British Asians and Black Brits traditionally voted Labour, which was seen as the party of the poor and the coloureds. As Muslims were most often both poor and coloured, Labour became the party of British Muslims too. The Conservative Party was viewed by the blacks and Asians as ‘the lot that don’t like our lot’. It’s a view still held today by many British Muslims.
Enoch Powell was often quoted, and little distinction was made between the views of the National Front and that of the Tories. A poll by Tory pollster Lord Ashcroft in 2013 found that:
the memory of Enoch Powell remained strongest among black Caribbean participants, 64 per cent of whom said they had ‘heard of him and know who he is or what he said’. 28 per cent of Asians knew who he was. Among the wider population, nearly three-quarters had heard of Powell and 58 per cent knew who he was or what he said. 90 per cent of UKIP voters fall into the latter category.1
The ‘N’ word was still widely used in the 1960s, and the Conservative Party was seen to have made it acceptable to use in the famous Smethwick election slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour,’2 a phrase which UKIP returned to in the recent Stoke Central by-election, replacing the word ‘nigger’ with ‘jihadi’.
Later, in the 1990s and 2000s, as the children of the immigrants grew up, the Conservative Party was seen as having moved from overt racism to covert racism. The party’s approach to immigration was seen as deliberately structured to make life difficult for immigrants and the process of migration humiliating. The primary purpose rule of 1980 was one such example.3
Labour abolished that rule soon after the election in 1997. The move was popular in immigrant communities.4
An early government consultation by the Coalition government in 2011 raised concerns that the ‘primary purpose rule was about to be brought in again via the back door’. Thankfully we didn’t do this, but the suggestion we would didn’t serve us, the Conservatives, well.5
The Labour Party was also viewed as the ones who were for the labourers. The migrants who had once worked in factories during the 1950s and ’60s associated it with the trade union movement, the ones who kept them in jobs. It was also seen as the party that bought in anti-racism legislation and was the most vocal against the National Front – and of course as the party who provided protection by passing the Race Relations Act 1974.
This, however, is a simplistic narrative. For example, the Harold Wilson Labour government in the late 1960s gave grant aid to local authorities who faced pressures because of the presence of substantial numbers of immigrants. These funds were originally supposed to be directed at marginalized and discriminated black communities but didn’t reach many, and ‘the programme could be read as a compensatory programme aimed at whites living in multi-racial areas’.6 And while there is no doubt Labour was the driving force behind the Race Relations Act, it was also broadly supported by the Conservative Party.7 And Enoch Powell’s views on race were at odds with many of his Conservative colleagues.8
However, there is no denying that there were some morally questionable positions taken by some members of my party. One Tory MP, Ronald Bell, who served as an MP from 1950 to 1982 and was a prominent member of the Monday Club, argued that to make the incitement of racial hatred an offence would curtail free speech and, by protecting a specific group, i.e. people of colour, was giving people special treatment and privileges. In other words it was a privilege not to want to be called a Paki and curtailed free speech if we made regular National Front chants such as ‘Go back home, Pakis’ illegal.
The question I have asked myself about the 1970s and ’80s is whether the Conservative Party had a terrible racist streak at its core or whether much of its rhetoric and political posturing on the issue of race was just simply that: politics. Were we really, as the current prime minister described us when she was party chairman in 2002, the ‘nasty’ party?
There are many historical examples of Conservative members becoming involved with the National Front and the BNP, and indeed some of the language at times hasn’t been too dissimilar. John O’Brien, the chairman of the National Front from 1970 to 1971, was a Conservative Party member and a supporter of Enoch Powell, and John Read, chairman of the National Front from 1974 to 1976, too was a Conservative Party member and chairman of Blackburn Young Conservatives, as were many activists and subsequently elected officials and councillors. The overlap between the far right and the Conservative Party over time diminished, and thankfully progress in the Conservative Party made it an increasingly less attractive offer to the fascists of the right. In the 2005 elections, for example, the BNP was more dissatisfied with the then leader of the Conservative Party, Michael Howard, than the National Front were with Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. This would suggest that the Tories’ appeal to the far right has over time diminished as it pulled itself into the centre ground. Personally, I believe it was more to do with an early and strong intervention by Michael Howard in the form of a hard-hitting anti-BNP speech in Burnley.
However, what is strikingly similar between the position of both the far right and the Conservative Party is that during the 2000s the focus of both the far right and mainstream right-wing politics shifted from a focus of difference on the basis of race to a focus on a difference in cultures and values. This became the basis of a new ‘other’, a feature also present in the more subtle positioning of UKIP, who, despite being described by David Cameron as ‘fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists’, try hard to couch their arguments on race in terms of immigration and cultural difference. Unlike the BNP and National Front, they were not racists in suits, they never preached or practised violence, but some would probably satisfy what government policy would currently call ‘non-violent extremists’.
This new positioning and alignment also spills over into the media. The right of politics receives more support from those newspapers that BNP voters are most attracted to and they are the same newspapers that regularly run anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stories.9
The instinct of the political right is to conserve, and through that a suspicion of the new, the other, makes it more susceptible to attracting the respectable racist. I’ve encountered many examples of this. At a members’ meeting I addressed in Croydon, an elderly member tried to explain to me that the use of the term Paki as in ‘Paki shop’ wasn’t racist, it was merely a figure of speech. This caused my colleague Gavin Barwell, MP, much embarrassment; I simply took it as another frank question from a not very well-informed member. Whilst I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of Conservatives are not racists or Islamophobes and genuinely believe that the odd embarrassing and inappropriate outburst from party members is more ignorance than malice, it could be argued that sometimes we, on the right of politics, can create the climate, the swamp, within which the racist feels comfortable. We have been the breeding ground for many an individual who eventually found his way to the soft far right such as UKIP or hard far right such as the BNP, individuals who went on to run a campaign of ‘othering’ during the Brexit referendum, one that translated into attacks on our streets.
Despite the mistakes of the post-9/11 period, the right of politics had a unique opportunity to define future race and community relations in the United Kingdom. Conservative thinking provided fertile ground for combining the strong message on security with the equally strong message on opportunity irrespective of background or origin. It was the perfect place to make the argument of a small state and a large society where individual liberties and community are precious. And it was the right party to understand religion with all its nuances and complexities.
I viewed the party as the space where a clear commitment to the rule of law, core principles around natural justice and a profound sense of a moral compass would be natural and instinctive. I felt that opportunity for all and a sense of fair play had the potential to drive an understanding that was fresh and realistic and that would allow us to look back and hold our heads high rather than in shame, as so often right-wing parties have to do on the issue of minority rights when history judges us as being on the wrong side. The ‘Muslim problem’ of the 1990s presented an opportunity for the Conservative Party to get it right and not make the mistakes of the ‘black problem’ or the ‘Irish problem’ they had got so wrong in previous decades.
Each of the last five leaders of the Conservative Party has in their own way had the tools to understand Britain’s Muslims. William Hague, who was leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 until two days after 9/11, had Yorkshire experience, was a staunch defender of marriage and was respectful and understanding of religion. His Yorkshire roots and connection with key Tory activist Mohammed Riaz from Bradford, who himself was deeply rooted in the British Muslim community, gave him inroads, and he appeared to connect with umbrella groups like the Muslim Council of Britain.10 Iain Duncan-Smith, with his understanding of faith and commitment to social justice, and then Michael Howard, with his own migrant history and minority religious roots, as the son of a Romanian Jewish immigrant, had personal insights into issues of race and religion.
David Cameron too started in a good place. He was open, prepared to learn, to ask the difficult questions, to understand the nuances and place himself in the shoes of others. During an early visit to Dewsbury in 2005, en route to party conference in Blackpool, when he made that historic note-free speech which convinced so many of the party faithful that he was the future, David went with his wife Samantha to visit a reading project for children of parents for whom English was a second language. As he sat eating biryani off a paper plate in the lounge of a working-class Muslim family and the children excitedly sought his attention, he seemed at ease with difference and comfortable with ordinary people despite his own extraordinary upbringing. In 2007, not long after David became leader, he spent time in the home of a British Pakistani Muslim family in Birmingham came away impressed with the sense of community, inter-generational living and family values. I was hopeful that he could be a man for today’s Britain.
In both domestic and foreign policy speeches he was keen to stress inclusion, partnership and trust, inspiring people to be British, not demanding it, commanding loyalty from all who have made these islands their home.11 In an early foreign policy speech in 2006 he spoke of a foreign policy based on humility, patience and winning the trust of the majority Muslim community.12
In 2007 he was the leader who, at the behest of David Davis, MP, now minister for Brexit, firmly planted the Conservative Party as the champions of civil liberties against a Labour Party onslaught. David Davis stood down from his seat in 2008 and called a by-election on the issue of civil liberties and Britain’s increasingly draconian anti-terror laws. It was during this campaign that David Davis, at my invitation, came to Dewsbury on the third anniversary of 7/7 and at a community event gave a powerful speech on how Muslims felt unnecessarily targeted by arbitrary and unnecessary anti-terrorism laws.
So, by 2007 my party had distanced itself from neo-conservatism, was a champion of civil liberties and prepared to challenge Labour on how it was alienating Britain’s minorities. From the oft-quoted Cameron’s hug-a-hoodie moment to that resounding defeat of the Labour government’s proposal to detain suspects for forty-two days without charging them, this felt like a new dawn for the Conservative Party and its relationship with its minorities.
And it was different to the platitudes and old-guard community leaders route that was the Labour way. We were not brown-nosing the brown folk, we were engaging on the issues. We were not thinking of how we could offer an alternative ethnic minority manifesto to the ones the Labour Party and the Lib Dems had offered.13 We were focusing on the barriers to integration and committing to tear them down. From poverty to education, cultural barriers to political correctness, no longer were the minorities going to have to settle for the crumbs from the table: no, we, the Conservatives, were offering a stake in the cake.
It felt fresh and exciting, a new way, an honest way, a break from the past. It was substantial not showy, it was engaging and it was finding a balanced place between security and liberty. And we were engaged in serious discussions about fighting for the votes of British Muslims.
The Conservative Party has talked about engaging the non-white vote for nearly two decades. It’s a vote we’ve traditionally not enjoyed, and ever since the days of Mrs Thatcher we have tried to make some overtures to the Muslims.14 John Major as prime minister and Michael Howard as home secretary in the mid-1990s certainly tried to court the Muslim vote.
By the time I fought a seat in 2005, however, little progress had been made. Attempts by candidates like myself, Ali Miraj, who fought Watford, Sandy, now Baroness, Verma, who fought Wolverhampton, and Tariq, now Lord, Ahmad, who fought Croydon North in 2005, to reach beyond our core vote were seen as too little too late. This, along with the party’s high-profile anti-immigration campaign and a refusal by Michael Howard to say that, if he had known then what he knew now on the dodgy dossier, he wouldn’t have supported the war in Iraq, meant that the Conservative Party made few inroads either in the BME vote generally or the Muslim vote specifically. The Lib Dems picked up BME voters dissatisfied with Labour.
In 2005 the Conservative Party took approximately10 per cent of the BME vote.15 By 2010 the party had made little progress, taking only 16 per cent of the BME vote.16 For me the BME vote was crucial to long-term electoral success, but despite my many efforts prior to the 2010 election the party seemed uninterested in engaging with the BME vote. Stephen, now Lord, Gilbert was head of campaigning. And despite numerous attempts to get him out of London to see BME community campaigning in action, his diary seemed never to permit it. Dates were arranged on three separate occasions, and each time he cancelled at short notice.
A meeting I had with Canadian Conservative MP Jason Kenney not long after I’d being appointed to the shadow cabinet in 2007 provided some early hope. His was a centre-right party that had taken the issue of BME votes seriously and had seen some success. I asked Stephen and others to study and learn from the experience; it took the party four years to get round to it, finally ‘discovering’ the Canadian campaign experience in 2012.17
Before 2010 we talked about extending our vote base but did very little practically to extend it in the BME community. We rarely attended ‘ethnic’ events and other than the customary handshakes and places of worship visits that made for good photos during the last few months before an election we didn’t make any real effort as a party to engage. Individual candidates such as Gavin Barwell in Croydon and Paul Uppall in Wolverhampton made real inroads and took their seats in 2010, Paul sadly losing his after one term, but we failed to win in many other seats mainly because the national party didn’t get its act together.
The Ashcroft poll and report of 2011–12 was a long overdue wake-up call. The report, Degrees of Separation, Ethnic Minority Voters and the Conservative Party, was based on a polling of 10,000 people plus twenty discussion groups, as opposed to the more recent British Future report in 2015, which only polled 2,067. It found that voters who ordinarily fit the profile of ‘Tory voters’ based on criteria such as income, house ownership, profession, public or private sector employment and a whole series of other categories still didn’t vote for us if they were ‘not white’.18
The poll is significant both in its findings and the timings of its findings. It was conducted around the time the ‘hard language’ and policy towards Muslims, the Munich speech being one such example, was starting to take shape. It was also around the time that the party was very deliberately mounting a charm offensive towards British Hindus, including the setting-up of the Conservative Friends of India.
After 2010 I was appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party alongside Andrew, now Lord, Feldman. We both came from religious minority and migrant backgrounds: his Eastern European Jewish, mine South Asian Muslim. In Andrew I had someone who was as committed as me to extending the voter base of the Conservative Party. And by 2012 we had not only convinced the prime minister to push for broader engagement of cabinet colleagues with the BME communities but also established ‘interest’ groups within the party such as Conservative Friends of Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Tamils, etc. They were very much modelled on Conservative Friends of Israel, which was widely regarded as the most effective group identity interest and lobbying group in British politics.
Alongside this sat the Conservative Christian Fellowship, which had been established in 1990, and the much newer Conservative Muslim Forum (CMF), an organization set up by Lord Sheikh, the Conservative Party’s first peer of the Muslim faith, under the auspices of Michael Howard. David Cameron, however, for the most part viewed CMF and its chairman as an irritant, neither engaging them in policy thinking nor giving them real and meaningful access.
All political parties use sophisticated tools to identify and target individual voters. The targeted campaigning relies upon a sophisticated breakdown of individual voters by a number of key indicators including income, home ownership, employment status and sector, education, geographical location, etc. A racial or religious identity or affiliation as a key indicator provided a completely new dynamic. To woo these voters, we needed not only policies that resonated, but also to show them that people like them were made to feel welcome in our party, and our party understood the issues that mattered to them. It was, as David Cameron put it, not enough for us to leave the door open so they could step in, we needed to step out and welcome people in.19 We needed to make them feel like they mattered and belonged in the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party decided to focus its energies on certain groups only, and it paid off: these ‘relevant’ communities felt positive towards the Conservative Party as they believed the party felt positive about them. The reverse too was true. British Muslims felt the party over a number of years had distanced itself from them (the policy of disengagement), had unfairly discredited and demonized them (the Munich speech, the Bratislava speech) and had written off their votes and their community as collateral damage in the war on terror, a message I heard over and over again on the campaign trail during the 2015 General Election.
And although the 2015 General Election saw a modest rise in non-whites voting for the party in particular seats, the jury is still out as to whether any sort of breakthrough has happened.20