No Prime Minister, your colleagues do not represent us

Sonoo Singh

Papa called up from India when the new British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced his new cabinet: “Congratulations! The first Asian Brit Chancellor ever. And that woman named Priti, the new home secretary. Wah! C’mon we need a sardarni next in the cabinet.” I groaned, “They are the wrong kind, Papa.” 

The wrong kind of what? The wrong kind of immigrants. But are they? Sajid Javid, our new Chancellor is of Pakistani-Muslim origin. Priti Patel, the new Home Secretary — her Gujarati parents migrated to the UK in the 1960s from Uganda, just before Idi Amin’s decision to deport all Asians. Munira Mirza, a former cultural adviser to the mayor’s office when Johnson was the mayor and born to working-class migrants of Pakistani origin, is head of the No 10 Policy Unit. Then there is this unknown Alok Sharma, the new international development secretary — the third in this post this year.

Did I, and my “right kind” of immigrant friends, baulk at Javid or Patel being announced as the new Asian-origin cabinet members because they don’t represent us and our liberal values? Patel voted against equal marriage and on live TV asked to bring back the death penalty. She was disgracefully dismissed from her position as the international development secretary after being accused of planning to funnel UK foreign aid money to the Israeli army. And let no one forget that as former home secretary, Javid stripped British teenager Shamima Begum of her citizenship. And Mirza, she is an ardent Brexiteer. (But then, so is my husband, I have to keep on reminding myself).

Let me also tell you why Britain looks incredulously at Boris Johnson as the new Prime Minister. A former foreign secretary and ex-London mayor, often labelled as “far-right”, “racist”, “fascist”  —  rightly so for comparing veiled Muslim women to “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”  —  he is a minority leader succeeding another minority PM, elected by less than one per cent of the British voters. 

In the past two decades of living in the UK, I cannot think of another PM so reviled when moving to Number 10. Johnson and his so-called diverse cabinet (a few brown faces do not represent a modern Britain, by the way) have managed to divide the minority opinion like nothing before.

Writer Sathnam Sanghera tweeted when the cabinet roles were first announced: “Priti Patel as Home Secretary straight after Sajid Javid? I think even the Asian IT worker cliche was preferable to this new one for deporting people.”  Meanwhile, the editor of Burnt Roti magazine, Sharan Dhaliwal, wrote this in her column in The Huffington Post: “We no longer just want our faces visible, we want to have political allies, people with values and morals. People who won’t deport those who look like them at the drop of a hat. Those who don’t get sacked from their jobs for having secret meetings with Israeli ministers. Those who align themselves with Boris Johnson, whose racist and homophobic comments are now common knowledge, are not good people.” She calls Patel a “pawn in White supremacy”. Or like political activist Ash Sarkar says: “The ascendance of Patel and Javid to positions of power is a sign of progress if you see tokenism itself as progressive.”

But then I turn on the news and see “eager fans” taking selfies with the new PM while he’s on a trip to Birmingham.  He’s  surrounded largely by Indian massis/aunties and a few veiled heads. It’s like what journalist and blogger Sunny Hundal said rather eloquently on social media: “Some on the Left have a very stereotypical view of Asians…Most British Asians are socially/fiscally right-wing, and not raging socialists.”

This ‘immigrant’ or ‘minority’ tag seems to define all of us who are of a certain hue. Not every single one of us has signed ourselves to the tomes of a so-called progressive Left. My husband and I don’t share the same minority experience, or even the same political ideals.

These segmented discussions of skin colour and race are so clichéd that they almost hurt. Yes, we belong to both Britain and the land of our fathers and forefathers, but without being beaten into submission that my version of being an Asian would in any way be the same as my friend’s or my husband’s or Patel’s. Patel does not represent me because she is “from the subcontinent.”  She was born in Harrow, in north-west London. And she remains the politician who was fired for misconduct while in public office, and has since been elevated to Home Secretary.