‘I’m British, English and British Asian’, says Rishi Sunak in riposte to racially charged debate over identity
Rishi Sunak has described himself as being “British, English and British Asian” in a riposte to increasing racially charged language used by figures on the right.The UK’s first British Asian prime minister was speaking after his identity was questioned in recent debate sparked by a claim by the podcaster Konstantin Kisin that Sunak was not English because he was a “brown-skinned Hindu”.Suella Braverman, the London-born Reform MP and former home secretary, later appeared to give credence to Kisin’s claims by saying that she was not English and questioning whether others born in the country could necessarily have that identity.More recently, Matthew Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton byelection, refused to disown a claim that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds were not necessarily British.Speaking out for the first time since those interventions, the Southampton-born former Conservative leader said the racism directed at him and his siblings was “seared in his memory” and warned against Britain “slipping back” to a time when racism was more overt.
Sunak was giving evidence to the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, co-chaired by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, which aims to speak to millions of people to try to improve cohesion after the Southport tragedy and riots,“I think there has been – what I describe it as – is a bit more ‘shock jockery’, recently … as people are saying outrageous things to get attention,” said Sunak, when asked if there had been shifting of the “Overton Window”, a term for the range of ideas and language that are deemed acceptable in mainstream debate,“That’s one of my worries about the attention economy, or whatever you want to call it, and how that works now, and how we consume media, is that it rewards people for that kind of provocative, bigoted language, whatever that language might be,And I think that that is just a concern of mine,It’s something that, sadly, we’re seeing a bit more frequently as a result.
”Sunak returned to past comments he has made about how he and his siblings had faced racism growing up in Southampton, adding: “I haven’t a brilliant memory on most things, but that is really seared in my memory, because racism stings in a way that other things don’t.”Referring to Javid, who has also addressed the issue in his recently published memoir describing the racism he experienced in 1970s Rochdale, Sunak said they would agree such experiences were “less common” today.But he added: “There’s always more we can do.And I definitely wouldn’t want us to slip back into a world where racist language was heard regularly on the street, or considered permissible on TV.”The commission is being facilitated by the Together Coalition, founded by Brendan Cox, the husband of the Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered by a far-right extremist.
Sunak, who remains the MP for Richmond and Northallerton in North Yorkshire, said: “We’re all British, and underneath that, or alongside that, you can have lots of different identities that don’t come into conflict with that.Of course you can.“I’m British, I’m British Asian, I’m British Hindu, English.Sotonian – what we call people from Southampton, and an apprentice Yorkshireman.”On immigration, Sunak said that, with hindsight, he wished he had implemented measures to bring down numbers sooner.
On the tensions that spilled over into street violence in 2024, he said it was “evident that something has gone wrong” and that it was made worse by Islamist extremists and the far right, which were “feeding off each other”,It was “a lie” that Britain was a racist country, Sunak said, citing Javid’s career and his own, and adding that his successor as Tory leader is “a Black woman who grew up in Nigeria”,Sunak was speaking after a speech by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, earlier in the week in which he addressed themes including “British values” and warned against allowing migration policy to be exploited “by people who think whiteness is the same thing as Britishness”,
TikTok could be forced to change app’s ‘addictive design’ by European Commission
TikTok could be forced into changes to make the app less addictive to users after the EU indicated the platform had breached the bloc’s digital safety rules.The EU’s executive arm said in a preliminary ruling that the popular app had infringed the Digital Services Act (DSA) due to its “addictive design”.The European Commission said TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide, had not adequately assessed how its design could harm the physical and mental wellbeing of users including children and vulnerable adults.By constantly “rewarding” users with new content, the Chinese-owned platform fuelled constant scrolling and shifted the brains of users into “autopilot mode”, the commission added, which could lead to compulsive behaviour and reduce users’ self-control.The preliminary ruling accused TikTok of ignoring indicators of compulsive use, such as the amount of time children spend on the app at night
Deepfake fraud taking place on an industrial scale, study finds
Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts has said.Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit”, including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams.These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership
Amazon reveals plans to spend $200bn in one year the day after Bezos guts Washington Post
Amazon announced plans to spend $200bn on artificial intelligence and robotics this year, the latest tech giant to vow fresh enormous investments in the artificial intelligence arms race.The news of the investment comes one day after the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced it was cutting approximately a third of employees.Amazon also reported $213bn in revenue on Thursday. The fourth-quarter earnings of the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant came in slightly below Wall Street estimates even as sales and growth surged.Amazon will increase capital spending to $200bn this year from $125bn, CEO Andy Jassy said in a press release
Bitcoin loses half its value in three months amid crypto crunch
Bitcoin’s price sank to $63,000 on Thursday, its lowest level in more than a year, and half its all-time peak of $126,000, reached in October 2025. A months-long dip in cryptocurrency prices has tanked shares of companies that have increasingly invested in bitcoin, exacerbating broader stock market jitters.Bitcoin rode a high during Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency in 2024 and throughout 2025; its price steadily increased as the president made one industry-friendly move after another. Crypto’s largest currency hit $100,000 for the first time in December 2024 and even rose to a record high of $126,210.50 on 6 October, according to Coinbase
‘Orwellian’: Sainsbury’s staff using facial recognition tech eject innocent shopper
A man was ordered to leave a supermarket in London after staff misidentified him using controversial new facial recognition technology.Warren Rajah was told to abandon his shopping and leave the local store he has been using for a number of years after an “Orwellian” error in a Sainsbury’s in Elephant and Castle, London.He said supermarket staff were unable to explain why he was being told to leave, and would only direct him to a QR code leading to the website of the firm Facewatch, which the retailer has hired to run facial recognition in some of its stores. He said when he contacted Facewatch, he was told to send in a picture of himself and a photograph of his passport before the firm confirmed it had no record of him on its database.“One of the reasons I was angry was because I shouldn’t have to prove I am innocent,” Rajah said
How cryptocurrency’s second largest coin missed out on the industry’s boom
US crypto developer Danny Ryan submitted a proposal in November 2024 to Vitalik Buterin, the founder and symbolic leader of Ethereum, a prominent blockchain powering the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency. Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum’s de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift.Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too. The EF could now “exercise a stronger voice” without compromising its ethos of decentralization, Ryan said – and he was open to leading that charge if appointed as the foundation’s new executive director.Ryan told the Guardian that he could see how political tides were changing “overnight”, which informed his proposal
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