Rishi Sunak’s arrival as PM is historic but Britain still has work to do on racism

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In 1969, the late Queen’s chief financial manager, Lord Tryon, told a Home Office civil servant that “it was not, in fact, the practice to appoint coloured immigrants or foreigners” to certain roles within the royal household. People from ethnic minority backgrounds were, however, allowed to work as domestic servants.

The note was sent two months before Queen Elizabeth II invested her son Charles as the Prince of Wales. The UK’s rapid social and political change in the half-century that followed is best described with the official pronouncement made on Tuesday: Charles, now king, received the Tory leader, Rishi Sunak, a British South Asian and practising Hindu, to form a government and become Britain’s 57th prime minister.

Sunak attended a palace that would not have hired his grandparents – who arrived in the UK in the 1960s – into any important positions. His is a rise to provoke strong reactions. As he arrived at Downing Street in his car following his audience with the king, there were boos and heckles from the crowd. Others had waved to him.

Outside Downing Street, 31-year-old Bobby Alum said: “I think this is a brilliant appointment. I think he will bring more things to the table. I think he will uplift the nation … it will give people of colour more hope.

“If people of colour can become prime ministers in this country, in a country when we thought there would never be a person of colour on the top, then maybe we have a chance as well.”

Alum’s 28-year-old friend, who didn’t want to give his name, added: “Put politics aside, visibly having some sort of representation, someone who looks like us, who may not be from the same class background … Perhaps his family went through the same struggle that we went through and knowing someone in that position can be in the highest level of office is something that is aspirational as a second-generation immigrant.”

But 23-year-old Tyrek Morris, who helped lead many of the largest Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, had a different take. While he saw the importance of Sunak being a person of colour, he said it was also “a step back because of who he is”.

Sunak’s ascent caps a dizzying number of firsts in Tory politics. When, in 2020, Sunak replaced Sajid Javid, a Conservative politician of Pakistani descent, as chancellor, it was the first time the great office of state had passed from one politician of an ethnic minority to another.

Javid was the first non-white chancellor and home secretary; the latter role was passed on in 2019 to Priti Patel, the first female home secretary of an ethnic-minority background, and then held by another, Suella Braverman. During Braverman’s tenure under Liz Truss, there were no white male politicians in one of the four great offices of state. Kwasi Kwarteng was the first black chancellor – albeit briefly.

The significance of these firsts cannot be denied in a country in which “P***-bashing” was once a national sport for the far right. One only needs to look at this newspaper’s archives to understand the sustained campaign of terror that was inflicted on ethnic minority communities throughout the 1970s and 80s, with regular reports of racists firebombing the homes of black and Asian families.

In 2008, Sunder Katwala had wondered whether the UK would see a British Obama. He is reluctant to say this is happening.

“It’s not an Obama moment. If it is, it is an understated British version of the Obama moment because you are trying to have the Obama moment and try to not notice it is happening,” Katwala said. “The prime minister himself has spoken from the steps and decided not to mention something we can all see.”

What is behind Sunak’s rise and the Tories’ racial representation among upper echelons of the British government? There are no easy answers to this extraordinary phenomenon – especially from the Labour party, which has yet to have a female leader or one from an ethnic minority background.

But an 1983 election poster from the Thatcher era provides some clues: “Labour says he’s black. The Tories say he’s British.” The poster came in two formats; one with a picture of an Asian man, a second with a black one.

It is this narrative of an open and humane Britishness that has endured among the Tories and it is what Sunak tapped into for his leadership campaign in the summer.

“Let me tell you a story about a young woman almost a lifetime ago who boarded a plane armed with hope for a better life and the love of her family,” Sunak said in the opening of his leadership campaign video. The woman, who saved for a year to get enough money for her husband and children to follow her, was his grandmother.

His mother studied hard to run her own pharmacy while his father worked as a GP for the NHS. They settled in Southampton, where in 1980, Sunak was born. “It was Britain, our country, that gave them and millions like them the chance of a better future,” he said. The message was clear: if we work hard, there is nothing to stop us from achieving.

This question of who belongs and who thrives is not exclusive to Britain. In 2018, on the 242nd anniversary of US independence, writer and professor Jelani Cobb pointed to an ongoing tension at the heart of the problems facing his country.

“The question of ‘We, the people’ has been our ongoing and unresolved conflict in American identity,” Cobb said during a talk in western New York. “We’ve never sufficiently understood and defined who is included in that term.”

Cobb described a boom-and-bust cycle of who belongs in the country and who doesn’t – an expanding concept of ‘we’, followed by “a contracting, fearful idea of who ‘we’ should be”, he explained.

This is true for the UK too. There is an ebb and flow, a feeling of hopes raised and hopes dashed, that is glossed over when Sunak discusses the country’s history.

What followed after his grandparents’ generation across the Commonwealth were encouraged to migrate to the UK and help rebuild the country in the post-war era? A declaration by former Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1968 that a black person or Asian “does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman”. Racial reckonings and riots, as well the passing of notable race relations acts.

The 2012 London Olympic ceremony presented a tantalising view of British multiculturalism, showcasing proudly the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948. Yet, the summer afterwards, vans bearing the message “Go home or face arrest” were driven around London’s heavily diverse communities, while thousands of people from the Windrush generation were suddenly targeted for deportation.

The pendulum has always swung; when the country takes a step forward, it is forced to take two back.

Sunak the contender vowed to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, slammed “woke nonsense” from “leftwing agitators”, and railed against the felling of statues and the supposed replacing of the school curriculum with “anti-British propaganda”.

What would Sunak the prime minister do?

The late Ambalavaner Sivanandan, one of Britain’s influential thinkers on race and class, once said: “There are two racisms: the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills.” On Tuesday it was clear that Sunak’s entry to No 10 has dealt a blow to that first kind of racism – the nativist ideals of Britishness.

But for Kimberly McIntosh, an author and race campaigner, there has been a distinct lack of focus on the latter – the systemic and institutional racism and economic inequality that blights the lives of the average person from an ethnic minority background.

“For the majority of people who are from an ethnic minority background, the election of Rishi Sunak will make no difference materially to their lives. So I find it very difficult to celebrate that and what he is likely to deliver to those communities is more violence,” she said.