THERE are ways in which Kemi Badenoch’s advent as Britain’s opposition leader, at the helm of the Conservative Party, can be seen as a remarkable progression. A black Tory leader is decidedly an advance for a party that has long relied on anti-immigrant sentiment as a core value for its electoral support.

The Labour Party has consistently boasted more ethnically diverse MPs since 1987, and by 2019 more than half of its parliamentary representation consisted of women. But it has never had a female leader, and its front bench has been dominated by white men in both government and opposition. The Conservatives, by contrast, can lay claim to three female prime ministers, an Asian PM (via Kenya and Tanzania), and currently an opposition leader who was born in Wimbledon but grew up in Nigeria, and considers herself a first-generation immigrant.

As a student in England more than 40 years ago, I struggled to understand why any Briton from an ethnic background would be attracted to the Tories. The Labour alternative was problematic in many ways, but did it not point to a relatively brighter future for ethnic minorities and the working class?

I was gobsmacked in the early 1980s when a purported Pakistani community leader in Oxford — a........

© Dawn