24 Wednesday February 16 2022 | the timesComment
Ashford, to “Which small Australian
marsupial is notorious for its bad
temper?” I answered “koalas” but the
computer said “Tasmanian devils”. I
spent hours on Sunday researching
the temperament of koalas and
sending I-told-you-so emails to
fellow contestants.Too much hot air
T
wice a week, as my train passes
the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power
station, I note how many of its
eight giant cooling towers are
belching. My interest arises because
all coal-fired electricity generation
will be phased out by next year,
ministers say. I say that’s
baloney. Last week, all eight
were in action. Ministers haven’t
long. So what’s the now-urgent
plan? Am I nitpicking?
Probably. But I’m sick of
the government talking
rubbish.Fame at last
O
n the Westminster
pavement last
Wednesday
I encountered one of
those raggle-taggle
demos of people angry
about something or
other. Vaccination? HS2?
Pro/anti the green
agenda? Heaven knows,
but there was muchshouting and waving of cryptic
banners. I had to walk through
them, met no resistance, but
noticed one dishevelled chap who
looked just like Piers Corbyn.
Walking on I turned to hear him
shout: “That gentleman who’s just
passed used to be a member of
parliament years ago and... ” — the
rest was lost in crowd noise. I do
hope it was Piers. I felt strangely
flattered. As an ex-MP you take what
public recognition you can get.Feeling exposed
D
id you read in The Times
this week about that RAF
chap who’s been shopped
by neighbours for being naked
in the garden? Worrying. Our
outdoor bath is visible from the
field, and the llamas do
look over the gate when
I’m having a bubble
bath, though I think
they’re more interested
in the bubbles. Vera (the
llama) has always been
rather censorious. We
await the police siren.Genius at work
I
wouldn’t normally
belabour you with
accounts of art
exhibitions you’re unlikely
to see, but readers will be
familiar with the work ofA
snag of writing weekly
notebooks is that
anything new you’ve
discovered and
breathlessly shared with
readers may already be old hat to a
lot of them. “Gosh — tell me more!”
say half, while the other half groan,
“Tell me something I didn’t know”.
Ah well, here goes.
Aren’t village quizzes fun! We’ve
just been to two, one in Elton village
hall, the other in the village of
Ashford-in-the-Water. I’m useless at
quizzes but my partner Julian knows
everything, and I was there as his
gorgeous, pouting assistant. And I
got so caught up in it, so competitive!
In the Duke of York after the Elton
quiz we fell to arguing whether the
Emperor Charlemagne’s territory
included parts of today’s Austria. It
did, Julian had said so, but the
quiz computer said no. We won
anyway, but Julian is raging that we
should have won by more. Then inDenying expats the vote is so last century
Forget the ‘wealthy wastrel’ stereotype: those of us living abroad deserve the right to a ballot
anything else, Japan does not
permit dual nationals, so I’d have to
give up my British citizenship. And I
don’t want to be Japanese. I am
British, I want to remain British, but
I also want to continue living in
Japan and I want to vote.
If I was arrested the British
government would mobilise its
resources to secure my legal rights.
No one is suggesting that people
who have been away for 15 years
should be denied consular assistance.
Why then am I deprived of my most
fundamental political right?
Soon enough, all this may
change. The Elections Bill, which is
making its way through the House
of Lords, would abolish the 15-year
rule and re-enfranchise all British
people overseas, in fulfilment of a
Conservative manifesto promise.
Such attempts have been made
before, however, and fallen victim to
inter-party politicking and
compromise.
If it goes ahead it won’t make
much of a difference to everyone
else. About 2.3 million people will be
enfranchised; past form suggests
only a fraction will register to vote,
an average of a few hundred voters
in every constituency.
As expatriates we come in all
sizes and flavours. We are as wise
and foolish, and broad-minded and
as bigoted as the rest of you. Some
of us vote Tory and drink too much
gin, and some of us don’t. None of
us deserves to be left out.Richard Lloyd Parry is Asia Editor of
The TimesRoger Boyes is awayof nowhere. You don’t understand
what citizenship means.”
I take all this personally. I pay
income tax in Japan, rather than
Britain, because that is what the
law requires. Where else would I pay
it? I have lived abroad for all
this time not to “dodge” anything,
but because it is a condition of
doing a job that I love. I believe that,
in reporting on Asia for a
newspaper, I make a modest
contribution to British life and
so do many others like me in a
variety of occupations. I think of
friends who teach English in schools
and universities, equipping foreign
students for study in Britain, lawyers
at the Tokyo branches of British
law firms and companies, doctors,
bankers and business people.
Digital communications make it
possible for more and more people to
do their jobs anywhere in the world.
It is easier than ever to live abroad
and maintain the strongest
connections with family, friends and
current events at home.
Research by Susan Collard, a
political scientist at Sussex
University who studies expatriate
communities, shows their character
is dramatically different from those
stereotypes of rich, leathery, bibulous
expats.
“Since the 1980s, there’s been
massive movement into the EU —
young people, professional people,”
she says. “It’s not even the wealthy
anymore. A lot of the people I
interviewed were kitchen fitters,
lorry drivers, plumbers, builders.”
Taking on local nationality is a
possibility for some, although not a
practical one for me — apart fromI
live in Japan and have done for
27 years. My tea is green, my
fish is raw and I have one of
those lavatories that clean my
bottom with a cleansing jet of
water. But, all things considered, and
without wanting to sound aggressive
about it, I reckon that I am as British
as the best of you.
I live with my British partner and
my two British children and I earn
my living from a British daily
newspaper writing for you, my
substantially British readers. My
daughter goes to an international
school that follows the British
curriculum. Most of our summer
holidays, pandemic allowing, are
spent with her British grandparents,
aunts, uncles and cousins at the
British seaside.
The notion of being “proud” of my
nationality, an accident of birth for
which I can claim no credit, has
never made sense to me. I grew up in
Britain and was formed and
educated there. In my head and
heart, as well as in law, British is
what I am. In one significant way,
though, I am different from most of
you — for the past 12 years I have
been deprived of the right to vote.
Like millions of others I am the
victim of a law that disenfranchises
those of us who have lived outsideBritain for more than 15 years. David
Cameron, Brexit, the rise of Boris
Johnson — I have been excluded
from voting for or against any of
them. Personally, this is infuriating. It
also represents a failure to
understand the nature of national
identity and allegiance and the way
it has changed in the 21st century.
It is the Labour Party that has
historically sought to disenfranchise
people like me, beginning in the late
1970s, the era of wealthy Brits
decamping to the Costa Brava to
escape Denis Healey’s high-tax
regime. To Labour, those who left for
more than a few years were gin-
swilling, Tory-loving Bufton Tuftons
at best and, at worst, quasi-criminalopportunists. In a parliamentary
debate in 1989, Jeremy Corbyn
referred to them as “tax dodgers,
crooks, thieves and wastrels”.
Conservatives evidently agreed that
it was they who had the most to gain
from enfranchising expats. It was
they who first allowed overseas
voters in 1985. Before that only UK
residents had the right. The Votes for
Life campaign has been a
predominantly Tory cause, driven by
the Conservatives Abroad group.
But apart from craving their votes,
those on the right in Britain display
little respect for those who live
overseas. It was Theresa May who
said that “if you believe you are a
citizen of the world, you are a citizenI am the victim of law
that disenfranchises
long-term expatriates
the renowned 15th/16th-century
German painter and print-maker
Albrecht Dürer and, believe me, the
exhibition still running at the
National Gallery in London is
simply superb.
And I don’t even like Dürer. I
didn’t before I went and still don’t,
yet anyone can see he’s an absolute
genius. You look at a crowd of
ordinary people on his canvass, and
all at once one of them looks back at
you and you see a real person there.
Then another, and another, all
returning your glance. Dürer has
everything — realism, detail,
proportion, theatre, fierce accuracy
— everything, in fact, except grace.
He misses the delicacy, fragility,
tenderness, the swirl and wispiness
of things. He misses evanescence.
None of his people are really with
each other: each is in a world of their
own, solipsistic. He can draw a
flower that’s strikingly correct in
every small particular, lacking only
the essence of being a flower.
At Yale as a young man I tried
LSD, and my experience mirrored
what I see in Dürer’s work. I saw
the sharpness to every edge, the
grotesqueness of every tramp,
the harsh luminosity of the sky, and
(in my mirror) every line, every
crease in my own face. There was
nothing soft, nothing blurred. In
life, but not in Dürer, there is
blurring, and much softness.Matthew Parris Notebook
A historic
error by the
pub quiz
computer
Utopian Singapore
is a myth: it’s a
trasher of freedom
Jawad Iqbal
T
he city state of Singapore is
a Jekyll and Hyde place.
The good side is evident in
its emphasis on free trade,
low taxes, strong property
rights and clean streets, factors that
helped transform it from a colonial
backwater to one of the richest
places in the world. Fair enough. But
what about the ugly underbelly of
Singapore, an increasingly
authoritarian place that trashes the
rights and freedoms of its citizens?
Singapore has some of the world’s
harshest drug laws, and continues to
defy global norms by imposing the
death penalty for drug trafficking.
The latest case involves two men,
Roslan bin Bakar and Pausi bin
Jefridin, due to be executed this week
for trafficking small quantities of
diamorphine and methamphetamine.
Pausi has an IQ of 67, considered the
cusp of intellectual disability in most
developed countries (in other words,
he is deemed incapable even of
understanding the nature of his
alleged crimes) and is thereby
protected under international law.
The contravention of internationallegal principles stretches beyond
drugs offences. Laws are being
introduced to quash basic freedoms
and impose crude censorship. The
so-called fake news law that came
into effect in 2019 provides for severe
criminal penalties, including up to
ten years in prison. There is no
public interest clause, which means
journalists in particular are routinely
targeted. In October last year the
authorities passed a foreign
interference bill purportedly to
“prevent, detect and disrupt foreign
interference in... domestic politics”.
The wording is so vague that it is
hard for anyone to know whether
they might fall foul of it.
It is misguided to think of
Singapore simply as the low-tax
libertarian paradise hailed by its
founding prime minister, Lee Kuan
Yew. “Singapore-on-Thames” has
been touted as a deregulated model
for post-Brexit Britain — admirers
have included Michael Gove, Sajid
Javid, Jeremy Hunt and Dominic
Cummings. But it is time to take a
fresh look, warts and all.
Yes, Singapore has modernised
and developed at an incredible pace,
but its authoritarian instincts have
for too long been ignored. It must
become more like Britain in its
respect for basic freedoms and
human rights. A good first step
would be for Britain to demand that
Singapore impose a moratorium
on the death penalty for drugs
offences, followed by abolition.Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writerA drug smuggler
with an IQ of 67 is
in line for execution
@dicklpRichard
Lloyd Parry