London: Even as the average member of British parliament following last week’s general elections is still a man aged 51, and is most likely to have previously worked in politics, a statistical analysis of the composition of Westminster reveals that things might finally be changing in British politics.
While the undisputed single biggest shift in the new intake is the dramatic increase in Scottish National Party MPs at Westminster, equality campaigners are celebrating record numbers of women with almost one in three MPs now female.
And it was a good night all round for ethnic minority MPs last Thursday, with 41 entering parliament, up from 27 in 2010. Of the 2010 intake, 25 retained their seats and were joined by 16 newcomers (eight for Labour, seven for the Tories, and one with the SNP). The results have also returned a parliament with slightly fewer MPs who have been to fee-paying schools or Oxford or Cambridge universities.
A record number of 10 Indian-origin candidates - including Keith Vaz, Priti Patel and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s son-in-law Rishi Sunak - were elected to the British parliament on Friday.
Prominent Labour candidates like long-serving MPs Vaz (Leicester East) and Virendra Sharma (Ealing Southall) have won their respective seats, as they have a special connect with a largely Indian-origin electorate in their constituencies. Priti Patel also retained her Witham seat with a 41.5 per cent majority, winning 27,123 seats. Labour’s Valerie Vaz retained her Walsall South seat while Seema Malhotra won a her south west London seat comfortably.
Safe seat
Sunak, the son-in-law of Infosys’ Narayana Murthy, was contesting from the Tory safe seat of Richmond (Yorks) in the north of England and bagged 27,744 votes. “I grew up watching my parents serve our local community with dedication. My dad is a National Health Service family GP and my mum ran her own local chemist shop,” he said.
Other Indian-origin winners include Alok Sharma (Reading West) and Shailesh Vara (Cambridgeshire Northwest), another junior minister who has been an MP since 2005; first-timer Suella Fernandes (Fareham) for the Conservatives and a Labour novice Lisa Nandy (Wigan). The overall tally of 10 Indian-origin MPs in the British parliament breaks the previous 2010 general election record of eight.
There were also 10 MPs of Pakistani origin elected to the new parliament. Former Pakistani TV actress Tasmina Shaikh, representing the Scottish National Party, was elected as an MP with 26,620 votes. Yasmin Qureshi of the Labour Party was elected with 20,520 votes from Bolton South East. Labour Party’s Naz Shah and Imran Hussain also won.
Naz Shah, a 41-year-old disability rights campaigner who beat out her left-wing rival George Galloway, has an incredible life story of her own. Sadiq Khan of the Labour Party was elected from Tooting with 25,263 votes. And Manchester’s Shabana Mehmood and Khalid Mehmood, Weldone’s Conservative candidate Nusrat Ghani, Gillingham and Rainham’s Conservative candidate Rehman Chishti and Bromsgrove’s Conservative candidate Sajid Javed were also elected.
