Preet Kaur Gill: What The Election Of 12 UK Sikh MPs Represents

"As the new Sikh MPs begin their journeys in Parliament, the mark of our progress is no longer just as leaders in our communities but as leaders of the country."

Preet Kaur Gill

August 13, 2024 | 4.5 min. read | Opinion

Three weeks ago, watching a new generation of British Sikh MPs swear into Parliament for the first time made me proud and reflect on the great strides our community has made over the years.

In 2017, I was honoured to make history as the first Sikh woman to ever be elected to Parliament in the UK, alongside my great colleague Tan Dhesi, the first turbaned Sikh MP.

Nearly a century since the Representation of the People Act gave women the right to vote, after a long, hard campaign by suffragettes, including my hero, the Sikh princess Sophia Duleep Singh, it was my honour to carry that baton into a second century of the franchise for women. 

Now, following the 2024 general election, in which Labour achieved a stunning victory for the first time in 19 years, no less than nine new MPs of Sikh descent enter our Parliament. It gives us proportional representation of Sikhs for the first time.

In my community, we used to talk about Canada, which was well ahead of us in Sikh political representation despite their migration coming much later. Now, it finally feels like we have arrived as well.

When I grew up, people like me weren’t on TV. Our stories weren’t told in history books or at school. In fact, we weren’t really represented in British culture at all. Coming of age in the recession-hit Birmingham of the 1980s, you saw the distrust and division between communities spill into the streets. 

I couldn’t have imagined the progress we have made since. 

Whatever your background, it is important that our legislature is slowly coming to look more like the people it serves. Not only is this a powerful symbol of progress, but it also offers an opportunity to break down the barriers to opportunity that hold others like us back. 

My father, the late Daljit Singh Shergill, is why I am in politics today. 

When he came to this country, he was just 15 years old. Things were much more challenging for him than for us now. Getting a job was difficult, and the discrimination he faced was blatant. But one thing Britain gave him was opportunity—the chance at an education so he could change his life. 

Slowly, he and others rooted themselves in their community in the West Midlands. He unionised the workers at his factory to stop BAME workers from having their pay packets stolen. He helped establish Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Smethwick, where I still go to pray to this day. Previously a church, he liked that this was a place of God and always strove to maintain that interfaith ethos. Back then, we couldn’t expect the state to look out for us, so we had to build these institutions for ourselves. Our place of worship was our social welfare institution. 

Brick by brick, that generation laid the foundations for the next.

My father’s strong sense of community and belief in the power of local politics has influenced everything I do. We should never forget what the generations that blazed a trail before us have overcome. Our success is theirs, as much as our own. 

As the new Sikh MPs begin their journeys in Parliament, the mark of our progress is no longer just as leaders in our communities but as leaders of the country. The hard work of progress is never over, but this is a Britain that is a world away from what we lived through in the 1970s and 1980s—something which I only wish my father had lived to see.

This is why it falls to us to continue their work on other issues, like the Sikh ethnic tick box campaign, tackling Anti-Sikh hate, and championing various human rights causes.

I want my daughters to inherit our diverse, multicultural Britain—defined by our values of hard work, community, live and let live, and fair play. A country where they—indeed anyone—can achieve what they want to, held back by nothing but their own talent and hard work. Our Parliament is the democratic representation of that ideal, and no tiny racist minority will ever take that away.

I know that right now, many in our community are worried. In the past week, far-right mobs have taken to Britain’s streets, and for many Sikhs my age, these scenes bring back uncomfortable memories of the racism and violence we witnessed in our youth. These groups do not seem to need an excuse to cause havoc. But what they have in common is the ability to stoke unrest, cause destruction, and strike fear into minority communities like ours.

But they are the minority: the law-abiding majority are nothing but appalled by them and their lawlessness. 

Their week in the news will pass, and they will face justice for their crimes. I say to those Sikhs who rightly worry about the targeting of their communities to remember these destructive forces don't represent Britain. We do. 

Only a month ago, communities as diverse as Huddersfield to Loughborough voted for a Sikh to be their voice in Parliament for the first time. The forces of racial hatred and division won't win because, in a sense, they have already lost. They do not speak for the Britain I know and love. 

Now that we have 12 Sikh voices in Parliament, working together across lines of faith, ethnicity, and even politics to serve our communities and speak for everyone we represent, it gives me new hope for that better Britain we must continually renew and rebuild.

Preet Kaur Gill is a British Labour politician serving as an MP for Birmingham Edgbaston since 2017. 

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