His Mp Father Received Death Threats From Nazis and Had to Fight Corruption Allegations . . . Yet Anas Sarwar Still Wants to Swap Dentistry for Politics.Will He Become Scotland's First Asian Msp? Peter Ross Meets the 23-Year-Old with Holyrood in His Sights

Sunday Herald › August 08, 2006

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Summary

ANAS Sarwar, who hopes to become Scotland's first Asian MSP, lives in a quiet, leafy, affluent neighbourhood on the south side of Glasgow, the peace disturbed only by birdsong, the tick of a cooling Mercedes engine, and the pock of tennis balls being struck on a nearby court. This large villa is, in fact, the home of his father Mohammad Sarwar, the millionaire businessman turned Labour politician, who, in 1997, became the first Muslim to be elected to the House of Commons.

The youngest of four children, Sarwar is 23 and has no immediate plans to move out of what is clearly a cushy pad. The last months have been eventful enough; he graduated, started working as a dentist (he stocks both Heat and The Economist in his waiting room), married his girlfriend Furheen, and is seeking election to Holyrood in 2007 as Labour's leading list candidate for Glasgow. He is precocious and warmly Gatsbyish with his pink shirt, silver cufflinks and neat hair. His mother, Perveen, pops in with tea and KitKats, and, thus fuelled, we sit down in the lounge to talk.

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Extract

His Mp Father Received Death Threats From Nazis and Had to Fight Corruption Allegations . . . Yet Anas Sarwar Still Wants to Swap Dentistry for Politics.Will He Become Scotland's First Asian Msp? Peter Ross Meets the 23-Year-Old with Holyrood in His Sights

My first question is a tease - "Scotland has too few dentists and arguably too many MSPs, so why are you adding to that problem?" - but he takes it on. "That's a fair enough assessment, " he says. "We definitely have a chronic shortage of dentists, but we also have a chronic shortage of ethnic minority MSPs and MPs and young people who are active in politics."

This is true. According to the 2001 census, ethnic minorities make up 2-per cent of the total population of Scotland, around 100,000 people, and of those 42,6...

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