Standing ‘shoulder to shoulder’- Boris Johnson stresses countries' ties

by Amit Roy

Britain stands “shoulder to shoulder” with India to defeat extremist terrorism and “to ensure stability in the Asia-Pacific region”, the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said in London last week.

Johnson was chief guest at a dinner hosted by the Indian Journalists’ Association, which was holding a double celebration – the 70th year of Indian independence as well as its own 70th birthday (it was set up in London on May 29, 1947).

The foreign secretary set out the broad outlines of British foreign policy as related to UK-India bilateral relations.

He said “we are shoulder to shoulder with India in tackling the threat of extremist terrorism”; “we cooperate (on) intelligence sharing, and we have absolutely no inhibition about sharing our most advanced technology with India”, (for example on the) Hawk jet; and that “we must be as open as possible to talent from India, to students from India – we have to have a very pro-active policy on getting on with the visa system”.

Guests at the event included senior business figures, among them Lord Swraj Paul, Gopi Hinduja and Kartar Lalvani, the tennis player Vijay Amritraj, New York gallery owner Sundaram Tagore, Labour MP Stephen Pound, executives from Jaguar Land Rover and senior officials from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).

Johnson’s personal connection to India is through his barrister wife, Marina Wheeler QC, who accompanied him to the dinner. She is the daughter of the late Sir Charles Wheeler, who married his Sikh wife, Dip Singh, when he was the BBC’s correspondent in Delhi in the early 1960s.

The foreign secretary began by acknowledging that one of his own and the nation’s great heroes, Winston Churchill, had been wrong about India.

“My mind went back to Winston Churchill about whom I wrote a book recently,” he mused.

He was referring to The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. He has also written a foreword to Winston Churchill at the Telegraph, edited by Dr Warren Dockter, a Cambridge academic who has collated Churchill’s despatches to the Daily Telegraph when he was posted in India as a young cavalry officer. Churchill was a “great journalist by the way, but until the 1940s spent his career being pretty hopelessly wrong about many of the big questions of the day”, Johnson said.

He did not comment on Churchill’s guilt or otherwise on the Bengal Famine of 1943 but said: “He was wrong about Gallipoli; he was wrong about the gold standard; he got the abdication totally wrong – he thought the king should basically be allowed to marry whoever he wanted; he got the Chanak crisis (involving Turkey) totally wrong; he made a complete hash of his efforts to strangle the Soviet Union at birth.

But when in the 1930s he persistently and balefully prophesied disaster for Indian independence called Swaraj – it’s the Hindi for ‘take back control’ – when he prophesied disaster for the policy of ‘take back control’, he was more completely and spectacularly and utterly wrong that he had ever been before.” “But you have to face facts,” he went on. “We in the UK are beneficiaries of what Professor Anthony Giddens (director of the London School of Economics 19972003), was calling ‘reverse colonialism’”.

Johnson held up the Jaguar car as “a testament to the triumph of modern India. (It is) not only the biggest democracy on earth but a place which, in less than 30 years is going to become probably the second biggest, second richest country on earth – if not the first.”

“We Brits look at that in a state of admiration – and of course we want to get ever closer to India,” he admitted.

“And, of course, we want to do these free trade deals – one of our exports is delegations of ministers,” he joked. On trade, he pushed for a reduction in the 150 per cent duty that is currently levied on whisky imports.

“I hope I won’t cause any undue offence if I repeat a point I have made before – it would be a fine thing if the 150 per cent tariff on Scotch whisky could be reduced so that the vast number of Scotch whisky drinkers in India – I am including members of my own family – can enjoy the king of whiskies, the only real authentic whisky at a reasonable price. Isn’t that a humane thing to offer out of a free trade deal? I think it is.”

He continued: “This relationship is about so much more than trade and so much more than whisky and the exchange of goods and services. It is really about the things that – and a time when the world is full of promise but also full of threats and when global trade has actually been declining as a share of global growth – our relationship, the British-Indian relationship, is about the safety and security and freedom that made that trade possible.”

“And so 70 years after Indian independence it is about the astonishing community of values between our two countries,” he declared. “And we are shoulder to shoulder with India in tackling the threat of extremist terrorism of the kind that has been seen in our great cities – in London and in Mumbai.”

“I remember coming to this very room just after the Mumbai attacks – and we tackle those threats together,” he recalled, before revealing, “Two new (British) aircraft carriers will go to the Asian regions on one of their first missions.”

Johnson, who ceased writing a column for the Daily Telegraph only when he became foreign secretary, concluded: “There is one final characteristic that our societies have in common – the thing is essential for a free and democratic society: the press. A free intrepid and independent media, that’s what we need, isn’t it? Let us continue to build that living bridge between Britain and India.”