I have never voted Conservative. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a degree of delight when Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Not because I expected anything new, or that I agreed with him politically, but because I never imagined such a thing might happen in my lifetime.
Perhaps it’s a sign of where Britain is at that having a British Asian leader is hardly remarked upon. But there wasn’t an Indian family I knew that wasn’t privately thrilled when Sunak took power in 2022, even if only for a moment. We had arrived. I could allow my son to dream of holding the highest public office one day – a dream I never dared to have for myself when I was growing up in London in the 1990s, when the number of ethnic minority MPs was in single digits.
As disastrous as they have been in almost every other way, we have to hand it to the Conservative leadership for reflecting the country back at us demographically. In the last decade, as a result of deliberate action by David Cameron when he was prime minister, they have given us two female leaders and the most ethnically diverse cabinet in history.
The party made the issue of race seem almost banal when it came to how it delegated power. Black and Asian candidates were made to feel that they had as much of a chance as anyone else in nearly any constituency, as long as they shared the party’s values. And they thrived.
The same cannot be said of the Labour party. When I reflect, much of my frustration with the political left in Britain has centred on the feeling it has given me that I don’t count, not really. The party may have more ethnic minority MPs than the Conservatives, but it still doesn’t reflect the share of the ethnic minority vote it enjoys. About two-thirds of those from minority backgrounds have consistently supported Labour for the last few decades (the most recent high was in 2017, under Jeremy Corbyn), according to Ipsos.
If the House of Commons were to reflect the country as a whole, there would be 60% more ethnic minority MPs. Yet there is no statistical possibility of this happening in July, even if Labour were to gain a complete majority.
The Labour party has taken the black and Asian vote for granted from the start. If we were ever allowed to count, it was in areas with high minority populations such as Leicester, Bradford and parts of London. If we complained, we were accused of letting the side down. Our turn would come later, we seemed to be told, paternalistically.
To vote Labour in this election, as I will, leaves me almost as conflicted as I was when Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Labour is my natural political home, but the party has moved so far towards the centre-right that it’s difficult to be anything other than relieved that the Conservatives might be out, rather than excited at what might come next. If Labour wins, I still lose. I will lose a truly diverse cabinet and I will also lose the hope of a genuinely leftwing government.
Polling by YouGov showed that at the beginning of 2020, 61% of Britons saw the Labour party as fairly or very leftwing. Today, that proportion has almost halved. The party has moved undeniably towards the right in order to win votes. But with the Conservatives in a state of collapse anyway, would it really hurt Labour’s election chances so much if it were to show more sympathy to migrants, and to celebrate those of us whose parents or grandparents moved to Britain and helped make it a better, stronger country than it might otherwise have been? Instead, the party’s hostility-tinged policies include introducing a points-based immigration system and reducing the UK’s reliance on overseas workers. To those of us who are citizens but were immigrants once, or the children of immigrants, this looks a lot like rejection.
Never has Britain needed overseas workers – and their children – more. My son is named after Aneurin Bevan, the great Welsh socialist, Labour minister and architect of the National Health Service. Today, more than a quarter of those who work in the NHS in England are from ethnic minority backgrounds, including many members of my own family. The same goes for almost a quarter of social workers. We are not a drain. We are the reason that public services in this country are still functioning at all.
If the Labour party does win this summer, my hope is that it can come to reflect the country it will be governing demographically, just as the Conservative party learned to do. This is not only a numbers game, it is also about the care shown to its own party members (including Diane Abbott, whose suspension turned into nothing short of a scandal, and Faiza Shaheen, who was at the last minute blocked from standing as the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green), the efforts it makes to not sow or stoke division between groups, and its rhetoric around immigration. I hope, in short, that it can become a party that makes me feel as if I count.
Angela Saini is a science writer and teaches at MIT. Her latest book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell prize
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
