Key findings

• Following decades of very slow progress, the last three general elections saw large increases in numbers of ethnic minority MPs, leading to more than a tripling of their numbers in less than 15 years.

• The major political parties had to utilise different strategies to increase the numbers of ethnic minorities in Westminster, crucially leading to the fielding of ethnic minority candidates in many predominantly ‘white’ seats.

• Standing ethnic minority candidates in ‘white’ seats ends the era of ethnic ghettoisation of ethnic minority politicians and signals a qualitative change in ethnic minority representation in Britain.

• Despite the huge progress, minorities remain under-represented and recent data show that ethnic minority candidates still face discrimination at the stage of candidate selection.

• The majority of the 52 ethnic minority MPs elected in 2017 came from a similar class background to their white counterparts and therefore continue not to represent a broad range of voices among the ethnic minority electorate.

• Voting of British ethnic minorities has not changed as much in the last decades as political representation, with a majority still loyal to the Labour party.

• The Conservative party continues to make very slow, but steady progress with British Indian voters, despite some headline grabbing news announcing that progress has been dramatic.

• The Liberal Democrats have lost the vast majority of their ethnic minority vote, since minorities returned to Labour after a short period of voting Lib-Dem in protest over the Iraq war.

• Ethnic minority voters have always been thought to participate in politics less than white Britons, yet research now agrees that the main problem is in the rates of electoral registration, with many ethnic minority residents unsure and unaware that they can vote in British elections.

• A non-negligible proportion of ethnic minority voters voted to Leave the European Union (EU) in the 2016 referendum, but the majority supported Remain.

Introduction

The last decade has seen revolutionary progress in political representation of ethnic minorities. Yet we are still short of an exact match between the proportion of ethnic minorities living in the UK (at the last census in 2011 which was estimated at 14%) and the percentage of ethnic minority MPs in Westminster, which at the time of writing stood at 8% (52 MPs). Although progress was very slow until the 2005 election, in the 2010 general election the numbers of minority MPs nearly doubled, and advances were made in 2015 and 2017 as well, meaning that between 2005 and 2017, the number of ethnic minority MPs more than tripled. One in ten of the MPs elected in the 2019 general election are non-white; however, all non-white MPs represent English seats. The story of how and why political representation improved is the most dynamic story to be told about race in politics. The other aspects of politics have been marred – as before – by scarce or poor-quality data. The glimpses into the other aspects of politics that are available given the scarcity of data in this area focus on persistent Labour party loyalty among minorities, their patterns of electoral participation and, last but not least, their vote in the 2016 EU referendum. The main challenges for the future remain studying the still very under-researched substantive representation, and working towards equal opportunity in politics, particularly issues around candidate selection and voter registration.

Representation

Historically, Britain has lacked ethnic diversity in Westminster (Saggar and Geddes, 2000; Bird et al, 2010). Since 1987, when the first four self-identifying ethnic minority MPs were elected, progress has been very slow, with the numbers added in each election remaining in single digits. Nevertheless, the 2010 general election was a critical election in this regard, when the number of ethnic minority MPs elected to Parliament nearly doubled, from 16 to 27. The main reason why the 2010 election proved critical was a step-change in the way the main political parties approached candidate selection of ethnic minorities. The newly employed party strategies not only continued to lead to an increase of numbers of ethnic minority MPs in the 2015 and 2017 elections, but also represent a watershed moment for minority politicians, as they were no longer limited to standing in ethnically diverse constituencies (Sobolewska, 2013). The 2010 general election provided a good opportunity for the major parties to increase their diversity as a record number of incumbents were retiring (Labour 102; the Conservatives 37; Lib Dems 10) (Criddle, 2010; Sobolewska, 2013). Individually, all the major parties had an internal interest in growing their ethnic minority representation. The Conservative party, for example, wanted to overhaul their image as the ‘nasty party’ as well as attempt to court the ethnic minority voter, who historically had showed a tendency to vote for the Labour party in the postwar era (Evans, 2008). Meanwhile, Labour and the Lib Dems wanted to increase their representation to reflect the changing structure of their party’s support and broader pressure to diversify (Norris et al, 1992; Sobolewska, 2013). Some argued that Labour needed to increase ethnic minority representation in order to retain their vote and avoid complacency, particularly as a sizeable number of voters had defected to the Lib Dems previously following Labour’s position on the Iraq war in 2003 (Le Lohé, 2004; Curtice, 2005).

While the 2010 general election opened up a number of new seats, structurally each party suffered with both demand- and supply-side problems in selecting ethnic minority candidates for these vacant seats, and had to use different strategies to accomplish this aim. Four main strategies were used: centralisation of the selection process, recruitment from the outside of the party, selecting local ethnic minority candidates, and standing ethnic minority candidates in ‘white’ seats. The first of these strategies was designed to overcome a by-product of the British decentralised candidate selection model, which has been the very low success rate for ethnic minority candidates (and women; see Norris and Lovenduski, 1995; Durose et al, 2012). Many have argued that this was a direct result of the homophily in the local party selectorate, who were more likely to select candidates who were similar to them: white men to a large extent. Some level of centralisation of selections had already worked in the past to increase the number of women candidates for the Labour party, as the party National Executive Committee had an existing power to make any newly vacant seat consider an all-women shortlist.

The Conservative party attempted to make their processes more centralised in the run-up to the 2010 election, by creating an ‘A list’ of priority candidates, which they envisaged will be used as a basis of local candidate selection, and which contained a number of ethnic minority politicians. In the event, the ‘A list’ was dropped in the face of overwhelming opposition, but the indirect result of this has been that many of the politicians on the ‘A list’ were in fact selected and elected in safe Conservative seats. Conservatives also trialled open primaries in these elections, which were thought also to overcome the biases of the local selectors. Out of all the new Conservative ethnic minority candidates selected to stand for 2010 elections, one quarter were previously on the A list or were selected via open primaries, indicating that the party’s efforts were paying off. Although the Labour party has always fielded much greater numbers of ethnic minority candidates, they too struggled to select them into winnable and safe seats. Thus, Labour’s efforts to centralise in 2010 were also detectable, and yielded a third of their new ethnic minority candidates (see Sobolewska, 2013).

However newer research from Representative Audit of Britain 2015 suggests that candidates of minority origin still face a significant number of obstacles, having to apply for more vacancies to get a nomination for example, as well as having to be on more shortlists, and having to interview more times to get nominated (see Sobolewska, 2017). Many fewer ethnic minority candidates also reported that they were encouraged to stand for election by their own party. However, in the run-up to the 2017 snap general election centralisation of candidate selection was introduced to some extent by both Labour and Conservatives, and it seems that yet another increase in ethnic minority MPs elected offers yet more evidence that centralisation is helpful, if not necessary, for parties to increase the ethnic diversity in Westminster.

Finding the right ethnic minority candidates to stand for election has also been a struggle for parties, again particularly for the Conservatives who have fewer ethnic minority voters and thus a smaller pool to draw from, so again the 2010 election has seen some new strategies to recruit more ethnic minority candidates, which Representative Audit of Britain from 2015 confirms are continuing (Sobolewska, 2017). These two strategies are trying to find local ethnic minority candidates and selecting them from the outside of the party itself. Being a local candidate is perceived as desirable thing for all politicians (Campbell and Cowley, 2014), and it might be especially important for non-white candidates who feel the pressure to fulfil many more criteria of being a perfect fit to overcome their perceived ‘otherness’ (Durose et al, 2012). There is some evidence that the minority candidates at the 2010 election were to a large extent local (Sobolewska, 2013), although it is unclear whether this is a trend that continued in 2015 or 2017. Recruitment from outside of party politics carries a special importance, as it seems to have continued in 2015 as well as 2017, with ethnic minority candidates having on average only around half the years of party membership of white candidates before getting selected, were less likely to have been a party official than white candidates, and were also less likely to have held an elected office at the local level before standing for a seat at Westminster (Sobolewska, 2017). All of this is evidence that they were being fast-tracked in order to overcome a shortage of more experienced ethnic minority candidates.

The final strategy, which proved to be the most revolutionary in the 2010 election, was to select ethnic minority candidates for what are usually considered ‘white’ seats, where the ethnic minority population constitute less than 20%, or even 10%. This strategy was particularly important for the Conservative party, which has few safe and winnable seats in areas with high ethnic diversity. Thus, in order to elect new ethnic minority MPs at all, the Conservatives had to select them for their best safe seats, especially in the face of evidence that ethnic minority candidates still face a small electoral penalty from voters (discussed later in this chapter), and these seats are, for the Conservatives, predominantly ‘white’. This was a very successful strategy, as out of the 27 ethnic minority MPs who were returned in 2010 election, only 7 represented seats that had more than 40% minority residents, and 10 represented seats in which minorities amounted to less than 10% of the population. This strategy has continued with the 2015 and 2017 elections, again particularly within the Conservative party. What this strategy has achieved, however, is a symbolic shift in how ethnic diversity is perceived, in what amounts to a paradigm shift in the study of representation. There are three main consequences. First, the racial ghettoisation of ethnic minority MPs seems to be a thing of the past, with ethnic minority politicians no longer seemingly limited to being the spokespeople for ethnically diverse constituencies and very narrowly defined ‘ethnic’ issues, which used to limit their aspirations and political careers, as well as the types and number of constituencies in which they were able to stand and win (Saggar and Geddes, 2000). Second, both main parties now offer meaningful levels of ethnic diversity, which challenges the traditional link between ethnic representation and left-wing politics and throws open the party competition over voters of non-white origin wider than it has ever been before (although more on this later). Third and finally, as a result of both ethnic minority MPs coming from non-left-wing parties and their no longer being ‘ghettoised’ in the most diverse seats, an assumption of an almost automatic link between descriptive representation and substantive representation needs reassessing (more on this later). But before we turn to the consequences of the rapid increase of ethnic diversity in Parliament, let’s look at what it means in terms of evidence of discrimination from the white voters.

Does the recent dramatic increase in the number of ethnic minority MPs, and the fact that they are no longer elected in the most ethnically diverse seats mean there is little or no prejudice against non-white candidates at the ballot box? Analysis of the voting patterns for ethnic minority and majority voters in the 2010 and 2015 general elections, as well as an analysis of aggregate election results, gives us some indication on whether or not ethnic minority candidates suffer an ethnic penalty at the ballot box.

Traditionally, the aggregate-level evidence indicates that non-white candidates suffer a small ethnic penalty, losing around 3% of the vote in comparison to the general performance of their party in that election (Ford et al, 2010; Stegmeir et al, 2013). At the individual voter level, studies are much more rare, but generally show that the ethnicity of the candidate does not usually make a statistically significant difference. Evidence from the 2010 general election showed that white British voters were significantly less likely to vote for an ethnic minority candidate only if that candidate was Muslim (Fisher et al, 2015). However, even for Muslim candidates, the influence of party was much stronger than the impact of candidate’s ethnicity and, where present, the ethnic penalty appeared to be rather small and limited to particular segments of the white voting population. This matters in contests where the winning majority is small, but should not matter in so-called safe seats, where the majority exceeds this percentage vastly. As a result, it once again underlines that candidate selection, and not the prejudices of the electorate, is more decisive in driving – and preventing – fair ethnic minority representation.

Before celebrating the rising numbers of ethnic minority MPs, and a seemingly small levels of opposition to them from white majority voters, we need to assess whether the increase in the number of such MPs in parliament means that the interests of ethnic minorities are better represented. There has always been an assumption, both in the academic literature and in real-life politics, that descriptive, numerical representation leads to substantive representation: whereby a point of view, or interests, are brought into Parliament by the representative who comes from the under-represented group her or himself. However, the empirical evidence for this has previously been hard to come by, because almost all of the ethnic minority MPs were also members of the Labour party, thus it was impossible to see whether their behaviour was caused by their party ideology or their ethnicity. The finding that white Labour party MPs were also likely to substantively represent minority interests in Westminster, especially if they had a very ethnically diverse constituency, has been well established (Saalfeld and Bischof, 2012).

However, with the recent increase not only of the absolute numbers of ethnic minority MPs, but also ethnic minority MPs from both Labour and Conservative parties, we have a much better chance of discovering if non-white MPs are more likely to represent minority voters. Although there are no current in-depth studies of substantive representation of ethnic minorities, research into attitudes of ethnic minority candidates and MPs suggests that we can now disentangle the influence of party and ethnicity. Based on the Representative Audit of Britain survey of candidates and MPs, Sobolewska and others (2018) show that while all ethnic minority politicians have higher levels of motivation to represent ethnic minority interests than white politicians, there are significant party differences. Conservative ethnic minority candidates and MPs are much less eager to represent fellow minorities (although still more so than white Conservative politicians) than Labour party ethnic minority candidates and MPs. In addition to the directly expressed motivation and will to represent, this study asked the politicians if they felt that racism held back British black and Asian minorities. This is a crucial attitude to hold if one is expected to try and overcome racism and represent the minority interests. Again, all ethnic minority prospective and actual representatives were more likely to think this than their white party colleagues. However, again, the Conservative ethnic minority politicians were less likely to believe this than their Labour counterparts. Finally, the demographic composition of the constituency has a clear impact on how ethnic minority politicians think about their motivation to represent and whether they perceive racism as a problem. Those who represent, or seek to represent, very diverse areas score much higher on both, which makes them more likely to represent ethnic minority people in Parliament. Given that, as already documented, the number of ethnic minority politicians who represent less diverse areas increased dramatically, this is certain to have an impact on representation of minority interest by minority politicians. This offers a check on the assumption that all ethnic minority politicians will let ethnic minority voices be heard in Westminster.

This change in the nature as well as the volume of representation of ethnic minorities in parliament raises many new questions that future academics and politicians will have to grapple with. Particularly, is ethnic diversity an end in itself, or does it need to be linked to substantive representation of interests and points of view, to be valuable?

Voting behaviour

The positive efforts that the Conservative party made on representation have quite clearly been designed to banish the label of ‘the nasty party’. Although some of this effort was aimed at white liberal voters, the party had hoped that it would either win them some ethnic minority voters or, at the very least, banish the notion that the Conservatives are a no-go party for ethnic minorities. In contrast, Labour’s historic popularity among ethnic minorities has been further cemented over the last decades by the party passing all major legislation that supports their rights and opportunities and offers ways of addressing discrimination (Heath et al, 2013). With the growing number of ethnic minority voters in the electorate this was becoming a crucial electoral problem for the Conservatives. As a result, the party has renewed their efforts (the last such attempt being in the early 1990s) to fix their relationship with ethnic minority voters. Clearly promoting ethnic diversity within the parliamentary party has been one of the foundation stones of this tactic. In 2015, a slew of front-page headlines seemed to confirm that their efforts have started to pay off. A Survation poll commissioned by the think tank British Future announced that in 2015 general election the Conservatives captured a significant number of ethnic minority voters from Labour. However, a closer look at this result showed that the Conservatives have made much less dramatic inroads, and these were limited to those of Indian origin, a group that was already more likely to support the Conservatives (Ford et al, 2015). However, even among this group, almost 60% supported Labour in 2015.

The problem that British Future encountered is that data on attitudes and political behaviour of the ethnic minority population in Britain is scarce and of very poor quality. Since academic polling is very expensive, the last in-depth study of this type was done in 2010, and most other reliable data sets do not contain many political questions. It is predominantly because the ethnic minority population tended to be younger than the White British population, concentrated geographically, and many have poorer levels of English language that they are less likely to be included in the usual polling samples. A more recent analysis by Martin (2019) confirms this analysis of 2015 and 2017 general elections (Martin and Khan, 2019). It seems that, despite all efforts to aggressively recruit ethnic minority politicians, the Conservatives cannot get through to ethnic minority voters.

Using Understanding Society survey (waves 3, 5 and 7), Martin and Mellon (2018) also found that the advantage that Labour has with minorities is unlikely to fade because ethnic minorities aged 20 to 30 have much higher levels of party identity than White British people. In fact their level of partisan attachment is comparable levels to those of White British people aged 50. People who identify with and feel attached to a party are more likely to vote for that party consistently. To explain how this pattern arose, Martin and Mellon (2018) suggest that partisanship among ethnic minorities was shaped by parental views. Partisanship was therefore transmitted predominantly during socialisation processes. Unlike White British voters, ethnic minority voters continue to transmit strong signals about politics and the parties to their children, and this explains why partisanship is higher among ethnic minorities.

Participation

Historically, the enduring link between ethnic minorities’ vote and the Labour party has been carefully maintained by Labour, which has relied in many places on the so-called ‘ethnic bloc vote’. The party has therefore always cared about high turnout in areas where the percentage of minority residents has been substantial. In fact, against the picture of slightly lower than average national turnout figures for many minority voters, it has been shown that people who live in high concentration areas of (particularly South Asian) minorities, had higher than average turnout. However, recently, a dark side to this pattern has been more publicly acknowledged, and it paints a picture of political exclusion and disenfranchisement of large proportions of ethnic minority voters. Research on electoral fraud, which has been increasingly associated with areas of high concentration of South Asian origin minorities, which were previously thought to have high levels of political engagement, exposed a pernicious problem. In 2015 a study commissioned by the Electoral Commission (Sobolewska et al, 2015; Hill et al, 2017) showed that in those areas the high levels of participation are often actually artificial, as the reality is that women and younger people are often excluded from the political process through the influence of kinship networks and breaches of the secrecy of voting. However, both Sobolewska et al (2015) and Peace and Akhtar (2015) show that many, particularly younger, members of the South Asian communities in Britain, reject such influence and look to the political parties to help them eradicate it.

In addition to these problems, ethnic minority political participation is further marred by issues around electoral registration. Following the 2010 general election, the Ethnic Minority British Election Study uncovered much lower levels of electoral registration among non-white communities than the British average. As many as 28% British Africans were not registered to vote (Heath et al, 2013) and other minority groups were also affected more than the white majority population. The main cause of this under-registration has been due to lack of knowledge about eligibility: the majority of non-white British residents come from countries of the Commonwealth and thus can vote in all elections upon arrival, but a huge number of them do not know this.

In 2014 there was a change to the electoral registration system, which further threatened the number of ethnic minorities eligible to vote. The change saw a move from household to individual electoral registration (IER), with the former previously allowing one member of a household to register all of the people resident at the same address, while the new system required each person to register individually and, most importantly, to provide evidence of their identity such as their National Insurance Number (NIN) (Electoral Reform Society, 2019). This was a particularly risky change for many ethnic minority women, whose workforce participation is lower so they might not have a NIN, and who were previously registered by their husbands. While the move was designed to increase the accuracy of the register and tackle registration fraud, the Electoral Commission recognised the potentially negative impact on ethnic minority voters. These voters were also vulnerable not just because of their ethnicity but also because they were likely to belong to other groups that were likely to be negatively affected. These included students, private renters and young adults, groups known from previous research to be in specific danger of not registering to vote. For ethnic minorities, who, as shown in other chapters in this book, are overwhelmingly younger than the white majority population and are more likely to rent privately than their white counterparts, the electoral change might have negatively impacted on their political participation. Further research on this issue is imperative.

Brexit

With the most salient political development in British politics, the unexpected decision to leave the EU referendum, dominating the political and news agenda, we must ask to what extent ethnic minorities supported the decision to leave and what impact Brexit is likely to have on non-white people in the UK.

Much of the commentary on who has chosen to support Britain’s exit from the EU focuses on white voters who have been the losers of globalisation and have experienced relative decline in social and economic status over past decades. They are often characterised as ‘left behind’ and their seeming socio-economic exclusion has led to attitudes of disenchantment and alienation from existing political options. But, as the chapters in this collection make clear, ethnic minority groups are not only suffering from many socio-economic disadvantages, they also, as we saw earlier in this chapter, are often excluded and alienated politically. Many people in working-class jobs or with a low return on their human capital are not white, but from ethnic minority backgrounds, and yet the possibility that they also voted to leave the EU is largely ignored and discounted. Recent research that aims to fill this gap shows that while ethnic minority voters were less likely than white people to vote to leave the EU, the vote differed according to ethnicity (just like party choice, with Indian Britons more likely to have voted Leave). It is possible that some minorities have been persuaded by the leave campaign’s claims that post-Brexit immigration policy is less likely to be racially discriminatory, as white European migrants will face the same entry requirements as non-white migrants.

In addition, non-white people who match the description of ‘left behind’ were more likely to vote leave, just as among white voters (Martin et al, 2019). Ethnic minorities who believed that they cannot ‘get ahead’ in the UK were also more supportive of Brexit, suggesting that the subjective sense of deprivation, just as for white ‘left behind’ voters, correlated with the leave vote. This undermines the assumption that the phenomenon of the ‘left behind’ is a uniquely white phenomenon, but also raises the question of why ethnic minority people are excluded from these narratives and the subsequent efforts by politicians to reach out to the ‘left behind’. One answer comes from the work on what contributed to the result of the referendum, which consistently finds that attitudes towards ethnic diversity were a good predictor of the leave vote among white people: that is, these who were uncomfortable with racial equality were more likely to vote leave (Sobolewska and Ford, 2019). The many racial elements of the campaign are discussed further in Chapter 10 of this volume. The politicians who only include white people in their definition of the ‘left behind’ voters are effectively leaning in to this highly racialised tendency (Kinnock cited in Hughes, 2016).

Despite the fact that some ethnic minority voters supported leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum, Brexit is likely to affect ethnic minority communities negatively (something which is also true for many poorer white leave voters). Although the Conservative party since 2010 has placed ethnic equality near the top of their legislative agenda, with both David Cameron and Theresa May speaking on the issue in their first speeches as Prime Minister, and in fact they delivered some efforts in this direction (for example, Theresa May’s Race Disparity Audit in 2017), Brexit now seems set to derail any legislative effort in this direction. What exact impact leaving the EU has remains to be seen, but we must stay attuned to how it impacts on racial disadvantage in Britain, as well as more general effects it may have on the economy.

Conclusions

Although the story of race in politics in Britain is generally one of progress, with record numbers of MPs of ethnic minority origin now sitting on both sides of the Westminster aisle, there is still no equality in politics. The 2011 Census suggests that 14% of Britain’s population comes from an ethnic minority background and therefore, in political terms, to achieve accurate descriptive representation the number of ethnic minority MPs would need to increase from 65 to 84 MPs out of a total of 650 MPs in Westminster. Moreover, some groups are still extremely under-represented. While there are many MPs of Black African origin and a growing representation of Muslim Britons, the under-representation of people of Chinese origin and those of Black Caribbean backgrounds is very severe. This chimes in well with findings that candidate selection remains a major hurdle for candidates from non-white groups. Research also points out that ethnic minority MPs are more likely to be at the margins of Westminster, with fewer influential positions in government, the shadow cabinet and select committees (English, 2018) although with the Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary both of ethnic minority backgrounds (at the time of writing), clearly progress is being made here too. All these changes stand in stark contrast to the almost unchanged image of ethnic minority party choice, with the Conservative party making very small strides in an Indian community that was already more likely to vote for them.

Apart from continuing the effort to diversify the political parties in Parliament, other challenges include closing the ethnic gap on electoral under-registration and issues around fraud in British politics. It is also still uncertain whether the growing ethnic diversity of MPs will translate into these MPs tackling the persistent disadvantage minority people face in the UK – or will the dominant parties use them as a fig leaf to distract from and excuse inaction, or even worse, to pander to racially conservative white voters? Finally, the dark cloud of Brexit continues to hang over British politics and there is a worry that the continued uncertainty and political oscillations of politicians over Brexit might hijack the agenda, distracting from other important policy priorities such as tackling race inequality.