Unconventional mandate

With just a few days to go, Britain hurtles towards the December 12 general election in a welter of policies and promises offered by all parties. Spend, spend and spend is the mantra for all of them in this Christmas confetti of billions of pounds. It's Brexit or bust tamasha all the way.

Top contender, Tory party led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been the first to say goodbye to its austerity rule of the past decade. Starting with 20,000 more police on the streets, he reversed former PM Theresa May's cuts in police numbers. In a bold move, while releasing his party manifesto on Sunday he has promised to strengthen the National Health Service with 50,000 more nurses. Plans for building more hospitals and further investment in social care had already been announced. In a realistic but surprise move, he ditched tax cuts for the rich while retaining national insurance and other benefits for the weaker sections as promised a few days earlier.

In sharp contrast, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has promised to pump in billions of pounds to provide universal free broadband connectivity, paid for with a tax on tech companies, partly by nationalising BT (British Telecom), besides offering other help to those less conversant with advanced services. The building of 150,000 houses a year in the council or municipal sector and housing association or cooperative sector is next on the priority list. To top it all, the party has promised nationalisation of railways, postal service and water industry — the commanding heights of the economy.

Reduction of inequality by taxing billionaires and top five per cent of wealth owners is another eye-opening Labour promise, besides bringing in a national minimum retirement wage of ten pounds an hour and eradicating the emerging scourge of 'zero hour' jobs without regulatory contracts. Perhaps the most jaw-opening prospect comes with the party's idea of a four-day working week, ushering in an era where people work to live, not live to work.

The Achilles heel of Labour's grand plan, however, lies in the party's failure to decide its stand on the immediate issue of Brexit. Corbyn's categoric answer, in a four-party TV debate, of staying 'neutral' on the issue has muddied the waters even more. Asking party members to cast their verdict in a referendum on a new deal negotiated with the European Union within six months has added to confusion instead of simplifying it.

The admission of neutrality, or confession as his opponents call it, coupled with a referendum on the issue in six months is seen by opponents as a double dither of huge proportions. People are fed up with the Brexit imbroglio which has dragged on for more than a thousand days. They want to be done with it.

And that is not all. The shadow of a hung parliament stretches right to regional borders – from Scotland to Wales and Northern Ireland. The Scottish Nationalist Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon has already opened the possibility of an arrangement, not an alliance, with the Labour Party, to frustrate the Tory party's opposition to Scottish independence aspirations.

Yet the starting gun for the current Brexit tamasha is the old immigration bugbear which has bedevilled the country right since the end of the Second World War when Britain needed all hands to rebuild the war-ravaged country. Migrants from old colonies – India, Pakistan, rest of Asia, Africa and the West Indies – poured into work in factories, house building, transport and the nascent National Health Service.

Inescapably, the other side of the immigration coin happened to be, still is, the colour question. The recent Windrush scandal involving the long-settled Caribbean community is only the latest episode. The reality of having people of different colour complexion as your near or far neighbours, working colleagues as equal citizens found no easy acceptance among sections of the host population. Some of the leaders, to name only Enoch Powell, conjured the vision of Tiber (the Thames) running red with blood. Fortunately, the British public and leadership at large saw no such nightmare. In fact, Edward Heath, the Tory party leader, sacked Powell as a member of his shadow cabinet. British subjects uprooted from Uganda, Kenya and elsewhere were accepted for settlement in Britain and have thrived in the land.

However, the demon of colour and race keeps erupting now and again. Theresa May during her premiership explicitly introduced the creation of 'hostile environment' to discourage immigration with calculated resolve to follow her predecessor David Cameron's target of reducing immigration numbers from 'hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands'. The targets, which also covered white Europeans, remained unachievable and have been openly abandoned by Prime Minister Johnson in favour of a gradual rundown with a skills-based Australian style policy. With the inclusion of high profile ethnic minority members like Sajid Javid as Chancellor and Priti Patel as Home Secretary in his cabinet, Johnson appears to have achieved the right balance and popular confidence.

Subhash Chopra is a freelance journalist and author of 'India and Britannia – an abiding affair'. Views expressed are strictly personal