The Daily Telegraph tried its’ best to spoil Ed Miliband’s festive day with the Christmas Eve headline: “Labour’s crucial ethnic minority vote set to collapse.”
This was based on British Election Study figures showing ‘identification’ with political parties by ethnicity. It came up with the astonishing finding that Labour support within the Indian community had plummeted an astonishing two-thirds in just four short years.
That would be account for completely unprecedented slump in support for any political party from any sizable section of the electorate. Indians are the largest non-white ethnic group in Britain, so if these findings are true – and I don’t believe them to be completely accurate as I explain below – it would suggest that this community alone could cost Labour dozens of seats.
There is no doubt the Telegraph report is attention grabbing. The trouble is the sheer size of the drop make the figures truly unbelievable and calls into question the validity of the whole report. Yes there has been a steady shift by BAME communities away from Labour over past elections, but the smart money was on Labour arresting this decline in 2015 or even, temporarily at least, bucking the trend as a result of BAME communities disproportionately baring the greatest burden of austerity cuts.
It is true that Indians, traditionally the most Conservative supporting of all BAME communities, have been relatively insulated from the effects of the recession and austerity cuts. This is due to a combination of greater self-employment rates and more employment in the private sector, which has been growing in the gradual recovery while the public sector continues to shrink.
A report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on the effects of the recession found that in employment Indians are only just behind white workers, and Labour Force data I discovered earlier this year indicates that Indians came out of the recession relatively unscathed while some other ethnic minorities, particularly Africans and Caribbeans, suffered.
However the recession was biting before 2010 when, according to research by the Runnymede Trust research 61% of Indians voted Labour against 24% for the Conservatives. It is difficult to believe that the economic recovery under the coalition would lead to a dramatic two-thirds fall in Labour support.
And aside from Labour’s generally dismal performance and image over the past few years Labour has not insulted or upset the Indian community specifically. There have been no Labour figures who made any racist comments about them or their faiths. There were no major defections, and community media like the Eastern Eye newspaper (which I used to work for) remain generally supportive of Labour. Sunrise Radio (another former employer of myself) has long leaned to the Right but has very little political content and has not changed its’ tune, literally and metaphorically, in recent times. Quite simply nothing to explain the British Election Study (BES) predictions of Armageddon for Labour.
A small fall in Labour support would be expected, in line with the trend over past elections, but nothing to indicate such a seismic shift. The Conservatives have certainly been attempting to woo the Indian community, and David Cameron and George Osborne have been visiting temples and Gurdwara’s in the UK and in India while promoting trade links with India. But this must surely be counteracted to an extent by Tory efforts to restrict student visa from India and elsewhere, and continuing clampdowns on visas generally as well as extra scrutiny on marriages. Labour have been far more sympathetic in all these areas.
The sketchy nature of ethnicity voting studies make them unreliable and that casts doubt on the BES findings that Indian support for Labour has crashed in four years. In particular, failure to take into account the geographical variations in Indian political allegiance and socio-economic factors can seriously distort results out of all proportion.
The Runnymede Trust reported higher Indian support for the Tories in 2010 (24%) with the most Tory votes coming from East Africans (Uganda and Kenya) and Hindus, while Sikhs remained more stubbornly within Labour’s camp. However when you consider that the majority of East African Asians in Leicester vote Labour, it leads to more doubt over the way the BES study was conducted.
Some Hindu communities have been significantly Conservative-leaning for a very long time, which explains why Harrow in north London keeps returning Tory MPs in seats that are in the top third for a non-white population.
Indians are the largest ethnic minority in 175 constituencies in England and Wales but many of these are seats have a low overall BAME population. A more realistic measurement is that they are the largest ethnic minority in 34 of the 168 marginal seats where the BAME population is larger than the majority of the sitting MP, which I identified in the Operation Black Vote ‘Power of the Black Vote’ report. In short, Indians are the most powerful ethnic minority in general elections. As a community they also make both Labour and Conservative ‘safe seats’ safe by lending support to the incumbent.
Indians are also among the most likely to vote, with 74% voting in 2010 compared to a national average of 65%. The 74% needs to be measured against the slightly lower voter registration rate of BAME communities, but even taking this into account it is almost certain that Indian voters are more likely to vote than white voters.
There is also a regional pattern to seats with large Indian populations who play a very significant role in elections; with Labour relying on their support in seats like Blackburn, Bolton, Coventry and more ‘inner city’ areas like Brent and Ealing, while the Conservatives appear to benefit more from Indian votes in places like Chipping Barnet and Harrow. What this appears to suggest is that it is difficult to make overall judgments about Indian voting patterns, and that the differences may be down to socio-economic status.
If it is the case that economically successful Indian families living in prosperous leafy suburbs are more Conservative and that Indians in poorer neighbourhoods and in the north-west and midlands support Labour, factoring socio-economic status into ethnicity voting studies may hold the key to unraveling the true picture.
It also begs the question of how samples for such studies are collected in the first place. Surveying by ethnicity is problematic because it often requires making value judgments about which areas to survey. Picking Harrow over neighbouring Brent, say, could throw up completely different results. Which is why all such studies need to be taken with a pinch of salt until geographic and socio-economic data are overlaid. And that means more detailed and time-consuming studies which require more money to complete.
In addition, the Telegraph article should have come with a health warning in that affinity with political parties does not equate precisely with either voting intentions or actual votes cast. But it is not without use. Identification is still a useful guide to how strong political allegiances are, and therefore which sections of the voting public are more susceptible to changing their allegiance.
Lord Ashcroft’s Degrees of Separation report found that 55% of Black (African and Caribbean) voters declared their identification with Labour – against 4% for the Conservatives and 2% for the Lib Dems. But the Runnymede Trust found that the actual percentage of Africans who voted Labour in 2010 was 87% and Caribbean’s 78%.
9% of Caribbean’s voted Conservative and 12% voted Lib Dem, while Africans voted 6% for both parties. If these studies reflect reality in shows that there is a significant gap between identification with parties and actual votes. There are many issues that give rise to this but surely the biggest has to be tactical voting according to which parties stand a chance of winning. Black Labour sympathisers in particular may have voted Lib Dem to register an anti-Tory vote. But given the complex nature of Britain’s 650 seats it is impossible to say with any certainty how these factors play out on Election Day.
Yet whatever the inaccuracies of the BES / Telegraph story, it should still give Labour serious pause for thought. Labour have run a more ‘traditional’ pitch to all BAME communities, through its’ race equality consultation and subsequent speech by Sadiq Khan promising that Labour will put race equality “at the heart” of decision-making. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/sadiq-khan-declares-war-race-inequality There is a lot to commend this strategy, but it has its’ roots in an anti-racist approach of seeking to unite all non-white communities under the banner of tackling common barriers. Conservatives, meanwhile, have been conducting a more sophisticated and under-the-radar strategy that appeals to individual communities rather than BAME’s as a collective.
Labour have yet to truly combine individual targeting with broad-brush anti-racism, and Ed Miliband has left most of the heavy lifting to Khan and other front benchers rather than leading from the front, as Cameron, Osborne and Boris Johnson have done. If there has been a dip in Indian support one would expect that the BAME Labour group, supposedly the eyes and ears of Labour in non-white communities, an early warning system that would pick this up and devise a plan to address it. Yet the impression is of a group talking to each other and with Labour politicians rather rolling up its’ sleeves and doing serious grassroots activity.
However unreliable the BES figures might be Labour are not in a position to take chances or cross their fingers and hope everything will be alright on the night. The power of the ‘black vote’, and in particular the Indian vote, will need to be shored up if they are to take power in just over four months’ time. They need to not just reinforce and promote anti-racist policies but replicate the Tories’ more covert targeting of individual communities while likewise valuing Indian trade. Both BAME Labour and Miliband need to get out more and show just how much they want the Indian vote. The clock is ticking and the maths show they simply cannot afford to lose seats because Indians have abandoned them.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
