Wealthy immigrants have a special responsibility
Offered West Bengal’s finance ministership, Tulsi Charan Goswami, the brilliant but mercurial Serampore
zamindar, laughed that if he managed public money as he did his own, the state would soon be bankrupt. Such levity proclaims generations of idle riches. It is not expected from Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has become the richest member of the House of Commons, and whose wife is reportedly richer than Queen Elizabeth. But such wealthy migrants have a special responsibility in this age of migration.
That is not reflected in Sunak’s decision to lop about £4 billion off Britain’s £13.4 billion aid budget. A London commentator attributes the cut to political ambition. He says Sunak is wooing Conservative backbenchers who are notoriously impatient with overseas (read Afro-Asian) aid, and regard anything spent on alleviating poverty in these benighted lands as money down the drain. No doubt Sunak hopes they will overlook his dark skin and foreign origins and, remembering only that he went to the exclusive Winchester College and is immensely rich, both of which count rather more than his Oxford degree, rally round him one day to fight Boris Johnson for the party leadership. Sajid Javid was Britain’s first Asian Chancellor. Sadiq Khan is London’s first Asian mayor. If the calculation proves correct, the ethnic Punjabi Chancellor whom newspapers call “Dishy Rishi” and “Maharaja of the Dales” may be Britain’s first Asian prime minister.