Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has spoken of the “guilt” he feels as his children have to experience attacks against him.
Mr Sarwar grew up as the son of a politician – the UK’s first Muslim MP Muhammad Sarwar – and told journalists on Monday he had grown to normalise the racist attacks levelled against his family.
In the campaign for the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, Mr Sarwar was the subject of an attack ad from Reform condemned as “racist” by the party’s opponents.
The ad featured a 2020 speech where Mr Sarwar encouraged more people from a south Asian background to enter politics, but Reform accused him of “prioritising” Pakistani people.
Nigel Farage, speaking in Aberdeen on Monday, doubled down on the attack, saying the speech was “sectarian in nature”.
Asked how his family deals with racist attacks levelled at him throughout his career, the Scottish Labour leader told journalists in Hamilton: “To be honest, it only motivates me and drives me, and makes me want to work even harder.
“I think what gives me a bit more perspective is there were similar kinds of attacks, not identical, but similar kinds of attacks when I was growing up and my father was trying to be a politician, when he was trying to get elected as the country’s first Muslim MP, and there was threats, there was abuse, there was violence at that time.
“I think that probably has added resilience for me, and therefore it’s water off a duck’s back.
“I think the challenge is, where I feel a wee bit of guilt and where I feel a wee bit of trepidation, is the impact it has on my kids.”
When his father sat as an MP between 1997 and 2010, Mr Sarwar said there were “things that I accepted as normal that weren’t normal” and his children will have to do the same.
He added: “I’m doing it for them, in the sense that I genuinely fear about what the future of Scotland is unless we get some fundamental change.”
