A wake-up call for the political parties

Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the Labour Party’s Ethnic Minority Taskforce,  gave a speech last week in the House of Commons to introduce a Race Relations (Election Candidates) Bill, which would allow the introduction of all ethnic minority shortlists for the selection of parliamentary candidates.  A transcript of the speech is below for TMP readers. 

The United Kingdom is a diverse nation. A snapshot of what it means to be British today would surely provide us with a mosaic reflecting the many cultures, ethnicities and religions that make up our population. Post-war and post-colonial migration flows have enriched our country with more than just numbers of people. Every town, city and region has benefited from Leicester to London, from Wembley to Wigan and from Sunderland to Southall. It is not only the composition of our population that has changed, but the composition of our national identity – our Britishness.

The change in our national identity must be reflected in the way we think of ourselves as a country, represent ourselves to others and, most importantly, in the composition of our Parliament. It is that change that must be reflected, and I intend to address it in my Bill. I am delighted to see the Leader of the House of Commons, who is also the Minister for Women and Equality, on the Front Bench because she has championed the cause of equality throughout her long political life.

There are currently 15 ethnic minority Members of this House: 13 Labour Members and two Conservatives. As the House knows, the 2001 census reported a 50 per cent increase in our ethnic population over the last 10 years. The lack of such representation in Parliament is therefore truly disappointing. If Parliament were to reflect adequately the population of ethnic minority citizens, there would be 58 ethnic minority Members of this House. At the current rate at which ethnic minority Members are taking up seats in Parliament, it would take 75 years to achieve a proportion that would reflect the ethnic minority population of our country.

Since 1987, when I was elected along with the hon. Member for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), Mr. Paul Boateng and the late Bernie Grant (pictured right with Vaz), progress has been painfully slow. There were two more ethnic minority Members in 1992, three more in 1997, two more in 2001, four in 2005, and five in by-elections over the last 21 years. It is not that there is a lack of talent, numbers or desire to come to this place, but it is clear that ethnic minorities still face proportionately more hurdles than others in getting elected to this House. This Bill seeks to address the problems of imbalance in representation through the democratic decisions of our political parties, but there is no miracle cure.

The race issue does not have to be divisive; race can be used in a positive way to electrify the political process. Striving for the Democratic nomination in the United States, we have a candidate who embodies the multi-ethnic, multicultural and international character of its society: Barack Obama. Born to a Kenyan father and an American mother, and having spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, Senator Obama is a poster boy for the integration and amalgamation that has taken place globally – the mixing of cultures and consequent reforming of identities.

Read more

BSS NEC Report

The Black Socialist Society’s representative on Labour’s National Executive Committee, Keith Vaz MP, has kindly passed us a copy of his latest NEC report and update, for TMP readers’ perusal. Click here to view it: kv-nec-report-25-june-2007.pdf.

Keith is a member of the NEC’s organisation sub committee, which decides where to declare all-women shortlists for the selection of Labour’s parliamentary candidates. Seats which are presently under consideration are Ealing Southall, where there is to be a by-election following the death of Piara Khabra MP last week, and Walthamstow. The recent decisions to declare all women shortlists, in Ealing Southall in particular, have been controversial.

There has been much debate (including on these pages) about the wisdom of declaring all women shortlists in constituencies such as these, where there are high ethnic minority populations – 52.67% in Ealing Southall and 40.83 in Walthamstow – given that all women shortlists have yet to select an ethnic minority woman.

Read more