A massive fire raged underground in London's West End on Thursday evening as seven political leaders exchanged fireworks in the only debate of the campaign that will end with Britain's parliamentary election on May 7. I could not help but contrast the smooth efficiency with which the MC, Julie Etchingham, conducted it with Indian TV's rumbustious panel discussions under self-important anchors.
There can't be a British election without the spectre of immigration rising from the rhetoric. With Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) among the panellists, this debate was no exception. But the immigrants now are white Europeans and not Afro-Asians. Standing conventional sentiment on its head, there are some - David Cameron, the prime minister for instance - who argue that immigrants mean growth and progress.
Some even argue that London is dynamic because 300 languages are spoken in its streets and 20 taught in primary schools. Nearly 3.2 million of the capital's 8.6 million people were born in other European Union countries. That's 200,000 more than in 2011. There is another category to which an Englishman with a Malaysian Chinese wife drew my attention: his sons, he said, were not English despite being born and bred in England. They were Londoners.
Adversity teaches Polish plumbers and Lithuanian cleaners to make the best of a bad job, like Indian doctors, Caribbean bus crews and Pakistani taxi drivers in the past. While London is booming with the spirit of free enterprise, north-eastern England, the once industrialised Tyne-Tees belt, is languishing. It claims only 155,000 migrants.
The rationale is obvious. Many European immigrants from former communist countries where earnings are a fraction of the British level are prepared to work long hours for far less than Britons consider living wages. Nor do they insist on the frills (coffee break, lunchtime, subsidised meals, overtime) that the unions made mandatory here. Since everyone benefits from cheap and easily available skilled labour, Farage's gut appeal to instinctive xenophobia wasn't resoundingly successful. There can't be many takers for the new UKIP poster flaunting the slogan "The only party you can trust to reduce immigration" under a picture of three escalators climbing the White Cliffs that Farage released in Dover this week. Above the escalators is the legend "Immigration is three times higher than the Tories promise".
Such claims try to exploit complaints of depressed wages, urban overcrowding, a shortage of affordable housing ("A new house is needed every seven minutes!") and pressure on the health and educational services. But even justified propaganda reckons without the traditional natural generosity that has down the ages made the British Isles a refuge for the homeless and a home of lost causes. The 200-strong studio audience burst into spontaneous applause when Natalie Bennett, representing the Green Party, accused Farage of using "dangerous and divisive" arguments. Disapproval was also palpable when the UKIP leader complained that "health tourism" cost the exchequer £2 billion annually and that most HIV patients in Britain were foreigners. Someone else rebutted Farage's demand for an end to foreign aid by stating bluntly that British prosperity could not be based on impoverishing distant parts of the world.
True, these contentions were not central to Thursday's debate. The economy was. Cameron and Labour's Ed Miliband, the prime minister in waiting, held centre stage with Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats trying to distance himself from the Tories and claim a valid separate identity. If debates have any impact, what Cameron, Miliband and perhaps Clegg had to say might influence some voters. Clegg was certainly alone in frankly admitting that no party can expect a clear victory on May 7. Britain is getting ready for another coalition with UKIP, the Greens, the Scottish National Party (Nicola Sturgeon) and the Welsh party, Plaid Cymru (Leanne Wood), holding the balance.
Can such a panel be replicated in India? Perhaps there may have been some chance before the last election of persuading Prakash Karat, Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee, Jayalalithaa and either the reticent Sonia Gandhi or her even more elusive son to thrash out the state of the nation. But language is a permanent problem. Personality presents an even greater challenge. Not many prime ministers would explain themselves to students and pensioners as patiently as Cameron did on Thursday. Our democrats are too aristocratic for that, and our aristocrats (if there be any!) are not democratic enough.
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