I am angry (as the capital letters indicate) at the comedian Trevor Noah who is all over the news media online as you can imagine. I would like to briefly throw my hat into the ring because I can’t resist it. This is not, clearly, a general news media website and therefore I will provide my personal first-hand experience in living in the UK about the response of British citizens to the appointment of a British Asian Hindu to the post of Prime Minister. He is the youngest UK Prime Minister in modern times.
Note: What I have said here relates to mainstream society. It does not apply to the armed forces and the police both of which are endemically racist and misogynistic in my opinion. These institutions are populated by uneducated, idiotic young men.
I, like many others, am a fan Rishi Sunak. His appointment as Prime Minister is popular in the UK. We don’t see him as a ‘foreigner’ or Indian. We see him as a British citizen. And we see him as a very competent individual with financial knowledge. He has the ability to organise and manage. A vital ingredient for a successful Prime Minister.
And we don’t care that both he and his wife are very rich. It’s irrelevant in my opinion. The only relevancy is competence. And he has proved that he is compassionate about the more vulnerable in society.
The British people are looking for competence. This is to be expected considering we’ve just experienced 44 days of great incompetence from Liz Truss the former prime minister who was in the post for the shortest time ever.
There is simply no racist backlash against Rishi Sunak. Trevor Noah defends himself by saying that he did not suggest that all of Britain is against Rishi Sunak because of racism. In his defence he said that he suggested that some British citizens were part of a backlash against him.
He said: “Watching the story of Rishi Sunak becoming England’s first Prime Minister of colour, of Indian descent, of all these things and then seeing the backlash is one of the more telling things about how people view the role that they or their people have played in history.”
He doesn’t have a shred of evidence for this fictional ‘backlash’. And as Camilla Long a Times journalist with acid wit wrote in The Sunday Times:
“The only example of real, high-level racism came not from Britain, but Noah’s close friend Joe Biden, who couldn’t pronounce Sunak’s name propertly: ‘Rasheed Sanook'”.
I read the papers from cover to cover every day. I’m switched on about what’s happening in Britain and in the world. I speak to my friends, and I can say with complete confidence that there is no backlash. They will be some racist Brits who don’t like it, but this minority is so small that their voice is unheard.
As I mentioned above, the vast majority of British citizens are pleased about Rishi Sunak’s appointment as Prime Minister. The citizens of the UK want a normal, well-balanced person, even a boring person to be in the top job in this country.
Above all they seek competence as mentioned. We need a settled UK going forward dealing with the problems that we have and which are present in many other countries.
It is a time for practical solutions and pragmatism and a steady and persistent drive towards a better UK after the shocks of Covid and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent price rises and high inflation. High inflation is partly the result of incompetence and greed.
I say incompetence because it is the Bank of England which printed too much money. When you print money, you devalue it which in effect is inflation. They euphemistically call it “quantitative easing”. It’s just pumping money into the economy to boost it. A bit like putting the country on steroids but there’s also a downside to the process. There is a temporary uplift but a longer-term downside of inflation which is very damaging.
We need someone with financial competence and Rishi Sunak has that in spades to squash down inflation. These are very difficult times for the UK, Europe and other countries including the USA although the USA is doing better. But they, too, have a massive national debt which is too high in relation to their GDP. But Britain borrowed way too heavily during the Covid pandemic to support the furlough scheme and small businesses.
The furlough scheme, instigated by Rishi Sunak, went on too long and was too generous in my view. It engendered laziness. That’s a criticism of the man. He is not perfect. But by and large people were happy with the scheme and the generous grants to small businesses despite the fact that about £10 billions of these grants was stolen!
Sunak like all politicians will make mistakes. He has Jeremy Hunt by his side who is now the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Together Brits hope that they will stabilise the country’s finances going forward. We are optimistic. There is no backlash just quiet and cautious optimism and a feeling that more settled times are ahead.
That is conditional upon one thing: Putin, whose constant threats of nuclear war are highly distressing to millions of people. The man is mad. He is paranoid about the West trying to destroy Russia. The West has no aspirations to destroy Russia. Putin was raised within the KGB and during the end of the era of the USSR. He believes in a wider Soviet empire, and it upsets him that Gorbachev ended it. He wants it back and he doesn’t mind if he kills tens of thousands of innocent civilians and hundreds of thousands of animals in the process. He is a mad war criminal, and he needs to be stopped.
