“Physics tells us you can’t unscramble eggs That entropy’s a universal fate This firm law of thermodynamics begs The question: Is it always much too late
To untangle the knots of yesterday The die is cast the mould of love is set The second law of drift comes into play I guess the third law spells the word ‘regret’!” From Beynami Tsunami by Bachchoo
Sadiq Khan was sworn in as London’s mayor at Southwark Cathedral as part of the Muslim mayor’s intention to announce his inter-faith-friendship credentials. His first act as mayor was to attend a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial in Barnet, London.
Mr Khan is trying hard. During the last weeks of his mayoral campaign, his Labour Party stood accused of being riddled with anti-Semitic personnel and ideology. Naz Shah, an MP from Bradford, and Ken Livingstone, London’s last Labour mayor, a member of the party’s national executive and a friend and associate of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, were both suspended from the party for allegedly anti-Semitic remarks. Ms Shah has apologised repeatedly for these, though Mr Livingstone sticks to his guns saying he was being historically accurate in claiming Hitler initially supported a Zionist settlement of Jews away from Europe. He insists he has nothing to apologise for even though his remarks threatened to negatively affect if not destabilise Mr Khan’s campaign.
Mr Khan verbally distanced himself from Mr Livingstone, won the mayoralty with an unprecedented mandate and proceeded to prove his credentials as an anti-anti-Semite with his appearance in Barnet.
Politics is, as is being made abundantly clear in the American primary races, a balance between drama and policy. The mayor of London is a prominent if not a plenipotentiary position. He is in charge of transport in and through London, but has to operate within the structures of ownership and spending set by Parliament and government ministers. He is in charge of appointing the chief of the Metropolitan Police and of determining London’s policing priorities, but these powers too are subject to the amount of money the home office gives to employ policemen and women and subject also to the powers that Parliament gives the police. Mr Khan can’t, for instance, arm all policemen with guns, in US style, and institute a shoot-to-kill policy against terrorists.
He was photographed on his first day of going to work standing at a city bus stop near his home and then changing to the Underground to get to the mayoral offices. He used the photo opportunity to demonstrate that he was someone who needed, as millions of Londoners do, to take public transport to work and announced he would be bringing in a low bus-and-tube fare for work commuters. Popular policy dramatically announced!
Mr Khan’s manifesto promised to build 50,000 new homes during his term. He announced an intention to strengthen the police force and to work with the intelligence agencies to eliminate terrorism.
The best policies of mayors, and even of black Presidents of the US, are subject to political, democratic and vested-interested checks and balances and may not come to pass precisely as promised. The election of Mr Khan, as with that of Barack Obama to the globally-significant office, is symbolic of a broader development. The dramatic significance of both outstrips the material developments which any candidate would promise and any mayor execute.
Mr Khan is not Britain’s first or even 25th elected Asian or Muslim politician. He was, till he became mayor, the MP for Tooting. MPs such as Ms Shah of Bradford and Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, relied in their 2015 campaigns on large contingents of, in Ms Shah’s case, Mirpuris and, in Ms Ali’s, Bangladeshis to elect them. The last mayor of Tower Hamlets in London was one Lutfur Rahman who was removed from his post for corruption, played heavily on Muslim and Bangladeshi factors to get elected making his campaign, with endorsements from mullahs, resemble rural Sylheti politics.
An important minister in the governing Tory Party is Sajid Javid. One of the leading lights in the House of Lords is Tory Baroness Warsi. Mr Khan, Mr Javid and Ms Warsi are all Muslims and all of them claim to be the offspring of immigrants who worked as bus drivers. (Which prompted one of my friends to ask: “How many Pakistani bus drivers are there in Britain anyway ”)
Though Mr Khan’s parliamentary constituency of Tooting has a large ethnic population which contributed to his election to Parliament, one can’t say the same about the whole of London. Undoubtedly, the “ethnic factor” played a part, but the ethnicity of London is itself extremely diverse and consists of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indian Punjabis — Hindu and Sikh, Gujaratis, a minority of other Indian regionals, Africans from diverse nations, West Indians, Chinese, a considerable population of Poles and other Eastern Europeans. A factor of “immigrant identification” with Mr Khan may have come into play, especially as his chief opponent was posh, bumbling rich-boy Zac Goldsmith. Even so, the white majority of voters in London weren’t put off by the fact that Mr Khan is Muslim. Yet, despite the fact that the liberal-minded would have voted for him on the grounds that his religion shouldn’t be an electoral factor, it very much is.
The significance of a Muslim, rather than a Sikh or Hindu or Afro-West-Indian, being elected mayor is crucial. The Muslim communities of Britain, those that elected Ms Shah and Ms Ali and scores of other communities like them, have clustered themselves in isolated enclaves within Britain. From these communities, in Luton, Bradford, Dewsbury and other ex-mill-and-now-mosque towns, the isolation emerges in the form of opinions and allegiances which are vastly out of step with contemporary Britain: among other opinions, a support for severe Sharia law overruling British law, homophobia, the idea that women are secondary and should be subservient, even a small minority asserting support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and its death cult.
Mr Khan’s election, with his devout Islam devoid of such opinions and influences, is the symbolic antidote to this apartheid. Let’s hope it can evolve into more than symbolism.
