Puede leer aquí la versión en español de este artículo.
Britain has a new Prime Minister: Rishi Sunak. Of Indian descent, he is the first person of colour and the first Hindu to become the nation’s prime minister.
Installed by Conservative Party (not elected by the population) on 24 October, he replaces Liz Truss, whose premiership lasted only 44 days after her calamitous foray into trickle-down economics spooked markets, tanked the pound, and spurred MPs in the ruling Conversative Party to oust her. The country’s fifth prime minister in six years, Sunak takes the helm at a time of political unrest and a cost-of-living crisis.
Mr. Sunak’s coronation coincided with Diwali, the annual Hindu festival that marks new beginnings.
“Glass ceilings are being broken,” said Anas Altikriti, an anti-racist activist and director of The Cordoba Foundation, which aims to increase understanding between the Muslim world and the West.»Regardless of why Sunak became Prime Minister or how his tenure will turn out, the fact that people of colour and different religions can aspire to hold the very top job in this white Christian country must be a positive.”
Altikriti described Britain as streets ahead of other European countries like France, Italy and Sweden in which, he said, the prospect of a non-white, non-Christian person occupying the highest elected office is «nowhere in the horizon». Even having “non-white ministers is something that is quite novel in many European countries,” he added.
Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups now make up 13% of the British population and are represented at senior levels of all main political parties. Over the last two decades, the Conservative Party, the country’s traditional centre-right party whose policies benefit the domestic oligarchy and finance capital in particular, has made particularly strides in mixing things up.
When Sunak was promoted to Chancellor of the Exchequer (economy minister) in 2020, he replaced Sajid Javid who is of Pakistani descent – it was the first time the position had passed from one ethnic minority MP to another.
More strikingly, Liz Truss’s premiership, economically ruinous though it was, marked the first time ever that none of Britain’s four “great offices of state” was held by a white male: Prime Minister Truss was a white woman; her Chancellor of the Exchequer was born to Ghanaian parents; her Home Secretary (which oversees national security and immigration) was born to Indian parents; and her Foreign Secretary’s mother was Sierra Leonean.
But racism in British society has hardly vanished: ethnic minorities are still more likely to receive discrimination in housing, education and employment. And in post-Brexit Britain, the use of the race card as a political trick has plenty of mileage.
“The whole issue is full of contradictions,” said Dr. Jim Wolfreys, lecturer in French and European politics at King’s College London. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who governed from 2019 to September this year, “had the most diverse cabinet up to that point of any prime minister,” he said, “but probably has one of the worst records of racist outpourings of any politician to have taken that office, depending how far back you go.”
Johnson has referred to Africans as «piccaninnies» with “watermelon smiles” and has written that Muslim woman wearing the burqa look like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers.”
The Conservative Party today, in concert with the country’s billionaire-owned right-wing press, works to create moral panics around immigration and asylum.
Sunak himself pitched right on immigration during his leadership campaign. Capitalising on the furore about people who cross the English Channel by boat from France, he floated the idea of putting asylum seekers on cruise ships rather than assessing their case inside British territory («taking back control» of borders was a dominant Brexit narrative).
He also said he would cap the number of asylum seekers entering the country. The fact that states have a legal obligation to provide asylum to anybody who seeks protection from persecution and serious human rights violations in another country no longer seem to matter.
A decade ago, such crude xenophobic policies would have been fringe; now they are mainstream.
The level of hysteria surrounding asylum seekers bears no proportion with reality. Government figures show the number of asylum claims in the UK in 2021 was below 60,000 – well below the peaks of more than 80,000 of the early 2000s after the ‘War on Terror’, in which Britain was involved, unleashed a great flow of refugees from the Middle East.
Britain also receives far fewer asylum applications per capita than other European countries: the UK received eight asylum applicants for every 10,000 people across the country in 2020/21. This compared with 23 for Germany, 18 for France and 153 for Cyprus.
The urbane, technocratic Sunak, who worked for Goldman Sachs before entering politics, hails from the “modernising” wing of the Conservative Party which though economically right-wing but socially liberal. But to form a government he had to cut a deal with the party’s nativist wing, which thrives on cartoon-style racist signaling.
His home secretary Suella Braverman, herself of Indian descent, is this wing’s epitome. She recently described the arrival of asylum seekers in the UK as an “invasion.” She is also a keen supporter of the party’s policy of flying asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally to Rwanda (brokered by her predecessor as home secretary, Priti Patel, herself of Indian-Ugandan descent). Tough torture in detention facilities in Rwanda is commonplace, according to human rights groups, Braverman has said that watching the planes take off would be her «dream».
Ironically Braverman’s ethnicity seems to give her more leeway to articulate and implement racist policies. As Financial Times reporter Edward Luce observed, she “is one of those non-white figures the party adulates because she can get away with saying things that would have white Tories labelled as racist.”
For example, the Manston migrant centre in the South of England, in which people arriving in the UK by boat are held while their cases are assessed, has vaulted into the British news cycle in recent weeks because of overcrowding and reports of on site outbreaks of diphtheria. The image of the building — a boil pustulating with immigrants and their infectious diseases — is largely a government-created spectacle: by refusing to pay for hotel rooms for the extra refugees, the Conservative Party to some degree manufactured the overflow, while diptheria outbreaks would seem to be linked to overcrowding and a lack of healthcare.
Rather than to look for solutions, Braverman chose to further dramatise and militarise the scene: she flew into Manston on a Chinook: a twin-rotor helicopter that the British military has deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Racist rhetoric and policy looks set to continue under Sunak’s premiership: not only because the Tea Party wing of the Conservatives retain significant clout in government, but because Sunak himself comes with baggage he needs to deflect attention away from.
He is fantastically rich, possibly Britain’s wealthiest ever prime minister. Educated at Winchester College, a school with fees of roughly $50,000 a year, he went on to study politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford — where six of the last seven prime ministers and more than half of all British prime ministers since 1721 also studied.
He married into fortune. His wife, Akshata Murty, is the daughter of Narayana Murthy, who founded the Indian technology giant Infosys. The Times of London this year estimated the couple’s wealth at $845 million.
Sunak and Murty have together amassed a property portfolio that includes a penthouse in Santa Monica, California; an $8 million, five-bedroom townhouse in London’s Kensington neighborhood; and a $2.3 million manor house in the North England countryside that is undergoing renovations to build a $460,000 swimming pool.
Earlier this year it emerged that Murty, Sunak’s wife, avoided paying an estimated $23 million dollars in British taxes on her income because of a privileged tax status. Mr. Sunak, it also emerged, had retained a U.S. green card from his time living in that country, which would allow him to settle permanently in the U.S. Though both the tax status and the green card have now reportedly been rescinded, Mr. Sunak’s «Davos man» image, that of a jet-setter out of touch with ordinary people’s lives, will be hard to kick.
He’s also been caught on camera giving a series of embarrassing if remarkably clear insights into his politics. Footage recently emerged of a 20-year-old Mr. Sunak telling documentary filmmakers: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper class, I have friends who are, you know, working class, but — well, not working class.”
Earlier this year he told an audience of Conservative Party members about how, during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he rigged government subsidies to favour the rich: “We inherited a bunch of formulas from the Labour Party which shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that,” he boasted.
Sunak’s government has already announced £35 billion in spending cuts, ostensibly to balance the books after the pandemic. Facing double digit inflation, the bulk of the population is already living with falling real wages. The poor will inevitably be hit the hardest as the public services they need are further hollowed out.
It’s certainly welcome and admirable that Britain is capable of having a non-white person in Number 10 Downing Street. On the other hand, the cynical use of racist narratives by the Conservative Party, which have become more shrill in recent years, are unlikely to go away any time soon. In post-Brexit Britain, particularly during times of “austerity”, they are just too useful.
