David Miliband’s elegant slumming
As well as sticking his tongue out at the retreating back of George Bush, David Miliband’s also been indulging in a little tokenistic slumming while on his trip to India:
Foreign Secretary David Miliband spent the night in the hut of a Dalit or “untouchable” [as those on the lowest rung of India's ancient caste heirarchy used to be known] in an Indian village, sleeping on a wooden cot, reports said Thursday.
As the Foreign Minister says on his blog:
I am at the airport on the way to Amethi district in Uttar Pradash. 800m Indians live on less than 2 dollars a day, 450m on less than 1 dollar. Today I will get a chance to see some of the gap that exists between metropolitan middle class India and the rest.
And again, you think: right words, wrong bloke to be saying them. I’d be interested to see if Miliband’s had any meetings while on his trip to facilitate arms deals.
In 2002, the UK government lobbied hard to flog a billion quids worth of arms to India (at a time when India and Pakistan were toe-to-toe over Kashmir). In 2008 we gave most of that money back ‘to target areas such as the eastern state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest’.
Government officials will also be on hand this February to ‘support’ UK businesses attending the Aero India 2009 arms fair. India is, after all, a lucrative market for merchants of death (it was worth £130 million to the UK in 2007).
So when our Foreign Secretary and his new-found conscience emerges from his thatched hut wringing his hands about India’s poor, don’t forget that him and his colleagues are the middle men urging the Indian government behind the scenes to spend their money on other things than 800 million Indians living on less than two dollars a day.
Posted on January 15th, 2009 at 8:08pm under Eye Catching Initiatives, New Labour
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• 2 Comments |
If MY neighbour was Pakistan, border ignoring host and enabler to people who wanted to kill or convert my family, myself, my friends and neighbours, and who might be keen on killing members of their own faith (wrong sect, don’t you know?) I think I would be more than a little keen on being armed to the teeth.
I’d have more sympathy for people living on a dollar a day or whatever if, whenever such figures are bandied around, I wasn’t reacting to the alarm that goes off in my brain telling me that someone, somewhere, thinks that ‘s a viable new direction for the British economy.
(See also the new deal, internships, etc.)