STOCKTON: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Friday he was hurt and angry that a supporter of Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party had been recorded making a racial slur about him, saying it was too important for him not to speak out.

Sunak, Britain’s first ethnic-minority prime minister, was responding to comments broadcast by Channel 4 News, by a man named Andrew Parker calling Sunak a “… Paki” — a British racial slur for people of South Asian descent.

Sunak, currently campaigning for the July 4 national election that his Conservative Party is tipped to lose after 14 years in power, was born in the southern English port city of Southampton to Hindu parents of Punjabi-Indian descent.

“My two daughters have to see and hear Reform people who campaign for Nigel Farage calling me an effing Paki. It hurts and it makes me angry, and I think he has some questions to answer,” Sunak told reporters.

“I don’t repeat those words lightly, I do so deliberately because this is too important not to call out clearly for what it is,” he added.

Farage initially said he was dismayed by the language used when the comments were first broadcast on Thursday. But on Friday he suggested, without providing evidence, that Parker was an actor involved in “a political setup” to undermine Reform during the election.

Asked during a television debate when he would accept some responsibility, Farage said: “I am not going to apologise […] it is a setup, a deliberate attempt to smear us.”

Published in Dawn, June 29th, 2024