By the sheerest chance I found myself in the UK last week. Sixty-five million Brits were going in for a general election on July 4 and everyone expected the ruling Conservative Party, which had been in power for 14 years, to lose and the Labour Party to form the new government. It would be a huge Rajiv or Modi type majority the pandits were claiming.

The main election issue was immigration but no political party would admit it. The hard truth is that many of the whites want the non-whites to go away unless they are able to pay taxes. But they say this only privately.

Mostly it’s the Muslims who have caused the anger against immigrants. It’s because these migrants have become parasites. UK laws guarantee them a good life — housing, health, education for children, etc — in return for nothing. Or that’s what the broad majority thinks anyway.

The prejudice is striking. One Englishman told me there were 25 million migrants in the UK. I asked him how he knew. He said the government was measuring the output of sewage. There’s more of it, apparently, than the official population figure of 65 million would suggest. He was dead serious. Later he said it wasn’t true.

So that’s the level of detestation of immigrants which has influenced this election so hugely. The Tories, as the members of the Conservative Party are called, have met the same fate as the Congress did in 2014 and 2019 because they had been promising to stop the flood of illegal immigrants for over a dozen years and done nothing useful.

So they are viewed by a large part of the electorate as the BJP is viewed by a very large number of Hindus. Useless to their respective core constituents.

Anyway, on July 4, at 8 am, I went along with my English host to watch the election. Watch turned out to be an exaggeration. There’s absolutely nothing to watch. Only about 43 million people vote compared to around 600 million in India. It should be over in a couple of hours but they take the whole day over it.

We drove around 15 kilometres through those fabled winding very narrow country lanes with tall hedges on both sides. The day before the election we had been wandering around a small town.

There was nothing to suggest that an election was happening and that a major change was just around the corner. The Brits were ostentatiously keeping calm and carrying on.

In Britain they allow campaigning to go on right through polling day. You couldn’t see any signs of it. Like religion, politics is a private affair.

We reached the polling station where my host was the only voter present. He went in and came out in two minutes. I thought to myself how easy it would be to do some light booth capturing. You’d have to stamp only about 500 ballot papers.

The Brits also don’t put a mark on the forefinger after you have voted. They trust each other implicitly and don’t trust absolutely anyone else at all, not even EVMs! But online voting is permitted. Talk about ‘funny foreigners’, a term that the British invented in the 19th century.

Immigration issue

But now that Keir Starmer has become the prime minister, that too with such a massive majority (winning over 63 per cent of the 650 seats in the House of Commons), he will be expected to deliver on immigration. Exactly what is unclear. Mass deportation? A change in human rights inspired laws that make the UK such an attractive destination for ‘dunki’ types? Will he close the English Channel?

The world wants to know but we have to wait and watch because there is no publicly stated view of the Labour Party on it or of his own. Indeed both are suspiciously silent on it. You’d think they regard it as a non-issue. It’s like the Congress party, at least until recently, on Hindutva politics with all that it entails.

The short point is that Starmer will have to follow exactly the same broad policies as have been in place since 2000 or so. They call it centrist politics but a more accurate term is ‘cop out’. And the reason is simple: he has to make sure that he doesn’t lose the next general election. His is not a coalition government but it was a coalition that gave him his majority. It’s a perfect do nothing situation.

It’s what Modi did during 2014-19: become so cautious that your core support starts getting restive. To be sure he will occasionally lunge this way and that, but his achche din promises are probably a pie in the sky.

Talking of pies, Starmer has his eccentricities: he is a pescatarian which means his non-vegetarian diet comprises seafood only. If it swims he will eat it, but not if it walks.

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