On 30th June the Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats held a dramatic leadership hustings, described by Simon Woolley, Director of Operation Black Vote, and guest chair as Tim and Norman’s “most difficult, yet most inspiring hustings event to date in front of a largely BME audience.”
It was certainly the highlight of the campaign for me. In his blog, Mark Pack noted that Simon took questions on themes, “intervening with follow ups and switching to the floor on regular occasions to explore issues in greater depth.” Both candidates handled a range of questions from a sceptical, if still hopeful audience, but whichever of them wins it is clear that they – and the party as a whole – has a lot of work to do to regain the trust and confidence of a great many ethnic minority party members and members of the wider public.
EMLD’s Marisha Ray had some revealing stats: for any given ethnicity except white British, the proportion of new members self-identifying as such were at best half as numerous as we would expect given the racial makeup of the UK today. This is worrying, especially in light of Mark Pack and former Cambridge MP David Howarth’s research finding that those describing themselves as ‘not white British’ are disproportionately likely to share values that ought to make them natural Liberal Democrats. Indeed, Simon Woolley revealed that the winning margin in many of our Tory-facing seats was smaller than the BME vote. Had the Liberal Democrats successfully courted it, we might have rather more MPs today.
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