[Like many articles on here this may pop up as more recent than it was originally posted - for posterity's sake this went up 25/10/22. Edited to change the title to something more generic because regardless of the original title being said in good spirit the same way I'd poke fun at Christmas, in this context it just gave me a mocking/racist vibe I couldn't put my finger on, so figured I might as well can it. I'm overall pretty confident that I don't put out inflammatory, bigoted etc. content, but this is as good a place as any to mention you ought to feel free to get in touch if anything I say is wrong or the vibes are off - doesn't matter that like 30 people see the blog, I don't want to ruin anybody's day by putting anything careless or harmful up.]
Rishi Sunak is going to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom by the time I’m in bed tonight. (Maybe not you, reader.) Let’s set aside the necessary disclaimers. The fact that he is going to the richest Prime Minister ever epitomises much of why I am not a fan of the UK Conservative Party. The levels of power and privilege that feel normal to many of their members, let alone MPs, make them a party at turns disgusting, frightening, and cartoonish.
Disgusting with how abuses of power and apathy about rules do everything from elevating sex offenders to delivering a slap in the face to ordinary people who obey COVID rules. Frightening in the way they fixate on their money counting to the detriment of British children who cannot go to school with food in their lunchboxes. Cartoonish by dressing themselves up in the language of values and traditions while every week brings the new most bizarre scandal you’ve ever heard.
I don’t want them in power. I hold little faith in the British Labour Party after the past…honestly, where to even start? Since Jim Callaghan? But I still hope and believe that Labour will finally oust the Conservatives at the next election. They are wrong for Britain, they do real damage, and with no clear plans outlined, it is unclear what good Sunak, the most competent of a bad bunch, can do. Beyond, of course, not being Liz Truss, being who he is. Being who he is still matters.
Symbolism has consequences in and of itself. The “Obama effect” people can have when they break the glass ceiling and reach new heights is statistically documented to have positive effects throughout their community, as others from the same group decide to throw their hat in the ring and give making a change a try too, now they see that it is not impossible. Even if Sunak himself lies within the Tory mainstream, all of those other people bring different backgrounds, experience, and perspectives that you are never going to get from the same stale pale males.
If you look at the more populated leadership race after Johnson stepped down, you see several other people of colour, from Baghdad to Lagos. David Cameron is a man I have no fondness for, not least thanks to Brexit, but he did predict that a decade after he started diversification efforts in the party, an Indian-British man would be Prime Minister. Parties here could stand to take a lesson from that. The National Party did not work hard to recruit Tania Tapsell, the impressive new mayor of Rotorua, to run in Tauranga to replace Simon Bridges. They instead ended up with a bunch of identical men, settling on Sam Uffindell. That cannot possibly be a meritocratic process.
This is a huge day for the UK. Rishi Sunak will be the first Prime Minister of colour and the first Hindu person in the role. His wife is the daughter of one of India’s most renowned businessmen. Frivolously, he will also be the first teetotal PM in a century; less frivolously, he will be the youngest in two centuries, a breath of fresh air amidst the gentrification of politics everywhere from America to India.
On a semantical tangent, he is not the first Prime Minister from an ethnic minority; Benjamin Disraeli was of Jewish heritage. I’m prioritising getting this article out in a timely fashion over factchecking just yet, but he may well be the first Prime Minister of colour in any former European colonial empire, coming on the heels of a change in . I hope I haven’t got that wrong, because the achievements of other less famous milestone-makers should not be overlooked. For instance, celebrations of Kamala Harris as the first vice-president of colour ignored Charles Curtis, who proudly displayed his Kaw heritage alongside his Osage and Potawatomi descent. Harris is a huge milestone in her own right, and deserves recognition of her own Tamil Indian background as well as being Afro-Jamaican.
For Rishi Sunak to be my Prime Minister (especially rather than Cameron, Johnson or Truss) makes me proud to be a citizen. The moral of the story here is not to pat ourselves on the back and go all "we beat racism!" It is suspicious that the Chancellor of the Exchequer who guided the country through COVID did not beat Liz Truss, an incontrovertibly unqualified candidate, in the first place after Johnson stepped down; he is only getting in now that alternatives are being exhausted and the party is having to acknowledge his competency. Every previous Prime Minister has been white, and that cannot all be owed to chance or meritocracy. The moral here is that racism can be fought when people are aware and make choices to change the world around them. Even when those people are David Cameron.
In order to demonstrate the relevancy of racism to the United Kingdom today, allow me to step through how recent overt colonialism was still the policy and practice of the government. If you were conscious in 1997, you could flick on the TV and watch Hong Kong, the last formal British colony (though lands like Diego Garcia remain in dispute today), be returned to China. I am not arguing about whether China has been wonderful for Hong Kong since; the simple fact is that the British Empire formally existed then, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was not even halfway through his leadership when I was born into his country. If you were conscious in 1997, you could go to a bookstore and pick up The Philosopher’s Stone, and if you looked outside, you might just see Princess Diana for the last time.
Only a few years prior, in 1994, apartheid South Africa came to a formal end as Nelson Mandela’s ANC won the election. If you want to argue that cannot strictly be owed to British colonialism (blame the Afrikaners, eh), you could try Rhodesia, today’s Zimbabwe, where white British settlers were still holding onto power at the end of a gun in 1979. If you were alive in 1979, you would see Saddam Hussein already in power (where he would remain until in my lifetime), the new regime in Iran that is brutalising protestors today, and Teodoro Obiang in power in Equatorial Guinea, where he still leads today.
The Erebus disaster had already happened. You could watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian, or listen to Another Brick In The Wall or Iron Maiden’s titular album. Rishi himself was born after all of this, at a time where a British colony was still holding on power and dozens of others had only been independent for a generation. Sunder Katwala, of the identity think tank British Future, points out: “When Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980, there had been no Asian or black MPs at all in the postwar era. There were still no black or Asian Conservative MPs when he graduated from university in 2001.” Opportunities to make a change and shape the society he lived in did not yet exist for people like him.
This isn’t just about him; this is about his background and his community and the people that shaped him. His parents, Yashvir and Usha, were born in Tanganyika and Kenya, both still British colonies at the time, before working in the UK to support the health sector. He was raised by parents who lived under the rule of an empire. Their parents had migrated to the UK, and to East Africa before that, from the British Punjab. He was raised by parents who learnt everything they knew from parents who grew up in the “jewel of the empire”. He is now the Prime Minister of the core of that empire. The shadows of the empire are cast from not that long ago after all.
To document the effects of colonialism goes beyond the scope of this article, and I am not the most competent person to do it. What this article certainly ought to demonstrate is that decolonial activists are worth listening to and have a point. Societies like ours have not moved past the point at which they or their experiences are relevant, particularly when their families often directly experienced colonialism. Learning history from that era continues to be worthwhile with present-day ramifications.
Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister, for better and for worse. He deserves to be engaged on why the Tories are wrong on the issues, why they are wrong for this time, and on how his immense wealth and other facets of his privileged upbringing make him out of touch with vulnerable British people in need of assistance. He should absolutely not be attacked not on his identity he cannot choose, that he has every right to be proud of, and that Western liberal democracies like ours should be predicated on protecting. As mentioned earlier, one concern is how many people in his party hold racist attitudes towards him; hopefully he can silence the doubters on that front, even if criticisms of his governing grow. His political opponents should be willing to put their differences aside now and during his premiership to smother any racist voices against him, as, for instance, John McCain did while fighting Barack Obama.
Racist sledging from the left is too common to see and it should be avoided, even though I fear it will not. I am not the person to step into intra-community disputes, but I am sick to death of seeing white people calling people of colour who disagree ideologically with the majority of their community traitors and worse things. More broadly, the subtle insinuations that people of colour are a monolith arrayed on one side of the aisle and do not need to be individually heard needs to stop.
The Labour Party need to seriously take on their host of issues they overlook from anti-black racism to anti-Semitism. Just because we talk a lot about issues of racial justice and claim to be more effective than right-wing parties at addressing them does not mean that the left is entitled to the votes of people of colour. Labour and other parties, there and here, must continue to hear the priority issues of minority communities and fight for those.
That is all the warnings and suggestions I can muster. The rest of me is filled with eagerness to see this next, new chapter in British history. For the first time in a while, I can have some feeling about the country that includes excitement! Something unprecedented has happened! Happiness! People will feel a whole range of ways about his ascent, but for a lot of other Indian people in Britain and across the world, this is an Obama moment that somebody like them can lead. Hope! Where he is going, he will hopefully not be the last for a long time, and at all the levels lower than him, in Britain and elsewhere, change is coming. How recent colonial rule was - but how quickly things can change! The height of Diwali is done in New Zealand and India, but the festival continues for a couple more days. Here and for where the third day goes on, in West and Central Africa, Europe (and the UK 🙂), the Americas, where Hindu people and people who choose to celebrate live and deserve to belong, a very happy Diwali across the world!
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