Record number of Indian faces likely in UK’s House of Commons
LONDON: As political parties select candidates for the June 8 mid-term election, indications are that the next cohort of Indian-origin MPs will include some new faces and a higher number of MPs than the record 10 in the outgoing House of Commons.
The 10 Indian-origin MPs included five each from Labour and Conservative parties. In 2015, the Conservative party had fielded 17 candidates, while Labour had put up 14.
In all, there were a record 59 candidates from the community with influence in several constituencies.
As senior Labour MP Virendra Sharma launched his campaign in Ealing Southall on Wednesday, new faces such as Labour’s Rohit Dasgupta (East Hampshire) and Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham Edgbaston) were confirmed as candidates.
Gill and Labour’s Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) will seek to be the first Sikhs to be elected to the House of Commons. The 10 sitting MPs will contest again, while several individuals joined parties amid trends that the Indian community was moving away from Labour to the Conservatives in recent polls.
The new entrants (not candidates) include Ankit Love (son of Panthers Party leader Bhim Singh) who joined the Liberal Democrats, and former BBC journalist Pankaj Dubey, who joined Labour. Love, who contested the London mayoral election in 2016, told Hindustan Times that he has joined the Liberal Democrats to help the party stop what he calls “disastrous Brexit”.
KOLKATA BOY GETS LABOUR PARTY TICKET
KOLKATA: Rohit K Dasgupta, who was born and brought up in Kolkata and graduated from Jadavpur University only eight years ago will be the first Bengali to be in the electoral fray in the United Kingdom. Dasgupta, a lecturer at the Loughborough University, London, has been living in the UK for past eight years. “It is a great honour to be fighting a seat for Labour Party in this election and offer a credible alternative to the Tories,” Dasgupta said.
THE 10 SITTING MPS WILL CONTEST AGAIN, WHILE SEVERAL PEOPLE JOINED PARTIES AMID TRENDS THAT INDIAN COMMUNITY WAS MOVING TOWARDS THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY