticised, never to have their actions questioned. The Chinese people – or at least the single party that comprises their Government – are always right. Those that dare to question their actions always wrong or, in the special jargon that official Chinese statements use “mistaken”.

We have increasingly seen this demonstrated in Beijing’s bullying treatment of those small South East Asian nations which dared to resist its claim to virtually all the South China Sea as its sovereign territory.

Its arrogance is highlighted in its refusal to test its case before the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea because as far as it is concerned there is no case. It is right and everyone else has to live with that.

And when the Philippines refused to buckle to Beijing’s will it was punished with an initially meagre humanitarian response to Typhoon Haiyan’s devastation of that country – a response that was upgraded in the light of a storm of unfavourable publicity.

Add to that, its persistent publishing of maps showing large swathes of Indian territory as part of Chinese Tibet and its row with Japan over islands in the East China Sea, and it is easy to see why Beijing is regarded with fear and mistrust by many people in its region.

And to go off at somewhat of a tangent, what about the boorish, ignorant attitude of the Chinese football supporters in the Asian Cup game between Guangzhou Evergrande and Western Sydney Wanderers this week?

The Australian team members were subject to late night abusive phone calls and banging on their hotel doors on the eve of the match, a car deliberately swerved into the team bus, causing an accident of the way to the stadium and during the game bottles were thrown and lasers flashed into the eyes of the players.

None of this was reported in the local media and complaints to the Chinese club have been ignored.    

As I said at the beginning, Clive Palmer was wrong to use gutter language in what is essentially a corporate dispute. He is now trying to mend fences.  

If China really wishes to be a force for good in its neighbourhood – if it really wants to be a partner, rather than a master in the region - then it could begin by accepting there might be value in points of view other than its own.

What price 44 Indian labourers?

Many years ago in the United Kingdom a veteran news editor explained to me his rule for judging the weight he gave to stories on any given day.

A pedestrian run over in the High Street outside the office equalled 10 people killed in a gas explosion in another UK town.

That equalled 100 miners dead in a disaster in Germany and 1000 killed in an earthquake in China.

“Of course, if there was anyone from here killed in the Chinese earthquake we would give it much greater prominence,” he added.

I thought of this advice after reading an article by Indian journalist Shishir Gupta who is trying to remind the world that there are still 44 Indian labourers missing in northern Iraq since the Islamic State took over the territory more than two months ago.

Since then the Government in New Delhi has been making persistent but as yet futile efforts to discover their fate. Families have agonised first with reports that the labourers were all dead, then by apparent sightings of two of them.

Gupta has been told by the Indian Ministry of External Affairs that the reported sightings of two of the labourers in Mosul were difficult to confirm because the grainy picture showed them with beards.

This could be an indication that the mostly Hindu workforce had converted to Islam in order to avoid execution.

The Ministry official said further intelligence suggested the men were alive and being held in a cement factory on the outskirts of Mosul.

“In the absence of any bodies or pictures of executions, we will consider the men to be alive and will continue to seek their extradition,” the official said.

The world heard briefly of the Indians in the first hectic days of the Islamic State’s advance. Since then the horrifying pictures, first of a seven-year-old Australian boy holding up the severed head of a Syrian soldier, then the beheading of American journalist James Foley, have dominated news from the area.

The boy and his family are out of reach; Foley is dead. There is still some hope that 44 men, who went to work in Iraq to better themselves and their families, are still alive and can be saved.

While the American, British and Australian Governments are right to be outraged by the events of the past weeks, it is to be hoped they are not overlooking the plight of the labourers simply because they come from a country far away.  

 

 

Indian PM heads biggest clean-up on earth

The Indian Government has embarked on one of the most ambitious environmental projects on earth with the announcement of a single high-powered ‘super task force’ charged with cleaning up the 2500-kilometre River Ganga.

The new body — which as yet has no name — will take over from the National Ganga River Basin Authority and various other responsible entities spread across a number of Ministries.

This diffused approach has been criticised in the past for wasting millions of dollars on clean-up initiatives with little or no effect.

While the Ganga is sacred to Hindus, who believe bathing in its waters will cleanse their sins, entering the river amid mounds of garbage, industrial waste and untreated sewage has become a health hazard along much of its course.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced he will personally take charge of the new clean-up effort, an indication of the importance his newly-elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Government places on the task.

In announcing the latest proposals, Modi says the private sector will play a significant role and has not ruled out engaging overseas expertise. This has already been seized upon by Germany, with Deputy Consul General Michael Ott saying his country’s experience in cleaning Europe’s longest river, the 1232-kilometre Rhine, could be invaluable to the Ganga project.

Hundreds of new sewage treatment plants will be required, industries which discharge into the river will be required to clean up their acts, while a number that dump waste illegally may be closed down altogether.

There are religious sensitivities. Apart from ritual bathing, Hindu funeral rites normally involve cremation with the ashes often deposited in the sacred river. Modi, whose parliamentary constituency is Varanasi, the holiest city on the banks of the Ganga, has said he wants senior Hindu leaders involved in the project from the outset.

An indication of the problem on the Ganga and other Indian rivers can be seen at this video link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG3thzNUIdY

No one is underestimating the enormity of the task and talk about it getting done in the BJP’s first term, which ends in 2019, is now being downplayed.

But by tackling head-on what will probably be the most difficult task on the BJP agenda in the first few months of the Government’s term, Modi is setting the pace for what he sees as five years of urgently-needed reform if the nation of 1.2 billion people is to reach its full potential.

 

 

Encouragement for small business and access to credit for the entrepreneurial poor were also in the speech. It is setting poor people upto fail by giving them access to credit, so they then exceed their limits and get bankrupted!