THE recent Rewind Queens tour was an absolute shocker. The concerts had already been postponed from 2024 due to Alka Yagnik’s severe illness, yet organisers likely knew she wouldn’t be able to perform in the January shows in London and Birmingham – but only announced her absence days before.
Kavita Krishnamurthy, Anuradha Paudwal, and Alisha Chinai headlined instead, but the sound quality in London was so poor that even these seasoned performers sounded like amateurs. The backing singers were equally dreadful. This was evident in reels shared on social media, which were nothing short of cringe-worthy.
Kavita Krishnamurthy
AIMLESS RELEASE
DESPITE earning positive reviews at major film festivals, releasing Superboys of Malegaon in cinemas on February 28 feels like a futile exercise. The comedydrama, based on real-life events, has already been confirmed for release on Amazon Prime shortly after, reducing the incentive for a theatrical run.
Adding to the challenge, there is little buzz around the film, and its cast lacks the box office pull needed to draw audiences to cinemas.
Superboys of Malegaon
JAI HO FOR VISH
POPULAR Bollywood busker Vish surprised music fans in central London by performing the Oscar-winning song Jai Ho alongside its original singer, Tanvi Shah. The duo delighted passers-by, who joined in singing the Slumdog Millionaire hit.
This isn’t the first time Vish has been joined by celebrities while busking – he has previously performed with artists like Indian rapper Badshah.
Tanvi Shah and Vish
PAUL’S UNIQUE APPEAL
POPULAR stand-up star Paul Chowdhry embarks on his biggest-ever UK tour in March, with multiple venues already sold out in advance.
A pioneer who paved the way for British Asian comedians on the live circuit, his greatest strength lies in his raw authenticity.
This is perhaps why he attracts one of the most multicultural crowds in comedy today. In contrast, many other high-profile British Asian comedians have reshaped themselves for mainstream television, becoming little more than tick-box exercises – resulting in far fewer audience members from ethnic backgrounds at their shows.
Paul, however, has bridged that divide and remained fearless, making his new show, Englandia, one to watch. Look out for my in-depth interview with him later this month.
Paul Chowdhry
STUNNING UK SOUNDS
THE South Asian Sounds music festival returns to the Southbank Centre in London from May 15-18. British artists performing include multi-instrumentalist Baluji Shrivastav, singer Jaz Dhami, and sitar virtuoso Roopa Panesar. Audiences can also celebrate Gujarat’s folk traditions with Osman Mir & Third Culture Collective. Pakistan’s Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Group will headline a major show at the festival.
Roopa Panesar
WHY ATTACK ON SAIF RAISES SUSPICIONS
CELEBRITY couple Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan will be hoping the storm surrounding the stabbing incident at their home dies down.
What began as global shock over Saif being attacked and hospitalised has now turned into a case riddled with unanswered questions, fuelling suspicions and multiple conspiracy theories.
Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the case is the Mumbai police repeatedly arresting suspects who bear no resemblance to the alleged attacker seen on CCTV.
One wrongly accused individual has even claimed the ordeal has ruined his life. Adding to the mystery, reports suggest the prime suspect’s fingerprints do not match those found on the weapon.
Given how celebrity cases often unfold, I doubt this investigation will ever reach a definitive conclusion – there’s clearly something being concealed.
Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan
SONU QUERIES INDIAN AWARDS
SINGER Sonu Nigam has drawn attention to the deep flaws in India’s national honours system. The recently announced 2025 winners list, like in previous years, saw many deserving candidates overlooked in favour of others with far lesser achievements.
Nigam rightly questioned why legendary singers like Alka Yagnik, Shreya Ghoshal, and Sunidhi Chauhan had yet to be recognised, despite their immense contributions to music. He also called for a posthumous honour for the late Kishore Kumar.
Like many, he finds it astonishing that India’s biggest-ever star, Amitabh Bachchan, has yet to receive the country’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna. A quick look at past and current recipients only reinforces how flawed the system has become, with many honourees paling in comparison to the icons who continue to be overlooked.
Sonu Nigam
RICH KID’S FILM FLOPS
IF THERE’S anything worse than nepotistic newcomers from Bollywood dynasties getting lead roles over talented outsiders, it’s when the child of a wealthy family is handed a film debut. That appears to be the case with Veer Pahariya, who made his debut in the recently released Sky Force.
Unsurprisingly, he brought little talent to the flop film. Had an outsider with real screen presence been cast, the movie might have fared better. Instead, Sky Force became a wasted opportunity to introduce much-needed new talent to Hindi cinema. As for Pahariya, this will likely be the peak of his acting careers.
Veer Pahariya
FLOP EPIC WILL FAKE HISTORY
MOST Bollywood period films share one thing in common – they are wildly inaccurate, often to the point of being absurd. In recent years, the rise of extremist right-wing fervour in India has pushed these fictionalised accounts of historical figures even further from the truth.
That is why Chhaava, set for release on February 14, is unlikely to offer much historical accuracy. Instead, it promises exaggerated action sequences and strong undertones of religious bias. With Vicky Kaushal in the lead role, few are expected to watch what seems destined to be an expensive flop.
ROSHNI IS SET TO SHINE
A MAJOR highlight of this year’s Afro Futures Festival, taking place at Rich Mix Centre in London from March 6-9, is Roshni. The acclaimed Sonia Sabri Dance Company presents a breathtaking solo Kathak performance set to a rich soundscape of global music.
Like their previous works, the show promises to deliver an uplifting experience, blending dynamic dance, compelling storytelling, and diverse musical influences. Described as deeply moving and gloriously entertaining, it is one of the festival’s standout performances. Tickets are on sale now.
NAGA MUNCHETTY should feel secretly pleased that after Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, she has become the number one hate figure in the media, especially for white women feature writers who earn less than her £360,000.
Naga apparently gets cross with junior staff who don’t do her toast right – it apparently has to be burnt the way she likes it.
Naga, a presenter on BBC Breakfast, is accused, among other things, of bullying staff. If her critics have their way, she will soon be toast herself.
Last week, following the resignation of Rushanara Ali as a junior housing minister, I drew attention to other Asian women politicians – among them Tulip Siddiq, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Baroness Pola Uddin and Rupa Huq – who have got into trouble for one reason or another.
Is something similar happening in the media?
Samira Ahmed
Apart from Naga, I can think of other Asian women journalists in television or radio who have not seen eye to eye with the employers.
I will come to the others – Mishal Husain, Sangita Myska, Ritula Shah and Lisa Aziz – but Naga first.
Annabel Denham, columnist and deputy comment editor in the Daily Telegraph, had a piece, “It’s not easy to defend Naga Munchetty, but workplace wokery is out of control”, which said: “This generously paid cultural arbiter once called Boris Johnson a ‘useless tosser’, liked disparaging tweets about Robert Jenrick and bizarrely scolded Kemi Badenoch for failing to watch that tendentious Adolescence series – prompting the Tory leader to reply, rather neatly: ‘In the same way that I don’t need to watch Casualty to know what’s going on in the NHS, I don’t need to watch a Netflix drama to understand what’s going on.’
” Her colleague, Liam Kelly, wrote: “Her on-air behaviour has also occasionally caused controversy. She was censured in 2019 for criticising Donald Trump for telling a group of non-white Democrat congresswomen to ‘go back’ to their ‘crime-infested’ countries. ‘Every time I have been told, as a woman of colour, to go back to where I came from, that was embedded in racism,’ she said live on BBC Breakfast, before later adding that she was ‘absolutely furious’ about the US president’s comments.
“The Corporation partially upheld a complaint that her remarks had breached editorial guidelines before Tony Hall, then the directorgeneral, intervened to reverse that decision. Some two years later, Munchetty apologised after liking ‘offensive’ tweets that disparaged Robert Jenrick, then the housing secretary, for being interviewed on Breakfast with a large Union Flag and a portrait of the late Queen behind him.”
Pointing out she tied for 11th place on the BBC’s high pay list, Kelly added: “It is a far cry from her childhood growing up in Streatham, south London. Her Indian mother, Muthu, and Mauritian father, David, moved to Britain in the 1970s and worked as nurses while they brought up Munchetty and her younger sister, Mimi.”
Mishal Husain left the BBC earlier this year for Bloomberg TV after 11 years as a presenter on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme.This was after Andrew Marr was replaced by Laura Kuenssberg as presenter of the Sunday morning politics slot.
Sangita Myska
Last year, LBC removed Sangita Myska as a presenter after she was a little too robust in questioning the Israeli government spokesman, Avi Hyman.
In 2000, Samira Ahmed took the BBC to an employment tribunal, after protesting she was paid £440 for Newswatch, which is shown on the BBC News Channel and BBC Breakfast. But Jeremy Vine was getting £3,000 per episode for the similar BBC One’s Points of View. The tribunal agreed with Samira: “The difference in pay in this case is striking. Jeremy Vine was paid more than six times what the claimant was paid for doing the same work as her.”
In 2023, Ritula Shah left the BBC after 35 years, having been lead presenter of the World Tonight on Radio 4 since 2013. She said she was upset to discover she was being paid tens of thousands of pounds fewer than her male colleagues. She now has a late night slot on Classic FM, but misses the urgency of current affairs: “It’s a really painful episode in my life and I still can’t quite get over it, even though it’s now behind me.”
Liza Aziz, once the glamour girl among TV presenters, joined ITV in 2006 after 10 years with Sky News. But after four years she fell out with ITV West in Bristol after her employers accused her of financial irregularities and she considered taking legal action for race, sex and age discrimination. Lisa left after a settlement was reached.
Each case is different, and I am not taking sides. But Asian women with high profile jobs in the media have to be extra careful about not giving offence. Quite often in order to fit in, they have to buy a bottle of wine to share with their male white colleagues after work. In the workplace culture, they have to go with the flow.
Ritula Shah
Sheela Banerjee, author of What’s in a Name? Friendship, Identity and History in Modern Multicultural Britain, told Eastern Eye a couple years ago when her book came out: “I gave up TV. As a state school educated, nonOxbridge, brown woman, it is hard. There are not that many of us. If you were trying to make documentaries, it was virtually impossible. We’d get shunted off into light entertainment and stuff like that. Which is fine. But that’s not what I wanted to do. And also, it’s just rife with discrimination. That’s the problem. And it’s really stressful. It’s still the same.”
She quoted some diversity figures from television. “The number of black, Asian and minority ethnic directors in factual television in 2018 – not that long ago – was like three per cent. I mean it’s absurd. And most of the productions are in London or Manchester, hugely diverse cities. And most programmes are now made by independent production companies, even for the BBC. If you go on to their websites and then ‘meet the team’ pages, there’s a sea of Hannahs and Lucys and Elsas and Charlottes. It makes me so angry. There are lots of industries that are exactly the same – for example, academia and publishing. But television is still really important because lots of people watch it and get their information from it.”
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HERE’S a list of Asian women politicians who have got into trouble in recent years for one reason or another – Rushanara Ali, Tulip Siddiq, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Baroness Pola Uddin and Rupa Huq.
Is it that they are held to higher standards than others? Or do some allow their greed to get the better of themselves, especially when it comes to expenses?
If there is a lesson, it is that Asian women going into politics have to be like Caesar’s wife. The Latin version is sometimes loosely quoted as Uxorem Caesaris tam suspicione quam crimine carere oportet. The phrase originates from an incident involving Julius Caesar and his wife, Pompeia. When allegations of an affair arose, even though Caesar claimed to know nothing of any wrongdoing, he divorced Pompeia, stating, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” The idiom is used to highlight that those in positions of public trust must be beyond reproach and that their actions, and even the perception of their actions, can have significant consequences.
Rushanara Ali
Rushanara Ali resigned last Thursday (7) as parliamentary under-secretary of state for homelessness and rough sleeping after being “accused of hypocrisy over the way she handled rent increases on a house she owns in east London”. Laura Jackson, one of her former tenants, said she and three others collectively paid £3,300 in rent. Weeks after she and her fellow tenants had left – apparently because the property was going to be sold – “the self-employed restaurant owner said she saw the house re-listed with a rent of around £4,000”.
Rushanara, born in Sylhet on March 14, 1975, and PPE graduate from St John’s College, Oxford, has been a Labour MP since 2010, first for Bethnal Green and Bow, and then, after boundary changes in 2024, for Bethnal Green and Stepney.
Suella Braverman
Her career is damaged as is that of Bangladeshiorigin Tulip Siddiq, who resigned on January 14, 2025, as economic secretary to the treasury. She was targeted by the regime in Dhaka after her aunt, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the country’s prime minister, had to flee to India. Much of the mud thrown at Tulip is probably concocted. What was harder to understand was the way she either owned or rented various properties in London. She remains MP for Hampstead and Highgate where she was successor to the late Glenda Jackson, the double Oscar winning actress. The prime minister’s standards adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, said he had “not identified evidence of improprieties” but it was “regrettable” that Tulip had not been more alert to the “potential reputational risks” of the ties to her aunt. It has to be said the new lot in Dhaka are not an improvement on Hasina.
Baroness Pola Uddin
Goan-origin Sue-Ellen Cassiana (“Suella”) Braverman (née Fernandes) has the distinction of twice having to quit as home secretary. She resigned as home secretary on October 19, 2022, from Liz Truss’s cabinet “following public claims that she had broken the ministerial code by sending a cabinet document using her personal email address. Six days later, she was reinstated as home secretary by Truss’s successor, Rishi Sunak. She was dismissed from her post by Sunak in the November 2023 British cabinet reshuffle.” She then sought vengeance by doing her best to bring down the Sunak government. She will probably join Reform if Nigel Farage promises her the job of home secretary should he win the next election.
Priti Patel resigned as international development secretary on November 8, 2017, amid controversy over her unauthorised meetings with Israeli officials. She was ordered back from an official trip in Africa by Theresa May, then prime minister, and summoned to Downing Street over the row. In her resignation letter, Priti acknowledged her actions “fell below the standards of transparency and openness that I have promoted and advocated”. Priti, born in the UK of Gujarati parents who came from Uganda, has undergone reincarnation as shadow foreign secretary under Kemi Badenoch. One of the Israelis she met in 2017 happened to be Benjamin Netanyahu, now prime minister. Priti is also a strong supporter of Narendra Modi.
Priti Patel
Another Bangladeshi, Baroness Pola Uddin, was suspended in October 2010 following the findings of the parliamentary expenses committee. They found that from 2005 to 2010, Pola, then with Labour, named a flat in Kent as her main residence while living in a housing association property in Wapping. She returned to the Lords in May 2012 after repaying £125,349, the “largest amount of the United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal”.
In May 2023, Rupa Huq, Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton since 2015, was stripped of the party whip after disparaging Ghanaian-origin Kwasi Kwarteng, chancellor under Truss: “He’s superficially, he’s, a black man but again he’s got more in common... he went to Eton, he went to a very expensive prep school, all the way through top schools in the country. If you hear him on the Today programme you wouldn’t know he’s black.”
Rupa and her TV presenter young sister, Konnie – both went to Cambridge University – were born in Britain of parents who came from East Pakistan (Bangladesh after 1971) in 1962.Rupa had her whip restored after five months, apologised for her remarks and indicated she did penance by undertaking “anti-racism and bias training”.
Asian women are to be commended for having the courage to go into politics but they should realise people look up to them as role models. Views in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the newspaper.
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The Cross of Sacrifice and outline of the tennis court at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Kohima
AS THE King and prime minister lead the 80th anniversary commemorations of VJ Day on Friday (15), this may be the last poignant major wartime anniversary where the last few who fought that war can be present.
Everybody knows we won the second world war against Hitler. But how many could confidently explain the complex jigsaw across different theatres of the wider global conflict? The anniversary is a chance too for the rest of us to learn a little more about a history that most people wish they knew better.
Those three short months from May to August between VE Day and VJ Day in 1945 reshaped our modern world. The Potsdam conference rewrote the map of Europe. Britain’s voters dismissed Churchill with a Labour landslide. Atom bombs were dropped, killing 70,000 people instantly in Hiroshima. Historians still debate whether it was a terrible crime or a defensible choice to avoid a land invasion of Japan. Yet the second bomb on Nagasaki, killing 50,000 more, is harder to try to rationalise in utilitarian terms. The shadow of the mushroom clouds add to the solemnity of the VJ Day commemoration. Eight decades on, the focus is on commemorating service and mourning all who suffered from war and dictatorship.
The vast Commonwealth contribution to the war in the east will be one focus of the 80th anniversary commemorations. General Slim’s Fourteenth Army has been called the “forgotten army” which won a “forgotten war” in Burma. It was an enormous multi-national force. Old war movies of the Burma campaign rarely reflected that only a tenth of its soldiers were from Britain, with nine-tenths from India or Africa.
The Indian Army of the second world was the largest volunteer army in history, growing from 195,000 men in 1939 to 2.5 million by 1945, its fledgling air force expanding a hundred-fold from 285 men to 29,000.
The battle of Kohima in May and June 1944 was the turning point of the war in the East. It blocked the Japanese invasion of India from advancing to seize Dimapur, while creating the route into Burma. Kohima even won a surprise victory over D-Day as Britain’s greatest battle at a National Army Museum event a decade ago. The audience found historian Robert Lyman’s argument persuasive that “great things were at stake in a war with the toughest enemy any British army has had to fight”.
It sounds strange, to our modern ears, that Indian soldiers would volunteer for the army of the British imperial power. Yet, the British Indian army’s successful defence of Kohima illustrates why many Indian officers saw the Japanese regime as the more imminent existential threat than a faraway Hitler. So the Indian Army outnumbered – by a 50:1 ratio – the 43,000 rebels who heeded Subhas Chandas Bose’s effort to raise a rebel army for the Germans and Japanese. Indian soldiers won 22 of the 34 Victoria and George Crosses of the Burma campaign. Commonwealth service was honoured despite and alongside the Empire’s entrenched racial hierarchies. General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, said in 1945 that ‘every Indian officer worth his salt today is a nationalist’. Their crucial role in defeating Japan was one final proof that India was as ready for self-government as Canada or Australia.
And ,the plaque honouring those who fought in the Battle of Kohima
On the second anniversary of VJ Day, Jawaharlal Nehru was already declaring India’s independence. The speed with which the British finally quit India left veterans forming the new armies of India and Pakistan struggling to mitigate the bloody tragedy of Partition.
So this shared endeavour in defeating Japan is a crucial bridge in the arc of both British and Indian history, but rarely recognised in either country’s national narrative in the decades after 1945.
As the world wars slip beyond living memory, many anticipate that the meanings of 1945 will fade. Yet we should be ever more proactive – between now and the 2039-2045 centenary of the second world war – in ensuring everybody understands its foundational part in our national story.
It matters that the next generation understand that the armies that fought and won two world wars resemble the Britain of 2025 much more than that of 1945 or 1915 in their ethnic and faith demographics. The scale of the Hindu, Sikh and Muslim contribution to the Commonwealth effort, and joining the dots between wartime service and the post-war arrival of the Windrush are keys to understanding the making of modern Britain. British Future, Eastern Eye and the Royal British Legion will launch an exciting new project this autumn to honour and raise awareness of south Asian service in the world wars.
Let us never duck the controversies of the complex and contested history of empire. But understanding how it shaped the society that we are today should include recognising all of those who contributed to protecting the democratic freedoms that we share today.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
THE headline in the Daily Telegraph read: “Kemi Badenoch: I no longer identify as Nigerian.”
The Tory leader, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, was born in Wimbledon on January 2, 1980. But her parents returned to Nigeria where she grew up until she was 16. She returned to the UK and is now married to Hamish Badenoch and the couple have two daughters and a son.
Speaking on the Rosebud podcast with Gyles Brandreth, she said: “I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s. I don’t identify with it anymore, most of my life has been in the UK and I’ve just never felt the need to. I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really. I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there. But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family, my extended family, I call it.”
Her comments have been widely reported. I would have thought her identity is not unidimensional but a real potpourri – Nigerian (it’s hard not to be since she spent her formative years in Nigeria), British, wife, mother, the first black woman to be Tory party leader and would be prime minister.
It is important not to twist her words or misrepresent her, but she almost appears to be saying: “I am distancing myself from my Nigerian roots. Although I may look like a black woman, inside I am culturally white.”
The question to ask is: why is Kemi Badenoch saying what she is saying?
Is she a little confused and in need of a session with Raj Persaud? Is she to be applauded for asserting, “I’m black and British” (which she could have said but didn’t), or is she scared of Nigel Farage?
Not so long ago, Rishi Sunak said: “Of course I’m English, born here, brought up here, yeah, of course I’m English.”
But he was also happy to light Diwali diyas in Downing Street and visit Hindu temples and didn’t feel the need to say, “I no longer identify as Indian.”
Lord Swraj Paul has long used a mathematical impossibility: “I am 100 per cent British and I am 100 per cent Indian.”
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Demonstrators from Stand Up To Racism challenge a far-right march calling for mass deportations in Manchester last Saturday (2)
SIX days of violent rage last summer finally ended after a call for a racist pogrom where nobody came. That week showed how much small groups of people could shift national narratives.
The violence which flashed across thirty locations saw fewer than 5,000 rioters nationwide. Hundreds came out for clean-up campaigns, sending a different message about what their towns stood for.
The online list hoping to incite violence targeting forty migration centres and law firms was a violent fantasy – yet the fear and panic it generated were real. Around 15,000 people went out to show practical solidarity. But millions more were glad that they did. For one day, the front-pages of the right-wing Daily Mail – “The Night Anti-Hate Marchers Faced Down the Thugs” – and the left-wing Daily Mirror were hard to tell apart.
That brief outbreak of unity feels like a distant memory now. Asylum dominates politics again. The police must contain those seeking to intimidate asylum seekers by facilitating only lawful protests. The anniversary of the counter-protests is marked too by a “Welcome Weekend” to ensure those who support refugees can make their voices heard too.
British Asian views of asylum are not so different from those of the white British. The balance of pretty sympathetic, more sceptical and downright xenophobic views shifts dramatically by age, education and political perspective among Asians as it does among the broader public too. Those who see their own families reflecting the positive contribution of migration to British society can find that a distinction between legal and illegal immigration resonates. Black British views tend to be more sympathetic to asylum seekers. Sharper scepticism about the Home Office was reinforced again by the Windrush scandal.
A wide range of views about immigration numbers, its pressures and gains, and how to make integration work can be found across minority and majority groups. One useful litmus test of a legitimate argument about immigration is whether it can appeal across white, black and Asian Britons – or only speaks to one group.
Politicians constantly emphasise that they recognise ‘legitimate concerns’ about immigration – but a crucial half of the argument has gone missing this summer. Any meaningful description of which arguments and debates are legitimate in a democracy depends on rejecting arguments rooted in violence, xenophobia and racial prejudice. But how often, when a politician talks about recognising legitimate concerns in 2025, is anything said about what needs to be excluded as illegitimate too?
This anniversary of the counter-protests should be a chance to rebalance the argument. It is time to ensure that the legitimate concerns of ethnic minorities in Britain – about a concerted effort to dissolve foundational social norms against racism, and to deny our status as equal citizens – are heard too There is an attempt to mainstream the idea of ‘remigration’ – a far right code for kicking out all of the migrants and ethnic minorities too. The last three years have seen the de facto legalisation of racial abuse in online space. Elon Musk has turned Twitter/X into one of the most powerful amplifiers of racism we have ever seen. Government departments are reluctant to even review whether they should still use, as a key channel of public communication, a site which ethnic minorities can barely use without facing everyday racism from antisemites, racists and open Nazis.
New TV channels appear unwilling to draw a line between political debate and sweeping prejudice too. GB News platformed a guest essay to argue that anti-Muslim prejudice is rational not irrational - and since Islam does not “belong here”, anybody wishing to uphold that faith should leave Britain for a “Muslim country”.
Rupert Lowe is campaigning for negative net migration. He confirmed that he now wants to deport “a large share of legal and settled migrants” so net migration is negative. Yet Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch seems to lack the authority to prevent Tory MPs joining Lowe’s Restore Britain campaign for mass deportations.
Former soldier and TV celebrity Ant Middleton, who was part of Nigel Farage’s Reform delegation to Trump’s inauguration, now proposes banning people from public office until their ancestors have been here for four generations. He would not just make Sadiq Khan and Kemi Badenoch ineligible for office - but even their children too.
These absurd racist fantasies of disenfranchising or deporting Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch and Sadiq Khan will fail but they toxify the experience of public life. British-born minorities do have some birthright, nativist privilege when racist troglodytes reveal their maximalist remigration agenda. It is a bigger challenge to protect asylum seekers from dehumanising rhetoric and action. Our leaders should be able to address the legitimate concerns of minority and majority groups at once. Only those seeking to pander to illegitimate xenophobic views too should fear that it is a zero-sum game. If politicians want to be trusted, they need to address the legitimate concerns of ethnic minorities about keeping racism out of British public life.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.