Black and Asian people hoping to become MPs face “outright racism” as they struggle to overcome “dinosaur attitudes” among party activists, a report has warned.
In one case a local councillor told a parliamentary candidate, “people like you clean toilets at Heathrow”, while another prospective MP was regularly “marched out” to defend the party against allegations of racism.
The study from Quilliam, the counter-extremism think tank, warned all three major parties that they must work harder to eliminate prejudice from Westminster politics.
Researchers conducted 70 in-depth interviews with MPs, parliamentary candidates, councillors and party members, for the report, Skin-Deep Democracy.
They found that the major parties had made progress in recent years, with a record 27 non-white MPs elected at the May 2010 general election.
However, prejudice and sometimes “outright racism” remained significant hurdles, particularly in the selection of candidates at local level.
George Readings, the report’s co-author, said that promoting the integration of minority groups through involvement in Westminster politics would help tackle extremism in Britain’s “diverse society”.
“It is vital that the parties do all that they can to ensure that everybody who has the talent and desire to become involved in politics can do so, whatever their background,” he said.
“Unfortunately, our report also found a worrying number of examples where dinosaur attitudes held by some individual party members undermined this important goal.”
The study detailed numerous cases in which individuals experienced racism, sexism and religious prejudice during the process for selecting candidates for elections.
One candidate, from a minority background, told the researchers: “A councillor in my local area said to me ‘you’ve come a long way my dear – isn’t it wonderful you’ve been elected [as councillor]? People like you clean toilets in Heathrow’.
“The [local party] officers know about this man and his views – he’s a known bully – but they don’t understand why I’m being so sensitive.”
An Asian candidate described appearing at a selection panel for a predominantly white parliamentary seat as an “absolutely horrific” experience, adding: “Those at the selection were white, middle class, and sneering.”
Another told the researchers that the local party chairman “took me aside and said that they wanted me to stand down because of my gender and my ethnicity”.
More commonly, candidates from ethnic and religious minorities found themselves “pigeonholed” and were deployed in the media to prove that their parties were not racist, the report said.
Some election strategists treated racial or religious groups as a “bloc vote” to be won, rather than addressing the concerns of individual voters.
However, the researchers warned that centrally-imposed positive discrimination in the selection of potential candidates could backfire because it continued to define politicians by their race or religion, rather than ability. Such an approach has been favoured by David Cameron with his “A-List” of candidates for the last election, to the dismay of some grassroots Conservatives.
The report recommended that parties should redouble their efforts to recruit a wide range of new members to bring “new blood” into Westminster politics.
Telegraph
