The New Britain Just Made Its Voice Heard. The Labour Party—and the U.S.—Had Better Listen.

Remember 2016? It surprised the world with the back-to-back racist retrenchments of Brexit and MAGA. Now in 2024—coincidentally another shared election year with America’s most familiar foreigners—the twinning is over. In the U.S., convicted felon Donald Trump is leading the polls while preparing Project 2025. That would essentially install a draconian, theocratic dictator in place of a rapidly deteriorating (and stubborn) guardian of democracy in Joe Biden.

By contrast, steeped in Brexit regret, Brits this week elected Keir Starmer, a human rights lawyer and literal white knight, in a landslide victory for the liberal Labour Party that marked the worst defeat for the conservative Tories in their 190-year history, losing some seats held since the 1800s. The election restored trust in Labour and ended the Tories’ 14-year reign—of five prime ministers, one who resigned just 45 days in. The last of them was Rishi Sunak, the first nonwhite person in the job, now packing his bags. As of Friday morning, Labour has captured 412 seats in Parliament to the Tories’ 121, with the remaining 115 members of Parliament divided among smaller parties and two results outstanding.

Labour is regaining power with an unprecedented mandate to reshape the U.K. in its vision; the headline of Starmer’s victory speech was “change begins now.” Will it?

Sweeping change is coming to London this summer, but the new resident of No. 10 Downing St. deserves less credit than what he is inheriting: a populace adopting an American-style ethos—more mythos in the States these days—that democracy is an ever-radical experiment in equality. That experiment is undergoing a British breakthrough: Starmer’s victory coincides with London—for centuries the hub of history’s largest empire with its requisite colonial villainy—joining the very short list of majority-minority global capitals—Europe’s first!—thanks to the might of Asian Brits. His reign may well be defined by Labour’s relationship with them.

In Britain’s 2021 Census, 46.2 percent of Londoners identified as Asian, Black, mixed, or other, and extrapolating demographic trends, they will cross the majority threshold this summer. (With Dubai’s majority comprised of migrants trapped in what is essentially slave labor and Washington D.C.’s disenfranchised, London’s only true counterpart is Brasilia, where 48.7 percent of residents are mixed race alone.)

Exit polls are still rolling in, but on the eve of the election, 53 percent of nonwhite Brits told YouGov they intended to vote for Labour. The party has been riven by racial tensions, particularly over the Gaza war, but another preelection poll showed that more than twice as many Asian voters (40 percent) thought Labour would improve life as those who thought Labour would make things worse (19 percent).

The historic demographic shift transforming London may not be a political watershed yet. But Londoners are living in the globalized 21^st century heretofore known only to pockets of Los Angeles, New York City, Singapore, Sydney, and Toronto. Otherness is Britain’s newest tradition. Starmer can lean into that truth or be knocked over by it. Canada is projected to become majority-minority by 2036. America is forecast for 2044. There will be plenty of other chances if the U.K. doesn’t get it right.

And there are plenty of reasons to doubt that it will.

Sunak—a devout Hindu who moved into 10 Downing on Diwali—is an anti-immigrant child of immigrants. One of his party’s most controversial plans was to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda. And Starmer is not much more inviting. “Are you two really the best we have got?” an audience member asked them at a town hall debate. Like Sunak, Starmer does not want to rejoin the E.U. When Starmer criticized the Rwanda plan at the debate, Sunak repeatedly asked, “What would you do with them?” Starmer’s uninspiring answer was that he wants to debut a vague Border Security Command focused on enforcement. It’s a bit of the bland leading the bland.

Not much has changed in the government since 2021, when then–Prime Minister Boris Johnson rewrote a supposedly independent report on ethnic and racial disparities to deny institutional racism so flatly that 10 Downing’s highest-ranking Black adviser resigned in disgust. No politician—Labour or Tory—seems to have read a 2019 paper finding that British prosperity was not ruined by immigrants but rather by the government’s welfare austerity plan.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, life is even harsher. Denmark, Italy, and Spain are cracking down on immigration and minority populations. France and Germany prohibit gathering data on race and ethnicity. But a major German survey last year revealed discrimination and racism so endemic that the director of the reporting institute said it “can weaken and threaten democracy.” And a report last year by France’s human rights commission found that 51 percent of the country doesn’t feel “at home” in France anymore—rising to 91 percent among supporters of the far-right National Rally party, which in June elections tilted France the farthest right it’s been since collaborating with Nazi occupiers in World War II. Forty-three percent of the French public blames immigration for that insecurity, rising to 83 percent among National Rally supporters.

But there are signs of change in Britain outside the Labour triumph. Consider the London borough of Newham, where no ethnicity comprises more than 16 percent of the population. Despite being impoverished, Newham is sending schoolchildren to Oxford and the Ivy League and participating in a massive, 10-year study on the mechanics of prosperity. It’s just one example of how London is leading the world in how to be the kind of plurality about which even America only dreams.

The fastest population growth in the U.K.—as it is in the U.S.—is among Asians. Between 2011 and 2021, Asian Brits grew from 4.2 to 5.5 million, accounting in 2021 for 9.3 percent of the national population. For context, Britain’s Black population is 4 percent—barely more than the 3 percent of Brits who are Indian alone. (For comparison, in the States, Asian Americans make up roughly 6 percent of the population.) If British census trends hold, this summer the U.K. becomes 10 percent Asian. In mixed-race data, the 2021 Census also saw 0.8 percent of the country identify as an Asian-White blend, so by some measures, this double-digit threshold was crossed years ago.

The U.K. is crossing a social Rubicon. In its favor, Asian Britain has a superpower beyond demographics or elections: everyday culture. Brits are now a generation beyond the well-worn truth that their nation’s most popular dinner is chicken tikka masala. The Asian reality of British culture is now far more entrenched: London is now the Asian capital of Europe.

Asian Brits win The Great British Baking Show, captain the Tottenham fútbol team, bring home Olympic gold as young as 13, sweep the Booker Prizes, and win BAFTAs at the awards ceremony they co-host. London’s West End is wowing audiences with sold-out stage productions of anime classics like My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, as well as with brash upheavals of orientalist tropes such as Untitled Fuck Miss Saigon Play (which came out of a surge of Asian plays at Edinburgh Fringe Festival). New Asian arts festivals are flourishing, too, from the ESEA Lit Fest of domestic East Asian and Southeast Asian writers to the Muslim International Film Festival.

Taken in all, British pop culture is now anchored in Asianness as much as American pop culture is in Blackness. In both countries, the only thing more persistent than bigotry against minorities is defiance by the marginalized themselves—and a grudging, unacknowledged acceptance by those very bigots of their victims’ vitality.

Starmer must decide whether his government works for or against this new Britain. But even if he adopts the reactionary postures of his predecessor and Britain’s neighbors, he may have no choice but to adapt—or risk political punishment.

Labour’s tenure is likely to rely on how many voters Starmer can retain—as Black voting was long a pillar of Democrats’ successes and now, feeling underserved, threatens to defect. Or consider how Muslim Democrats may tip the U.S. election with voter absenteeism in solidarity with Palestinians. As with the many unspoken similarities between Starmer and Sunak, America’s least popular bipartisanship is that Biden and Trump are near-kindred spirits on immigration, policing, Chinese trade feuds, and Israel–Palestine. Voters have noticed.

I am a Palestinian Brit who lives in America with a green card. I have watched—without the ability to vote anywhere—all three of those countries descend into tribal spirals of anger, hatred, and spite. When you’re a Palestinian immigrant who gets treated as foreign in Brooklyn, London, and the West Bank, you learn to develop a radar to listen for the people who welcome you as you are.

That radar perked up during London mayor Sadiq Khan’s radical embrace of mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. And in 2022 when I queued to pay homage to the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II and was greeted by SWAT officers—not a militarized police force but the Sikh Welfare and Awareness Team. They offered weary, waiting mourners free hot chocolate, coffee, tea, soup, sandwiches, and sweets. And this year, at the Ramadan lights twinkling around Piccadilly Circus alongside the 3,000 meals of a Trafalgar Square iftar.

There is also increased acknowledgment by the broader British public that Asian Brits have long been part of British success, from the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I to the pivotal miners’ strikes in the 1980s. And there is lingering goodwill from 2015, when a knife assailant on London’s subway system had his “This is for Syria” battle cry rebuffed by an onlooker who replied “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv” to global acclaim.

Asian Brits are leading their nation—not by making it more Asian or less British, but by proving that the clash and community of cultural crossroads can be about more than zero-sum antics of pettiness and counterpettiness that tend to dominate “identity politics.” A melting pot can privilege cooperation and validation over domination and submission. London’s future is about how it embraces the zhongyi of it all. The mashallah of it all. The jugaad of it all. The thương of it all. (If you don’t know those words, wait a few years; you will.)

London is certainly no paradise. A massive report last year on London’s police force found it to be systemically bullying, homophobic, racist, sexist, and all-around bigoted—against the public it serves and within its ranks. (A Muslim officer got bacon stuffed in his boots, for example.) There is also recurring Asian-on-Asian violence, chiefly in London’s Chinatown—Europe’s largest—between Hong Kongers and Beijing loyalists. In March, a major donor to Sunak’s party said that Diane Abbott, who in 1987 became the first Black woman elected to Parliament, made him “want to hate all Black women” and that she “should be shot.” Although Sunak himself condemned the remarks, his party kept the donor’s £10 million. And in April, a white Londoner went viral for a racist tirade on the subway in which he said “Listen, this is England, not no fucking foreign cunts like you lot.”

Moreover, diversity in politics is a dangerous idol. Black political power can manifest as Clarence Thomas or Ketanji Brown Jackson. Women can elect a serial womanizer to the highest office in the land. And it’s a dice roll whether clumsy constructs like “the Latino vote” can mean a future of immigrant amnesty or legislation to protect fetal heartbeats. Similarly, Britain’s 14-year Tory reign saw two female prime ministers as well as Sunak. Heterogeneity is not always a winning prospect for progress.

Take New York, please.

In New York City, America’s bastion of multiculturalism, locals squabble about the overrepresentation of Asian students in the city’s elite public high schools (and the consequential underrepresentation of Black and Latino students). They squirm at living next to hotels converted to shelter majority-minority refugee migrants or homeless people. A poll last year of New York City residents found 62 percent agreed with Eric Adams, the city’s second Black mayor, that a migrant influx will “destroy” the city. That’s the current state of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

By contrast, London has unquestionably beaten America at its own multicultural game. Consider this moment a cultural or social Sputnik. Americans have some serious catching up to do.

Asians are not part of Labour’s rise to power; Labour is part of Asians’. The question Britain now faces is one the U.S. has been failing since its inception: Can it be a democracy that actually represents all the people in it, and doesn’t only or best serve white people? Starmer, for all his faults, has said growth “relies on migration.” He can pivot from toxic ideology toward government enabled by and centered upon shared domestic otherness. If he doesn’t, Britain’s ever-growing nonwhite population will have little reason to think much of the Labour Party. For their part, Asian Brits are confident their ascendant power persists with or without the new government’s backing, trusting that the future is the one home where all arrive as migrants.