Degrees of Separation E-Book

Michael Ashcroft

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 87

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

At the 2010 general election, only 16 per cent of ethnic minority voters supported the Conservatives. In Degrees of Separation Lord Ashcroft explores the gulf between ethnic and religious minorities and the Tories that is a well-known but little understood feature of British politics. Based on a unique 10,000-sample poll and extensive research among voters from black African, black Caribbean, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh backgrounds, Degrees of Separation sheds new light on one of the Conservative Party's biggest and most longstanding challenges.

Leseprobe

What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of the Conservative Party?

[Ethnic minority voters]

What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of the Labour Party?

[Ethnic minority voters]

What is the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you think of the Liberal Democrats?

[Ethnic minority voters]

Contents

Introduction: Degrees of separation

Methodology

1. Identifying the barriers

2. “I would never vote Conservative because…”

3. Being in Britain

4. Political perspectives

5. Full poll results

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction: Degrees of separation

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 in Minority 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-Conservative voters they did not think the Tories were for people like them, were not in touch with how they lived their lives, and did not share their values or priorities. This is the party’s familiar brand problem, which I first discussed in Smell The Coffee, my analysis of the 2005 election.

However, by polling white voters alongside those from ethnic minorities, we demonstrated that the Conservative Party’s unpopularity among black and Asian voters is not simply a matter of class and geography. There were sometimes strikingly different results between white and non-white voters living in the same area, and between different ethnic minority groups.

Among ethnic minority voters the Conservatives’ brand problem exists in a more intense form. For many of our participants – by no means all, it is important to state – there was an extra barrier between them and the Conservative Party directly related to their ethnic background. If Labour was the party that helped their families to establish themselves in Britain, had represented people who did their kind of work, and had passed laws to help ensure they were treated equally, the Conservatives, they felt, had been none to keen on their presence in the first place. Enoch Powell was often mentioned in evidence, as was the notorious Smethwick election campaign of 1964 in which a poster appeared – not distributed by the Conservatives, but remembered as such – saying “if you want a n****r for a neighbour vote Labour”. The failure, on the Conservatives’ watch, properly to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence was also cited.

Most thought that if prejudice had been widespread in the party, then the Conservatives had changed in recent years, whether through principle or necessity. But significant numbers – which particularly included people from a black Caribbean background – felt the Tories remained indifferent or even hostile towards ethnic minorities. Many felt the Tories, and David Cameron in particular, had unfairly blamed ethnic minorities for last summer’s riots. There was a widespread view that Conservative policies, particularly when it came to deficit reduction, hit minority communities especially hard, and the Tories seemed at best unaware and at worst unconcerned about their impact. Whatever the motive for these policies, the tangible outcome they saw hit parts of society where many ethnic minority voters find themselves.

Ethnic minority voters are perhaps the only group to think that the Conservatives have lived up to their pre-election promise to toughen immigration laws. Some of our participants saw this as a good thing, and talked about the destabilising effect of recent high levels of migration, the contrast as they saw it between their parents’ and grandparents’ hard work and the resources available to new immigrants, or various scams that had been widely used to circumvent immigration laws but which were no longer possible. At the same time, they saw that since the government had no power to restrict migration from within the EU, in order to achieve its aim of reducing overall numbers greater controls were being placed on immigration from outside the Europe, most of which originated from Africa or South Asia. Since Australians did not seem to have much trouble getting in to the UK, this made the distinction between EU and non-EU immigration look like different treatment of white and non-white immigration.

We found that multiculturalism was unequivocally regarded as a good thing. There was no clear or consistent definition of the word – for many, it simply amounted to the technical term for the welcome presence in Britain of people like them. A speech that David Cameron made at last year’s Munich Security Conference, which was reported as criticising multiculturalism, was raised spontaneously by several participants, usually those from an Asian background. A thoughtful speech about the roots of extremism and the importance of cohesion had the effect of confirming, for some, suspicions about the Conservatives’ attitude to ethnic minority communities. Some assumed the speech was intended to reassure white Tory voters who were concerned about the effect of immigration on their national identity.

The fact that the Conservatives seem to have very few MPs or spokesmen from ethnic minorities was often mentioned as evidence that the party was not engaged in their communities. However, the issue was far from straightforward. Many of our participants could not imagine anyone from their background – culturally and, especially, economically – becoming a Tory candidate. This was particularly true of black voters. Their first reaction to seeing a black Conservative MP would often not be to think that the party must be for people like them after all, but to assume that to have become a Conservative MP the black person in question must be quite rich and posh, and therefore no more able to understand or represent them than any other Tory. More broadly, there was a suspicion that when parties give prominent positions to individuals from ethnic minorities, they often do so for presentational reasons and the individuals in question have little influence.

When a Conservative politician speaks to an ethnic minority audience, his theme will very often be the values he believes the Tories have in common with the relevant community. These are likely to include a strong emphasis on family, community, enterprise (especially small business) and the desire to get on in life. These things will almost certainly be important to the community he is addressing. The problem is that what many in these communities mean when they think about these things may not necessarily match what they think the Conservative Party means when it thinks about them. Principled encouragement for family life and the institution of marriage, for example, is all very well – but our participants were more likely to think Labour had done more to support families, through tangible things like tax credits. On this score, the Tories now seemed to be eroding support for families, not strengthening it.

On the question of community – best summed up in David Cameron’s maxim that there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state – there was a perception that Tory values tended towards rugged and even selfish individualism, and that it was in fact Labour who, of all the parties, best embodied the principles of community that many minority voters tried to practise. This can be particularly frustrating for Conservatives who would argue that the philosophy these voters stand for has more in common with Tory tradition, from Burke’s little platoons to the Big Society, than it does with Labour’s statist approach. Nevertheless, Asian voters were twice as likely to say Labour shared their values as to say the Tories did; black voters were more than three times as likely.