Oh dear you really do want to try to project Sunak onto your family and your family onto Sunak.
As Udayana appreciates, migrants are all the same - everyone's story is different, including yours and Sunak's.
So let's nail some of the points.
You knew someone who migrated by plane in the 90s - so what, air travel was commonplace in the 90s. In the 60s air travel was prohibitively expensive to most people. So unless you had serious money you travelled by sea. So the notion that she flew suggests that she was either stupidly profligate with her money or that there was some considerable financial resource available to her. Note that there is hardly any mention of her husband (Sunak's grandfather) - he was an engineer (a prestigious and well paid job and presumably a graduate) and then became a tax official (also a prestigious and well paid job) who became senior enough to be awarded an MBE in the early 80s (note in those days goes for civil servants was largely awarded due to seniority of position). So I suspect there was plenty of money around, sufficient to fund an advantageous move for an upper middle class couple from one country to another. As often happens, one member of the couple goes ahead to sort matters, while the other remains behind with the children and then join later. Indeed my family did this in a much smaller distance (from Liverpool to London in the 70s).
And no mention of the other side of the family - the family described by Ashcroft as upper class and educated over generations - the grandfather who was deciding which separate continent to send some of his 6 children for their A-level and university education and which separate continent to send the rest of them (noting that in no case did the 6 kids study even in the continent where they lived). And the great grandfather who was in a very senior position within the Raj etc etc.
Yup - what we have his is an educated, upper class and advantaged family over many generations who would, presumably have significant financial resource slopping around to be able even to contemplate sending kids overseas to study or to be sending kids to eye waveringly expensive private schools.
And on to the parents and Rishi so through the 90s, apparently on just a NHS GP's salary they were funding three kids through private school, at least one boarding at a school with fees of £46k in today's money. Also affording a 6 bedroom house and (new revelation) when Sunak graduated they gave him over £100k to buy a flat in Chelsea - at that time £100k was more than the average house was worth - think about it. Despite having been funding these kids through private school they had enough money slopping around have been able to buy a house more expensive than the average outright, with cash had they chosen. And all this before they bought and set up the chemist's company.
Nope Sunak isn't from humble beginnings (whether that makes it like you VG or not I cannot say) - he has come from a highly advantaged, educated upper middle class background that extends back over generations. One that is internationalist in background, happy to relocate globally for a better life, safe in the knowledge that their educations, and probably their networks, will see them very comfortably in their new countries. For generations they have sat near the top of the social tree and although they might find it a little tricky to rise towards the top as they move they are comfortable that their resources (education, financial, networks) will get them there in short time.
Oh and on the football shirt - if you are spending a few thousand pounds on a 18th birthday present (as you seem to idly dismiss it) that is yet another hall mark of privilege - most people don't have the funds to be able to spend a few thousand pounds on a birthday present, even a significant one. A few hundred pounds maybe, but a few thousand - nope. That you find that seemingly just normal suggests that perhaps your upbringing was somewhat more privileged than your are implying.
And on that final point - you haven't told us details of your private schooling - again noting Udayana's astute point that not all private schools are the same. Did you and you brother attend as day pupils or as boarders (Sunak was a boarder)? Did you get bursaries of scholarships (Sunak didn't)? Was you brother attending Harrow School as a boarder which had to be paid in full by your parents (this would be the equivalent)?
Oh dear - all this waffle from you without answering the basic question I asked. Where in the video does it say Sunak's grandmother was penniless? Can you answer that question first since that seems to be what you have a bee in your bonnet about.
The only thing the video seems to say is that Sunak's grandmother came to England, found a job, and saved enough money to bring her husband and children over after a year- she seems a very capable woman to me. And not that different from many other immigrants who found a job and saved to pay for the rest of the family to join them. If the grandfather had a good job maybe he brought some savings too, though unless it was in GBP the exchange rate would have meant it was worth a lot less once converted.
If you are mistaken about that point about the video saying she was penniless, you don't have much credibility for the rest of your unevidenced assertions. I suggest you provide some links to your assertions so we can look into where else you might be mistaken.
For example, your assertion that in the 90s, only Sunak's father was bringing in any income to pay for private school. What is your evidence that his mother's pharmacy business was not doing well and bringing in income? Or that they did not use the equity in their house to fund fees or the money they loaned Rishi Sunak towards his first flat? Or if the pharmacy business was doing well because his mother was working long hours in it, his mother's Ltd could have loaned the money to Rishi Sunak. I assume he took out a mortgage to cover the rest of the purchase price. And as far as I can tell Sunak has not pretended that his parents did not work hard to fund these things or that he did not enjoy these privileges.
I am not sure why you seem to have a problem with people coming to the UK and working hard to earn money to pay for a private school education or to buy property?
The 2nd property - the 3 bedroom flat my parents bought in the 1990s near Kensington Olympia in London - it was bought in my name and my brother's name, with a mortgage. Buying your children property is just a thing Asian professionals spend their money on, rather than other stuff middle class people spend their money on. It doesn't negate our relatively modest upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s. Of course we weren't ever penniless - my parents worked and saved and owned a 3 bed semi in London after only being in the UK for 3 years, and having arrived in the UK in 1971 with pretty much nothing (£6 maybe) with my dad being a student for 1 of those years.
Of course I transferred the Kensington Olympia flat ownership back to my parents in 2001 once they had paid off the mortgage on it. I got to live in it rent free for at least 6 or 7 years in the 1990s before I moved out. I was unable to transfer it back to my parents earlier as they could not get a mortgage for a term longer than 10 years in their name, because of their age and because my mother had retired, so the interest rates would have been really high for such a mortgage, so we had to wait until the mortgage was paid off to be able to change the ownership back to my parents. My parents wanted my brother and me to have their 2nd property but we wanted our parents to have it as we figured we could earn our own way and buy our own properties, given the privileges we had already been given - such as a private school education, a stable home life, a 4 bed detached house in the suburbs to grow up in etc. Plus if they were going to retire they would need a place to live and a source of income such as the rent from a 2nd property. Sure, this is a relatively privileged position for my parents to be in compared to others, but that's where hard work and sacrifice and saving money and luck can get you in Britain even if you arrive with nothing except brains and qualifications.
Presumably the Sunak children attended private schools from age 11 or did they go later? So possibly early 1990s onwards? And what were the fees of the private schools at the time they attended during the 90s - no point talking about the cost today, given all the articles about how over the past 25 years private school fees have risen by 550 per cent. But consumer prices in that time are up only 200 per cent.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-charts-that-shows-how-private-school-fees-have-exploded-a7023056.htmlRegarding the football shirt - we don't know whether it cost anything at all yet. I was running a charity sports event and a young guy who coaches under-privileged youth football in East London said if I wanted to run an auction to raise funds he could get me a signed professional football team shirt from his contacts. He didn't know me at all but his brother-in-law knew me and the guy also drove all the way across London to coach football as part of my charity event, without ever having met me.
We ran an American Auction to raise funds at another charity event and someone (not wealthy) donated a cricket bat signed by the Sri Lankan cricket team. If you take being able to get these signed souvenirs as signs of privilege in terms of wealth, you are mistaken. It's just down to luck or being friendly and getting to know people.
My point has not been to project my story onto Sunak, but to show you that your apparent ignorance of the lives of immigrants based on your posts here, means that your assumptions about Sunak could be incorrect. If you have a link to evidence about how his parents funded their assets and expenses, feel free to post it. But until you do, your assumptions could be way off the mark.
For a start, I'm still waiting to find out how you came up with the assumption that Sunak's grandmother arrived in the UK penniless. If as has been reported by the media, she sold her jewellery to buy a plane ticket, then we can assume she had some money when she arrived. If she chose to travel to the UK by plane (as my parents did) yes we can assume she had a middle class life-style in Tanzania. My parents had a middle class lifestyle in Sri Lanka. My dad was working as an engineer and my mum was working as a doctor in Sri Lanka. There just wasn't much of a future for my dad in Sri Lanka, as the government increasingly adopted racist and socialist economic policies under the Sinhalese nationalist left-wing government of the time. It still does not change the fact that my parents started out life in the UK with hardly any money and managed to buy a house in London within 3 years.
And what year did Sunak's grandfather get an MBE? MBEs really aren't all that difficult to get - they give out loads these days and to people from all different walks of life. I don't know when he got his MBE or what the process was of getting it when he was given an MBE. My husband has one. But many of my children's friends from school live in far nicer homes than us, they drive newer cars than us, they buy their children far more stuff than we buy our children - tickets to festivals, clothes, new iphones etc. You can't tell much from an MBE.
Oh and just to add, my husband's great grandfather was knighted by the British ie he was a Sir, when it was Ceylon - before independence. So according to you that signifies generations of privileged upper-middle class lifestyles in Sri Lanka. That didn't mean anything for my husband's and his siblings' lifestyle when they came to the UK. When I met my husband in 1992, his lifestyle was on par with my parents' lifestyle in 1974. So maybe stop making so many assumptions without linking it to some kind of evidence if you want to be taken seriously.
ETA - I just made this edit PD
