Expertise trumps ethnicity as eco crisis looms: This time, only MPs, not full party, chose Sunak

Rashmee Roshan Lall

It says a lot about the scale of Britain’s current troubles that the history-making aspect of Rishi Sunak’s ascent to 10 Downing Street minister was mentioned much less than its effect on gilt yields soon after he won his Conservative Party’s vote.
That Sunak, a third-generation immigrant of Indian origin and a practising Hindu, has become Britain’s first nonwhite prime minister — and the youngest since 1812 — is being acknowledged as remarkable. But much less than what one economist described as the precious “dullness dividend” that might come from “a vaguely competent, boring even, prime minister leading a stable government with economic policies that add up.”
With the pound rising, as it became clear Sunak was generally seen by the markets as a safe pair of hands, commentators pounced on the calming effect that the former chancellor might have on the economy.

There is much less chatter than one might expect about the striking symbolism of Sunak’s rise to Britain’s top political job, both in visual terms and in the new axis of aspiration and inspiration it sets for ethnic minorities in the country. That too on so symbolically significant a day as Diwali.
All the colour about the glass ceiling Sunak has broken as the first of 57 prime ministers not to be white is now mainly coming from the sub-continent. The airwaves are replete with vignettes from India, with smiling Indians crowing about “reverse colonisation” and the “brightest Diwali in years”. For now, the conversation in Britain’s Conservative Party and among most people is not about Sunak’s ethnicity but his expertise.
That would be admirably meritocratic had Sunak not been thwarted in his quest for party leadership and the prime ministership less than eight weeks ago.

Read on at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com on October 25, 2022.