I have made several visits to the Great Britain in the recent and distant past. I could not convince myself all these years that this country could have been the ruler of more than half of the world. But irrespective of my belief, she was the dominant power of the world for over a hundred years or so or roughly until the Second World War.
In 90s, it was polluted and dirty and during my visit in December2011, I found it much more environmentally squalid and unkempt. The degradation of the environment in UK is escalating without any tangible remedies to contain it. The atmospheric hygiene is poor. The streets remain littered for days and weeks together without being cleaned. It is a common scene to see water drains outside the houses choked by stray papers, odd trash items, causally thrown away plastic bags, bottles and wrappers. It might become a third world country in due course. If one compares the civic upkeep elsewhere in Europe like in Germany and Austria, one would come across a bewildering contrast. Germany has been rebuilt after the colossal devastation during the Second World War. The autobahns (highways) between the major cities are modern, wide, properly lined up with gas or fuel stations all along. The face lifting and landscaping is all over the country. The zoning laws are in place and strictly enforced. But in England one fails to find that sparkling touch and luminous spectacle in cities and on roads and highways on a huge scale. One would find the familiar sight of cows grazing along the inter-cities highways on lush green grassy landscape far away. But within the cities the traffic looks to be stuffy and. The traffic lights too are not as modern and plenteous as for instance in the United States. The streets lights look to be dim and sparsely installed on roads in the cities. The cab and private drivers take liberty with traffic laws by jumping the signals or fast driving or parking at forbidden or no parking places. This kind of law breaking is not common but happens sparingly and at odd times.
The British society is essentially conservative and therefore, any change or transformation in the construction of buildings, remodeling the public traffic system and buses is not willingly undertaken or conceived. The outskirts of the cities are full of old taverns and restaurants with their primitive designs dating back to several centuries.
The lamp posts on historical roads in downtown look like relics and were perhaps erected with the discovery of electricity. Since the skies in the United Kingdom remain overcast for better part of the year, there is a pervasive dampness. One feels a kind of depression for not seeing the skies for days together.
One would aspire that the underground mass transit system of local railway is updated and modernized. Also one would wish that the double-decked bus transportation system too is done away with and the normal sized buses with modern frame and latest internal gadgets are introduced. The phenomenal difference in the overall picture of the United States and the United kingdom is that USA looks all new with big shopping plazas and housing constellations fast coming up. In United States, the businesses, the shopping centers and factory areas are separate from the residential areas. Barring the apartment complexes, every built house or living unit is separate from other houses. It would be impossible under the American laws to open a gift shop or small retail outlet in the parlor or garage of the house. In England the houses share wall with each other as part of block. In England, Scotland and other parts, the living or guest rooms can be converted into a kind of kiosk for selling grocery times.
In Britain, the dirt and filth and smut accumulated in lanes around the roads and on the walls of the buildings must be washed and erased through a nationwide sweeping campaign. England has to overhaul its municipal system drastically and radically to put on the grab of a modern society. In the past such huge buildings with Gothic spires and domes were the symbols of the imperial glory of a colonial power.
The House of Commons and also the House of Lords accommodated within the vast edifice of Palace of Westminster have almost the same internal format as at the time of their inception.
The seating arrangement in perpendicular shape is unchanged for centuries. The prime minister has to bend forward to speak and in four years may develop leaning shoulders. The seats are smaller and joined together in rows. The parliament buildings in other countries look like magnificent structures and striking architectural monuments. But British parliament has the same primitive space and set-up. One would wonder if any British government ever would think of constructing a new building for the parliamentarians of both the houses with modern fittings, new seating arrangements, new tables, decorations, wall hangings, microphones and with more space. Yet despite being housed in a traditional old building, it still is one of the most powerful parliaments and pioneering symbol of democracy. In Glasgow the main city of Scotland, the railway stations seems to be following the same system of collecting tickets from the disembarked passengers by the collector standing at the tip the platform. In this city I saw the building made of stone bearing the marks of soot, smoke and blackness caused perhaps by the bombing during the Second World War.In the houses of several of my acquaintances both native British and immigrant Pakistanis, the bath tubs and water supply system with minor modifications is the same as was prevalent several decades ago. The residents in some houses collect the water from the tap in the basin. Unbelievably they use the same water for washing face and gurgling and shaving. I wonder if someone can bear me out on this phenomenon. At about 11 o’clock in the evening, a manual bell is rung in the pubs for the customers to leave by which one is reminded that this should have been the custom in olden days. This is yet another manifestation of British penchant for conservatism.
Of late, the crime is on the rise. Even such worthies as late jimmy Savile a former BBC television host had indulged for decades in molestation of teen age participants in his TV programs as well as his staffers. The street crime is mostly motivated by the racial hatred for the immigrants, for sex or to rob for money. The sex crimes too are proliferating in which both immigrant communities and local citizens are involved. The fabled investigation agency Scotland Yard is shorn of their luster and renown of the past. Many high profile crimes are still shrouded in mystery and unresolved.
The nationals of the British Commonwealth countries had enjoyed special privileges and preferential treatment with regard to visit or immigration visas after the World War II. This practice continued for several decades till the streets of cities in UK were conspicuous with sizable presence of the foreigners. The plight of most of the immigrants or expatriates is miserable. Big families live in small units with limited space. In some houses or the apartments, I have seen the bath tub fixed in the kitchen. The toilet is in the courtyard and one has to walk many steps to reach that isolated place.
The influx of foreign students has been quite heavy during the past two decades. It was pretty easy for the students to get an admission letter from genuine or private and mostly fake educational institutions in UK. The embassy or the high commission would readily grant visa. These young persons would pay heavy amounts to the schools and colleges run by crafty professional businessmen. The basic purpose of most of these students was however, to get a legal stay in UK for a good future. They would be associated with these schools but would in due course find job and marry with a local girl for permanent legal status.
Now these students are in big trouble. They are being deported or sent back home in droves without even fulfilling the legal formalities. Such is the decay and devaluation of the acclaimed justice system in England. There seems to be a drastic halt in granting student visas to educational applicants from Pakistan and other south “Asian countries whose citizens invariably aspire to move to the green pasture like Great Britain. Instead of punishing the crook bosses of these phony schools, the onus has fallen on the hoodwinked young aspirants who came to UK legally for education with underlying motive of a legal stay.
There are localities and neighborhoods in various cities of UK where there is exclusive and complete hold of the immigrants such as South Hall in London. No one would believe on the first glimpse that these are the parts of a western country. The sanitary conditions in such neighborhoods are appalling. With heaps of garbage accumulated all over, with noise and din, with strung dresses and utensils, and cooked food displayed openly with smell all round can remind visitors the similar conditions back home.
Even in politics the immigrants are now demographically in such numbers that they can elect their won member to the House of Commons. In local elections the naturalized citizens have been elected. That shows the grass-root and a genuine democratic culture embedded in the English society. The ceremonies of a new prime minister taking over and the former leaving the 10 Downing Street is very simple and is total contrast to the extravagant ceremonies witnessed in the third world countries.
The writer is a senior journalist and a former diplomat.
Upright Opinion
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December 1, 2012
Additional Reading
Britain is being rebuilt in aid of corporate power
- Trust business, Cameron tells us, self-regulation is a force for social good. Silly me – I thought it was an invitation to disaster
- George Monbiot
- The Guardian, Monday 27 February 2012 15.30 EST
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
They used to do it subtly; they don’t bother any more. Last week a column in the Telegraph argued that businesses should get the vote. Though they pay tax, Damian Reece maintained, they have “no say in the running of local or national government”. To remedy this cruel circumscription, he suggested that elections in the UK should follow the example set by the City of London Corporation. This is the nation’s last rotten borough, in which ballots in 21 of its 25 wards are controlled by companies, whose bosses appoint the voters. I expect to see Mr Reece pursue this noble cause by throwing himself under the Queen’s horse.
Contrast this call for an extension of the franchise with a piece in the same paper last year, advocating an income qualification for voters.Only those who pay at least £100 a year in income tax, argued Ian Cowie, another senior editor at the Telegraph, should be allowed to vote. Blaming the credit crisis on the unemployed (who, as we know, lie in bed all day devising credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations), Cowie averred that “it’s time to restore the link between paying something into society and voting on decisions about how it is run”. This qualification, he was good enough to inform us, could exclude “the majority of voters in some metropolitan areas today”. The proposal was repeated by Benedict Brogan, the Telegraph’s deputy editor.
No representation without taxation: wasn’t that Alan B’stard’s slogan in the satirical series The New Statesman? Votes for business, none for the poor: this would formalise the corporate assault on democracy that has been gathering pace for the past 30 years.
This column is a plea for distrust. Distrust is the resource on which democracy relies. Distrust inspires the scrutiny and accountability without which representation becomes a lie. Distrust is all that stands between us and bamboozlement by people who, like Reece, Cowie and Brogan, channel the instincts of the billionaire owners of newspapers and broadcasters.
Last week David Cameron argued that those who say business “isn’t really to be trusted” do so as a result of “snobbery”. Business, in fact, is”the most powerful force for social progress the world has ever known”. Not democracy, education, science, justice or public health: business. You need only consider the exemplary social progress in Zaire underMobutu, Chile under Pinochet, or the Philippines under Marcos – who opened their countries to the kind of corporate free-for-all that Cameron’s backers dream of – to grasp the universal truth of this statement.
He gave some examples to support his contention that regulation can be replaced by trust. The public health responsibility deal, which transfers responsibility for reducing obesity and alcoholism to fast-food outlets, drinks firms and supermarkets, reaches, Cameron claimed, the parts “which the state just can’t”.
Under the deal, Subway and Costa are “putting calorie information up front when people are buying”. The state couldn’t possibly legislate for that, could it? Far better to leave it to the companies, who can decide for themselves whether they inform people that a larduccino coffee with suet sprinkles contains no more calories than the average Olympic sprinter burns in a month. He forgot to mention the much longer list of companies that have failed to display this information.
Another substitute for regulation, he suggested, is a programme called Every Business Commits. Through its website I found the government’s list of “case studies of responsible business practice”. Here I learned that British American Tobacco is promoting public health by educating and counselling its workers about HIV. The drinks giant Diageo is improving its waste water treatment process. Bombardier Aerospace is enhancing the environmental performance of its factories, in which it manufactures, er, private jets. RWE npower, which runs some of Britain’s biggest coal and gas power stations, teaches children how to “to think about their responsibilities in reducing climate change”.
All these are worthy causes, but they are either peripheral to the main social harms these companies cause or look to my distrustful eye like window dressing. Nor do I see how they differ from the “moral offsetting” that Cameron says happened in the past but doesn’t today. But this tokenism, in the prime minister’s view, should inspire us to trust companies to the extent that some of the regulations affecting their core business can be removed.
We are living through remarkable times. The government, supported by the corporate press, is engaged in a naked attempt to rebuild the life of this country around the demands of business. Extending the project begun by Tony Blair, Cameron is creating an economy in which much of the private sector depends on state contracts, and in which the government’s core responsibility is to provide them. If this requires the destruction of effective public healthcare and reliable state education, it is of no concern to an economic class that uses neither.
The corporations gaining ever greater powers will be subject to less democratic oversight and restraint, in the form of regulation. Despite the obvious lesson of the credit crunch – that self-regulation is an invitation to disaster – Cameron wants to extend the principle to every corner of the economy. Trust them, he says: what can possibly go wrong?
Twitter: @georgemonbiot
