I’ll vote Labour, but it angers me that the party could

With Starmer’s election chances so high, would it really hurt to show more sympathy to the migrants who help this country to thrive?

I have never voted Conservative. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a degree of delight when Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Not because I expected anything new, or that I agreed with him politically, but because I never imagined such a thing might happen in my lifetime.

Perhaps it’s a sign of where Britain is at that having a British Asian leader is hardly remarked upon. But there wasn’t an Indian family I knew that wasn’t privately thrilled when Sunak took power in 2022, even if only for a moment. We had arrived. I could allow my son to dream of holding the highest public office one day – a dream I never dared to have for myself when I was growing up in London in the 1990s, when the number of ethnic minority MPs was in single digits.

Angela Saini is a science writer and teaches at MIT. Her latest book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell prize

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