Riding the Elephant

Daughter of economic migrants opposes advantages her parents enjoyed

Immigration and other snags develop as Truss government in crisis

LONDON Oct 13: Cutting a somewhat insignificant looking figure on a late night television show when prime minister Boris Johnson was about to resign three months ago, Suella Braverman announced to a bemused television panel that she would stand in the contest to succeed him. She was the first candidate publicly to state her intentions, but neither Robert Peston, the ITV interviewer, nor subsequent media reports seemed to take the then little-known attorney general very seriously.

Born to Kenyan Indian and Mauritian parents who moved to Britain in the 1960s, Braverman has however has proved to be ambitious and ruthlessly controversial and outspoken.

That has led to her playing a seemingly leading role in slowing progress on the current India-UK free trade deal (FTA) negotiations by opposing the sort of economic migration that her parents enjoyed.

Though quickly eliminated from the leadership contest that eventually produced Liz Truss as a crisis-prone prime minister, Braverman’s strengthened her post-Brexit popularity with the anti-immigration and anti-woke right wing of the party during the campaign. That led to her being made home secretary, one of the four top posts in the cabinet at the age of 42, even though she lacked the experience of most predecessors.

Along with Priti Patel, who she followed as home secretary, Braverman is far to the right of other top politicians of South Asian descent, notably Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javed.

Denying opportunity

Her stance horrifies many others from the subcontinent because she is denying would-be new immigrants the success that she is able to enjoy as a result of the opportunities given to her parents when they were economic migrants. She has said she is proud of what her parents achieved – her mother became an NHS nurse and local councillor in north London, and her father worked for a housing association.

Along with Patel, Braverman’s motives are widely thought to stem as much from political ambition as ideology, Both pander to the Conservative Party 80,000 largely right-wing members who elect the leader. They want to show they are “whiter than the whitest of Cheltenham colonels,” I was told, controversially but maybe aptly, by a friend of Indian origin.

Last week during the Conservative Party’s chaotic party conference, Braverman horrified government insiders with a Spectator magazine interview where she opposed the inclusion of more open immigration in , for Indian students, key workers and others in the trade agreement that Truss and Narendra Modi had been aiming to sign by Diwali. That festival is celebrated at the end of next week and the target now has slipped to later in the year, unless some sort of interim deal is concocted.

Braverman also infuriated British universities with complaints about students’ extended families and said she wanted to drive down immigration, even though Truss’s economic growth needs immigrants to help fill over one million job vacancies.

Other cabinet ministers cashed in on the conference’s free-for-all and rebelled against Truss, who had been weakened a few days earlier by a disastrous mini-Budget and a financial crisis, but Braverman was perhaps the most disruptive. She has gone quiet publicly since then and last weekend joined a chorus of party leaders appealing for unity behind Truss.

In the Spectator interview she said she had “concerns about having an open borders migration policy with India” because she didn’t “think that’s what people voted for with Brexit”.

In the context of the trade agreement, she said there could be flexibility for students and entrepreneurs, though she had reservations. “Look at migration in this country – the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants. We even reached an agreement with the Indian government last year to encourage and facilitate better co-operation in this regard.”

The remark about India not abiding by the agreement to take back over-stayers is in line with Home Office grumbles over several years. It brought a predictable response from the Indian government that said it was was committed to facilitating the returnees and awaited “demonstrable progress” from the UK.

Braverman talked about immigration in other interviews and has complained about the number of dependents who accompanies students. – “family members who can piggyback onto their student visa.”

Lord (Joe) Johnson, who was universities minister in his elder brother Boris Johnson’s government, said her ideas on foreign students “bode ill for her period as Home Secretary if this is going to be her approach to, frankly, one of the most promising export industries that the UK has”. Without international students, the government could “kiss goodbye” to its ambition for Britain to become “a science superpower”.

Deal “in peril”

The reverberations from the interview continued and led to a story in the UK’s Times newspaper on October 12 headlined “Indian trade deal in peril after Suella Braverman migrant comments”. This quoted anonymous sources from India saying the “relationship has taken a step back” while a British source alleged Indian officials were “apoplectic”.

In parallel, India’s Economic Times ran a headline that the deal was “stuck over access to skilled workers”. It said India had hardened its position demanding easier immigration into the UK amid the concerns raised by Braverman. A Delhi trade department spokesman was quoted saying India would not “sacrifice quality for speed”.

There are many other issues as yet unresvolved in the trade negotiations where subjects range from access in India for Scottish whisky and British cars. A stumbling block is the UK wanting effective protection such as international arbitration for UK investments and freedom to store business data overseas, both of which India resists.

But apoplectic or not, relations between the countries seem as cordial as ever, at least at top levels.
India’s has a new high commissioner (ambassador), Vikram Doraiswami in London who arrived three weeks ago and has been extremely active with a country-wide tour.

Those he has met include King Charles, at a reception in Scotland, Liz Truss in a Downing Street reception (on Oct 11), plus with regional leaders and Keir Starmer who heads the Labour Party.

Ultimately, the trade agreements prospects could rest on whether Truss has enough prime ministerial authority to over-rule her home secretary in the interests of a deal that would be good for the British economy.

Usually a prime minister would be able to do that but these are not usual times, Truss’s future is in doubt, and it might just be easier to let issues slide for now.

Braverman will not however have won the admirers and supporters she desires among the party leadership with her outbursts in the past week and could maybe have even reduced her chances of stepping into No 10 Downing Street if Truss loses the job that she now holds precariously.

Record ethnic mix likely in Truss’s top Cabinet jobs

Truss faces massive crises that will test her abrasive character

Rishi Sunak has been beaten – more narrowly than many had expected – by Liz Truss to become leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and the country’s fourth prime minister in six years.

Truss’s 81,326 votes against Sunak’s 60,399 showed a majority of approximately 21,000, which is less of a landslide than recent media commentary has suggested. It means that she has less authority over MPs, who originally backed Sunak, and less support among party members than she would have wished in order to enforce her radical right wing policies.

The fact that only about 11,000 voters need to have switched sides to make Sunak the winner reflects the result of five televised “hustings” where he clearly won over the audiences with his willingness and ability to give clear cut answers. Truss kept her replies vague and did not develop her ideas.

It is fair to conclude that if more party members had known more about Sunak when they voted over the past month, the result might have been different.

Ethnic mix in Cabinet

Britain will not – for now at least – have an Indian-origin prime minister, but it looks likely that there will be an historic broad-based mix of ethnic backgrounds at the top of Truss’s cabinet.

If media forecasts are correct, the three leading Cabinet posts will go to Kwarsi Kwarteng, whose parents come from Ghana, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Cleverly with a British father and Sierra Leone mother as Foreign Secretary, and Suella Braverman with Kenyan Indian and Mauritian parents, as Home Secretary. They have all held less senior cabinet posts in the past. In Johnson’s government the Chancellor and Home Secretary posts were taken by Indian-origin Sunak and Priti Patel.

Also probably included in Truss’s Cabinet will be Nadhim Zahawi, the current (temporary) Iraqi-origin Chancellor, who may go back to his old role as Heath Secretary. There might also be a job for Pakistan-origin Sajid Javed, one-time Chancellor and later Health Secretary, who triggered Boris Johnson’s exit as prime minister when he resigned in July, quickly followed by Sunak.

This reflects the growing social mix of British society. It far exceeds the 15% of the UK population who come from a minority ethnic background, while in parliament there are currently 65 MPs from those backgrounds, just 10% of the total (an increase of 25% over the 2017 general election).

There will always be suggestions that Sunak lost because of his Indian origins, and there may be something in that because Conservative Party traditionalist members are almost certainly less likely to want a non-white person as prime minister than the general electorate.

The main reason however is that Truss’s unwavering true blue tax-cutting rhetoric, and developing right-wing image as an experienced politician, appealed in the tortuous month-long election campaign to more grass roots party members.

Sunak appeared as a super-efficient well-groomed policy manager. He knew exactly how to run the country during an economic crisis and had an answer to every contingency, something Truss carefully avoided. He shunned quick popular tax cuts.

It all seemed rather unreal because, while Britain faced news of escalating crises with rocketing energy prices and inflation, plus a drought and the prospect of water shortages, the two contestants fought over their primary differences – Truss’s tax cuts that in reality will worsen inflation and scarcely help the poorest and most destitute, while Sunak condemned that as lunacy and proposed interventionist policies that Truss will now be forced to adopt.

Johnson’s jaunts

Meanwhile the government became sterile and Johnson enjoyed his final weeks in power. In addition to visiting Ukraine, where he is a popular hero, his jaunts included flying in a jet fighter, joining a dawn police raid, and announcing distant nuclear power plans. He even suggested people should buy a new £20 efficient kitchen kettle to save £10 a year on their electricity bills. That was his solution for families facing rocketing energy bills that have just risen from an average of around £2,000 a year to over £3,400 and are then forecast to nearly double to more than £6,000 in six months’ time.

Sunak’s defeat compares with the voting among Conservative MPs in July where he led Truss with 137 votes to her 113. Those figures probably reflected Truss’s lack of popularity among MPs, many of whom will have welcomed Sunak’s role in triggering the 50 or so Cabinet resignations that led to Boris Johnson’s downfall.

The grass roots party members knew him less well and only gradually realised his potential. Nearly half of them wish Johnson was still prime minister according to opinion polls, so will have resented Sunak’s role. At the start of the campaign, his position was undermined by heavy criticism from Truss’s supporters for being ‘disloyal’ to Johnson – he replied that policy and other differences became too great for him to remain in the cabinet.

Then there was the issue of his immense family wealth totalling some £730m, mainly stemming from his wife Akshata, daughter of Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s three leading IT companies. Akshata, who was little known before the campaign started had retained non-domicile status and used it to escape some £20m UK tax. During the campaign however she emerged as a visible and enthusiastic supporter.

Sunak also had a much weaker political and policy team around him than Truss, who managed to garner traditional Conservative support, though that seemed less evident in the more prosperous south of the country than in the north. She quite quickly gained personal confidence, keeping the debate focussed on her popular tax cuts and rejecting interventionist policies that she is now likely to announce.

Truss’s family story

She traded heavily on her apparently poor northern childhood roots in order to distinguish herself both from Sunak’s childhood in Hampshire, a well off country in the south, and from his immense wealth. In fact, they both come from professional middle class families and Truss was born not in the north but in Oxford. Her father was a mathematics professor at Leeds university and her mother was a nurse and teacher, while Sunak’s East African Indian father was a doctor and mother a pharmacist.

Truss , age 47, now faces a series of crises that need immediate attention. They will test her reputation for abrasiveness and whether she is uncharacteristically willing to consult and be flexible.

Reports suggest that no-one who knew her when she was young expected her to get this far, though there is a general view that she is always determined to win and succeed. A quick YouGov opinion poll today however showed only 14% of people thought she would make a better leader than Johnson.

On the economy, there is double-digit inflation and a cost of living crisis with public finances heavily stretched, rising debt and a prospect of a long recession. That worsened this morning with gas prices rising sharply after Russia banned supplies to Europe. Early action to freeze energy prides is espected.

Foreign policy issues include Ukraine where Johnson – backed by Truss as foreign secretary – led the toughest response to the Russian invasion, and the West’s simmering confrontation with China. Unresolved problems stemming from Brexit are led by a confrontation with the European Union over trade barriers that threatens stability in Northern Ireland, and there is the question of Scotland’s independence that would cripple the United Kingdom. On all of these issues, Truss has till now struck confrontational stances that would not ease solutions.

The National Health Service is in a crisis. Hospitals are barely able to cope with a post-Covid demand, but the subject that scarcely figured in the leadership election debates is serious labour unrest that looks like leading to the worst rash of trade union strikes since the 1970s. The railways are being hit with a series of crippling one-day stoppages that have also hit bus services and the country’s largest port. Other groups threatening action include teachers, lawyers, ambulance drivers, refuse collectors, and telecommunication and airport workers.

Trade union strikes

Both Truss and Sunak have aired confrontational policies to restrict public service workers’ freedom to strike. If Truss stays on that track, without introducing attempts at labour conciliation that have been absent under Johnson, she could face an early showdown with the unions this winter. Co-ordinated action is due to be debated at the annual Trades Union Congress next week.

Meanwhile, Johnson still harbours hopes of returning as prime minister. There are even reports that MPs who support him are thinking of triggering a new leadership crisis before the end of the year.

“I will deliver a bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy, and to tackle energy crises,” Truss told party members after her election was announced today. The policies will begin to emerge tomorrow when she enters Downing Street and begins to appoint Cabinet ministers. That will happen after she has visited the Queen at Balmoral in Scotland where she will be invited to form a new government.

Sunak of course must be regretting today that it is Truss who will receive that invitation but, given the scale of the immediate crises, he can console himself with the thought that the prime minister’s post might be up for grabs again in two year’s time.

This is a slightly extended version of an article commissioned by TheWire.in https://thewire.in/world/liz-truss-rishi-sunak-new-prime-minister-uk-analysis

Mistry “ably led Tata group” – Harsh Goenka

Victim of Ratan Tata boardroom coup in 2016

Cyrus Mistry, who was tragically killed in a car crash yesterday ,aged 54, will always be remembered as the competent and effective chairman of Tata Sons, India’s leading corporate group, who was ousted after four years in a 2016 boardroom coup because he had failed to please his predecessor, Ratan Tata. He fought his case through India’s courts and appeals procedures but failed to win significant victories, notably in the supreme court in 2021.

Many in Mumbai, India’s corporate capital, sympathised with him at the time, but the establishment gathered around Ratan Tata who had never been challenged in such a way before and is reputed never to forgive those who he feels have opposed him.

Mistry may have been ousted from the head of India’s most admired group, one of India’s top corporate jobs, and lost his subsequent legal battles, but tributes yesterday commented onhis role as a leading businessman.

Two respected Mumbai chairmen pointedly lauded him for his role as head of Tata Sons. Harsh Goenka of the RPG group said he was “a friend, a gentleman, a man of substance” who “ably led the Tata group”. Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra group said he “got to know Cyrus well during his all-too-brief tenure as the head of the House of Tata,” and he “was convinced he was destined for greatness”. Messages also came from leading industrialists Anil Agarwal and Gautam Adani.

Other tributes came from the government minsters, including prime minister Narendra Modi who said he was “a promising business leader who believed in India’s economic prowess”. His death was “a big loss to the world of commerce and industry”.

Ratan Tata failed to issue any message of condolence, but N.Chandrasekaran, who he chose from inside the group to become chairman in 2017, said Mistry “had a passion for life and it is really tragic that he passed away at such a young age”. [Sept 6: While Tata remained silent, his stepmother Simone Tata attended the funeral along with business leaders.

Search for chairman

Mistry’s family is the only significant minority shareholder in Tata Sons, the group’s holding company, with an 18.4% stake dating back to the 1930s. The family played a low key role for many years, which ended when Ratan Tata failed to find someone to succeed him as chairman of Tata Sons and eventually lighted on Mistry, a non-executive board member, much to the surprise of India’s corporate world.

Mistry became the deputy chairman in 2011 and took over the top job in December 2012. He was reported to be a reluctant appointee, but was persuaded by Tata who said he had been impressed by the “quality and calibre” of Mistry’s work on the board, praising his “astute observations and humility”. Mistry was then managing director of the construction part of his family’s Shapoorji Pallonji group, named after his grandfather who founded the business 150 years ago.

Tata said later that he thought that any guidance he might have given Mistry would have been to “be your own man – you should take your own calls and you should decide what you want to”.

That is exactly what Mistry did, surrounding himself with a group executive council that included outsiders, one or two of who were too brash and lacking in humility for the courtly aura of Bombay House, the group’s headquarters. Neither Mistry nor the advisers showed due deference to Ratan Tata, who remained in a position of authority as chairman of Tata trusts that own 66% of the group. (Tata had previously headed both Tata Sons and the trusts, a controversial dual role that, coincidentally, was ended by the group a few days ago).

Tata left substantial problems for Mistry to tackle.

They included a debt-ridden £11bn Tata Steel investment in the UK’s loss-making Corus, poor performance and a dismal new product line at Tata Motors’ India business where he had focussed much of his time, unsatisfactory results at the group’s Taj hotels, plus other problem areas including telecoms.

Mistry was making good progress sorting out these problems, though his decisions were not always to his predecessor’s liking, notably over the group’s badly conceived Nano mini car and what to do with the Corus stake.

Tata decided to oust Mistry and built up a majority on the Tata Sons board to execute the coup, even though Mistry’s performance had only recently received positive reports from Tata operating companies that he headed. Nevertheless, complaints about him criticised his performance and his alleged negative impact on the group’s reputation.

Serious damage

Arguably however, his ousting seriously damaged the group’s reputation “The halo that once surrounded the Tata name has gone. The group looks like just one more conglomerate that has lost its way,” said Swaminathan S.A. Aiyar, a respected veteran commentator, in The Economic Times. “Most group companies have long been under-performers. And the manner of Mistry’s ouster falls short of the high standards the group boasts of”.

The group’s operating companies still face serious problems, but the Tata reputation has been restored under Chandrasekaran, who previously headed the highly successful Tata Consultancy Services business. Chandrasekaran knows, as a group insider, how to handle the patriarch and keep him involved.

As I discovered when I had a long conversation with Mistry, he was an approachable engaging businessman who had constructive and imaginative proposals about how to develop the Tata group.

He had great respect for the Tata name and it is sad that his forced departure in 2016, and now his untimely death, mean that he had little chance to establish an enduring legacy that would prove what he could achieve.