Some people on the left appear to be reluctant to say it, but it is undeniably a great thing that, in Rishi Sunak, Britain has its first brown prime minister. Frankly, I never expected to see such a thing in my lifetime.
After all, many immigrants of my parents’ generation can still recall a time when white gangs roamed the streets of British towns and cities with iron bars and knives, looking for West Indians, Africans or Asians to assault, a judge at Birmingham crown court complaining in 1973 that “roughing up of coloureds is almost a hobby in some parts of the Black Country”.
It was only recently that it was revealed that Buckingham Palace barred “coloured immigrants or foreigners” from serving in clerical roles in the royal household until at least the late 1960s. It was only 1975 when, in Liverpool, an employment agency admitted that a covert colour bar governed the job market (only one fifth of black people were successful in finding a job). In my home city, the Wolverhampton West End Working Men’s Club introduced a colour bar after two Indians had applied to join in 1961, a colour bar was still operating in some working men’s clubs, according to local historians, as late as 1984, and separate “black”, “Asian” and “white” pubs were a fact of my life during my adolescence.
Let’s face it, the only interaction that some Asian families had with white Brits in the 1970s and 1980s was when racist yobs put shit through their letterbox. And now the residents of the house with the most famous letterbox in Britain are brown. Like my family, they probably speak a mix of Indian languages and English at home. Like my family, they probably mark Christmas with a twist: their grandmother, perhaps, putting chillies into the stuffing. Admittedly, in the case of the Sunaks a private chef is probably doing the stuffing, but I hope you get what I mean.
It’s amazing. The difference it will make in terms of the aspirations of young brown British people is incalculable. The most successful Asian I knew as a kid was a branch manager at a local bank, and so for many years the only career I aspired to was his. Seeing someone like myself (albeit much shorter) in the highest possible office would have supercharged my aspirations. All sorts of brown kids in all sorts of places will dream higher as a result of Sunak’s appointment. Although to observe Sunak’s wealth is to spot a chink in the increasingly popular idea that his success heralds the end of racism in the country.
For not only did Sunak marry into wild riches (his wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of NR Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire businessman who founded Infosys), he also comes from a solid middle-class background (his parents were a pharmacist and a GP) and attended some of the most prestigious private schools in Britain (the preparatory Stroud School in Romsey, Hampshire, and Winchester College, where he was head boy).
Indeed, the last time I looked, British Hindus were one of the most successful ethnic groups in Britain, with nearly two thirds of Hindu men in managerial, professional and associate professional jobs. In contrast, only just above a third of Muslim men were at this level, and Muslim men experienced a pay gap of 17 per cent compared with white British men. Just because we have one British Hindu in charge, and just because some brown ethnic groups are doing well, it doesn’t mean that Britain has defeated racism. No more than Barack Obama’s election as president represented the defeat of racism in America.
All sorts of ethnic groups, from British Pakistanis to, yes, working-class white men, face serious racial and class disadvantage. To be honest, I’d argue that even Sunak has faced racism, with his leadership campaign being a clear illustration of how white privilege works. For while it has been evident for some time that he’s by far the most qualified candidate (Liz Truss’s disastrous tenure even demonstrating he was right about the economy), he has still had to prove himself repeatedly against utterly woeful white candidates. Meanwhile, the racism of too many Conservative Party members was betrayed by one of them, a military veteran named Jerry, calling the LBC host Sangita Myska the other day and telling her in a conversation that has since gone viral that Sunak “doesn’t love England” and “isn’t even British in most people’s opinion”.
Not that the Conservative Party or even Sunak himself would ever admit to the existence of such racism. For the first thing you have to do, as an ethnic minority in the modern Conservative Party, is sign up to its anti anti-racism ideology. The former party chairwoman Sayeeda Warsi recognised it the other week when she remarked to me in an interview that “it’s almost like ethnic minorities in the Tory party have had to be more right wing than the most extreme right wing to be accepted, and that in itself, I think, is a form of . . . internalised racism. It’s saying, ‘I don’t want to bring the full version of myself.’ I speak to lots of young ethnic minorities; they feel they have to strip out their authenticity to be the acceptable version of what’s considered to be a black/minority ethnic candidate. There’s something really sad about that. It’s a backward step.”
A smart friend of mine puts it another way: diversity, in Britain, has become about celebrating the increased number of non-white faces in white places as long as they leave those places unchanged. Which brings me to another thing that is tempering my excitement about Sunak’s appointment — he has signed up to his party’s culture war on race and empire. A culture war in which ministers, among other things, have attacked the National Trust for daring to explore colonial history, instructed the Metropolitan Police to protect a statue of Winston Churchill with a team of officers (even after a protest, which didn’t threaten it in the first place, was over) and published a controversial government race report that did its best to minimise the existence of racism in Britain.
● When Rishi met Akshata: birth of a power couple
● Indians bask in Rishi Sunak’s rise to power
At one stage it looked as though Sunak might rise above it all, remarking that he had “zero interest in fighting a so-called culture war”. But during his campaign for votes from party members he joined in, attacking “left-wing agitators” for trying to “take a bulldozer to our history, our traditions and our fundamental values”, and in a moment of inanity worthy of Oliver Dowden, even announcing that “vilifying the UK” should be an offence referred to Prevent, because it would amount to extremism. If this is true, Prevent is going to be very busy indeed. For in recent years there has been an explosion of interest in how the sometimes brutal history of British Empire has shaped racist attitudes around the world.
As I argue at length in my book Empireland, while this country has a proud tradition of anti-racism, our particular brand of racism can also largely be explained by the imperial project. Brown people, when they arrived in Britain, faced the same kind of racist violence they faced in empire. The fear of miscegenation that stalked imperial British communities at the height of empire and was later imported directly into postwar Britain, with a striking number of race “riots” being provoked by the sight of brown men interacting with white women. Some of the wild racial stereotypes of empire still persist today, with surveys finding, for instance, that lots of Britons believe certain ethnic groups are “born” to work harder than others.
To categorise the people who explore this essential history as enemies of the state, as Boris Johnson’s government did so consistently, and as Sunak has shown he is willing to do, is to set back the fight against racism. And while it’s a thrill to think that our prime minister, along with millions of Indians across the planet, would have been celebrating Diwali last night, and while lots of us will have lit lights to mark what his elevation means for the aspirations of children, we might hold back on setting off fireworks for him for now.
