Toby on Tuesday

'Reverence and Reclamation'

There have been three events in the past week that will help shape all our futures.   The first was the vote on bombing IS in Syria in which our one MP, Douglas Carswell, quite properly supported the Government.   The real challenge of course will be to deal with the cancer of jihadism in our own country, with the ability to control our borders again and the end of using human rights legislation to protect terrorists.   The second was yet another honourable second place for UKIP in the Oldham West by-election.   But the third, and in some ways the most significant, was the news that India had overtaken China to become the fastest growing economy in the world.   Thanks in large part to her one-child policy, China’s growth is slowing while India’s growth is now running at comfortably above the astonishing rate of 7% a year.

This was underscored recently by the one piece of good news to come from our beleaguered steel industry for many months.   This was the purchase by India-based Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty House Group of Caparo Tubular Solutions, based in Oldbury in the West Midlands, which had fallen into administration.   As the steel industry across the EU finds itself at the mercy of growing energy costs and dumping by Chinese producers, Mr. Gupta is taking a counter-cyclical view and will be combining the company with his existing facility in Wales, “in order to create a comprehensive and robust model for the steel sector in the UK.”  So the time has come to rekindle the centuries-old love affair between Britain and India.   By this I don’t mean any unwanted Government “soft power” initiative to influence Indian politics, but rather to recapture the spirit of an earlier India where adventurous young Britons went to trade, to make something of themselves and often to find personal fulfilment.   

The East India Company’s first Governor-General, Warren Hastings, was so dazzled by the world he found there that in 1785 he authorised the first translation into English of the Hindu holy “Bhagavad Gita”, the “Song of the Lord”.   In his introduction to this, he wrote with great prescience, “Every instance which brings the Indians’ real character home to observation will...teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own.   But such instances can only be obtained by their writings, and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.”   And he sent his friend George Bogle to explore Bhutan and Tibet.   There Bogle had two daughters by a Tibetan wife and wrote in admiration of Tibet’s unique form of polygamy in which one woman could take multiple husbands!

So as both the Continent of Europe and the Middle East are drawn deeper into the abyss, it is time to rekindle the reverence for India that inspired those young adventurers of 250 years ago.   And it is time too to reclaim our immigration policy, so that criminals and terrorists from within the EU no longer have an absolute right of entry into our country, while doctors, scientists and indeed investors from India, now the world’s fastest growing economy, can be made welcome here for their benefit and for the great benefit of our people!

Until next Tuesday!

Toby