For non-white voters at the last election voting was as easy as ABC: Anyone But Cameron. In 2010 the best indicator that someone would not vote Conservative was not profession, region or class, but ethnicity. In no non-white demographic did the Tories achieve a plurality of the vote. Only 19 per cent of all non-white voters backed the Conservatives. That contributed decisively to the party’s failure to gain a majority. This slim volume is the first serious attempt to analyse the reasons why, but it falls frustratingly – if revealingly – short.
The result of the largest survey of British ethnic minority voters to date, this is a book devoted to studying the rule rather than the exception. I, instinctively, was more interested in the 19 per cent. If I wanted to talk to an ethnic minority non-Conservative I would look in the mirror – but by the end of the book I was no better informed about them than I was at the beginning. What we get instead is an unprecedented insight into the diverse concerns and preoccupations of Britain’s ethnic minority people. From immigration to the economy, this is an enthralling read, but the book fails to meet its stated aim. Were I a Conservative strategist, I would be little better placed to fashion an appeal to ethnic minority voters than before I had picked it up.
What it does provide, albeit accidentally, is an insight into why the Conservatives will likely continue to struggle to appeal to non-white voters. It is not hostility to minorities that marks out Conservative politics in the 21st century, but indifference. Michael Ashcroft notes a ‘perception’ that Labour governments had enacted legislation to advance minority groups. But that is not a perception, it is a historical reality. The Conservative government did not ‘appear’ to be indifferent to an ingrained culture of racism within the police during its last period in power: that is an incontestable truth. What set Ashcroft’s earlier works apart was that they grasped the essential truth that the voters’ perceptions are not the result of smoke and mirrors, but a rational response to how political parties conduct themselves. What weakens this book is an unwillingness or an inability to do the same.
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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for ProgressOnline
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Degrees of Separation: Ethnic minority voters and the Conservative party
Michael Ashcroft
Michael Ashcroft | 55pp | £3.99