What a Hindu prime minister can do to an English ideology

THE PREMIERSHIP OF Rishi Sunak marks a significant departure for the British Conservative Party. Sustained in recent times by anti-immigration rhetoric, the Tories now find themselves led by the son of immigrants. There is a feast of irony here.

Since the decision to leave the European Union (EU) in 2016, the Conservative leadership has taken in an unprecedented level of immigrant stock. Many pundits saw the Brexit vote as a demand to restrict immigra­tion, so there is more than a hint of hypocrisy about politicians with recent histories of immigration enthusias­tically raising the drawbridge behind themselves.

Despite vocal demands from the Tory grassroots that it be made increasingly difficult to get into Britain by crossing the English Channel in inflatable dinghies, it has become increasingly easy for immigrants to get into government in Britain through membership of the Tory party. The cabinets of the last three Conservative prime ministers— Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss—have each contained multiple figures of immigrant heritage, including Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, Alok Sharma, Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Dominic Raab.

Before the current incumbent, Jeremy Hunt, the three previous Chancellors of the Exchequer were of immigrant background: Rishi Sunak himself, who was born in Britain, Nadhim Zahawi, born in Iraq, and Kwasi Kwarteng, born in London of Ghanaian parentage. This is quite a turnaround for a party whose MPs were once happy to campaign on the slogan “Vote Labour if you want an n-word for a neighbour”.

But looking past the irony, it is quite natural, even inevitable, that the party of choice for indigenous entrepreneurs should attract ambitious new arrivals wanting to better themselves. The surprise is not that immigrants should be attracted to the Conservatives, but rather that the Conservatives should be so keen to welcome immigrants into their ranks, especially the post- Brexit iteration of the party, which has lurched into a stridently nationalist stance, where contempt for the French and fear of the Chinese play well with the base.

Here we can detect a paradoxical shift in the Tory mindset. Brexit was sold on the prospectus that Britain would be “open to the world”, but the idea was always that we would go to the world and sell things, not that the world would come here. This is the knottiest part of the tangle of economic and cultural issues that obsesses the modern right in Britain. Economic growth is necessary, and the quickest way to get it is to bring in foreign workers. Low pay maintains profit margins. But one of the principal aims of leaving the EU was to get rid of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, which was depressing the living standards of the native workforce.

Resentment towards low-skilled migrant workers is credited with driving former Labour voters into the Conservative column at the last election, breaching the ‘red wall’ in the north and giving Boris Johnson his whopping 80-seat majority. Going soft on immigration would imperil this newfound support.

Precisely this issue flared up in the recent, brief premier­ship of Liz Truss. Truss was fanatically keen on growth, and was prepared to tolerate increased immigration to propel it, but Suella Braverman, her home secretary, was fanatically opposed to any increase in net migration. Braverman, née Fernandes, was born in London of parents from the Indian diaspora, and is without doubt the most anti-immigration politician to have graced a Tory cabinet since Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.

Sunak is not entirely in the clear with the political right. It is because his background in corporate banking makes him what is now called a ‘globalist’. But a simplistic tag like ‘globalist’ hardly does Sunak justice; he is a whizz-kid wealth creator, a figures man. He is not trying to build up or tear down any particular kind of culture, and has been much less vocal on culture war issues than almost all his colleagues. And he has made sincere efforts to balance his cabinet selections to appease all factions in his own party

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Braverman, now commonly called “Cruella”, soon lost her job, not for hawkishness but for breaching the ministerial code, only to make a spectacularly quick return to the Home Office just six days later, after the coronation of Rishi Sunak. Sunak is an economic technocrat and is also keen on growth, so he is much softer on migration than Braverman. The funda­mental economic-cultural split at the heart of contemporary Toryism remains to be resolved.

One major aspect of that split is that the word “conservative” no longer accurately describes the politics of the Conservative Party.

Generally speaking, conservatives like to hold on to the best of the past while approaching innovation with a degree of caution, so while the left was making the running in roughly the years 1850-1980, conservatism was a natural right-of-centre position. But in recent times it has been people on the right of politics who have wanted to smash up institu­tions, possibly because they are deemed to have been irre­deemably corrupted by progressive thinking. The great surge of rightwing populism that swept the Anglo-Saxon world around the time of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump had precious little that was conservative about it. That eruption laid bare what now lies at the heart of mod­ern rightwing thinking—the denial of social connection.

Though they usually dress it up in fancy language, righ­twingers have always defended inequality, asserting variously that it is either natural, or merited, or an inevitable side-effect of personal liberty. Maintaining hierarchy requires defend­ing the strong against the depredations of the weak, such as welfare payments. State regulation simply protects the weak; the strong can defend themselves. Free markets allow the best ideas and the hardest workers to succeed.

But this is second-order thinking, which passes unexam­ined in normal political discourse. The new core of rightwing thinking is not traditionalism, which can be embraced by the left too. Nor is it a rejection of empathy. Rightwing people can feel empathy as keenly as anyone, but always on strictly con­ditional terms. Fundamentally, contemporary rightwingers believe that the wealth they accumulate is theirs alone, that it comes entirely from their own efforts. This means that their fellow citizens can make no claim on them.

This outlook has been in vogue in the US for decades, where it spawned the Tea Party, and it is a philosophy we might expect to find in a relatively young society with a strong egalitarian social ethic. It is a refinement of the American Dream—everyone can get ahead if they try—and the pioneer spirit—everyone must fend for themselves. The surprise is that it has taken root in Britain, where it has been added to the older tradition of working-class conservatism, which lionised the self-made and abhorred scroungers. Tory grandees who began life at the bottom of the pile include John Major, prime minister from 1990 to 1997, and David Davis, who was (wrongly) tipped to become party leader in 2005. Such successful men could easily identify with righ­twing tropes about merit and ambition, and it should not be surprising that Rishi Sunak, who, like Major, had a successful career in banking, was attracted to the party and rose to its leadership. History was moving that way.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher remodelled the Tory party by rejecting the patrician style and adopting a non-paternalistic, lower middle-class ethic, where taxation was the great enemy. If I have books in my house, she asked, why should I pay for a public library? If I have a car, why should I pay for public transport? This was, in essence, a rejection of social connection.

THEN CAME THE modernising reforms of David Cameron, Conservative leader from 2005 to 2016. Cameron added a soft Britishness to Thatcher’s harder Americanism, by insisting that the modern Conservative Party should look like the country it sought to represent. To that end he remodelled the party’s social attitudes, especially towards minority ethnic groups. His efforts bore swift fruit. New members joined; new stars rose up. In 2005, Cameron had two ethnic minority MPs; in 2019, when Boris Johnson became prime minister, there were three in his cabinet.

It was always wrong to assume that working-class people could not hold right-of-centre views, and Tory strategists finally realised that this was also true of non-white immigrants, particularly on economic matters. Successful immigrant entrepreneurs are almost guaranteed to have made whatever fortune they hold entirely from their own efforts, so the barrier to Toryism was always cultural—a question of true patriotism.

Faith in Britain and rejection of foreignness were present in equal measure in the minds of many Brexiteers, so a further irony of Brexit was that it became very easy to prove your Britishness simply by being an ardent leaver. Rishi Sunak was a passionate advocate for leaving the EU even as a schoolboy, when a referendum on membership was still way over any imaginable political horizon.

This is where the circle joins up. Brexit was not a party is­sue, but a large proportion of the Conservative Party member­ship had supported leaving the EU since the early 1990s, when the Maastricht Treaty opened the door to closer European integration. While Euroscepticism was not a guarantee of pro­motion within the party, neither was it a handicap. After the defeat of the Europhile John Major in 1997, over the ensuing eight years the next three leaders of the party were professed anti-Europeans.

Sunak’s pedigree as a long-time Brexiteer undoubtedly helped him to navigate his way to the top of the party; he became an MP in 2015, so six of his seven years in parlia­ment fell after the referendum. The man he replaced as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020, Sajid Javid, was forced to reburnish his credentials, having been a vocal Remainer. The woman he replaced as prime minister, Liz Truss, had had to do precisely the same.

But however much his views and his choices may have helped him, Sunak is not entirely in the clear with the politi­cal right. This is not because of his skin tone. It is because his background in corporate banking makes him what is now called a “globalist”, and globalists, in the modern rightwing worldview, are not to be trusted. They are the people who wish to abolish borders, promote mass migration and dilute indigenous culture—all in the pursuit of profit. But a sim­plistic tag like “globalist” hardly does Sunak justice; he is a whizz-kid wealth creator, a figures man. He is not trying to build up or tear down any particular kind of culture, and has been much less vocal on culture war issues than almost all his colleagues. And he has made sincere efforts to balance his cabinet selections to appease all factions in his own party.

The point about Sunak is that the modern Conservative Party, though it didn’t seem to know it, was absolutely ready to embrace and promote a man who turned out to be not only Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, but also its youngest for more than 200 years, and its richest ever. Most Commonwealth immigrants who arrived in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s gravi­tated towards the Labour Party, partly because they were more likely to be employees than employers, and partly because rank and file Conservatives could be nakedly contemptuous of non-white immigrants. There were still echoes of this in the self-styled ‘hostile environment’ (to illegal immigrants) promoted by Theresa May when she was home secretary.

Although there were certainly echoes of that hostility in some of the rhetoric surrounding the Brexit referendum, the choice of remaining or leaving allowed anyone of an immigrant background to breeze through an updated version of Norman Tebbit’s notorious “cricket test”, which laid down that people with Commonwealth roots who didn’t support England in home Test matches were essentially the enemy within.

The recent ‘browning’ of the Conservative Party leadership is undoubtedly anomalous; the Sunak government includes non-white people in three of the four major offices of state. This is far in advance of the nation’s demographics, and may indeed be something of an affront to the unreformed racists still hiding in the Tory membership—the ones who wouldn’t support Rishi Sunak in the leadership contest with Liz Truss because he was “too clever by half (wink, wink)”—but Sunak’s accession to the premiership has done an enormous amount to deracialise mainstream rightwing thinking in Britain.

This may be a tangential and purely unintentional benefit of Brexit, but it may yet prove to have real value.

About The Author

Roderick Matthews

Roderick Matthews specialises in Indian history. He is the author of Jinnah vs Gandhi and Mountbatten and the Partition of British India