The Tories are doomed unless they reach out to ethnic minority voters

Thoughtless blunders have tarnished the party’s reputation among nonwhites. It must act quickly

There are still two weeks of campaigning to go but the Conservatives have all but given up on London. A city that twice elected a Tory mayor is now seen as a kind of Corbyngrad – what the Home Office might call a “hostile environment” for Conservatives. Cabinet members who have ventured out on the doorsteps find themselves blamed for knife crime, Brexit and other general ills. The Tories offer up various theories for their unpopularity in the capital, including property prices and their effect on the young, but the most depressing excuse is the demographics: that two in five Londoners are from an ethnic minority, so the Tories are probably doomed.

The fatalism is astonishing, given the party’s progress in this area until relatively recently. David Cameron spent years trying to repair the Tory standing with what he tried not to call “BME” voters. His first lesson was that the phrase “black and minority ethnic” covers a diverse people with differing, often conflicting views on life, but what unites them is an instinctive suspicion of Conservatives. Inspired by the success of Canadian conservatives, he set out to copy their tactics: turning up at Sikh gurdwaras and Hindu temples, trying to show that he was listening. When he won a narrow majority three years ago, his aides put this down to a Tory swing among ethnic minority voters.

But when Cameron left, the agenda died. Mrs May likes to define herself against her predecessor and hers was the Conservatism of the shires, not the cities. On immigration – an issue that matters to many diaspora voters – her byword was discipline. She tended to see every complaint (even from Cabinet colleagues) as the whingeing of the mass immigration lobby. She defended the system, even when that system, run by her Home Office, was turning away students, husbands and even wedding guests. And, it turns out, teachers, engineers and retired chefs who had been living here for decades but were suddenly decreed to be aliens. A system failure, to be sure. But also a failure of the humans running that system.

Were the Windrush debacle an isolated incident, it would be bad enough. But there are more than three million EU nationals still waiting to be told whether they can stay in Britain after Brexit and, if so, on what terms. It was Mrs May’s idea to deny them instant and unconditional assurances after the referendum result, to the horror of the Brexiteers in her Cabinet. If the EU nationals now join the many members of the Indian, Bangladeshi or Caribbean diaspora in concluding that the Tory party tends to dislike them, who would be surprised?

Such impressions can be hard to dislodge. Sajid Javid, the Communities Secretary, once told me that when he became an MP his family’s friends assumed he was Labour. When he asked his dad why, the reply was: “Two words: Enoch Powell.” It didn’t matter that Powell was kicked out of the front bench for his Rivers of Blood speech 50 years ago. It fed into an overall feeling that, whenever a political candidate says something vaguely racist, the odds are that they’re a Tory. Cameron sought to counteract this by speaking about what Tories and many immigrant communities have in common – with an emphasis on self-reliance, family, faith and institutions. But a report last autumn by British Future found such progress has already been washed away.

At times, Tory attempts to win ethnic minority voters have made things worse. Cameron once expressed outrage that black teenagers are more likely to be in prison than at a top university, a claim that was utterly untrue. Mrs May followed this up with a race disparity audit, which looked a little too much like a desperate appeal for more voters. “She genuinely cares and it was a sincere gesture,” says one minister. “The only problem was that none of the problems highlighted in that audit were due to racism in any way whatsoever.” Such behaviour only serves to highlight the Tory panic.

And panic they might. By some estimates, the party’s unpopularity among non-whites cost 28 seats (and, ergo, their majority) in the last election. Under current demographic trends, the penalty will be even higher next time. Ministers are busy with tokenistic gestures, like the jamboree planned for the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush. But if the Home Office has been systematically and illegally deporting this very generation of immigrants – simply because no Tory minister cared enough to stop it, or even notice – then this tends to send a stronger message.

It explains the minor Cabinet revolt earlier this week. The tipping point was the news that Mrs May had refused to meet a dozen Caribbean leaders who had come over for the Commonwealth summit and wished to discuss the Windrush deportations. Except she hadn’t actually refused: an official had done so on her behalf. It was a symptom of the whole problem: general thoughtlessness, rather than Tory callousness, although to the outside world there will be precious little difference. It took external pressure for her to relent.

The pressure continues now. We saw Boris Johnson and Michael Gove openly making the case yesterday for a new immigration policy, saying that public opinion is behind them. The Foreign Secretary has declared himself “very liberal” and the Environment Secretary points to surveys showing how migrants from outside Europe are more welcome here than in any country inside Europe. Brexit will bring the chance to treat all immigrants as equals, and there is nothing stopping the Tories from outlining, now, what might happen next. And immediately removing students from the migration targets, something that the vast majority of Conservatives back.

Other, similar policies are badly needed. Nothing will repair the damage of the Windrush scandal. But the Conservatives can do far more to address the idea of their being the party that snarls at foreigners (or deports people it might retrospectively decree to be foreigners). Cameron had built the foundations of a Tory response to this, but they didn’t last. If Mrs May can’t start the repair work, her Cabinet colleagues will have to do it for her – with or without permission. It’s no exaggeration to say that the party’s future depends on it.