Gandhi: Cordial

Blackburn (England), April 1 (Reuters): When British foreign secretary Jack Straw welcomed Condoleezza Rice to his home town of Blackburn this weekend, he told her she was in “the centre of the world”.

As the US secretary of state winds up her trip to northern England, she might reflect that if Blackburn prides itself on being at its centre, the world must be a strange place.

What did she make, for example, of the man who came to greet her wearing a Union Jack necktie and carrying a Stars and Stripes flag and a placard which read: “US and Great Britain, God’s battle-axe”?

Or Straw's explanation of the lyrics to The Beatles’ song in which John Lennon sings about the “4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”?

It was an explanation ? touching on how Lennon had been inspired by a newspaper headline about potholes in local roads ? which appeared to leave Rice none the wiser even though she is on record as a big Beatles fan.

“The northwest is very different from what I could have imagined,” Rice said today. Washington’s top diplomat said she came to Straw’s constituency, and to The Beatles’ home city of Liverpool, to get away from London’s corridors of power and to meet ordinary British people.

It was the biggest visit to Blackburn by a foreign dignitary since 1931, when Mahatma Gandhi came to this former cotton town to protest against the protectionist policies of Lancashire’s textile exporters.

While the Indian independence leader was given a cordial welcome, Rice, an architect of the Iraq war, was met by protests at every step.

Angry Muslims gathered outside a school she visited on Friday and 1,500 anti-war activists waited for her at a theatre in Liverpool where she attended a concert.

Dissent even followed Rice into the Liverpool concert hall where one artist dedicated her performance of Lennon’s Imagine to the protesters standing outside in the rain.