The rise of UK South Asians in politics: is Scotland’s Humza Yousaf next?
- Humza Yousaf is considered a favourite to win the Scottish National Party leadership contest as First Minister Nicola Sturgeon exits
- If he wins next week, Yousaf would be the first ethnic minority leader of Scotland and the first Muslim leader of a major UK political party
Nearly five months since the UK Conservative Party installed multimillionaire Rishi Sunak as the country’s first prime minister of colour, the Scottish National Party (SNP), the ruling party north of England’s border, could also make history in its leadership race.
If Yousaf beats Finance Secretary Kate Forbes and former junior minister Ash Regan in the contest, he would become the first ethnic minority leader of Scotland and the first Muslim leader of a major UK political party.
Yousaf is well-known in Scotland, having already held the Scottish development, justice, transport portfolios.
He is currently the Scottish health minister. When elected to the Scottish parliament in 2016, Yousaf in a tartan kilt took his oath in both English and Urdu, the official language of Pakistan.
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There were a handful of people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the UK parliament in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then none until 1987 when four were elected for Labour. The number overall rose to 65 in the 2019 general election, about 10 per cent of the House of Commons.
That’s just shy of the approximately 14 per cent of the UK population who identify as ethnic minorities.
Sunak, Britain’s 42-year-old prime minister, is a devout Hindu and the first person of South Asian heritage to lead the UK, the world’s fifth-largest economy.
The most powerful Labour politician of South Asian heritage in the UK is 52-year-old Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. Khan, the son of a Pakistani bus driver and seamstress, made history in 2016 as the first Muslim elected to lead a major Western capital.
Braverman, who is in charge of the UK’s post-Brexit immigration policy, has said Britain faces an “invasion” from people travelling in small boats crossing the English Channel.
London-born Priti Patel, Braverman’s predecessor in the Boris Johnson government, is also of Indian heritage. Patel’s family immigrated to the UK from Uganda in the 1960s before Ugandan dictator Idi Amin started expelling Indians in 1972.
Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss won plaudits for having the most diverse cabinet in UK political history. Truss, who was in power for just 49 days in 2022, nominated seven people of colour for her cabinet.
Before Truss in 2019, Johnson selected six people from ethnic minority backgrounds. They represented 18 per cent of the cabinet, according to equality charity Diversity UK.
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“The Conservative Party has been very strategic about how it uses ethnic minorities,” said Rima Saini, a senior lecturer in sociology at Middlesex University, who is writing a book about South Asians and politics in the UK.
“A lot of them had very middle-class parents and went to the best private schools and then Oxford or Cambridge.
“It’s strategic for the candidates as well because they get in positions of power that wouldn’t have been possible in the Labour Party.”
Historically, Muslims in the UK have tended to align themselves with the Labour Party. Constituencies with large Muslim populations are considered among the party’s safest seats.
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British Hindus have also backed Labour, but support for the Conservative Party has grown as their wealth increased.
British-born Sunak’s parents came to England from colonial Africa in the 1960s. They enrolled him in Winchester College, one of the UK’s top private schools.
He attended Oxford University in the UK and Stanford University in California before starting his career in banking.
Sunak is married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire and is seen as being part of the global financial elite.
A hard-line Brexit supporter, Patel the former home secretary is the local MP for Witham in southeast England, one of the whitest constituencies in the country. According to 2011 census, just over 1,000 of Witham’s 24,000 inhabitants identified as an ethnic minority.
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A majority of voters there voted in 2016 for the UK to leave the European Union.
Meanwhile, Scotland’s leadership race is being closely watched. If he wins next week, Yousaf would lead the third largest party in the UK.
Outgoing leader Sturgeon has backed Yousaf. Sturgeon, who became SNP leader in the wake of a 2014 independence referendum when Scots voted to remain in the UK by a margin of 55 per cent to 45 per cent, said that she lacked the “energy” to carry on.
The UK’s top court ruled in November that Scotland could not hold a second referendum without approval from the British parliament. Yousaf has said he wants to build a “settled, sustained” majority for independence.
The SNP holds 64 of the 129 seats in Edinburgh’s Scottish parliament, and governs in a coalition with the Greens.
As SNP leader, Yousaf will likely face Anas Sarwar, the leader of Scottish Labour in the next general election, which is due by 2025. Sawar’s father is Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar, who became Britain’s first Muslim MP in 1997.
Sawar senior was the Labour MP for Glasgow for 13 years, before stepping down in 2010 to become governor of Punjab in Pakistan twice – first in 2013 and then in 2018 until last year.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
