Sunak Leaves D-Day Ceremonies
The PM got this calculation very wrong.
Rishi Sunak wants us to believe that his monumental error in leaving D-Day commemorations early in Normandy, is a misjudgement.
Since the blunder he gave an unconvincing interview and further since then, it’s indeed been All Quiet on the PM front. He has not given an interview this weekend.
And like you I am also thinking, a few days on, how and why it came to be that a British Prime Minister actually missed a D-Day Ceremony.
And, so in the absence of any tangible explanation, I am coming up with one.
Could it be that as a maths loving child of immigrants, he just does not know enough about history and D-Day to care?
Sunak is roughly my age, and by my own experiences, back in the day in Britain, literally every Asian child I knew was taking maths and sciences at A’Level, aiming for medicine or medical sciences.
Things may have changed now, but certainly back then, there was a lack of prominence given to Asians taking arts subjects at schools.
I have no idea what A’Levels Sunak did at Winchester College, but I am going to take a punt that he did a number based A’ Level. Of course he did. How else is he so good on the numbers?
In fact I will credit him this that in the ITV Leaders debate, even I came away thinking, yeah, he is a Tory but he also looks like a walking spreadsheet and that is compelling for families who need to make ends meet.
Does what he studied at school matter anyway?
Having studied history in school at A’Level in the 90s myself, I had a deep dive into European and British history. This then led me to having to research the lived experiences of World War veterans in my teens. And I was lucky enough to live next door to one.
My neighbour, Stanley Samuel and now deceased, was a war veteran. When I went round to his house one day looking for information for a History project, I specifically recall him telling me that the things he saw in World War II were things he will NEVER be able to describe.
I told him about what I had read about the D-Day landings and he nodded his head to all as confirmation.
But the thing is, I did not need a commentary from Stan about the war (and I did not get much). All the commentary I needed came in the fact that his ham pink face went white and he grimaced when I mentioned the D-Day landings.
Fast forward to when the Brexit campaign began, as a Remainer, I found myself at odds with many, and alarmingly Asians too, having to try to recall to some the importance of European cohesion, in light of what I knew about European history.
People are of course entitled to vote and believe in Brexit and did so for a host of reasons, but it did feel to me that a fair few wealthy British Asian science and maths-y people that I knew did not seem to know much about the wars at all, and they did not seem to know enough.
Europe to them was a holiday destination, an opportunity to make a fat career in finance at an EU regulated bank, and it was not a strategic geopolitical space with a spectrum of cultures upon whose cohesion determines world peace.
We do know that Sunak studied politics at university as part of his Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree. Didn’t that cover the wars?
Meanwhile and to be expected, growing up, my own white British friends had a greater awareness of the World Wars, no matter what their subject background. When I was living in Japan, an English friend who came to stay in the early 2000s told me how upset her grandparents were with her decision to visit Japan. Her grandfather had served in World War II and had suffered at the hands of the Japanese.
Ah yes. The grandparent connection. Now this is very strong.
In my own family, on my husband’s side, World War II is a topic. My children’s great grandfather was a South African national and prisoner of war. He didn’t see his son, my father in law, for the first few years of his life as a result of being at war. We credit my father in law’s slight figure as that of one who was raised on rations. World War II is a thing in the family and the grandparent connection is a strong factor in passing down these war histories.
Migrant children, like Sunak meanwhile, growing up in the 80’s may not necessarily have that grandparent connection.
But I do not want to generalise, as many British Asians and migrants have family who served in the world wars.
I feel though that as Asians some of us do fall short on understanding our own ancestral part in those wars. When someone called me up about the D-Day Landings and the general emotion conjured up by the ending of World War II, I added to the conversation as to how India too, played its part.
India, its location, its food and its people were used to prop up the war effort. And the more you read about it, you realise just how pivotal India’s resources and people were utilised and depleted for the war effort.
And so, when I see Sunak leaving the D-Day ceremonies, and as we are all none the wiser as to exactly why he left the ceremonies early (he hasn't shown us his workings out), I am afraid I do not see a man just making a simple error of judgement that can be forgotten about.
Instead I wonder if I see a highly successful child of migrants whose success hinges upon an upbringing being shut off to things - seemingly emotionally cut off from his own culture’s part in the wars, and never fully immersed in the culture his parents adopted to understand the enormous importance of the sacrifice of those living today.
Why else would you decide to leave these ceremonies early?
Work hard, make money and get on with it. Look forward.
Isn’t that the mantra many middle aged second generation migrants grew up with?
Don’t mention Partition let alone look deeper as to how Indian independence was influenced by the end of World War II. Don’t mention racism. Don’t read the books by British Asians such as Sathnam Sanghera exploring Empire. Treat the World Wars and your whole raison d’etre of being in the UK as something not related to Empire.
Study numbers and do not ask emotional questions. Sunak is a walking example of how this mantra is a winner.
But now, in unprecedented election questioning since the blunder, aimed at whether Sunak, weeks from an election, intends to stay in position as PM (from the likes of Trevor Phillips), perhaps the mantra doesn’t pay you that full dividend?
Will he really leave before we go to the polls over this? Is this what has tripped him up?
When people in migrant communities, in particular South Asian, are still telling their friends that their offspring's relatives are studying law, when in fact they are studying History or English or Drama, it hits home that attitudes still haven’t changed.
We need to value history and the Arts more.
Sunak’s early departure of D-Day commemorations and his treatment of it as a line item that could be scratched off the balance sheet, is a stark reminder to us parents to take the time to talk about history, other people’s histories and our histories to our children, not to avoid the criticism Sunak is receiving, not just to avoid mistakes, but to also enable histories to be heard and passed down for their own feeling of belonging, wherever they are.
I hope this Substack informs your outlook!