Last week, I was returning in my labour law lecture to the point that labour law legislation has been strongly determined by the ‘colour’ of the government, statutes in colour in my lecture slides, when a non British student asked me to remind them who was red and who was blue. I explained, with a detour into the exception provided by the States, but the question stayed with me enough to look for and find an excellent wikipedia page on political colours. I learnt that calling a politics brown means it is neglectful of the environment and also that the political colour of the Whigs was buff- that lasted. Interesting also to read the attempted mixing of the facing red and blue. Orange and green, opposites in Ireland and in India, have had no such attempt yet. And also the examples of colour emerging not from an expensive branding exercise, but from history and its associations. Or consciously reflecting the associations of different colours, as with the Rainbow Pride Flag created in 1978 to replace the Pink Triangle.
Finally I was reminded of this song by the Sufi poet Bulle Shah of Kasoor: The colourful one made the colours of the world. Our brains need to remember history but to think past single colours.
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