Britain rises against unfair privilege

Britain rises against unfair privilege

Sunanda K Datta-RayUpdated: Friday, May 31, 2019, 03:26 PM IST
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Queen Victoria was not amused by the Marquess of Salisbury’s remark that the British public would not vote for a black man. The year was 1892 and the occasion was Dadabhai Naoroji’s candidacy for the House of Commons from the North London constituency of Finsbury Central. Not only was Salisbury proved wrong but now, 124 years and several Asian MPs later, Britons have elected an ethnic Pakistani – a 45-year-old Labour Party solicitor called Sadiq Khan – as Mayor of London in a historic breakthrough election.

The Mayor of London is an elected politician who, along with the 25- member London Assembly, is accountable for the strategic government of Greater London. He is not to be confused with the Lord Mayor of London who holds an ancient but largely ceremonial position that goes back to the 12th century but wields very little authority nowadays. His role is restricted to the small area of the City of London where the Lord Mayor yields precedence only to the monarch. The position of mayor was created in 2000 as part of the process of political and administrative devolution. The first incumbent was the feisty Labour politician, Ken Livingstone. He was succeeded by the flamboyant Conservative, Boris Johnson, who served two terms before stepping down to become an MP.

Sadiq’s election to this position by a margin of more than 1.2 million votes over his Conservative rival — the largest personal mandate ever obtained by any politician in British history — says much about the liberal vision of British voters which Salisbury did not comprehend, but Victoria did. Although Rotterdam has had a Muslim mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb, since 2009, no capital city can boast of a leader with Khan’s credentials. Britain-baiting being the fashion in this country, I have read in recent weeks senior Indian writers claiming that the British built the railways only for their own strategic needs, that their famine code was mingy, and that Britain should be forced to surrender the Kohinoor and other looted treasures. Few recognise that Sadiq Khan’s election is a triumph of democracy proving that British voters appreciate merit regardless of caste, creed and class.

Class is especially important because although the British are seen as snobbish, the two men Sadiq Khan succeeded and defeated belong to the highest echelons of society. The new mayor himself is a working class man. His grandparents migrated from India to Pakistan, and his parents moved to Britain just before he was born. His father was a bus driver. Two other British-Asian politicians who at once congratulated Sadiq on his success stressed they, too, were the children of bus conductors.  It just happens that both Sajid Javid, the business secretary in David Cameron’s government, and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, minister for faith and communities and former Conservative Party chairman, are of Pakistani origin: that is because by and large there are more working class people among Pakistani migrants in Britain than among Indian immigrants who tend to be more middle class.

Sadiq’s mother supplemented his father’s bus driver’s wages by working as a seamstress. They lived in a cramped three-bedroom house in a council estate with their seven sons and a daughter. Sadiq shared a bunk bed with a brother until he left home in his 20s. “I was surrounded by my mum and dad working all the time, so as soon as I could get a job, I got a job,” he once explained. “I got a paper round, a Saturday job – some summer days I laboured on a building site.” The family still sends money to relatives in Pakistan “because we’re blessed being in this country.” Being a trade union member, his father got “decent pay and conditions” whereas his mother, working from home on her own, “wasn’t, and didn’t”. That convinced Khan of the trade union movement’s relevance and propelled him towards the Labour Party. He fought and retained the marginal parliamentary seat of Tooting for Labour in 2005, one of that year’s five new ethnic minority MPs. When Gordon Brown became prime minister, he included Khan in his cabinet, first as minister for communities and then transport.

Johnson, whom Sadiq Khan has replaced, was born in New York City to upper class English parents. He was educated at Eton, read classics at Balliol College, was Oxford Union president, and editor of the upmarket Spectator magazine. Zac Goldsmith, whom Sadiq defeated, is also an Old Etonian, the son of Sir James Goldsmith, the billionaire businessman and financier whose daughter, Jemima, married the Pakistani politician, Imran Khan. He surprised many Londoners by attacking Khan on grounds of race and religion, saying he had “given platform, oxygen and cover to extremists.” What was even more astonishing, Goldsmith made a direct appeal to Indian voters, warning them that a Labour mayor would impose a tax on jewellery and – in an oblique comment on Sadiq’s religion – claiming that he himself had always respected various Hindu festivals like Navratri, Janmastami and Diwali. He also professed to be an admirer of Narendra Modi. His sister’s Pakistani marriage was nowhere mentioned.

This fanning of anti-Muslim sentiment may not have been generally evident, but one of Goldsmith’s sponsors, Michael Fallon, defence secretary in Cameron’s government, left little to the imagination by saying during the election campaign that Khan was unfit to be mayor. The implication was that as a Muslim, he was a security threat. As the Guardian newspaper wrote, “Goldsmith waged a campaign soaked in racism, in one of the most ethnically diverse cities on Earth, shamelessly exploiting anti-Muslim prejudices in an effort to secure a shameful victory.”

As already mentioned, London’s mayoral election also broke the barriers of class. It reminded people that in a highly publicised interview with the Financial Times two years ago, Michael Gove, then Britain’s education secretary, criticised the “preposterous” number of Old Etonians in Cameron’s inner circle. Himself the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish processor, Gove attended a state primary school before receiving a scholarship to go to a fee paying school. According to him the concentration of privilege among those who run Britain does not exist in “any other developed economy.”

Gove had a word, too, about the Marquess of Salisbury who thought British voters would reject a black man like Naoroji. He said Salisbury, also Etonian like Cameron, Johnson and Goldsmith, was heavily criticised for nepotism. “At the beginning of the 20th century, the Conservative cabinet was called Hotel Cecil. The phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ came about and all the rest of it. It is preposterous.” I was familiar with the phrase as meaning “Your success is guaranteed.” What I didn’t know is that the expression arose after Salisbury, Robert (Bob) Gascoyne-Cecil, then Conservative prime minister, appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour as chief secretary for Ireland in 1887.

The vote for Sadiq Khan must be seen as also a vote against unfair privilege.

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