The Staggers

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Why the Tories are still failing to attract ethnic minority voters

The party acts as if racial discrimination is no longer a problem for BME communities.

By Samuel Kasumu Published 29 August 2012 14:06

David Cameron takes a photo with an Olympic volunteer. Photograph: Getty Images.

David Cameron takes a photo with Olympic volunteer Anita Akuwudike on her Blackberry phone. Photograph: Getty Images.

It is well-known that the Conservative Party has to work a little harder than its rivals when attempting to attract voters from certain parts of the UK population. With an unreformed boundary system meaning that the Tories also need to attract more votes than Labour to win a parliamentary majority, it would be wholly inappropriate and unwise for the party to ignore Britain's growing ethnic minority communities.

This challenge is historical, with its origins dating back to the period following the arrival of the Empire Windrush. The party chose to adopt an aggressive approach to dealing with new migrants who arrived to help rebuild post-war Britain. Back then, anyone with noticeably dark skin was classified as either a "New Commonwealth Migrant" or simply as "coloured". Labour would go on to become the party of choice for black and Asian Britons and would benefit from a monopoly of votes from ethnic minority groups for generations.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, would suffer by being the party that was in government during major riots in two generations. Parents like my own would remember how they were treated during Thatcher's premiership and instinctively support Labour as a result. So history would demonstrate an element of fairness when asking why the Tories attracted just 16% of the BME vote at the last election. But the present state of play offers an opportunity to do much better. Under the last Labour government, the gap between the rich and the poor widened, crime significantly increased within inner city areas, and black youth unemployment rose to 50%. Labour has lost its status as the only party for ethnic minority communities, and the Bradford West by-election was a clear indication that voters are looking for something different.

In my new book Winning the Race, I talk about how I joined the Conservative Party aged 20 during my time as vice president of the Union of Brunel Students. This was my own attempt to find a new type of politics and an alternative to Labour. Yet we as a party have continued to ignore the fact that racial inequality is still an obstacle faced by many people in the UK. Instead, we speak as if ideals are realities when it comes to racial discrimination. Yesterday we celebrated the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. He presented an ideal but never stopped dealing with the issues of the present. Inequalities still existed then, and still exist today.

Politicians in the UK have failed to effectively engage ethnic minority communities, but the future will belong to the party that succeeds in doing so. There is a genuine desire among the Conservatives to make progress in this area, and the fact that we went from having just two ethnic minority MPs to having 11 is a sign of progress under David Cameron. As a Conservative, it is my hope that there is a centre-right alternative when it comes to tackling inequalities. But, for now, that remains to be seen.

Samuel Kasumu is the founder of social enterprise Elevation Networks and the author of Winning the Race.

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13 comments

Fri, 2012-08-31 14:36 — Muddy (not verified)

It seems to me that the 'ethnics' do not care for their countries of origin, having achieved independence they would rather hang on to the UK's skirts than work to achieve improvements in their home countries that they demand here.

Fri, 2012-08-31 00:49 — tory troll (not verified)

The ethnic minorities are not attracted to toryism: fair enough. I must confess I am not particularly attracted to the ethnic minorities.

Fri, 2012-08-31 00:35 — Davidaslindsay (not verified)

It is the Conservative Party that is the fully functioning British political vehicle of the Far Left, of Islamism, and of South Asian communalism.

The entire Socialist Workers’ Party faction of Respect in Tower Hamlets not long ago defected to the Conservative Party after having fallen out with the Islamists. Johanna Kaschke, a longstanding Respect and Communist Party figure, left the Labour Party in 2007 after having failed to secure its nomination for the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, and ended that year by joining the Conservative Party, in which she has rapidly become a well-connected activist. Around the country, local factions of various Asian and other origins routinely defect from Labour or other things to the Conservatives on frankly communal grounds, and are always welcomed with open arms.

David Cameron’s vehicles toured Ealing Southall blasting out in Asian languages that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh festivals would be made public holidays under his party. His “Quality of Life Commission” (don’t laugh, it’s real) then proposed giving the power to decide these things to “local community leaders”. What else will those figures be given the power to decide in return for filling in every postal voting form in their households in the Bullingdon Boys’ interest, and making sure that all their mates did likewise? To the statelets thus created – little Caliphates, little Hindutvas, little Khalistans, and so on – people minded to live in such places will flock from the ends of the earth, entrenching the situation forever.

With some fanfare, the Conservative Party recently welcomed John Marek, who was fiercely anti-monarchist and anti-hunting while Labour MP for Wrexham, and who went on to become the founder and only ever Leader of Forward Wales, a Welsh separatist, Welsh-speaking supremacist, economically Hard Left, unyieldingly Politically Correct, Tommy Sheridan-endorsed, RMT-funded party which was only dissolved in January 2010, and which continues to be named as Marek’s party, despite his having become an enthusiastic Conservative, on the list of former MPs who continue to hold House of Commons passes.

Will David Cameron also recruit, if he has not already done so, Marek’s fellow founder-members of Forward Wales: Ron Davies, one of the very few former Cabinet Ministers without a seat in either House, and a noted campaigner both against shooting and for the abolition of the monarchy; Graeme Beard, a former Plaid Cymru councillor in Caerphilly; and Klaus Armstrong-Braun, who in his time on Flintshire County Council was the only Green Party member ever elected at county level in Wales?

Cameron has already signed up Mohammad Asghar, a Member of the Welsh Assembly who has moved seamlessly from Plaid Cymru. Rehman Chishti, now a rising star as MP for Gillingham and Rainham, was Francis Maude’s Labour opponent in 2005 while working for Benazir Bhutto, whom he assisted from 1991 until her assassination in 2007 in her leadership of a party the motto of which includes both “Islam is our Faith” and “Socialism is our Economy”; he was still doing that job when he defected to the Conservative Party in 2006 and became an aide to Maude as its Chairman.

And so on, and on, and on.

They obviously find the 1980s Radical Right’s company as congenial as they find each other’s, with David Cameron and 80 per cent of his party’s MPs as members of Conservative Friends of Israel, which is not even a front for the thoroughly racist Israeli Government, since that would require some degree of secrecy, or at least of discretion, about the treasonable nature of the relationship. Liam Fox has had to resign as Secretary of State for, of all things, Defence because the Israeli Far Right and its nominally American fellow-travellers had, treasonably, been running a parallel foreign policy out of his office and through its subsidiary fake charity, now deregistered.

Blue is the new Red-Brown.

Thu, 2012-08-30 22:32 — Eddy S (not verified)

It depends what sort of ethnic minority one is. If your Indian or Chinese chances are you are richer and better educated than whites. If you are Muslim or black chances are you are not, perhaps in a generation it will be the whites who may be less wealthy and educated than all ethnic minorities.

Thu, 2012-08-30 15:57 — Joey McJoe Joe (not verified)

Aren't the Conservatives, for the most part, well known for voting against equality of rights with regards to homosexuality?
Perhaps you can add equality with sexuality to the list of things that the Conservative party needs to examine/update. (on the plus side, it seems the MPs vote against it regardless of what race or ethnic group the gay people are in)

Thu, 2012-08-30 15:04 — Trotwood (not verified)

Conservatives do not appeal to ethnic minorities because a vast number of them are racist, at least the ones I know are.

Thu, 2012-08-30 04:11 — PoshTosh (not verified)

I just love idea of the Scandinavian minorities taking control once again.

Wed, 2012-08-29 23:00 — Gareth

"Under the last Labour government, the gap between the rich and the poor widened..."

This may be true, but it happened in spite of the determined effort by Labour to redistribute wealth from rich to poor through means such as the minimum wage and tax credits. Without this, the gap would have been even larger, and I have seen little evidence that the current Conservative party wishes to go further in this regard: Osborne's reduction of the highest income tax band during the last Budget, as well as his rebuttal of Nick Clegg's Wealth Tax suggest that his priorities remain with the rich.

You shouldn't assume that the Tories will automatically benefit from a growing prosperity gap, unless your party can present some credible policies that will go further to help the poor. Without these, all the engagement that (Lord Ashcroft's) money can buy will be of little electoral benefit.