In an age full of nepobaby second-generation politicians posing as ‘outsiders’, new Green Party MSP ‘Q Manivannan’ is the real thing. Indeed, the St Andrew’s postgraduate is so much of an outsider that he doesn’t even hold British citizenship or permanent residency, and is unable to take up paid employment as a condition of his student visa. ‘Q’ was allowed to stand for office last month because the Scottish government – the Wuhan Lab of terrible ideas in UK politics – recently changed the rules allowing foreigners with only limited leave to remain to compete in elections. Although Manivannan faced a probe into his visa, the powers-that-be ruled that being a politician wasn’t a real job. This prevented possibly the funniest outcome of all – the new member of the Scottish Parliament representing his constituents in Edinburgh and Lothians East remotely from Tamil Nadu.
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A ‘transgender Tamil immigrant’, ‘Q’ – born Srivatsan Manivannan – identifies as non-binary and describes himself as ‘passionate about more caring politics rooted in the working class, the queer, and the solidary’. Currently engaged in a research project called ‘Archiving and (Re)imagining Caregiving as Peacebuilding in Third World Social Movements’, at the time of his election he was also crowdfunding £2,000 to pay for his visa, apparently too impoverished to pay for it himself.
