The spy who loved too much

Normally, I wouldn’t bother to write about a mediocre book, but this is a rather special mediocre book.

Not much of a spy novel...

It’s called The Mystery of Tunnel 51, and the action’s set in British India in the 1920s. I write ‘British India’ not because I think India was ever British – it was always Indian and never more than under British administration – but because the main characters of the novel clearly thought of it that way. They are engaged in a bitter struggle to protect the British Empire against an implacable foe, in this case the ‘Russian Soviet’. It has somehow managed to build a huge network of ‘Bolshevik’ agents inside India.

That’s one of the threadbare tropes of the novel: creation of a paranoid atmosphere in which the ‘enemy’ is everywhere, with huge power to deploy its Machiavellian plots. This leaves the British administration out of account, though it would have given Britain a huge head start when it came to countering a foreign power’s intelligence activity.

But the book is full of clichés. The Bolsheviks turn out to be fiendishly cruel; fortunately, they are up against a couple of British agents who are fiendishly clever. So clever, in fact, that their leader, Sir Leonard Wallace, is able to see through all their diabolical subterfuges and turn them to defeat, usually at the eleventh hour. Sadly, he’s not quite clever enough to put the prisoners he captures under proper guard, so again and again they either escape or get themselves rescued by their dastardly accomplices.

This Wallace isn’t a mere agent. He is the Director of the ‘Intelligence Department’ back in London. Why the director is out in the field directly involved in a counter-intelligence operation thousands of miles from home isn’t made entirely clear, but who are we to question such decisions?

What kind of a man is Wallace? I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to discover that he’s something of a superman. He’s not particularly tall and quite slight in build. He’s of extraordinary strength despite the build and despite having lost an arm – naturally, in the service of his country. Above all, he is supremely intelligent, always able to think himself into other people’s minds and be, in consequence, several steps ahead of them, wherever they may be going.

In addition, he’s a man of irreproachable domestic habits. His wife was, naturally, one of the most striking beauties of London, and the family they have built together is exemplary:

…with all her beauty, Lady Wallace was clever, sweet and charming, and she was as popular with her own sex as she was with her men friends. She adored her husband, as he adored her, and they were consequently an ideally happy pair, who jointly worshipped their small son Adrian, a merry little fellow of six.

The irony here is that the book is by Alexander Wilson. The BBC made an excellent series about his life, called Mrs Wilson. Some of the inspiration came from his granddaughter, the actor Ruth Wilson. As well as being one of the executive producers, she also plays her own grandmother, Alison. This, incidentally, produces a wonderful moment when Ruth Wilson, as her grandmother, meets a girl playing her.

Alexander dies in the first episode. After his death, and while she is preparing his funeral, Alison starts to make some puzzling discoveries about his past. In particular, she finds out that not only was she not the first Mrs Wilson, but also that Alexander had never divorced the woman to whom he was married when they met. Nor, indeed, was that woman his first wife – there was another before her, and she too had never been through a divorce.

So Alison quickly establishes that he had been a bigamist and then some. A trigamist? Nor was that the last of it, for towards the end of the series, a fourth wife appears who was also, to her knowledge, still his wife.

A quadrigamist?

Alexander Wilson: writer of sorts, spy of a kind, husband too often

In addition, Alexander Wilson was a genuine spy, who had worked for MI6. But then things had taken a strange turn. He had gone bankrupt, he had been gaoled for theft and, as Alison finds out, he had worked as a hospital porter. Was this all cover for his heroic work in the British secret service? Certainly, he always maintained that he was forced into some strange forms of existence to allow him to do his secret and dangerous work for the good of Britain and its Empire.

Except that MI6 doesn’t see things that way. Not all the papers on his case have been declassified yet, but what has been released suggests that he had been fired by the secret service as a result of having fabricated intelligence about the Egyptian Ambassador to London.

This may not come as much of a surprise, but it turns out he was quite the fantasist.

Unfortunately, the imagination on which he drew may have been fertile but it wasn’t particularly creative. Hence his mediocre Mystery of Tunnel 51. And a bunch of other novels I won’t be bothering with.

By the way, the novel ends as it should. I’m sure that’s not a spoiler as you are assuredly aware that such a book cannot end with anything but a British triumph. In any case, I’d be astonished if after this description you’d be inclined to read it. The ‘Russian Soviet’ is defeated and British rule in India is once more on a rock-firm basis set, no doubt, to last a thousand years. Which is ironic, since the book was published in 1928, just nineteen years before the British Raj came to its blood-soaked and ignominious end.

The TV series, on the other hand, is excellent. I strongly recommend it.

Travel: places make it. And people even more

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. I suppose it does that because it exposes you to different experiences. And to different people.

For instance, my team was recently asked to send someone to work in India. That’s not our territory. But we were happy to help and one of my colleagues went. It was a week of hard work but he found it rewarding. On his return, he remarked ‘it’s the first time I’ve taken a three-and-a-half hour flight and left the plane in the same country I took off from.’

Obviously, there are other places where it can happen. Russia. China. The United States where, even without including Alaska or Hawaii, you can get even longer flights: for instance, 6 hours 35 minutes from Miami to Seattle.

But in our little countries of Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin, it’s unlikely. Though for a moment I thought it had happened a while back. I’d caught a plane home from Spain. As we landed, a cabin attendant welcomed us ‘to Madrid’.

But then she was Spanish and perhaps anxious to get home, which may have caused the slip. Flying two and a half hours from Madrid only to find ourselves back there would have been a little surprising. Though the French air traffic controllers were doing their best, by indulging in their traditional pastime around major holidays, of going on strike.

That trip wasn’t only significant for its geographical aspects. It was also a fine example of travel bringing me into contact with other people. Two of them, in this instance. On the train home from the airport.

The first was Sandeep. It was 10:00 at night and he’d been working since 8:00 that morning, though he was clearly using the word ‘work’ in a loose sense. He was obviously, as he later confirmed, in a well-lubricated state. Indeed, he was carrying a wine bottle only half full, and a couple of plastic glasses, one of which contained part of the other half.

‘Are you taking this train to Bedford?’ he asked me.

It struck me as an odd formulation of the question. But I had a straightforward answer, so I gave it.

‘No,’ I said, ‘to Luton.’

He had a brief moment of anxiety before asking the obvious follow-up.

‘But does the train go to Bedford?’

‘I hope so,’ I told him helpfully, ‘or I’m on the wrong train.’

That answer seemed to satisfy him because he sank onto a chair across the aisle from me.

‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘I’m a bit pissed and I couldn’t work out which train I needed to take. Glass of wine?’

I managed to resist the temptation of warm white wine out of a plastic glass and we got into conversation. Which meant that he talked to me – or at me – while I nodded at appropriate points. I even tried to say the odd word to encourage him, but he needed no encouragement and talked right through any remarks of mine.

The second person was Ryan. At first he walked up and down the carriage several times, I assume to see if he could find any congenial company, and eventually decided that there was nothing better on offer than us.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘this sounds like a good on-going conversation.’

Clearly, he had the same notion as Sandeep of what constituted a conversation.

‘Mind if I join you?’ he went on, sitting down without waiting for a response, and picking up Sandeep’s wine bottle which he examined critically. He didn’t seem to share my reticence over absorbing its contents, so went on without pausing to another question, ‘mind if I have a drop of your wine?’

Sandeep clearly felt he was not being allowed to play his role of host as fully as he liked, so rather than sitting back and letting Ryan help himself, he poured him a generous plastic glass full. A clearly hospitable man, I decided, since he had presumably only brought the second plastic glass to entertain such guests as Ryan.

‘Good Lord! Not that much!’ said Ryan, but he raised his glass to our health, accompanying the gesture with a beaming smile, so I suspect he wasn’t as unhappy about the quantity as his words suggested.

‘I’m a bit pissed,’ he added, rather unnecessarily.

Travel companions: Ryan (left) and Sandeep

At this point, Sandeep managed to regain control of proceedings. He regaled us all the way to St Alban’s, where Ryan left, with a convoluted tale of how he’d forgotten his phone in a tube train the night before. I won’t bore you with the details, but just cut to the finish: he’d left it next to a colleague who had, fortunately, spotted it and brought it back for him the following day, even though he was officially on leave and the round trip took him three hours. What I’ve told you in less than a sentence, Sandeep managed to make last the full twenty-five minutes to St Alban’s.

After Ryan left, Sandeep decided to tell me a little about himself. He’d spent five years as a software developer on contracts, earning £580 a day.

‘Work it out,’ he said.

I had. He’d been making nearly £12,000 a month. As much in two months as the median annual income of British employees. But then he’d decided that he’d had enough of the existence and had taken a job as an employee again, cutting his earnings by two-thirds. He’d recently been promoted to lead a team, and was finding the stress difficult to handle. Could it be the team that had taken him drinking, what with Christmas so close? And the stress that had him hitting the bottle so hard?

But there was an issue that was bothering me. He was clearly of Indian extraction and drinking. Since I’m a complete stranger to tact, I asked him, ‘You’re not a Muslim, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, and then with a little pride, ‘I’m a Sikh.’

He explained that he’d used his years on high earnings to buy property.

‘Three houses and an off-licence,’ he told me. ‘The off-licence is for my Dad. He’s retired but he’s a shopkeeper at heart – he was one for years and he hates not having a shop to look after. So now he runs the offie.’

And the other three houses? Rented, naturally. It’s something that quite a few members of the Indian community seem to do: get into property quickly. A smart move. I don’t know what may happen post-Brexit, but housing does seem to be an excellent investment, one that holds its value far better than most.

‘My Dad owns nineteen houses,’ Sandeep added. Leaving me wondering why I hadn’t bought a couple more when I’d had a chance. Too late now, alas.

Interesting, anyway. As curious as long flights that leave you in the same country. A conversation that opened my eyes to other ways of doing things, and therefore broadened my mind.

Besides, he was likeable, Sandeep. Fun to be with. I’ll raise a glass to him over the holidays. One actually made of glass. And the white wine in it will be chilled.

The memory of an entertaining encounter will make it taste all the better.

Leatrice: hankering for more

When I last wrote about my mother, Leatrice, I mentioned the strange circumstance that my parents’ wedding took place in Genoa.

Nothing strange about that for the Genoese, of course. Just unusual for a young English couple. Except that they’d met in Paris and were travelling to Rome, where Leonard, my father, was about to take up a new job with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. Genoa was on the way. So maybe getting married there wasn’t really that odd after all.

July 1951: my parents get married in Genoa

It was a moment of transition for Leatrice. Years later, she wrote several letters to contacts from the forties, asking for testimonials of the time when she’d worked for them. John Parker, Labour MP and leading member of the Fabian Society, one of the oldest progressive organisations in Britain, wrote one of them. He explained that she had worked for him from 1942 to 1945, when he had been General Secretary of the Fabian Society and MP for the seat of Romford in Essex:

… then the largest Parliamentary Constituency in Britain … which was divided into 4 Parliamentary seats at the time of the 1945 General Election… She also assisted me in the work of the Fabian Society… In particular she did a very useful job in our India Committee at a time when [India’s] future was very much in the melting pot… Much useful organizing work was also carried out for the Fabian Society particularly in connection with the running of the Summer Schools.

She already had a testimonial from August 1947 by Woodrow Wyatt, later an admirer of Margaret Thatcher’s but back then a Labour MP in his first term. He worked with the British Commission in India and in particular handled relations with the Muslims, who were preparing not only for independence from Britain but also independence from India, as Pakistan.

Wyatt had known Leatrice for two years and she had:

…acted as Minutes Secretary of the Indian Affairs Group of the Fabian Society when I was Secretary of the Group and during that time she was most energetic and capable, and showed a high sense of responsibility.

Another of the testimonials she collected in 1974 came from David C. Williams, Chairman of the International Affairs Committee of Americans for Democratic Action. He’d been sent to London in July 1946 on behalf of the Union for Democratic Action, its predecessor organisation.

One of my first actions was to engage Miss Leatrice Bannister, now Mrs. Beeson, as my assistant. Her knowledge of the principles and programs of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and of many of their leading personalities proved invaluable to me… It enabled me to get into the swing of things much more promptly than I would otherwise have done.

She had worked with him until January 1948, when she left for Paris.

It must have been quite a heady atmosphere for a woman in her twenties. The India committee of the Fabian Society must have been particularly gratifying: Labour’s Clement Attlee was in office and, in foreign affairs, overseeing Indian independence remains his most significant achievement.

1951, the year of her wedding, definitively closed that period of Leatrice’s life. I was born in 1953, my brother in 1956. Leatrice, who’d worked for her own living since becoming an adult, became a wife and mother with no job of her own but dependent on her husband’s earnings.

Leatrice with my brother Nicky in 1956

One of my lasting memories of our time in Italy was the yearly summer holidays in Porto Ercole, in Tuscany. At the time, the place was a small fishing port, where my brother or I could wander off, and local people would be able to tell my parents where we were. Today, it’s a heaving mass of tourists. But what remains is Feniglia, outside the town, with its kilometres-long golden beach, where we’d spend hours in the warm water and then roll in the baking hot sand to get warm again, with barely another person in sight.

Nicky on the rocks (literally not metaphorically)
at one end of the Feniglia beach

Me on the edge of beach

My father would join us when he could

Leonard would come up and join us at weekends, and generally spent a week or two at some point. Eventually we’d head back to Rome, where we lived in a converted farm building on the edge of the city. It was part of a baronial estate which still had a large cement-walled pond where two local families would do their washing, the wives using bars of soap and cold water, wringing and beating the clothes in a sink fed from the pond.

Nicky on the edge of the pond at Via Casale San Pio V in Rome
Not the first place we lived in but the last
and where we stayed the longest

Leatrice in the garden
We lived on the top floor of the building beyond the gate

My father had work. My mother had us. Those long summers at Feniglia – did she enjoy them as much as we did? Or did she miss the intellectual stimulation of her English life? John Parker mentioned her role in organising the Fabian summer schools, at Dartington in Devon, where my parents eventually sent my brother and me to school. Another of the testimonials she solicited in 1974 came from a close friend from those times – I suspect they’d had at least a fling – and he wrote as a Professor from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

Did she ever wonder wistfully whether that was the world to which she should have belonged? That all the international travel had been exciting, but that she might have been more at home in academe or politics – or possibly both? Did she ever entirely recover from her pain at not getting the university education she had wanted in 1942 but passed up to go straight to work?

There’s a hint in the reason why she was asking for all those testimonials.

In 1974, Leonard was working at the headquarters of the United Nations Development Programme in New York. Leatrice decided that this was the opportunity to undertake the studies she’d missed before. She enrolled at Queens College of the City University of New York. The testimonials won her some credits for her course, but she hardly needed them: she took A grade after A grade, disappointed on the rare occasions when she fell as low as a B.

She was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and arguably the most prestigious of the American academic honour societies. That was something of which she was profoundly proud, and for many years she would wear the gold Phi Beta Kappa key around her neck.

Badge of pride: Leatrice's Phi Beta Kappa key

One of her papers was graded by a Professor Zvi Yavetz at Tel Aviv university. A Holocaust survivor, he was one of the founders of the university and a major figure in history studies in Israel for several decades. He wrote to her to say:

The following cable has been sent to the department of History, Queens College: ‘Grade Beeson Leatrice’s superb paper A+…

I would also like to tell you that only students like yourself can make a course interesting, because only they can stimulate a teacher to prepare his class.

It’s ironic today, with the Labour Party embroiled in a long drawn out dispute over antisemitism, to read this forty-year old praise from an Israeli academic for a lifelong, Jewish Labour supporter.

In June 1976, at the age of 52, she graduated in History with the top class of a US degree, Summa Cum Laude.

Leatrice's degree certificate
A proud achievement. But - three decades late?

It must have been a valediction for her. But perhaps also a source of regret. 

There’s no doubt that my mother took great satisfaction from most of her life and wouldn’t have wished to change much in it for anything else. On the other hand, her results in 1976 demonstrated just how much she could achieve. She must have wondered at times whether she’d missed the opportunity to fulfil her potential. Had she won such success three decades earlier, when she’d wanted to, how much more might she have accomplished?
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Attlee: a quiet celebration of a quiet man

It’s far from inappropriate that the anniversary on 3 January passed quietly. It was the anniversary of a quiet man. A modest man, a shy man, but the architect of some of the more remarkable achievements Britain has seen.

There are some things about Clement Attlee that are incontrovertible, a matter of historical record. He was born on 3 January 1883. He led the Labour Party into a wartime coalition with the Tories, under Winston Churchill, in 1940. And, five years later, he led Labour to its first spell in government with a parliamentary majority.

Other issues are more open to interpretation.

It was a key factor in Britain’s war effort that the country was led by a national government – in which Labour played a major role. Indeed, Attlee was described as ‘home front Prime Minister’ since Churchill’s key contribution was on the international scene, above all in securing US support. And yet it must have taken extraordinary courage to join a coalition with the Conservatives just nine years after a previous Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, had split the party and reduced its parliamentary strength to just 50 by doing the same thing.

What was a betrayal in 1931 was essential in 1940. Labour’s role as the voice of the downtrodden and of workers had to be laid aside for a while, to ensure the very survival of a country in which that voice could be heard at all. The mood was perfectly captured in a cartoon by David Low, showing Labour having to turn away from its appointed task for a while, to focus on something more urgent – but it would be back.

Labour leading 'our democratic institutions' in the shelter
But only for a time

In 1945, triumphantly, it was.

Again, few would dispute that major reforms were achieved by the 1945 government Attlee led. Indeed, many would argue that it was the greatest reforming government Labour has formed. The welfare state was launched, with both universal social security – independent of means, available to wealthy and poor alike – alongside the NHS were key pillars of the post war consensus. They’ve survived to this day, though they’re increasingly battered now.

He also ensured that India achieved independence, persuaded as he was that it was time. By doing so, he set in train the process by which the British Empire would be dismantled over the next twenty years.

Other aspects of Attlee’s time in office are more controversial. One was the secret drive to build a British Atom bomb, once it became clear that the US was not going to continue the wartime practice of sharing nuclear secrets with the UK. Another was his determination to preserve British colonial power in certain colonies, even through the use of military force, around Africa, for instance, or in Malaya. What he felt about India he didn’t necessarily feel about every part of the Empire.

Is that inconsistency? Or a willingness to compromise? A readiness sometimes to be pragmatic which led him sometimes to do things we might admire, and sometimes to do things that we might not like so much?

Still more controversial is his attitude towards the left of the Party. Before Attlee formed his government, one of his most outspoken critics was Nai Bevan, clarion voice of the Labour left. It is a tribute to Attlee’s breadth of vision that he invited Bevan to join the government and gave him the opportunity to build the NHS. But the differences remained as powerful as ever and, indeed, Bevan eventually resigned from the government in its dying days, an act for which Attlee may never fully have forgiven him.

The tale of his relations with Bevan give a measure of Attlee. He was a conciliator, and that allowed him to able to lead a government which contained both Bevan to the left and Ernest Bevin to the right. It was all the stronger for it.

As well as the left and right of his own party, Attlee could also work with the Conservatives, as he showed in the wartime coalition. Indeed, he could fight the Tories – though not an outstanding public speaker, his powerful response to the vicious attack launched on him by Churchill during the 1945 campaign was a major factor in giving him the victory – but that didn’t stop him cooperating with them when necessary.

I’m not convinced that someone like that would find it easy to forge a career in the present Labour Party. Given the chance, he became arguably Labour’s most successful leader. But would we give him that chance today?

Ah, well. At least I raised a glass to him on his birthday. A quiet celebration in memory – nostalgic memory – of a quiet man who achieved so much.

Far more than many who are a great deal noisier.

Backing Brexit, because I know it makes sense. Or ought to, apparently

Ah, the pride and joy of Britain as a great power
Putting down the Kenya Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s

Normally I don’t get into debates on Twitter – or what passes as debate – but I’m on leave so I felt I could put in half an hour or so yesterday and today.

What was the issue? Well, the one that’s going to dominate British politics for years. As our local MP points out, if he’s lucky enough to be re-elected for the next ten years, his professional life is going to be dominated by Brexit.

So, as you can imagine, it was Brexiters who were – how shall I put this? – a little exasperated with me.

“What an infantile perspective he has.” That was one of the politer comments. Still, note that referring to me in the third person is delightfully dismissive. Seen as witty, too, I expect. In certain quarters.

Slightly less courteous were references such as “…hundreds of people … ripping the piss out of your preposterous assertion... Pompous ass!”

It’s never easy to come up with an effective response to an argument as well constructed and closely reasoned as that.

Some people decided to focus on another major shortcoming of mine.

“…well you are a fiction writer – a bad one at that.”

It had never struck me that my skill as a writer, or lack of it, was going to be an issue in the Brexit process. But, hey, that process has already amazed me repeatedly, so perhaps I should contain my capacity for surprise.

At the crux of the argument, aside from the gentle remarks on my personality, was the proposition that Britain would be better off out of the EU. I suggested that this view was based on the belief that Britain remains a global power which, I pointed out, struck me as illusory. At work, I felt, was nostalgia, a backward-looking sense of greatness, which has little or no contact with current reality.

“We are a global power,” I was told indignantly. “Despite the best attempts of some. Recognising that doesn't involve 'going backwards'.”

Another commentator put up a pair of tables, showing that Britain still accounts for 3.9% of global GDP, and that the country is fifth in spending on defence, making it a major military force too.

On the face of it, this sounds compelling. At least, if you see military might as an essential component of global importance, a proposition I might question if it weren’t a digression from the main point here. 

In any case, this writer failed to set his claims in historical perspective.

Comparative GDP

As far as GDP is concerned, Britain’s 3.9%, according to my correspondent’s own figures, represents US$2.9 trillion. That compares with the US’s GDP of $18 trillion – over six times more. When Britain was a genuine world power, its GDP was close behind the US’s: in 1890, British GDP was moving towards $250 billion dollars, when in the US it was nearly $350 billion.

Comparative military strength

It’s also telling that, according to my critic’s other table, Britain, still the fifth most powerful military nation, has a total of 205,330 serving in the three branches of the forces – army, navy and air force. Now, when Britain was still clinging on to its status as a leading power, in 1914, it was criticised for the weakness of its army. On the brink of World War 1, the army’s strength was only 733,514.

A weak force and it made for a difficult start in the fighting that engulfed Europe. And yet – it was slightly more than the three and half times more than the total in all three branches today.

Hence my suggestion that aspiring to be a global power is a backward-looking, vain aspiration for Britain. We simply don’t have the economic muscle or, if military strength really is a key factor, the firepower to play that role. Once, maybe, but not now. “We are a global power”? Wake up and smell the cordite.

And that is my quarrel with these people. They’re refusing to wake up to the reality of our real status. We remain a power, but an intermediate one. In the same league as Germany, France or Italy. To be taken seriously, but in no position to dictate terms to great powers.

Not that I regard the situations as anything to regret. I don’t want to go back to Britain as a world power. When it was, it chalked up a string of horrors: genocide of the aboriginal population of Australia, the cruel putting down of the Indian ‘mutiny’ (in reality, an uprising against a colonial presence that had no right to be installed there), the Amritsar massacre, the hunting of insurgents in Malaya or Kenya or Cameroon – the list goes on and on. Indeed, the British Empire provided the first trial of an innovation that marked the twentieth century: concentration camps used against its Boer adversaries – civilians and not just fighters – in South Africa. Torture, of course, was commonplace across the Empire.

No, I want those things behind us. I’d like us to recognise that they already are. I’d like us to come to the realisation, as Germany, France and Italy have, that we are now intermediate powers. Alone, we’ll be pushed around by the US, China, Russia, Japan and others who may well grant us free trade deals, but on terms we’re not going to like. Together, on the other hand, in the European Union, we, Germany, France, Italy and 24 other countries can truly influence the way the world travels.

That’s why I feel the Brexiters are missing the point. They’re grasping at a mirage. And missing the real opportunity in front of us.

But, hey, who am I to have a view? It seems that “the arrogance of [my] position is breathtaking. And hilariously stupid”. The hilariously stupid should, presumably, just shut up and let others do the talking.

Which is what I’m going to do now.

Brexit and Malaria and what they have in common

An old friend of mine was an intensive care specialist at a prestigious hospital. He told me of a case he once had to deal with, of a wealthy business man who went hunting in Africa every year. All had gone well for ten years but in the eleventh he’d returned suffering from malaria in an advanced state and spent several weeks in Intensive Care, much of the time close to death.

“But,” my friend asked him, “didn’t you take anti-malaria tablets?”

“Not this time.”

“You mean, you always had before, but just decided that this year you wouldn’t?”

“Yes,” replied the patient, “you see, I never had any trouble in the previous years, so I decided I didn’t need them this time.”

Christmas this year was fun. As well as many English friends and relatives, we also saw people from abroad, mostly from other countries of the EU. We took full advantage of the opportunity to do so since, in two or three years, it may become a great deal harder. 2016 has turned into the year of the wall: Trump won office in the States on a promise to build one, England and Wales voted to retreat behind new barriers to separate them from their nearest neighbours.

So, though fun Christmas was also poignant.

Still, I’m assured by Brexiteers, not least on Twitter, that I’m wrong to see Brexit as anything but an opportunity. It seems that it will give us the chance to strike some exciting new business deals.

Presumably that would be impressive deals, like the one that allows us to trade without customs or other barriers, with the world’s biggest trading block, embracing over 500 million people and three of the world’s top seven economies. That would be the rest of EU. The organisation to which we still belong, for the next two or three years, and which absorbs over half our total trade.

We can get out and strike some new deals with major economic powers. Like Bahrain, recently visited by Theresa May, and worth 0.3% of the EU’s Gross Domestic Product.

Bahrain: ideal post-Brexit partner, worth about 1/300th of the EU
And the labour practices are a great model for the times
when all those pesky EU regulations have been swept away

Still, she also went to India, whose GDP is about 44% of the size of the EU. Per head of population that’s only one-seventh of Germany, but let’s not get pedantic about matters of detail.

Anyway, we’ve been a member the European Union for 43 years, and we’ve barely notice the trade benefits. Why should we need them now?

It’s just like malaria tablets. Take them, and you never get malaria. And if you never get malaria, why bother to take the tablets?

Enlightenment doesn't mix well with elitism

Though he was a son of the emperor, the young prince Ashoka was far from the line of succession. But he was respectful of the Ministers so, when his father died, they backed him to inherit the throne. He carved his way to there through human flesh, it is said, with some recounting that he killed 99 of his 100 brothers and half brothers, sparing only one.

Indeed, it is said that he rid himself of the legitimate heir by tricking him into a pit of live coals. To deal with any further adversaries, he even set up a torture chamber called the heavenly hell, because of its beautiful exterior hiding horrifying deeds. He waged war, too, extending the empire he now controlled, until it extended across the Indian sub-continent, from the Hindu Kush to Bengal, and down to the extreme south except for some parts of what we now call Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

His final battle was at Kalinga. And as he walked across the battlefield afterwards, he had an epiphany. How could 100,000 have died in this way, and though his orders? 150,000 people be deported? Suddenly, he could bear it no more.

He converted to Buddhism and devoted the rest of his reign to the cultivation of virtue, within himself and for his people. He became one of the most glorious and saintly of rulers the world has ever seen, and Buddhism had its golden period of growth though much of East Asia in consequence of his actions. Sadly, however, his great and good Empire survived only fifty years after his death.

Now much of this is just wonderful legend, written long after his life, by people with an axe to grind, most of them Buddhists. The story of his early bloodthirstiness is particularly questionable, since it suits anyone wanting to prove the depth of a conversion, to stress how sinful and vicious the man converted was beforehand. With no written records of his personal history from the time, we can assume that much of this is little more than embroidery.

However, there are written records of his rule. Because he ordered huge pillars to be set up around his Empire, many containing edicts for wise rule. There were more at one time, but only nineteen still survive intact, with fragments of others.

One of Ashoka's Pillars

What do we find among these edicts?

… the king abstains from (killing) living beings, and other men and those who (are) huntsmen and fishermen of the king have desisted from hunting. And if some (were) intemperate, they have ceased from their intemperance as was in their power; and obedient to their father and mother and to the elders, in opposition to the past also in the future,by so acting on every occasion, they will live better and more happily.

The killing must stop.

It is my desire that there should be uniformity in law and uniformity in sentencing. I even go this far, to grant a three-day stay for those in prison who have been tried and sentenced to death. During this time their relatives can make appeals to have the prisoners' lives spared. If there is none to appeal on their behalf, the prisoners can give gifts in order to make merit for the next world, or observe fasts.

So there had to be due process, and justice had to be tempered by clemency.

Contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions.

“Piyadasi”, meaning “one who looks with kindness upon everything”, was one of the nicknames of Ashoka.

This was all happening in the third century before our era. And here’s a ruler who recommends not just the negative toleration of indifference for other faiths, but the positive, active toleration of studying them and learning from them.

Too enlightened to last? Indeed it was. And who overthrew this regime? Why, representatives of the Brahmin caste, the wealthiest and most powerful, the elite of Indian society.

A world in which all were treated with respect, regardless of caste, even regardless of faith? Where was the mileage in that, if you held sway over others? Why would you accept the implicit restriction on your power to act according to your will, accountable to no one or your actions?

So they put an end to it.

So it has always been, down the ages. And so it is today. As Thomas Piketty shows in his great book on growing inequality, Capital in the 21st Century , after the great egalitarian trend triggered by two world wars, a huge depression and the Russian Revolution, we have over the last thirty years, witnessed the reaction from wealthy elites. Initially spearheaded by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, this movement has set out to roll back the gains for the ordinary people, while ensuring that the financial elite consolidates its power and extends its wealth.

Just as happened when the gentle Buddhist regime set up by Ashoka was brought to its brutal end.

A dire anniversary, which calls for action

Thirty years ago today, on 3 December 1984, the people of Bhopal in Central India woke up to the realisation that their city had been the victim of perhaps the worst industrial accident the world has seen.

Overnight, the toxic gas Methyl Isocyanate leaked from the local fertiliser plant run by Union Carbide. Estimates of deaths vary, though it seems likely that 8000 died within a fortnight and 8000 later on as a result of the poisoning. The Indian government counted nearly 600,000 injuries, some 42,000 of them serious including nearly 4000 permanently disabling.

Bhopal victims lie where they fell, on 3 December 1984

To this day, there are children in Bhopal struggling with serious disability that most experts attribute to the accident, though the allegations is impossible to prove.

Eventually, Union Carbide paid $470 million in compensation, which works out at around $900 million in today’s terms. Taking only the deaths into account, that works out at about $56,000 per life, about $3000 more than US median salary currently. It seems that the worth of an Indian life takes a relatively low-paid US worker just over a year to earn, and that’s if we think the injuries to survivors count for nothing.

Union Carbide now belongs to Dow Chemical. For the year up to the third quarter of 2014 its earnings (profit) were about $2.3 billion, approximately twice the compensation paid for Bhopal. It paid its Chief Executive, Andrew N. Liveris, a little over $20 million last year, or a tad under the equivalent of 360 Bhopal lives.

In 2013, Dow Chemical paid over a million dollars in political contributions, getting on for 20 Bhopal lives’ worth. They contributed to both main parties in the US though, if we exclude the sums going to ostensibly non-party Political Action Committees and the like, Republicans received nearly four times as much as Democrats.

Like most large corporations, Dow is buying itself politicians, and is principally favouring its natural allies in the Republican Party.

By coincidence, today, as well as being the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, also saw newspaper stories about the physicist Stephen Hawking. He was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease at 21 and given two years to live; this year, he celebrated his 72nd birthday.

He owes his survival to his doctors. But he owes his ability to communicate, given that he now can only do so through moving a cheek muscle, to Intel with whom he has collaborated for many years. The work the company has done with him will benefit many highly disabled people.

Comparing the Intel and Dow stories teaches a key lesson: corporations are neither good nor bad, any more than guns are. What matters, in both areas, is what use we make of them. Helping Steven Hawking and others afflicted by a terrible debilitating disease? Good. Poisoning Bhopal? Bad.

It’s the same with guns. Sometimes we just have to use them, whether it’s to defeat the Nazis or ISIS. At other times, we’d like them securely locked away somewhere. Over here in Europe, we have taken strict steps to make sure they are, steps the US would do well to imitate.

Sadly, however, though we haven’t allowed the US to influence us out of gun regulation – we have, you might say, stuck to our guns – we seem to be having trouble breaking with US thinking on regulating our corporations.

Putting that right, so that we move towards a society in which a bunch of reckless bankers can’t put our entire finance system at risk, or a bunch of inept managers poison an entire city in India, feels to me to be as urgent for the world as gun control is in the US. And a lot more important than cutting immigration.

Besides, what better tribute could there be to the suffering citizens of Bhopal?

Indian Independence, and how it helped free Britain

Richard Lederer, in his Anguished English, quotes a student who believed that the sun never set on the British Empire because the Empire was in the East, and the sun sets in the West.

An American, the Revered W. B. Brown, suggested that the sun never set on the British Empire because God didn’t trust the Brits in the dark.

Both statements have some merit. 

We’re all watching blood-curdling events unfolding in the Middle East at the moment, as Islamic State militants terrorise their region to build themselves a new country that crosses the recognised borders of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. But where did those borders come from? Why, from the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. In the middle of World War One and without even waiting to beat the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the British, represented by Sir Mark Sykes, signed a secret agreement on how to divide up Turkish possessions in the Levant with the no more trustworthy French, represented by François Georges-Picot.

Sharing out the spoils of the Ottoman Empire

In other words, a lot of blood is being spilled today because of a devious deal brokered by the British and their fellow conspirators. It seems that letting them operate away from scrutiny was never a good idea. It was indeed wiser to keep the Empire in the sunlight.

As for its Eastern nature, it’s true that the main centre of the British Empire, the jewel in its crown,  was India. While I was preparing my recent Countdown to War series, it was curious to read a 1914 Manchester Guardian reference to Britain as an “Asiatic power”. It seems a strange notion today, but back then the possession of India and its other Far Eastern holdings, certainly made Britain an Asiatic power and a major one at that.

The fact that the Empire was best not left unsupervised meant that being a British colony was hardly a matter for self-congratulation in India. Just how serious a misfortune it was is perhaps best illustrated by the events surrounding the ending of that status. 

Rather than leaving India to the Indians, and allowing them to sort out their internal difficulties, including sectarian ones, Britain partitioned the country first. So the Muslim majority areas were hived off, eventually forming Pakistan, even to the extent of giving that country two separate wings with 1600 km of Indian territory between them.

To ensure that an independent India could not block the partition, Pakistan was granted its independence a day earlier. India was faced with a done deal, which it was forced to accept despite fighting four wars with its neighbour to undo it.

Partition also sparked the world’s largest migrations, involving some ten million people. Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to India and Muslims travelled the other way. Conflicts between the groups left anywhere between 200,000 and a million dead. Eventually the two wings of Pakistan fell out, and a short but destructive war led to East Pakistan winning independence as Bangladesh.

Refugees on the move as a result of Indian partition

And yet, was there any point in partition? There are more Muslims in India today than there are in Pakistan. They are one of the many disadvantaged minorities of the world’s largest democracy. Had the Muslims of Pakistan and Bangladesh remained inside India, sheer numbers might have ensured better treatment for such a large minority. It would also have spared the world the creation of two failed or failing states.

Kipling and his ilk thought of the British presence in India as shouldering the white man’s burden. It strikes me that the burden was British and it was carried by the Indians. Except maybe that by imposing it on the Indians, we in Britain bound ourselves to keeping our country authoritarian and imperialistic, to our own loss. I remember the late Tony Benn, the radical Labour MP, describing England as the last colony of the British Empire. So the independence of India was the beginning of a process to free us from our self-imposed yoke too.

The White Man's Burden: the question is, who was carrying it?

That’s why today, 15 August, I celebrate the 67th anniversary of Indian independence with my glass raised to my many Indian friends and colleagues. I wish them enjoyment today and prosperity in the future.

And breathe a sigh of relief that, however Eurosceptic it may be, my homeland has at last accepted that it is a second-tier European state, and not an Asiatic power with global reach.

Jawaharlal Nehru's first address as Prime Minister of an independent India

Even though, with a few islands scattered round the globe, technically the sun still doesn’t set on the British Empire...

Countdown to War. Day 6, 3 July: Peace in Mexico? Freight by air? And the Sarajevo business rumbles on

One hundred years ago today, on Friday 3 July 1914, Martin could breathe a sigh of relief: the insufferably hot weather was going to turn cooler. The Manchester Guardian announced: “Heat Wave Breaking. Further Storms. Cooler Weather forecasted for today.” 

A welcome change. But it didn’t mean that elsewhere in the world temperatures, or tempers were, cooling.

The Anglo-Russian convention was creating a dangerous situation in Persia, with Russia unscrupulously taking advantage of it to extend its influence in the country. Competition between the two nations over India, Kipling’s “great game”, meant Russia would dearly love to extend its territory right up to the Indian border. That was something the British Foreign Secretary seemed not to have seized:

The mistake that Sir Edward Grey has made in Persia is to credit Russia with the same loyalty to the professed objects of the Convention that he has himself. It is not that Russian policy and Russian agents are consciously unscrupulous and cynical men. But their whole point of view is diametrically opposed to our own. Our interest is in an independent and strong Persia to act as a buffer between Russia and India. But the disappearance of Persia has no terrors for Russia, and so far from avoiding a military frontier with us, there is nothing that she would like better, if only as a means of keeping us in order or, as she would express it, of retaining our friendship.

Elsewhere, however, trouble seemed to be dying down. Having predicted trouble in Mexico only three days earlier, now the paper was proclaiming the arrival of peace.

Negotiations between the warring Mexican factions, which it is hoped will eventually lead to peace, were begun to-day, when the delegates of General Huerta formally gave the South American envoys a note to be transmitted to the Rebel representatives at Washington declaring willingness to discuss peace terms.

General Victoriano Huerta, President of Mexico
In negotiations with the rebels against his rule

A separate article informed Martin that, despite the worries expressed before and the insistence of the British Minister that they should go, British residents planned to remain in Mexico City. So peace might be in the air. That had to be a good thing, surely? Even if Huerta was one of those military fellows with lots of medals who really ought to be kept well away from power, most things had to be preferable to war. 

The last word had clearly not been said about the assassination in Sarajevo at the weekend. As previously suspected, a thread leading back to Belgrade, the Serbian capital, seemed increasingly likely. Talking about the first, failed attempt on Franz Ferdinand’s life, the Guardian reported:

Gabrinovic, who threw the bomb which the Archduke escaped, has admitted his connection with an organisation agitating for a Greater Servia. The editors of the Greater Servian journals at Sarayevo have been arrested, and one of them has been expelled from Bosnia.

Marconi radio
You could talk to New York without so much as a cable?

But then Martin's eye was caught by a completely different piece on “Future Uses of Wireless.” It quoted a spokesman for the Marconi company who made claims for this bright new technology that seemed a little too good to be true: “... if Marconi does not talk to New York before the year is out I shall be very disappointed.” Conversation between London and NewYork without using a cable? That would be remarkable.

Just as outlandish was another item on “Aerial Transport” which referred to workers who apparently believed “that aeroplanes will become more and more means of carrying cargo.” It seems they felt that “there will be imperative need for a special union as part of the Transport Workers’ Federation.”

Flying cargo? Well, more extraordinary things had happened. And he wouldn’t mind getting involved. Flying around for work instead of grafting on the Earth’s surface to lay railway track sounded like a big improvement. Some interesting things could be happening in the next few years.