London Calling: How does India look from afar? Looming world power or dysfunctional democracy? And what’s happening in Britain, and the West, that India needs to know about and perhaps learn from? This fortnightly column helps forge the connections so essential in our globalising world.
It’s Rishi Sunak’s nightmare. As his Conservative Party gathers for probably its last annual conference before an election, it’s been plunged into a row about race and multiculturalism. And a supposed political ally of Sunak’s lit the fuse.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary and herself of East African and Goan heritage, delivered an incendiary speech last week denouncing the ‘misguided dogma’ of multiculturalism. She argued that ‘multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
Her speech extended into a wide-ranging criticism of immigration policy, one of her key ministerial responsibilities. In recent years immigration had been ‘too much, too many’, she said, and posed an ‘existential threat’ to Britain’s way of life. What Braverman described as the ‘toxic combination’ of uncontrolled immigration and the failure to integrate new migrants was creating ‘the conditions for more extreme politics’.
This was not just a passing comment in a TV interview. The home secretary made her remarks in a speech at a think tank in Washington DC. It’s a well thought through strategy to throw a spotlight on immigration and integration – and a spotlight too, of course, on the deeply ambitious politician who delivered the speech.
Braverman was promptly slapped down by the prime minister. Britain ‘is a fantastic multicultural democracy’, Sunak declared. ‘We have done an incredible job of integrating people into society.’ He spoke of how he was ‘the first person from my background to hold this job. That’s a wonderful thing, but it’s also not a big deal in our country. I think that speaks to the progress we’ve made over the years.’
Other prominent Conservatives of colour joined the clamour over the home secretary’s remarks. The foreign secretary, James Cleverly – who is of African heritage – pointedly remarked that the fact there are so many prominent ministers from ethnic minorities showed that Britain had been ‘brilliant at integrating people who have come to this country’. A former home secretary, Priti Patel, accused Braverman of making the speech simply to ‘get attention’.
The row is a symptom of divisions within the Conservative Party at a time when it needs to come across as united. The Conservative Party conference is now underway in the northern city of Manchester. And the grim truth is that hardly anyone gathered in the conference venue expects the party to retain power.
The next election has to be held by January 2025 but the exact timing is in the hands of the government. Commentators believe the most likely polling date is in about a year’s time. So this will be the last party conference season before the country becomes engulfed in an election campaign.
In Rishi Sunak’s 12 months in the top job, he has succeeded in reassuring the financial markets, improved relations with the European Union and resolved the hugely tricky problem of Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit status. But the government lacks direction and has proved unable to get on top of the cost of living crisis and profound problems affecting the state-financed National Health Service. Opinion polls consistently point to a commanding lead for the opposition Labour Party. The Conservatives are likely to face not so much a defeat as a drubbing when the country votes.
The public seems to have come to a collective decision – that the Conservatives have been in power for too long, 13 years and counting, and it’s time for a change. The scandals surrounding Boris Johnson, and then the catastrophe of Liz Truss’s brief tenure when the financial markets lost confidence in the government’s ability to balance the books, have stripped away all but core, unshakable Conservative supporters.
Many prominent Conservatives are now looking to what happens after an election defeat. If it’s as bad as seems likely, Sunak will almost certainly resign straight away as party leader. Braverman is one of those aspiring to succeed him. Her support base is among the determinedly ideological free marketeers and social conservatives who make up a surprisingly large part of the party’s grassroots membership. And she’s not the only minister who is positioning themselves for life after Sunak.
It all makes the prime minister’s job even more impossible. He needs to convince the electorate that the Conservatives are confident and coherent when everyone can see that the party is succumbing to feuding and factionalising.
As for Braverman’s comments on multiculturalism, there is unease that the integration of some ethnic groups has been painfully slow. Many people regard themselves as Black British, or British Asian, rather than simply British. That in part is a response to the racism they have encountered. And western nations that proclaim the importance of assimilation – notably France – have not been much more successful in integrating the children of those who migrated from former French colonies in North and West Africa.
But there’s also suspicion that the home secretary’s crusade against multiculturalism is intended to mask the failure to clamp down on illegal migration across the Channel in small, overcrowded and desperately unsafe boats and dinghies. Although the overall numbers are not huge, public opinion is alarmed by Sunak’s inability to tackle this hazardous and illegal form of migration.
But judging by the political mood of the country, that won’t be Sunak’s headache for much longer.
Andrew Whitehead is an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham in the UK and a former BBC India Correspondent.
