Nigel Farage’s party is taking heat for a Meta ad it has run as part of the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse by-election. (The incumbent MSP, the SNP’s Christina McKelvie, died from breast cancer in March.) Reform is pushing its candidate, local councillor Ross Lambie, and claims it stands a chance of capturing the seat, which would have been ludicrous not so long ago and is still hard to fathom today. A Reform victory here in Lanarkshire would be a historic upset and would give credence to a series of polls which suggest the party is on course to make gains in next year’s Holyrood elections.
The disputed ad, which ran on Facebook and Instagram, drew a contrast between Reform, which would ‘prioritise the people of Larkhall, Hamilton & Stonehouse’, and Labour’s Scotland leader Anas Sarwar, who ‘has said he will prioritise the Pakistani community’. The ad includes clips from a September 2022 speech Sarwar gave to mark the 75th anniversary of Pakistani independence. In the first clip, he says: ‘Pakistanis need representation in every mainstream political party in Scotland and across the UK.’ In another, he asserts that ‘the days where south Asian communities get to lead political parties and get to lead countries is upon us’.
The difficulty for Reform is that nowhere in that speech or in any of his other public statements does Sarwar undertake to ‘prioritise’ Pakistanis over white Scots or anyone else. Indeed, elsewhere in the 2022 address he rejects the fashionable label ‘New Scots’, saying that after generations of living in Scotland, people of South Asian heritage should refer to themselves as ‘just Scots’. That’s hardly the language of someone living in an ethnic silo.
Sarwar has condemned Reform for what he considers a ‘dogwhistle’ while Nigel Farage has defended the ad and accused Sarwar of practising ‘sectarianism’, and while this is too strong a word to describe the contents of the 2022 speech, there is a little more room for debate on this point. Much as I’ve strained to put a benign construction on it, I struggle with this line: ‘the days when South Asian communities get to decide not just which school our children go to but what they are taught in those schools’. Was it intended as a coded way of talking about sex and relationships education? (I doubt it: Sarwar is a social liberal.) Was it meant to hint at a future in which Pakistani Scots secure state-funded Muslim schools in a similar vein to Catholics? This segment of Sarwar’s address sounds a bit like — what’s the word? — a dogwhistle.
His 2022 remarks also carry a strong flavour of ethno-narcissism. Here is Sarwar’s alternative history of the pandemic:
Let’s think about the pandemic as an example. If it wasn’t for Scotland’s Pakistani community and the UK’s Pakistani community, we wouldn’t have had a National Health Service that was able to treat and save lives, we wouldn’t have had a vaccination scheme that has saved generations, we wouldn’t have had the food distribution and food manufacturing companies across the country, we wouldn’t have had those delivery drivers across the country, we wouldn’t have had those transport workers across the country. Scotland and the UK’s Pakistani community literally kept this country going in our darkest and most difficult moments, and we should never, ever forget.
These achievements are all the more impressive when you consider that Pakistanis make up 1.34 per cent of Scotland’s population. As though to prove just how Scottish his people are, Sarwar has come up with a Wha’s Like Us? tea towel of their accomplishments. While it’s not always objectionable to assign credit along ethnic lines, it does rather cut against Sarwar’s point about Pakistanis being Scots just like everyone else. Either we’re one nation that pulled together to tackle Covid or we’re a smattering of separate nations sharing a landmass and occasionally helping each other out.
The minority headcount game is a trap. While men like Sarwar might use it for what he considers benign purposes, in doing so he gives licence to those who would do the same for reasons he would not like. If it is permissible to tally minorities doing good deeds, it must be permissible to tally the wrong’uns. Overrepresented in NHS staffing numbers and business start-ups? Great. Overrepresented in terror arrests and grooming gangs? Less so. The minority headcount can go the other way too. If a Scottish politician of Pakistani heritage can cite favourably his community’s disproportionate contribution to healthcare, it must also be the case that a Scottish politician of white European origin can point to his community’s disproportionate service to the armed forces. You can’t have your multicultural cake and eat it.
These are mostly philosophical quibbles. On the substance of the charge, that Reform is trying to use Sarwar’s Pakistani heritage against him, the answer is obvious. The ad is plainly an attack on Sarwar’s allegiance, an imputation of dual loyalty that echoes similar accusations against Jews and their relationship to the State of Israel. The implication is that Sarwar prioritises his own ethnic or religious group and while that would be grounds for concern if it were true, I see scant evidence for it. I’ve been observing and documenting Anas Sarwar’s political career from the start. Sometimes I’ve liked what I’ve seen, sometimes I haven’t, but I have never seen anything to suggest that Sarwar gives preferential treatment to Scottish Pakistanis. If Reform has proof to the contrary, it should bring it forward, or accept that its Hamilton ad will be regarded by most as ugly, divisive, stigmatising, and an appeal to the lowest of instincts.
My guess is that Reform knows this, that it released the ad with its incendiary allegation hoping Sarwar would respond, expecting that this would bring more attention to the message. There is a segment of the electorate uncomfortable with Sarwar and looking for reasons not to vote for him. This hit job offers a reassuringly non-racial justification, however specious, and nudges them towards Reform as an alternative destination for their cross. Of course it’s race-baiting, but Anas Sarwar shouldn’t have risen to the bait.
Comments