Many were quick to judge Home Secretary Priti Patel’s response to the subject of Ukrainian refugees. Whilst it is always easy to point the finger of blame, at least it brought about robust discussion. It’s a good thing: one only needs to look at the different types of interchange that happened when Putin presented his war-that-is-not-a-war plans to the Russian equivalent of the cabinet.
Part of the reason that we are able to have robust discussions in the British government is because of immigration. In the present administration, five significant members – Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Alok Sharma, Suella Braverman and the Home Secretary herself – are beneficiaries by the heritage of a welcoming attitude to immigrants historically in Britain. In the case of Sunak’s, Patel’s and Braverman’s parents (and my own more modest personal case), the source region was East Africa. In Javid’s parents’ case, it was Pakistan. Alok’s from India.
The point, though, is not about where we or our parents are from (always the first question of the racist!), or particular political alignments, still less the difficult minutiae of immigration policy at any given time. The message, in a period of surging global nationalism of the most singulative and exclusionary type, is that we do actually have genuine diversity of ethnicity in the British government, thanks to the vision of our Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Contrasted with the small, servile group with which Putin surrounds himself, all drawn from the self-same class of siloviki, this diversity is one of the things that makes our democracy stronger. It also fosters plural nationalism more generally: pride in a Britain that’s comfortable with its own multiracial make-up.
The same is true of other countries that have admitted different ethnicities to the highest ranks of politics. Look at Jagmeet Singh, the Canadian politician who has served as the leader of the New Democratic Party since 2017 -- the first visible minority person to helm a major party in Canada. Look at Leo Varadkar, the former Irish Taoiseach and current minister, whose father of Indian origin was born in Mumbai. And so many others, immigrants themselves, or people of part or whole immigrant parentage -- people who have led the charge for democracy not just nationally but also globally. Barack Obama is the most notable example in recent memory, however much of his part-Kenyan heritage was weaponised against him domestically.
In Britain, where we don’t do the hyphen of partial exceptionalism (African-American, Arab-American etc), the admittance of the minority-ethnicity politician goes back a very long way. One thinks naturally of Benjamin Disraeli, the only British prime minister, so far, of Jewish origin.
Like many present-day politicians, Disraeli (in office 1874-80) often found himself in a scrape and suffered much personal criticism. Also, outright anti-Semitism, such as Ukrainian President Zelensky has suffered in the most perverse manner. But the politics or ethnicity of the exemplum is not the issue. Transcending the individual case, the simple axiom is that diverse government makes for better government. This is a message that is, I think, percolating from the mother of parliaments to other legislatures, to younger democracies, ones often with higher stakes in terms of the potential for social fracture than now pertains in Britain.
I’m talking about places such as Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In these countries, where tribalism regrettably remains a factor, the need for a government that is ethnically well balanced is of crucial importance. In Africa, the continent of my birth and a continent I know well, Nigeria is another country that has always been acutely aware of these issues.
We too in Britain need to hang on, as two competing versions of nationalism go head to head in Ukraine, to our own ideal of diverse government. Part of that involves listening to other stories, as President Zelensky so obviously was, channelling mainstream British myths (Shakespeare and Churchill) back to us when he spoke to parliament last week. He, like Disraeli before him, is a storyteller, one acutely alert to what the great Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie has referred to, in a famous TED talk, as ‘the danger of the single story’.
Lord Dolar Popat is a member of the House of Lords and the Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
