Vinoth Ramachandra

I was dismayed and angered by the life-imprisonment earlier this month of the Hong Kong democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai. Perhaps more dismaying was the British government’s silence on the matter. The Chinese government has also accelerated its crackdown on “underground” Church leaders in China, a news item under-reported by most Western media since it doesn’t count as antisemitism, homophobia or Islamophobia.

At the same time the British prime minister Kier Starmer is planning to visit China soon. While concerns about Chinese spying will, no doubt, be raised, the fate of Hong Kong and that of religious and ethnic minorities will not. So much for internationalism.

At the Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting held in Colombo in November 2013,  Britain’s prime minister David Cameron- much to the delight of many of us- lambasted the Sri Lankan regime for its continuing abuses of power and violation of human rights. Two weeks later, Cameron was again flying, this time to Beijing to kowtow before the Chinese Community Party leadership offering them a “dialogue of respect”, and wooing their rich elites with visa exemptions to invest in Britain. China’s human rights record was, and is, far worse than that of Sri Lanka.

In the face of betrayal by the Trump regime, China seems to be emerging as European governments’ best friend, along with the repressive petro-monarchies in the Gulf and India’s BJP. The idolatry of economic growth has always trumped human rights concerns. International law has been shredded by the US and Israel for decades. The work of all those who risk their lives for the restoration of the rule of law and public accountability in the no-Western world is severely undermined by the hypocrisy and double standards practiced by those governments that pay lip-service to human rights.

What do the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have in common, apart from being ex-British colonies? They are all immigrant societies. The tens of thousands of Britons who still migrate to these countries every year to better their prospects are never called “economic migrants”, That pejorative term is reserved for coloured people from other former colonies. So much for colour-blindness and liberal “British values”.

These examples of moral hypocrisy in politics are not, of course, confined to the West. In Sri Lanka, where I live, the government claims to be socialist yet, like those who came before, panders to the rich business elites. It votes in support of Palestine at the UN General Assembly, but signs an agreement with Israel to replace Palestinian workers in Israel with Sri Lankans. This is to support the Israeli regime’s policy of apartheid.

Furthermore, Israeli military reservists vacation in Sri Lanka and have caused problems for local, mostly Muslim communities on the east coast, by engaging in commerce (sometimes of a dubious nature). When local conflict erupts, the Israeli government calls it “antisemitism” and Western embassies who follow the Israeli narrative caution their nationals about visiting Sri Lanka. That affects our economy. Is the government waiting for another jihadist attack like the Easter bombing of 2019 before it acts?

Previously on this Blog I have expressed my puzzlement over the term “antisemitism”. Semitic is a linguistic term which according to the Oxford dictionary denotes a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian. By extension, it relates to peoples who speak Semitic languages, especially Hebrew and Arabic. But it is used in the English-speaking world exclusively as an equivalent to “Jewish”, and “anti-Semitic” is never used to describe hostility towards Arabs. And when “antisemitic” is further conflated with “anti-Israel” it insults the many Jews, both within and outside Israel, who are fierce critics of the Israeli apartheid state and thus sows further confusion.

How many Jews in Israel have a semitic background? Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth was perhaps the most articulate and winsome spokesperson for Judaism in today’s world. “Judaism is not an ethnicity and Jews are not an ethnic group,” wrote Sacks, “Go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and you will see Jews of every colour and culture under the sun, the Beta Israel from Ethiopia, the Bene Israel from India, Bukharan Jews from central Asia, Iraqi, Berber, Egyptian, Kurdish and Libyan Jews, the Temamim from Yemen, alongside American Jews from Russia, South African Jews from Lithuania, and British Jews from German-speaking Poland. Their food, music, dress, customs, and conventions are all different.”  (Future Tense, 2009)

Will 2026 bring us more balanced news reporting and a new breed of moral leaders?

Here is a stirring challenge by this year’s Reith lecturer to all young people:

Our planet is heating up. As temperatures of land and oceans increase, normal weather events increase in frequency, unpredictability and intensity.

A few days ago, for the first time in recorded history, three cyclonic storms converged simultaneously in the Indian ocean to leave a trail of devastation from Indonesia to Sri Lanka. Rivers and reservoirs overflowed their banks, trees were uprooted, houses demolished, hundreds of people perished, and thousands more left homeless and impoverished. Ten percent of Sri Lanka’s annual rainfall fell in just twenty four hours. The search for the missing and the dead continues.

The year 2025 began with the deadly Los Angeles wildfires. This was followed by record-breaking fires ravaging parts of the Amazon and Congo. Indeed, during this year alone a land area the size of the Indian subcontinent has been burned in wildfires.

Is this devastation attributable to climate change?

A new report, a collaboration between scientists across continents using satellite imagery and advanced modelling, shows that human-induced climate change did exacerbate the world’s wildfires. More than 100 million people were affected by these fires, and US$215 billion worth of homes and infrastructure were at risk.

The report analysed the Los Angeles fires and concluded that they were twice as likely and burned an area 25 times bigger than they would have in a world without global warming. Unusually wet weather in Los Angeles in the preceding 30 months contributed to strong vegetation growth and laid the foundations for wildfires during an unusually hot and dry January.

Not only are fires on this scale caused or worsened by greenhouse emissions, but they then contribute huge amounts of the same to the atmosphere. Fires emitted more than 8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2024–25, about 10% above the average since 2003. Emissions were more than triple the global average in South American dry forests and wetlands, and double the average in Canadian forests. The excess emissions alone exceeded the national fossil fuel CO₂ emissions of more than 200 individual countries in 2024.

The wars in Ukraine, Gaza and central Africa also pour tonnes of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere.

The greatest tragedy is that nearly three decades after the first UN climate conference (in Rio) global emissions are still rising.  It’s clear that if this continues, more severe heatwaves and droughts will make landscape fires more frequent and intense for half the world and incessant rainfall and floods for the other half.

Only last month COP30 in Brazil saw rich governments and the oil lobby wrangling with climate scientists and indigenous peoples over a proposed global agreement to roll back dependence on fossil fuels.

The richest 1% of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity. And precious little of the aid promised at every COP summit by rich governments to help vulnerable nations mitigate the effects of global warming has materialised. It is a moral scandal that is not raised in the EU, let alone the US.

According to one estimate, the cost of flying and accommodating 100,000 delegates at Cop28 in Dubai was probably higher than the total amount promised at that same COP to compensate poorer countries for climate-related losses.

The planet is awash with wealth, private and corporate, at the same time as it is burning. The levels are mind-blowing. Tesla shareholders recently gifted their loathsome boss a staggering $500 billion. For what?

It is moral fibre and political will that are in short supply. The celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has long called for a one-time global tax on the wealth (not just income) of billionaires. He estimates that in his country of France, the combined wealth of the largest 500 fortunes has grown by 1 trillion euros since 2010, so all it would take is a one-time tax of 10% on this trillion euro increase to bring in 100 billion euros-equal to all the budget cuts the French government is planning for the next three years.

It would be more than sufficient to help build climate resilience in the most vulnerable countries of the world.

At the same time, the governments of poorer countries must also shoulder responsibility for the relatively heavy loss of life and infrastructure when natural disasters happen. Ensuring that safety codes are followed in building construction, effective forest management and urban drainage, re-settling poor communities in areas not prone to landslides or flooding, and investing in better weather-forecasting systems and emergency relief teams should be higher on their list of priorities than pouring meagre tax revenue into military equipment and propping up unproductive national industries.