Abstract
The UK Conservative party leadership contest in 2022 consisted of predominantly ethnic minority candidates. The first British-born Conservative party leader and prime minister of South Asian (and Hindu) heritage, Rishi Sunak, was appointed in October 2022 after a short and tumultuous turn in leadership by Liz Truss. This chapter will discuss the contemporary phenomenon of the ‘Brown Tory’ in relation to discussions in previous chapters regarding the social mobility trajectories and socio-political identity frameworks of British-born South Asians, particularly Indians. This chapter will argue that not only the ethnoracial background, but the ‘South Asianness’ of these politicians is significant to the political ideologies, discourse and identity of the Conservative party and the changing landscape of British and transnational politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Kao (2023) discusses the shift to the right over the past five years amongst voters in Asian neighbourhoods in New York City, the largest electoral shift in these areas since 2006. This shift can, according to Kao, be explained by both push and pull factors: a sense of being overlooked by the left-of-centre Democrat party, and a greater concern around crime due to increased anti-Asian violence that makes the right-of-centre Republican party more attractive. Party identification may be less at play here, than policy issues. Kao (2023) also notes that Republican support increased in South Asian (Sikh, Indo-Caribbean, Bangladeshi and South Indian) neighbourhoods for these reasons. It also highlights increasing racial tensions between ethnic minority (Black, Hispanic and Chinese) communities.
- 2.
Engaging in respectability politics for legitimisation is a stratagem of ethnic minority politicians on the right and left. In his May 2013 commencement address at Morehouse College—a historically Black institution in Atlanta, Georgia—then President Obama noted “that too many men in our [Black] community continue to make bad choices” (Harpalani, 2020, p. 5). Obama not only spoke to the post-racial aspirations of some (not all) Black audiences but for White America, openly problematising yet individualising racial inequality without articulating racism, especially in an overt or uncomfortable way, and (whether deliberately or accidentally) setting himself above and apart from pejorative racialised and classed constructions of Black America.
- 3.
This is, interestingly, in contrast to a number of senior Republican South Asian politicians like former governors of South Carolina and Louisiana respectively, Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal, who converted to Christianity, signifying the strong relationship between Republicanism and Christian ideology in the South.
- 4.
Again, despite the decent size here for the South Asian middle-class sample (312) there are cells with missing counts, so the conclusions drawn here about statistical significance must be taken with caution.
- 5.
A number of the British Indian middle class pre-1947 were instrumental in India’s freedom struggle, such as Dr Sukhsagar Dutta, an active member of the Bristol Borough Labour party and member of the India League (Visram, 2002).
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Saini, R. (2024). British South Asian Political Conservatisms: The Brown Tory. In: Politics, Identity and Belonging Across The British South Asian Middle Classes. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54787-4_6
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