Sunak's Britain
A British Asian Prime Minister is a huge mark of progress - and may also help Britons get to know their country better
PROGRESS comes when it doesn’t speak its name. Yesterday, Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first Prime Minister of Asian descent, addressed the country for the first time, and didn’t mention the fact. Quietly, and without fuss, another glass ceiling was smashed.
It’s something I felt personally. My Malaysian born wife is from an Indian and Sri Lankan heritage. We have three mixed race children. Yesterday’s events outside Downing Street therefore gave me immense hope.
I hope it gave living proof to my sons and my daughter that somebody of a non-white skin tone can make it to the very top of the ladder in Britain.
And I hope as they watch Mr Sunak’s period in office – and let’s hope it’s more than 45 days – that it also teaches them something about the nature and the complexity of the country they live in. The new Prime Minister may not have chosen to dwell on his own heritage and story but I believe it will in time give us a deeper and a richer understanding of Britain than the one that our politics has served up in recent years.
Mr Sunak may have opted not to mention his background when he spoke to the nation yesterday but it is one that many British immigrants will be familiar with. In short, it’s complex.
He is described as a British Indian - his grandparents were born in the Punjab region on what was then British India. Or perhaps he’s actually a British Pakistani - Mr Sunak was being claimed as one of their own this week because, post-partition, the region where his grandparents grew up is now part of that state. Then again, Mr Sunak might also be seen as a British African: his grandparents left British India and moved, respectively, to Kenya and colonial era Tanzania (his maternal grandmother grew up speaking Swahili). But Mr Sunak could also be seen as a just a plain common or garden Brit: he was born here, and he has known nothing else. Mr Sunak is also, therefore, the smart British son of ambitious hard-working parents who got him a good education and saw him ascend the ladder of success.
The point is this: Mr Sunak’s story is all these things. In it, Britain played the role of both colonial disruptor and a new start. During it, his family went from outsiders, to citizens, and now to the Prime Minister’s desk itself. This winding story doesn’t fit easily with people of a simple disposition. For some, and there will be many in the UK, Mr Sunak’s immigrant background means he still doesn’t quality as a fully British. As one caller who contacted a phone-in at the weekend argued: “Rishi isn’t even British.” He appears not to have noticed Mr Sunak was born in Southampton.
Meanwhile, on the hard left and in nationalist Scotland, there is the sound of crunching mental gears as they try to work out how somebody of brown skin and from an immigrant background could ever be a hated Tory. “Just because you share the same characteristics as someone, does not mean that you’ll be supportive of that community,” tweeted SNP MP Anum Qaiser, who evidently struggles to understand how somebody who shares her skin pigmentation might not share her politics. She soon deleted the tweet.
That Mr Sunak’s elevation to the most senior job in government has exposed these simple idiocies is greatly encouraging. It is long overdue. Over the last decade, the explosion of social media has led to a paradoxical narrowing and shallowing in our public debate, as people end up speaking solely to people like them. We refer now to a series of “communities” which have evolved - be they black, conservative, Asian, British, Scottish, or Trans. Self-selecting leaders of these communities then build walls and define what is and isn’t right. Those on the inside are right. Those on the outside aren’t. It is simplistic, divisive, and destructive.
Mr Sunak’s convention-breaking story – of an Asian Conservative, a Brexit-supporting Hindu - takes a baseball bat to these walls. It will have many benefits.
Firstly, it this will improve politics. While Labour and the SNP may choose to go after Mr Sunak for his wealth, it will be harder to paint the dreary caricature of an old Etonian Tory when confronted by somebody like the new Prime Minister. Instead they may have to focus on policy for once, rather than undermining their opponents’ motives.
And Mr Sunak’s elevation to the post of Prime Minister will act as a reminder about the true nature of our culture and our national story.
It will provide a reminder of the enduring influence of the British Empire. As the writer Sathnam Sanghera has pointed out in his superb book “EmpireLand”, that legacy helps to explain so much about our history and culture and yet is something we have largely forgotten about. Even if he himself chooses not to dwell on it, Mr Sunak’s rise to Number Ten may help us see it is a little more clearly.
And following that, Mr Sunak’s time in office may also show us something important about Britishness. The United Kingdom is not a uniform nation. It is not defined by a set of centrally agreed values, cast down upon us by a written constitution – there is no top-down equality, fraternity, liberty here. Rather Britishness is best defined by its roominess. As the Royal Family showed so brilliantly following the Queen’s death in September, it is a multinational and multicultural experiment; a collection of experiences and histories from within its borders and without, bound together by a shared set of common institutions. The Conservative Prime Minister with an Asian heritage who now sits at the heart of those institutions is a living reminder of the capaciousness of Britain.
Mr Sunak will be judged on his policies and he has shown this week he does not intend to make his ancestry into an issue. It will regardless – and that will be positive. For, so long as he lasts a few more months than his predecessor, it may be that this legacy as Prime Minister will be reconnect Britain with a piece of itself, and to remind Britain that it is a nation of parts.
I hope he’ll show my children they can go as far as they like. I hope to he’ll make Britain a country more at ease with itself, its past, and its future.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 26th October 2022