I really don’t need unlocking, Mr Corbyn

Labour’s latest entreaty to ethnic minority voters shows exactly why it is losing so much support

As a 26-year-old brown girl yet to achieve my potential, I didn’t realise that I needed it to be “unlocked” by a 68-year-old white man until I saw a message from Jeremy Corbyn implying just that. “Only Labour can be trusted to unlock the talent of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people,” it read.

When I saw it, I fumed. And I wasn’t the only one. My Laboursupporting family and friends were caught between laughter and derision. How offensive. How patronising. It’s exactly this sort of old-fashioned attitude towards ethnic minorities that explains why the Labour Party is fast losing its status as the home for these voters.

Under Mr Corbyn, Labour has already been rejected by one important minority: the Jewish community. A remarkable poll released this week by the Jewish Chronicle revealed that support for Labour among Jews had declined to just 13 per cent, with the Tories on an enormous 77 per cent. The downward trend began under Ed Miliband, but has intensified surely due to a perception that Labour has little interest in dealing with the serious problem of anti-semitism within the party.

Labour’s troubles with other minority voters are different. There has been no equivalent for its Asian MPS of the abuse received by Ruth Smeeth MP at the launch of the official report into anti-semitism in the party. Candidates running in seats with large numbers of black voters have not felt the need to distance themselves from the party because of the open racism of some of its leading supporters (the Labour candidate in Finchley and Golders Green, by contrast, has declared that Corbyn has failed to demonstrate “sufficient understanding of the nature of contemporary anti-semitism”.) Historically, Labour has also been good at selecting ethnic minority candidates for winnable seats.

And yet, over the past 20 years, the percentage of British Indian voters identifying with Labour has fallen from just under 80 per cent to 45 per cent, and to 58 per cent for Black Africans. What is happening?

Partly, this is down to the Tories seriously improving their image, burnishing their reputation as a party that wants everyone to achieve their aspirations. David Cameron, in particular, made great efforts to engage with the Asian community, pulling out all the stops when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Britain in 2015, for example. The fact that the Tories managed to win over 50 per cent of the vote in Harrow East, a seat with a significant proportion of Asian voters, is evidence of his success in doing that.

More broadly, Labour’s values are increasingly out of sync with those of the hard-working, entrepreneurial, aspirational and increasingly middle class ethnic minority voter – as Mr Corbyn’s message perfectly exemplifies.

Labour gives every impression of believing that ethnic minorities are a homogenous group, vulnerable, systematically discriminated against, and essentially indistinguishable from each other in our needs and desires. We are not. We are individuals. We don’t want special treatment to “unlock” our potential. We of course want the government to address racism where it is found, and to demolish the barriers to our success if they exist. But we don’t harbour grievances against society, and we resent any suggestion by any politician that our lives are somehow unfulfilled just because there isn’t a Labour government in power.

Most problematically for Labour, its insistence on treating all ethnic minority voters as a unified bloc, apart from the rest of society, actually makes it harder for us to integrate. Although I am a Gujarati Indian Hindu woman of East African descent, I am British first.

So watch out Labour. Ethnic minority voters are growing as a proportion of the electorate, and we are not willing to be taken for granted. Of course all parties must continue to engage, listen and tackle remaining injustices linked to race. But increasingly, there is an opportunity for the Conservatives to woo minority voters simply by treating us like everyone else: as aspirational people. If they do, Mr Corbyn’s party won’t be able to rely on our support for much longer.