The Identity Trap: No One Narrative Can Encompass the Different Dimensions of Diversity

As Britain welcomes its first Asian Prime Minister, Hardeep Matharu explores how our pluralistic society is reflected in the multiplicity of its migrant experience – as demonstrated by the different reactions to Rishi Sunak’s rise 

Rishi Sunak is Britain’s first Prime Minister of colour. He’s also the wealthiest resident Downing Street has ever had.

Is his rise a win for representation and diversity in the UK; the culmination of its thriving, multicultural story? Or does it mask some uncomfortable truths about how race works in Britain today?

Sunak’s grandparents were born in pre-partition India and migrated to British East Africa, before coming to the UK in the 60s. His father, a GP, was born and raised in British Kenya; while his pharmacist mother was born in the British colonial territory of Tanganyika. Southampton-born Sunak has seldom spoken about racism and his political identity is seemingly not shaped by it.

But in his first speech in Parliament in 2015, he said “I owe a great debt to our country for what it has done for my family: showing tolerance, providing opportunities and rewarding their hard work”. His Conservative leadership campaign this summer was launched with a personal film, starting with his grandmother’s journey to the UK.

The many reactions to Sunak’s ascent, especially among ethnic minorities themselves, paints its own picture: one in which understanding our history is important and the discussion of the uncomfortable complexities of our past necessary; of how identities don’t conform to simplistic assumptions; about social mobility in a country where class endures; and one where the different experiences of different generations will shape them in their own ways.    

By avoiding easy conclusions and exploring conflicting ideas, we can avoid falling into the trap of ‘either/or’ understanding. As the response to Sunak’s story shows, no one fixed narrative can, or should, explain its relevance for modern Britain. 

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‘The Optical Illusion of Diversity’

The day Rishi Sunak emerged as Britain’s new Prime Minister, the president of the Hindu temple in his home town, founded by his grandfather, declared that “the UK’s Barack Obama moment” had come.

On countless WhatsApp groups, ethnic minorities exchanged memes and messages marking the occasion. One forwarded to me by relatives depicted Rishi Sunak, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and King Charles mocked up in the film poster for Amar, Akbar and Anthony – a 1997 Bollywood movie exploring tolerance. Its centres on the story of three brothers separated as children and raised respectively in the Hindu, Muslim and Christian faiths. 

But for journalist and author Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Sunak’s rise bears no comparison to the 2008 election of the charismatic US President of American and Kenyan descent. She describes it as “not our Obama moment but the optical illusion of diversity”.

“Obama, for all his faults, understood what equality was because he had worked in Chicago” –  where he was a community organiser in a predominantly black community, lawyer and lecturer before entering politics, she says. “None of our now most powerful brown and black people in the Tory Party have ever had that experience – they are middle-class and that is the deficit of understanding.”

She feels “no pride” in Sunak becoming Prime Minister. “It’s like saying to me, when Margaret Thatcher was in power, I should always have felt this amazing feminist pride – she did nothing for women.”

Born in Uganda, Alibhai-Brown came to Britain in her early 20s shortly before the expulsion of the country’s Asians by Idi Amin, who said he was reversing British colonialism by “giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans”. Under the Empire, many Ugandan Asians had lived a middle-class existence there – ‘below’ their white British rulers and ‘above’ the country’s black population. Kenya, where my father grew up, was another of Britain’s stratified colonial societies. 

For Alibhai-Brown, there’s an “expectation” that the children of immigrants should empathise with other immigrants “because it’s a reflection of your own life” – something she believes the current crop of high-profile ethnic minority Conservatives “betray”.

“They should reflect their own histories,” she says. “If you are a child of immigrants who came here for the good life, and then you try your damnedest to dehumanise people today who are trying to do the same, it’s not a question of ‘left or right’. I have a lot of right-wing friends, some of them in the Tory Party like Sayeeda Warsi, who I admire so much – but I respect her because she understands that you don’t turn on immigrants and make your career climbing on the backs of the most helpless people.

“If you betray your own history, in order to fit in or assimilate, by dehumanising migrants and asylum seekers, then I think it is a legitimate question to ask ‘am I proud?’ or ‘how can you do this?’”

“The optics camouflage some pretty unpleasant policies” that the Conservatives have introduced affecting ethnic minorities and, in her mind, prominent Tory politicians of colour are making “quite a cynical calculation” to fit in politically with the modern Conservative Party and the white British establishment more broadly – by having ideologies more to the right of those on the right when it comes to issues such as immigration.

But the Empire also casts a long shadow. Both Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel’s families migrated to Britain from British East Africa and would have benefited from the specific dynamics of the ‘divide and rule’ imperialism there, according to Alibhai-Brown. For some Asians, this included an inability to “tolerate black rule” – something she has spoken of in the past as a taboo to even mention.

These migrants to Britain were people “who were attached to the Empire and had attachments of empire”, she says of the Prime Minister and other families like his. 

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‘What Good Looks Like is Normal’

This summer’s first Conservative leadership contest – in which Rishi Sunak lost out to Liz Truss – had some questioning whether the Tory membership would vote for Sunak as a man of colour. 

It wasn’t a position that sat well with Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future think tank, who says the polling showed something quite different.

There’s a “daft and stupid form of progressive pessimism”, he says, which asks: “You don’t really think they’re going to accept him, do you?” The support for Kemi Badenoch among the Conservative membership, as well as other research, shows “it’s clear that the median voter doesn’t have a barrier” when it comes to race, he says.

“Progressives don’t understand that that form of imputed prejudice was the brake on ethnic minority Conservatives. It’s still the brake in Liberal Democrat selection meetings. It’s still a brake in Labour Party selection meetings in whiter areas.” 

Katwala sees Rishi Sunak’s elevation as a “historical, symbolic moment” that has been “strikingly low key and understated” because he wasn’t elected by the country to the top job. This “leaves unanswered some of the debates around ‘what would the Tory members really have done? What would the voters have done?’”

Does Sunak’s rise represent ‘progress’? For Katwala, “what good looks like is normal” and “the ethnic diversity of Britain is normal”. On this front, countries such as the UK and Canada have come far further far more quickly than other multicultural societies. 

“If you ask: did Thatcher achieve anything for women’s representation? Well Thatcher wasn’t particularly interested in women’s representation as she didn’t promote any women, but it was still important that there was a female prime minister – the symbolic importance matters anyway.” 

Katwala believes “the over-amplification of the ‘surprise factor’ of having any black or Asian Conservatives leads to an over-amplification of a particularly narrow niche: the ‘anti-woke’ black and Asian Conservative – that’s not representative of black and Asian Conservatives, no less than black and Asian people directly”.

To some – despite the fact that Sunak, Patel and other ethnic minority Conservatives such as Suella Braverman should be able to hold whatever political views they want, regardless of their race – these politicians have been politically useful to the likes of Boris Johnson, who consistently pointed to the diversity of the Cabinet to deflect discussion of racism.

“It might have that motive,” Katwala says. “When the Trump Republican Party puts forward a black candidate, I suspect that it could have that motive – but it might have that impact even if it hasn’t got that motive.

“There can be a form of inverse identity politics. ‘I faced racism in the playground therefore my government department could not be racist’ is not an answer to how you fix the Windrush Scandal. 

“If Sunak says legal migration is different from illegal migration, what you want is not ‘how can you, Rishi Sunak, have such a policy?’ but whether he accepts the lessons of the Windrush Scandal are still to be dealt with… He’s got the responsibility of the British state to deal with it.”

On this analysis, actions to deal with disparity and discrimination – rather than assessments about these individuals’ psychology and identities – should be the metric. 

According to the Government’s Equality Hub, it is “already delivering” the recommendations in the ‘Inclusive Britain’ report – a response to last year’s controversial Sewell Report – “which sets out a groundbreaking action plan to tackle negative disparities, promote unity, and build a fairer Britain for all”. 

“Our view of race across generations, across groups, needs to be a bit more sophisticated” but instead “it’s getting more simplistic”, according to Katwala.

The Labour Party’s high levels of diverse representation in Parliament, for instance, doesn’t mean that a culture of fairness and equality exists throughout its processes, he says – in the same way that Sunak becoming Prime Minister doesn’t mean there won’t be casual racism in the Conservative membership. 

Narratives around imperialist ‘divide and rule’ politics and ‘collaborators’ are also wide off the mark, he believes.

“It’s imagining the elite institutions to be white as a fact – which clearly they are – but also to be defending whiteness as their values,” he says. “If you look at the American South, you can see why white ideology matters. Do we think the British Civil Service or corporate elite is there as an agent of whiteness or thinks of itself as an agent of whiteness and that’s something it’s defending? I don’t see how that follows through… What we’ve got is a salience of whiteness that is an anxiety about diversity deficits in liberal institutions on the whole. 

“Those ‘divide and rule’ analogies are coding a lot of things as ‘white’ that most ethnic minority Britons wouldn’t accept as ‘white’. It’s a coded way of saying you’re either naïve or a fool or a coconut or you’re being a collaborator.”