It was early spring 1946. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, seeing the untenable status quo, sent a simple message to the British colonial officer in India: “In any case, get Britain out.” The following year, King George VI signed legislation passed by Parliament, finally ending Britain’s violent colonial rule on the Indian subcontinent. Twenty years later, British colonies in East Africa successively declared independence, moving the United Kingdom along the difficult transition from an imperial power to modern liberal democracy.
One person’s life experience has been a microcosm of these critical inflection points in the history of contemporary Britain and the collective West. He is Rishi Sunak, Britain’s new prime minister. Sunak, the child of ethnic Indian parents born in colonial Kenya and Tanzania, is the first British Asian to hold the highest office in the U.K. government.
Selected by his fellow Conservative Party lawmakers in Parliament, Sunak replaces Liz Truss, whose fiscal policy proposals ushered chaos into the British economy. His appointment has generated considerable controversies in the U.K., with Labor Party supporters decrying that he was not popularly elected through a general election. Yet, as controversial as it is, the process of his appointment should in no way diminish the historic nature of this moment. Sunak, as prime minister, symbolizes the impact of the modern movement to combat racism and inequality carried out by generations of advocates in the West.
