Rishi Sunak claims that he is ‘living proof that Britain isn’t a racist country’. That’s in connection with the current row over whether or not Lee Anderson MP’s claim that the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is ‘controlled’ by militant Islamists, was ‘Islamophobic’. Khan of course is a British Moslem; Sunak a Hindu of East Asian heritage. Anderson had the Tory ‘whip’ removed from him as a result of his ‘Islamist’ slur against Khan. (He may be off to join an even more right-wing party now.) A couple of days earlier Suella Braverman MP had claimed much the same as Anderson in a Daily Telegraph article, but without mentioning names; which is the reason given by the prime minister for not sanctioning her in the same way. At around the same time another Tory MP, Paul Scully, had to apologise for claiming that there were ‘no-go-areas’ for non-Moslems in London and Birmingham; which is false. – Islamophobia is of course today’s more acceptable equivalent of anti-semitism. There’s a lot of it about; far more, probably, than of genuine Judenhetze. But that’s only my guess.

Back to Rishi Sunak. – He may be right – I hope he is – to say that there’s less racism in Britain than there used to be, and by comparison with certain other countries of the world. But he’s wrong in thinking that his situation today, as the Asian-origin prime minister of a predominantly ‘white’ Britain, is ‘proof’ of that. The fact is that upper-class and wealthy non-Europeans have always been treated far more kindly in Britain than ordinary black or brown folk, even at their posh schools and universities. (Remember that ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is an Old Etonian.) This is undoubtedly true of the British upper classes. David Cannadine’s book, Ornamentalism (2001), illustrates it in the case of the old British Colonial and Indian civil services, showing public school-educated rulers getting along famously, and pretty equally, with African or Indian chiefs and rajas. And remember that the Tories once had a Jewish leader. In all these circumstances, ‘class’ easily trumped ‘race’.

Whether or not this was also true of the more deferential British ‘lower’ classes is hard to say. But in any case it makes Sunak’s experience (Winchester, Stanford, Oxford, rich as Croesus) totally atypical.

[Sources: for Anderson, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13129007/Rishi-Sunak-says-hes-living-proof-Britain-isnt-racist-country-amid-row-suspended-MP-Lee-Andersons-claims-Sadiq-Khan-controlled-Islamists.html; for Braverman, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/26/suella-braverman-condemns-hysterical-row-about-islamophobia/; and for Scully: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68412010.%5D