A booming democracy that leaves Europe in the shade
In 1997, when 5,000 people attended the Referendum Party conference, the speakers were under strict instructions from Sir James Goldsmith not to make any reference to Britain leaving the EU. When my 16-year-old son Nick, easily the youngest of them, came to the end of his pre-vetted speech, he added “which is why Britain should leave the EU”. He got a standing ovation, because this was just what the audience wanted to hear.
In 2006, Nick concluded that the West was in irretrievable economic, political and moral decline and that the future lay in India, where he has now lived for 10 years, running a successful business with his Indian wife, explaining India to thousands of Western university students.
Now he has posted on Facebook (as Nick Booker-Soni) a playful proposal to Remainers and Leavers alike that the best future for Britain would be for it to become a Union Territory of India, whose economy is now growing four times faster than any in the sadly stagnating EU. By the 2030s, it is projected by expert analysts, the Indian economy will be larger than that of the entire EU. By 2050, they say, it will be the largest in the world (with no EU country in the top 10).
Nick ticks off all our concerns, such as the future of the NHS, which already has almost as many Indian doctors (25,055) as those from other EU countries (30,082). As for cultural diversity and any problems with understanding other EU languages, he points out that India has 100 languages, but only two are official, one being English.
As for where to go on holiday, the Himalayas are twice as high and much more impressive than the Alps, and there are more palm-fringed beaches in the tropical south than
The future: India’s economy is growing four times faster than any in the EU
Europe could dream of. If we miss our EU bureaucracy, “nowhere else on the planet has perfected the shuffling of paper and the writing of rules better than New Delhi”. Nevertheless, unlike the EU, it is a working democracy and no more corrupt than Brussels. What’s not to like?