IN the course of an election debate, Anas Sarwar, leader of the Labour party in Scotland, challenged Reform’s stance on dealing with the existential crisis Britain is experiencing after years of mass indiscriminate immigration, implying that the party’s deportation policy would entail forcible removal of long-established families such as his own.
‘Where do you want my children to go?’ he demanded, shaking his finger at his opponent, the implication being that his family are so rootedly Scottish that any other country would be too alien to permit their comfortable assimilation into its way of life.
I hardly think that the Sarwars would be likely to face summary removal in the event of a Reform victory. In fact, I doubt whether a party which stands foreign nationals as candidates in local elections offers much of a threat to any but the most egregious offenders breaking into our country by small boat and lorry.
It is laughable to suggest that Mr Sarwar and his wife and children, all long-term British subjects born and raised in Scotland, would share the same fate as illegal immigrants and dual-national thugs and murderers, or with the wholly unassimilated tribal colonies which have turned parts of our cities into no-go areas for the native population while depleting the nation’s coffers as they send untaxed remittances back to their countries of origin. Nevertheless, it is possible that even upstanding Scottish Pakistanis may entertain somewhat conflicted loyalties when it comes to the crunch.
Recently a video clip of a speech which Mr Sarwar made in 2022 at a dinner to mark the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s independence circulated on the internet. In it, the Labour leader appears to be urging his audience to seize the reins of power in Scotland. He himself claims that he was simply advocating for the increased representation of South Asians in public and political life, and that the offending words must be read in context: so let’s do just that.
In the part of the speech not included in the video clip in question, Mr Sarwar says this: ‘I also listened to the assistant chief constable, and I agree with him when he said we are Scots first and Pakistanis second. I actually don’t think we should refer to ourselves as new Scots any more; and after all these years and all these generations, and after all our contributions, if we aren’t just Scots by now, then I think there’s a serious issue.’
As a former NHS dentist, married to an NHS dentist, he goes on to point out the part played by Pakistanis during covid, not only in the NHS, but in ensuring the distribution of essential supplies. ‘The Pakistani community,’ he says, ‘literally kept this country going in our darkest and most difficult moments.’
Do you see a slight problem here? First, he says that he and his audience are all ‘just Scots’; he then negates this assertion, by stating that it was Pakistanis who kept the country going during covid. Surely, if well-integrated Pakistanis really are ‘just Scots’, it was ‘just Scots’, not Pakistanis, who kept the country going. He can’t have it both ways.
The paragraph which follows – the one circulated in the video clip – highlights this sense of separateness.
‘Some may think,’ he says, ‘when they see Pakistanis in politics, and see Pakistanis in different political parties . . . that somehow that demonstrates a division in Pakistani communities. Actually I think the opposite. I think that it is the source of our main strength that we now have Pakistanis represented in every mainstream political party in Scotland and across the UK. Because we will only truly gain real power not if we just have one Pakistani sitting in council chambers and in parliaments, but actually have more Pakistanis and South Asians sitting in the corridors of power, making the decisions.
‘And that’s where I’ll end tonight, is to say that change is coming, and the days when our South Asian community are viewed as a vote bank or a curry bank are well and truly gone. The days where South Asian communities get to lead political parties and get to lead countries is now upon us; the days when South Asian communities get to decide not just what schools our children go to but what they are taught in those schools is also coming; the days when our South Asian communities get to decide not just what shifts they do in our National Health Service, but also how we operate and run and rebuild our National Health Service, is coming; and the days when our South Asian community don’t talk about the statistics of how many of them live in poverty, but how to get to work together to eradicate poverty, that’s what’s coming. That’s the mission of Scotland’s Pakistani community, and the UK Pakistani community. That’s the Scots that we truly are.’
What kind of Scots, exactly? And why, if all are now equally Scottish, is it so necessary to put people of Pakistani descent in positions of power?
It is concerning that Mr Sawar sees the involvement of Pakistanis in all the main parties as a ‘strength’, apparently setting ethnicity above politics in the pursuit of power. How does he square his group-preference, his natural urge to promote and advantage the particular ‘community’ to which he belongs – a community, moreover, defined strictly by race – with a commitment to the nation as a whole? Surely, a true Scot thinks of himself not just firstly as a Scot, but as a Scot pure and simple, with no ‘secondly’ to skew his politics towards the advancement of some other nationality. It is disingenuous to suggest that this inevitable bias does not exist.
The fact is – and it does not impinge in any way on his acceptance and security as a well-integrated British citizen – that Mr Sawar is not ‘just a Scot’. He is a British Pakistani whose roots in Scotland stretch back no further than half a century. His wife is also a British Pakistani. Should their children and their descendants marry ethnic Scots, the family will, over the generations, be absorbed seamlessly into the native population (though if replacement of that population by a mix of immigration and emigration continues at the present rate, there may soon be pitifully few ethnic Scots left for them to marry.)
As previously stated, families like Mr Sarwar’s have no need to fear deportation, regardless of their ethnicity. All the same, the suggestion of potential homelessness in his cry of, ‘Where do you want my children to go?’ is ludicrous. If the worst came to the worst, the answer would obviously be ‘Pakistan’, where their grandfather, Chaudhry Mohammad Sawar, is already comfortably installed, having renounced the British citizenship which he acquired post-immigration in 1976 when he returned to his homeland in 2013 to serve as Governor of Punjab.
With such a connection, the Sawars may seem to be a special case: but in fact no Pakistani is in danger of becoming stateless, should he or she face deportation. Pakistan grants citizenship to those of Pakistani descent; and under the Pakistan Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (2022) even those members of the diaspora who had previously renounced their citizenship can now reclaim it.
The people who should really be crying, ‘Where can our children go?’ are not longstanding and well-entrenched legal immigrants like Mr Sawar, but the native peoples of these islands, who, failing strict measures aimed at redressing the present demographic disaster, are likely to become impotent minorities in their own countries within a few decades.
