\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>hey are nursing their cups of tea on opposing sides of the table, and sit on opposing sides of the party political divide, but Gurinder Singh Josan and Kris Hopkins find common cause when it comes to the rise of populism, 1970s-style racism and community division \u2013 and finding ways to resist it.<\/p>\n Josan, 53, is a Labour MP; Hopkins, 62, a former Tory MP. It\u2019s bracing how different they are: different politics, different pasts, different manners, different modes of expression, everything is different, but on this issue at least they have ended up under the same banner<\/p>\n Both are trustees of Hope Unlimited Charitable Trust, one of the Guardian 2025 appeal\u2019s five partner charities. The appeal is raising funds for practical grassroots voluntary projects that build hope, tolerance and trust as an antidote to division, hatred and despair.<\/p>\n Josan\u2019s interest was sparked as a student at Royal Holloway, University of London in the 1990s. He was in the Labour club, and a member of the far-right British National party (BNP) <\/strong><\/em>had just started at the university as a fellow student. \u201cThat was a major thing,\u201d says Josan. \u201cThe UK representative of the Ku Klux Klan also lived in Egham, the university town.\u201d<\/p>\n Josan became deeply embedded in Labour politics as a councillor in Sandwell in the West Midlands from the early 2000s. In 2024, he was elected MP for the newly created constituency of Smethwick. He has been Hope Unlimited\u2019s chair of trustees formore than 10 years, and oversaw its recent revamp.<\/p>\n Hopkins\u2019spath to Hope Unlimited came via an altogether different route. He served in the army, became a Tory MP in the coalition government in 2010, and was a minister for local government before losing his seat in 2017, since which time he has been a special adviser and a political consultant gun-for-hire.<\/p>\n His first encounter with racist extremism came 50 years ago. \u201cI\u2019d be 12 years of age, sat at the stop for the 702 Braithwaite bus, and there was me and a young Pakistani-heritage guy, and a group of white lads just abusing him. I\u2019ll be honest, I didn\u2019t even know what racism was. But the instinct sort of stepped in to say, \u2018fuck off or I\u2019ll smack you in the face\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Hopkins was a member of Bradford council from 1998, the year after he joined the Conservative party. Like Josan, he believes passionately in the power of communities to resist the politics of division and hatred. They came by that belief, even while remaining loyal to their respective parties, by seeing what happens when people feel let down by politics.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen mainstream parties stop doing what they should be doing,\u201d Josan says, referring to the surge of the BNP in the mid-2000s, \u201cstop representing the community, stop engaging, leave a vacuum, that makes it easy for populists to walk in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got to create environments where people can develop relationships, understand and respect each other,\u201d Hopkins says. \u201cParts of Bradford are predominantly Pakistani heritage. You go to the Worth Valley, where I live, it\u2019s predominantly white, and there\u2019s very little interaction between the two.\u201d<\/p>\n Hope Unlimited gives out grants to community projects, \u201ca little hub on the estate,\u201d as Josan describes them: \u201cSomewhere young people can get together, employment support can be provided, they might be running a food bank there, none of that can happen unless that facility exists. Everybody\u2019s struggling, and if that organisation goes, people end up with the dead end of nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n If those places don\u2019t exist , there\u2019s nowhere to congregate in a crisis. Hopkins remembers 7\/7, a devastating time for Bradford, \u201cperpetrators from not too far away, people from all communities were frightened. Hope Not Hate [the anti-racism group] brought together an event, maybe 10,000-strong, the police, the council, the NHS, the university, the third sector, but also, regular people. I wanted to go home and cuddle my daughter. People recognised that we had to go to one place. We wanted reassurance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou saw it in Southport [in 2024] \u201d Josan adds, \u201cthe community came together very quickly, standing up and saying, \u2018we\u2019re not having this, we\u2019re not going to let this divide us\u2019. I genuinely believe that people are generally good.\u201d<\/p>\n Keeping the faith involves an element of tact: Josan and Hopkins are resolute about accepting different views. \u201cDiversity comes in lots of different ways,\u201d Josan says, \u201cwhen I see people put flags on lamp-posts, I don\u2019t automatically assume, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re racist\u2019. My constituency office has the union flag flying outside all year round, except St George\u2019s Day, when we take it off for a St George\u2019s flag. Black Country day, we put up the Black Country flag. We can let these symbols divide us, or we can let them bring us together.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPoliticians have a responsibility to address the reasons why people are angry,\u201d Hopkins says, \u201cBut what we shouldn\u2019t be doing is giving away our values to people who have become angry. I go back to my party, and say, \u2018you\u2019ve got to represent everybody. You\u2019ve got to look at the needs of people who aren\u2019t throwing things\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Josan sometimes asks at Labour party meetings, who is a school governor? Who volunteers? Who is a trustee? By the time he has finished, everyone has their hand up. \u201cOur communities are full of people who want to do the best for the people around them,\u201d says Josan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They are nursing their cups of tea on opposing sides of the table, and sit on opposing sides of the party political divide, but Gurinder Singh Josan and Kris Hopkins find common cause when it comes to the rise of populism, 1970s-style racism and community division \u2013 and finding ways to resist it. Josan, 53,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41224,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1558,947,15619,15673,134,4669,3677],"class_list":{"0":"post-41223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-bringing","9":"tag-communities","10":"tag-extory","11":"tag-hatred","12":"tag-labour","13":"tag-society","14":"tag-united"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}