The Guardian this week published a feature on how black voters can swing the 2015 general election. The piece, written by Hugh Muir, is sparked by research by Operation Black Vote which I authored. I am also quoted in the article talking about the Lib Dem perspective.
I am republishing the full article here:
It's a window of opportunity in what will undoubtedly be a tight election, says Woolley; a chance to finally force the mainstream parties to pay attention to concerns that might be collectively held by black and Asian voters. The parties thought the same. "Within 48 hours, I had in my diary meetings with senior officials from all three of them."
So will brown skins vote en masse? Not at all, says Woolley. "We are not homogenous, but there are issues that affect us all. Inequality is one; it's a big one, whether it is a middle manager hitting the glass ceiling or a young person who has never had a job and isn't likely to get one. We need to galvanise people and we need to hold some feet to the fire. And we've got about 18 months to do it."
It's a window in which to turn a paper opportunity into an actual one, and the drive began in earnest this week with the arrival from the US of that veteran galvaniser of the minority vote, the Rev Jesse Jackson . An odd couple perhaps, he and the British campaigner take that aspiration to mass meetings in London and Birmingham, Woolley with his research and Jackson with the experience he has gained through the voter-registration activities of his grassroots campaigning organisation, the Rainbow PUSH coalition . "There are parallels with the UK and the US regarding racial disparities and inequalities in unemployment, education, criminal justice at the hands of the police and courts," says Jackson. "Here we are, 50 years after the march on Washington for jobs and justice and just months after the supreme court struck a major blow to the Voting Rights Act . My visit to the UK is to celebrate, but also to prepare for action." Success is a million voters registered for 2015.
Does all this matter for Labour? Yes, but not perhaps to a heart-stopping degree because the party's hold over minority votes seems decisive in the short term. Class and force of habit trumps racial self-interest. And rare is the disgruntled black wouldbe parliamentarian who would defect. But that won't always be the situation, warns one hopeful Labour candidate. "As time passes, people become more likely to consider other options. We can't be so complacent."
The MP Diane Abbott also warns against complacency. "The black and minority ethnic vote has been very loyal to Labour for a long while, but younger people are more disaffected. Labour needs to be wary of taking the BME vote for granted. The old certainties no longer apply. The party needs a concrete strategy for moving towards more BME MPs and councillors. We just can't leave it to chance."
There is some appreciation of what might be required. For all the squalls of her career, in 2010 - in Hackney and Stoke Newington - where more than half of the electorate comes from an ethnic minority - she doubled her majority, taking 55% of the vote on an increased turnout. There are subjects an MP might address that chime with everyone, she says, but also concerns particular to minorities in her constituency. A current example is the rise in air-passenger duty on flights from Britain to the Caribbean. But the keys are credibility and tone. "It is about how you treat BME communities, how you talk about them and how you talk about issues that concern them, such as immigration."
Even before the OBV bombshell, the party was trying things. There was a fresh push by figures such as Indian-born vice-chair Alok Sharma to raise the profile of the party in minority communities and challenge the perception that the party is racist. A new campaign pack gave Tory parliamentary candidates advice on how to operate in minority areas. And it has been keen to find even more black and Asian MPs, now there is no A-list of centrally endorsed candidates with which such an outcome can be engineered. The A-list caused David Cameron a good deal of difficulty prior to the 2010 election. Instead, party officials are taking a closer interest in how selections are conducted, trying to ensure minority hopefuls get a fair shake. But even that is perilous. Voicing the aspiration for greater diversity in the party is one thing, engineering it is quite another. It smacks of "identity politics". For all the possibilities, Tory activists deplore identity politics.
"It's all a huge challenge for us, although I'm not sure any political party has got it right yet," explains one senior Tory MP. "We have a few more minority MPs and that's a good thing - although I do sometimes wish that some of them would be a bit more secure about their ethnicity. They just ape public school manners and so don't have the impact one would like."
And, he says, it's changing. "We are looking at the third and fourth generation now. It's no use looking to the old man at the mosque to deliver the vote. He can say what he likes, but the younger ones just go away and organise themselves on Facebook. They're one step ahead. The old thinking just isn't effective."
What could be decisive, he says, is shoe leather: door-to-door politics. "A lot of minorities have never seen a Conservative. All they know about us is what they have been told by Labour and the Liberals. We could counteract that. We've been trying. But when certain colleagues use certain kinds of language and send immigration vans on to the streets, that certainly doesn't help."
And no dabbling in identity politics, says Amin. It doesn't work anyway. "George Galloway fought a brilliant campaign in Bradford. He ignored the community leaders and had a campaign led by Muslim women who persuaded people who had never voted before to vote. We have to do things our way. There should be nothing we say to a Muslim audience that we would not say to a wider audience."
And the racism millstone? "You've got to fess up. Institutional memory is a big issue. People remember the party of Enoch Powell. We say: 'We're not racist now. We have a few racists still but the party has changed.' You can't change the past but you can change the future."
It's a problem for Nick Clegg. In 2009, he said that if his party - all white in the Commons - failed to improve that position by 2015 he would seriously consider all-black shortlists. Since then he has gone quiet on the subject and who can say whether he will be willing, or able, to make such changes after 2015. In the meantime, the prize for his party in this regard seems modest - holding on to its 57 MPs, maybe advancing just a little.
Lester Holloway, a Sutton Lib Dem councillor and anti-racism activist is the secretary of Ethnic Minority Lib Dems. He also led the OBV research, so he knows the specifics. "We have got everything to gain and everything to lose, but we need to broaden our appeal to minorities if we are to have a realistic chance of winning target seats from the Conservatives and holding on to about half of the seats that we have now," he says. Can they do that? "One of the reasons I am here is that I believe in the central philosophies of the party in terms of equality and social justice and that these are key qualities that can appeal to minorities."
There is a strategy, Holloway says, and he presents it as a hopeful one. But what is also needed is a leap of faith. The party, he says, has to unequivocally commit, banishing all concerns that to pursue a minority vote might conflict with the tenets of liberalism. It has no choice in this regard. "Things won't improve by themselves."
None of the major parties is as prepared as it might be, and that's a boon for the industrious Woolley as he prepares to make his demands, aided and guided by Jackson. But can they communicate the possibilities to those who need to hear them? Can they sign up enough new voters to make the effort credible? Can they establish whether enough common points of interest unite enough minorities for them to collectively dictate a view to the politicians? Can they cajole them from the breakfast table to the ballot box? There is no point identifying votes if the people don't vote. "I'll be here, there and everywhere, saying: 'Look, we have never had this sort of leverage. This is more potential power and influence than we have ever had in our entire political history.' The question is whether and how we use it."
* This article was amended on 5 September 2013. An editing error led to the earlier version saying that research by Operation Black Vote "effects different parties in different ways". What the author of the piece originally wrote was that it "impacts different parties in different ways"; this had been amended by a subeditor because the Guardian style guide counsels against the use of "impact" as a verb .
