At the 2010 election, only 16% of ethnic minority voters supported the Conservatives. More than two thirds voted Labour1. Not being white was the single best predictor that somebody would not vote Conservative.
The gulf between the Conservative Party and ethnic minorities is a well-known feature of British politics. It persists in spite of the Tories’ efforts in recent years to reach beyond their core voters. Some would argue this means the Tories should end what is surely the fruitless quest for minority support. I disagree, for two reasons.
First, in narrow political terms, it is in the Conservative Party’s electoral interests to address its huge deficit among these voters. As I noted inMinority Verdict, the average non-white population of the constituencies the Tories gained from Labour in 2010 was around 6 per cent. In the twenty of Labour’s one hundred most vulnerable marginals that the Tories failed to win, the average non-white population was over 15 per cent. In the five of those that were in London, the average non-white population was 28 per cent. Bluntly, the Conservative Party’s problem with ethnic minority voters is costing it seats.
Secondly, it is just not right that in contemporary Britain a large part of the population should feel that a mainstream party of government – which aspires to represent every part of society and govern in the whole country’s interest – has nothing to say to them.
I decided to explore this problem in detail. I commissioned a poll to be conducted in the areas with the highest non-white populations; the 10,268 sample includes 3,201 respondents from ethnic and religious minorities, making it the biggest such survey ever conducted in Britain. In addition we conducted 20 focus groups, involving 30 hours of discussion with some 160 participants whose backgrounds were black African, black Caribbean, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh. I hope readers from these communities will find that the results reported here ring true. They may well also think the findings are so obvious and self-evident that they were hardly worth writing down. If so, let me say that for a party as seemingly unengaged with their lives as the Conservatives have traditionally been, writing these things down is all too necessary.
The political outlook of large numbers of ethnic minority voters is closely connected to class identity. This has been shaped by their communities’ history and experience since arriving in Britain. Their parents or grandparents came to Britain to do working class jobs, lived in working class areas, and often joined unions, so Labour was their party. Most of our participants still thought of themselves as working class, including those with professional careers.
Labour had always been the party for people like them – a status it largely retained – but the Conservatives had always been for the better off middle classes. In common with large numbers of non-Con
