Earlier this week (29th October) I resigned from the Liberal Democrats after eight years as a party member, four of them as elected councillor for Sutton in south London.
It was a difficult decision but one borne of immense frustration with lack of progress on race equality and a growing view that despite the efforts of a number of campaigning members change seemed as elusive as ever.
The lead-up to the trigger
The trigger which pushed me over the line was a debate on the independent Lib Dem site for grassroots members, Lib Dem Voice. I commented on a story about how Lib Dems were helping an opposition party in Botswana, in southern Africa.
Given the Lib Dems had only two African or Caribbean prospective parliamentary candidates in the whole country so far – both of them in the most unwinnable seats – and have in all probability under one percent support from those communities in the UK, I was perplexed as to why the party were trying to unseat a popular (certainly in terms of elections) ruling party in Botswana with one of the most successful economies in the continent. Yes there are grumbles about a degree of autocracy there but it still begs the question of why were we, the former colonial power, interfering in their affairs, designing leaflets for the opposition party in Lib Dem colours and fonts and trying to unseat a ruling party with roots in the struggle for independence in order to depose president Ian Khama, son of the freedom fighter and first independence ruler?
The Lib Dems are also expending efforts to help an opposition party in South Africa, with a stronghold in the Cape and a white leader who has frequently landed in hot water over racially ill-judged remarks, in an effort to unseat the ruling African National Congress. Annoyed, I suggested the Lib Dems were “scratching a colonial itch.”
What then transpired was astounding. First, Lib Dems on the thread, led by Simon McGrath, gave the clear impression of not to knowing about the terrible and devastating impact colonialism has had on Britain’s former colonies and appeared to reject the notion that Africa had been under-developed. Worse was to follow.
The trigger
Then a thread contributor, calling himself “jedibeeftrix”, wrote a particularly nasty and explicitly racist comment that Africans “didn’t know what a toilet was” and made reference to inter-tribal hatred. I was sickened by the comment. But evidently no one else was.
As the thread discussion continued, it became a straight battle between the three BAME members (myself, Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece and Ruwan Uduwerage-Perera) and everyone else, who I suspect are white. Yet while all the white members nit-picked and criticised the BAME trio, not a single white member had anything to say about the atrocious racist comment by jedibeeftrix.
That night I reflected on the discussion in a blog post entitled “Why it’s unacceptable to say Africans don’t know what a toilet is.”
In the background, a senior BAME member had emailed the moderators at Lib Dem Voice asking for the jedibeeftrix quote to be removed. It was initially taken down but was reinstated shortly afterwards, after an email discussion which I later learnt I was copied into (my internet was down and couldn’t access emails at the time). Moderators were advised to publicly reprimand jedibeeftrix – not a decision the site came to by itself – and this led to Caron Lindsay telling jedibeeftrix off in the thread and stating that she regarded the comment as racist.
There were a mix of views behind the scene. The moderator argued that a reason for allowing the racist comment to stand was that myself and Meral had “won the argument”, which given the nature of the thread certainly wasn’t evident to me, and that the thread would look “odd” if the comment were removed. The consensus was that the comment should remain, which is illogical. The nature of anti-racism is to not tolerate racism, so leaving it in place demonstrated that the comment had not crossed the line. I believe it clearly had. And the very fact that LDV appeared unable to know how to deal with it – and in fact didn’t act until a complaint was made, and didn’t reprimand jedibeeftrix until given permission to do so – is illustrative of an alarming lack of understanding about how to deal with such issues.
The trigger for me was not LDV’s confusion or the fact that the comment is still there, but the fact that an appalling racist comment did not provoke a single participant in the thread to say anything against it until I resigned. Instead all the white members were too busy attacking the only three people who condemned jedibeeftrix, all three of which were BAME, to notice or care about the anti-African racism.
I made a comment that jedibeeftrix was a Lib Dem “supporter.” One Lib Dem, Duncan Borrowman, claimed this was “clearly not true.” Several others, both on the site and Twitter and Facebook, laboured on my apparent error by making a huge song and dance about it. In fact I had very quickly responded that I was willing to accept that jedibeeftrix was not an actual member, but had instead been a very active participant in LDV threads over a long period. That did not stop the haters, who continued to raise my ‘error’ for some considerable time. In reality there is no proof one way or the other about jedibeeftrix’s status. Borrowman offered no proof that he wasn’t a member – aside from analysing his comments I’m not sure how anyone can be sure – yet this was accepted as gospel fact and repeated ad nauseam. In any case, jedibeeftrix’s membership was never the issue, it was the conduct of people I know to be Lib Dems and the way they tolerated racism as they attacked BAME members.
Background
1. Culture of the party and online spaces
This row was just the latest in an endless and countless catalog of disrespectful and negative discussions on LDV on matters of race equality and racism. As a general rule whenever such issues are aired, especially by people known to be associated with Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats, we inevitably have to do battle with the angry white men who populate the threads. I acknowledge that it is difficult for LDV editors, as volunteers, to keep on top of this and do not blame them for the culture of their online space, but it is profoundly depressing that the mere mention of race brings out the haters every time. The flipside of this is the macho culture of the threads, and following my resignation both related issues were discussed on a LDV piece written by Caron Lindsay called “Making LDV more inclusive.” The tone of the almost 100-strong thread underneath was very reflective, and I thank everyone who expressed sentiments that my resignation was a loss or that they hoped I might reconsider my decision. I am very touched by this. Yet while I truly appreciate the goodwill and the desire in this thread to foster a more inclusive online Lib Dem community, more reflective of the party’s values, some members saw the racism row in isolation when in fact this was merely the tip of the iceberg.
2. Lack of policies to tackle race inequality
There are very many issues underpinning by resignation from the party. A key one is the lack of policies to tackle race inequality in Britain. The Lib Dems have wasted four and a half years in this regard. Institutional racism is alive and kicking throughout society and racial inequality has got worse since 2010 in several areas, not least disproportionate BAME unemployment. Disproportionality in the world of work was pretty big to begin with but the relative gap between working age white and non-white citizens has widened considerably under the recession, not least because public services (where many BAME workers are concentrated) have been squeezed by austerity while the growth in the private sector has disproportionately hired white over non-white employees. In fact while GDP and overall employment grew in every quarter of 2013 African and Caribbean people actually saw their numbers in work continue to fall. Lib Dems have no policies to tackle this. I attended a meeting with two of Nick Clegg’s special advisors over a year ago where this was discussed and they promised to work on employment policies for “stuck groups” including tackling disproportionate BAME unemployment but nothing has happened, and six months away from a general election I am not expecting anything.
In September this year, well within the last quarter of the electoral cycle, the business secretary Vince Cable promised a review into diversity covering all under-represented groups in the City’s top boardrooms. This is welcome but surely needs to be underlaid by wider policies to tackle race inequality across the whole mountain of employment, not just the very peak. Yet Cable’s initiative is, amazingly, the only significant development to tackle racial inequality in the entire term in government, a shockingly depressing level of inactivity caused by the fact that ‘race’ is well off the Lib Dem’s agenda.
There were a couple of other minor initiatives since 2010. An access to finance report into the lack of bank lending to BAME communities ended up absolving the banks of any discrimination and blamed BAME communities for having low credit ratings – surely the consequence of generational racial disadvantage. The Lib Dems had one worthwhile ‘race’ commitment in their 2010 general election manifesto, name-blind job applications. But this hasn’t even been rolled out beyond all Whitehall departments, and there has been no attempt to push this out to the rest of the public sector let alone promote it to the private sector.
Two other policies have proportionately benefited BAME communities – the raising of the tax threshold and the pupil premium – but only because those communities are disproportionately disadvantaged due to endemic racism. Yet there was not a seconds’ consideration given to the race dimension with either of these policies, and the overall picture of the Lib Dems’ record in government in this area remains depressingly poor. In fact the Lib Dems have fronted a number of policies that have negatively impacted on BAME communities, from the decimation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to hacking lumps out of the Equality Act under the guise of cutting ‘red tape’, to the increased fees and other restrictions on taking out race discrimination and other employment tribunal cases.
Attending meetings with two of the three Lib Dems to have occupied the role of ‘minister for race’ – Andrew Stunell and Don Foster – they attempted to claim that a series of small and medium-sized grants to interfaith charities, music and dance projects, and the girl guides and brownies, were fulfilling their responsibilities to making Britain a more racially-equal society, and their integration strategy, which focussed on tackling extremism, failed to mention the importance of race equality to good race relations.
Even when the party end up with a good progressive policy to tackle race discrimination - as was the case two years ago when federal conference unanimously approved a policy paper and motion that I took part in writing – they don’t do anything with it. That paper, written by the Race Equality Taskforce, recommended measures to address BAME school exclusions and using public service contracts to the private sector (‘procurement’) to ensure monitoring of race equality before public contracts are awarded. Although this is party policy it has sat on the shelf ever since, despite several follow-up meetings with special advisors and ministers.
This is an utterly dismal record; four and a half wasted years of largely ignoring the scar of racism and unequal racial outcomes.
3. Lack of BAME general election candidates
As mentioned above, the Lib Dems have just two black African or Caribbean prospectives parliamentary candidates (PPCs), both in unwinnable seats. This is just unacceptable. Party HQ are presenting a significantly higher overall number of BAME PPCs than is apparent from their profile pictures, but what matters is the PPCs in held or winnable seats, and at the moment there are two – Ibrahim Taguri in Brent Central and Layla Moran in Oxford West and Abingdon. The definition of what seats are winnable is, inevitably, cast more widely to include other BAME PPCs, but despite the best of intentions the party simply hasn’t taken a big step forward yet. I played a key role in writing a motion proposing regional targets for BAME selections in 2010 but this was rejected by party conference, however what emerged out of this motion was the Candidate Leadership Programme covering all under-represented groups, of which white women are the main beneficiaries. While that is welcome – women are drastically under-represented in the party – progress on racial diversity has been way too slow.
Other initiatives, like diversity training at conferences, “inspiration days” which frankly lacked inspiration, and a ‘new generation’ group that has essentially just become a mailing list, are at best ineffective in encouraging BAME communities to join the party or encourage BAME members from bidding to become MPs.
4. Lack of diversity within the party
I wrote in LDV last month about the “embarrassing lack of diversity” evident at the recent federal party conference. This is illustrative of a wider problem of getting local parties to nominate BAME members as delegates and seeking out BAME talent to stand for council elections. As a result not only is the party looking whiter than ever, but the elected representatives are less racially diverse than ever. This is partially as a result of getting hammered by Labour in inner city council elections, but that in turn is partially a consequence of the lack of appeal the party has in BAME communities. I wrote in that LDV article:
The Lord Ashcroft report ‘Degrees of Separation’ found that only 2% of Black (African and Caribbean) and 4% of Asians polled “identified with” our party, while 6% and 9% respectively actually voted for us at the last election. Given that we polled 23% nationally it is clear we weren’t appealing to BAME communities even with Cleggmania. That was in 2012. My antenna tells me now that support from African and Caribbean communities will be absolutely minuscule in 2015. So unless we are resolved to attract even less ethnic minority votes than UKIP urgent action is required.
The Power of the Black Vote report I wrote and researched for Operation Black Vote found that the BAME electorate was larger than the majority of 21 Lib Dem MPs in marginal seats. In that report I wrote:
Liberal Democrats could go a long way to consolidating their numbers in the House Commons in 2015 if they can win over the Black vote. They could potentially win 13 seats from the Conservatives in marginal constituencies where the BME electorate is larger than the Conservative MP’s 2010 majority. Nick Clegg’s party could also lose 21 MPs in seats where the BME electorate is larger than Lib Dem MP’s majorities (seven to Labour and 14 to the Conservatives). That means, for theLib Dems, it is all to play for. In addition, the Lib Dems are the second-placed challenger in 18 Labour marginals where the BME vote could decide the result. As the Party currently have 56 MP’s, these numbers represent a very significant portion of their overall representation in the House of Commons.Given the obvious electoral benefits of the Lib Dems attempting to win over more BAME communities, and the fact that they should be alarmed by polling showing just how low their support currently is, it has been amazing to see the relative lack of concern from the party over this. While there is an attempt to get their selling pitch right in key marginals, unless the party get their message right nationally – and that includes policies – they face an uphill battle making the case to BAME voters in isolated pockets where there is a desperate need to win a decent share of the BAME vote.Labour responded far more positively to the report than the Lib Dems, even though I wrote it and at the time sat in HQ one day a week supervising EMLD interns and spoke to all the key officials about it.5. Culture of the party One key reason why progressive ideas to advance race equality – both inside the party and on the policy front – was because many did not truly understand the arguments EMLD were making, or where they were coming from. We did get a good hearing from the left of the party – a group called the Social Liberal Forum, and held a very well-attended and positive ‘race conference’ with them where Vince Cable gave an excellent keynote speech – but outside this wing of the party there was a lot of warm words but little genuine enthusiasm. The main obstacle I, and others, kept bumping into was philosophical: the tendency of many Liberals to regard action to tackle race inequality as illiberal or even socialist. Yet state and party action on other matters barely raised an eyebrow. It seemed to me that if there was any issue guaranteed above any other to provoke a heated debate on the arguments between action to drive change and liberal freedom to chose to change or not was race equality. And, in the world of Liberals, where there isn’t consensus on such matters the default position is that there should be no action. The default position often won, and the consequences of this flowed over to almost everything I have written above in this blog. The one exception, or so I thought, was that all good Liberals would not tolerate open and explicit racism and bigotry. That was why the LDV debate that pushed be over the resigning line was so key for me. If the party not only lacked an appetite to truly diversify the party and its’ policies but also (contrary to my belief) even lacked a willingness to challenge an obvious example racism that was in their face, what hope did we have? Last year I wrote that the party required root and branch reform to embed race equality in its’ DNA. I wrote:
100 years ago the Lib Dems were eclipsed by an emerging Labour Party not because they didn’t help the poor but because they did not ‘represent’ the working class in terms of who they were. As the 2011 population census shows Britain is becoming ever more diverse in towns and villages as well as the big cities. As a result the Lib Dems are facing another historic watershed.
Having black MPs and policies to make Britain a racially equal society is not a luxury choice, it is a question of survival. If we grasp the opportunity and are the first to put race back on the political agenda the benefits could be significant and long-lasting. If we fail a slow decline to oblivion beckons.
Reaction to this was over 130 reader comments that were mostly extremely uncomplimentary, including several downright rude remarks directed against me personally.
Of course facing rudeness is something I have come to expect in the Liberal Democrats. The first-ever article I wrote for LDV, in 2009, called “The defection spiral”, upbraided the party membership for launching angry personal attacks on BAME defectors rather than reflect on why those members left the party. I wrote:
It’s a case of déjà-vu all over again. The defections of Chamali and Chandila Fernando seem to have produced carbon copy internal debates to the ones that greeted Norsheen Bhatti and Sajjad Karim’s walkouts.
As a party we really need to start learning some lessons from these regular blows because I, for one, am tired and frankly quite bored of witnessing the same depressing spiral of losing bright young BAME talent followed by a debate more notable for its heat than light, as the membership lob brickbats at the defectors.
All too often there is precious little by way of actual solutions to improve racial diversity in the party, but no shortage of insults. Arrogant, selfish and over-ambitious individuals who saw advancement in the party as their entitlement… good riddance to these jumped-up scumbags, I hear you say. Over and over again.
The trouble is, once we’ve stopped furiously kicking up sand there is virtually no energy left to tackle perhaps the biggest elephant in the room – our failure to look like a diverse party.
Yet five years later, even though I have merely left the party and not defected to any other, there was a great deal of hating against me personally on the private Facebook page Alliance of Liberal Democrats. In a debate on my resignation Daniel Jones accused me of adopting a “bullying” tone. Anne-Marie Atlay wrote: “If people want to stomp out because they don’t like not being able to oppress us, that is their choice.” Lauren Jayne Sal wrote that I had a “chip on [my] shoulder”, and that I appeared to be “anti-white” and a “bigot”, adding: “As a Trans person who has long been an activist I have often had to fight against oppression by BME groups who have sought to minimise LGBT and other issues.” Ben Mathis wrote: “If he’s leaving over toleration of racism – does that mean we don’t have to tolerate his anymore?” before going on to wildly misrepresent my utterances in years past over the term ‘coconut’, ‘land confiscation’ in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and more recently FGM. Mathis added: “and [he] refuses to condemn anti-LGBT laws in African countries on the basis of “culture,” he is essentially saying that people of one race should not be expected to uphold basic human dignity and support universal rights.” All Mathis’s points were a gross distortion of my views, but the point on anti-LGBT laws is an outright lie, pure and simple. I have condemned anti-LGBT laws in Africa strongly.
However in addition to the haters, there was a lot of love from many Lib Dem members who wrote on a range of online forums plus a great many emails, Facebook and Twitter private messages expressing their sadness that I had left the party, begged me to return, and paid complements about the contribution I had made to the party and how much the Lib Dems still needed me. I was very touched by such comments, which significantly outnumbered the haters by around 10:1 in my rough estimation. I won’t lavish any more complements on myself, but I do wish to reserve particular praise for Baroness Sal Brinton, who also made a point of stimulating a positive debate about becoming a more inclusive party. I truly hope she wins the race to become party president.
All the positive comments are a reminded that the party at large does want to be inclusive, but struggles to know what to do. In truth, despite writing reams of articles and speaking countless times, I genuinely think that because of my life experiences working and volunteering for 25 years in the anti-racist movement and 15 years working in the black media, most members didn’t really understand where I was coming from. They couldn’t grasp the extent to which my views were rooted in the ‘black struggle’, and indeed my colleagues in the struggle never really understood what I was doing in the Liberal Democrats. A friend of mine, who has experience of both, said to me that the party suffers from “boiling frog syndrome”, a tendency to stay put while the water heats up rather than jumping into action when the temperature gets too hot. I understood this to be a reference to our developing multicultural society, and particularly to changing demographics, and the inexplicable inability to respond accordingly.
The demographics of the party is that it is overwhelmingly white and middle class. While many that join the Lib Dems believe in equality they nevertheless hail from a demographic group that continues to benefit from the racism status quo in society. Strong leadership and guidance on any issue can change the culture of any organisation but unfortunately we have a privileged class of leadership which has no experience of tackling or understanding matters of race and community. They cannot see the problem and simply ‘don’t get it’. On top of that, we have a toleration of the Lib Dem online spaces being dominated by angry white men, and that in turn has proven to tolerate explicit racism.
This is what I meant when I said that the racism against Africans was the “tip of the iceberg.” There are many good members in the party, but until there is more of a movement to change the narrative and picture on race equality I feel progress will always wither on the vine. There is a chance the wind might start to blow in the right direction in the aftermath following the forthcoming general election – I certainly hope so because Britain needs a Liberal alternative, just one that understands, reflects and has solutions to offer Britain’s diverse communities. But after six years of solid activism I need to see evidence before even considering returning to the fold. A colleague on the left, Gareth Epps, said that my leaving the party was “letting them win.” I disagree; my resignation is a reminder to everyone who wants to see change to move out of bottom gear and press the accelerator if they don’t want to see others passing through the exit door in future.
I’ve done my bit for now having expended enormous amounts of energy, and will now only rejoin if there’s a bigger army for change. If not, I’ll forever wish them well but will get on with the rest of my life outside party politics.
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
