There was one moment on last night’s BBC London radio debate on leadership that led to startled looks in the studio. It came when David Cameron’s advisor, Shaun Bailey, admitted that the Prime Minister looks at him as the man who can attract “masses of black voters.”
The interview with Shaun starts at 38 minutes 20 seconds.
Presenter Dotun Adebayo asked him:
“When you speak to David Cameron, and the last I hear you have the man’s ear Shaun, does he look at you and think “Woah! You’re a potential black leader for us, for our party, to bring in those hordes and masses of black voters that we’ve ignored for the last 50 or 60 years even though they came to this country, many of them, as natural conservatives, but we excluded them at the time, we didn’t invite them in. “Shaun Bailey could be the kind of man who can bring them in! He’s a black leader!””
Shaun replied:
“I imagine he does and we have conversations about the black community, why they don’t vote Conservative, what’s interesting to them, what they want, what they need, all the time. And in that environment I always represent myself as a black man because it’s important. As a black man you wake up every day and make a decision: do you represent black people and how are you going to go about that? So I have no problem with that at all. I relish that job. If someone said to me ‘Why are you conservative?’, the two key things are this: I don’t believe in dependency policies and I think that’s what the Left’s all about, secondly [coughs] excuse me, as a black man I want to be in a place where I can challenge some of what’s said about us and what’s believed about us. I like to give a first-hand story of what it is to be black in this country, for sure.”
The first few words of Shaun’s comment sparked some interest from myself and fellow guests Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote, Labour councillor Claudia Webbe and Dr Rob Berkeley of the Runnymede Trust. I picked up on his point about “dependency policies” by saying that the core of race equality politics was about self-sufficiency not dependency.
If Cameron does indeed see Shaun as the savior for the Tories by pulling in the masses of black voters it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of Britain’s black community.
As the recent report I wrote for Operation Black Vote on the Power of the Black Vote indicated, what all parties need to do is demonstrate what policies they have to specifically tackle the scar of race inequality and put ‘race’ back on the political agenda before they are in a position to appeal effectively to black voters.
A report by Lord Ashcroft for the Conservatives showed that bridging the gap between party and the black community meant giving serious consideration to a range of issues and addressing the negative reputation which Tories have built up over several decades. One savior will not cut it.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
