Can minority politicians succeed within mainstream parties? Kensington Labour MP Emma Dent Coad's regrettable comments about Shaun Bailey, the black one-time PPC for Hammersmith, have sparked a debate about tokenism in the Conservative Party, and about the Labour Party's alleged belief in their God-given right to the votes of ethnic minority Britons. That assumption has, historically, been a safe one for Labour to make. But can it continue to do so? Or might ethnic minority Britons begin to look elsewhere—perhaps, even, to seek out a party explicitly for them?
One Gallic version of the latter scenario provides the context for Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel Submission, which opens with an Islamist party campaigning in the 2022 French presidential election. The novel raises interesting questions, not least about what exactly “representation” means.
Political science is equivocal, for instance, on the substantive impact of minority MPs. Professor Karen Bird, Chair of Political Science at McMaster University, Canada, tells me the composition of the electorate which chooses them is more important. On the other hand, Professor Jessica Lavariega Monforti—who is a specialist on how public policy affects different races and genders differently—argues that “the race of a legislator influences his or her substantive policy-interests and choices, beyond the effects of constituency characteristics.” A third academic, Professor Andra Gillespie of Emory College, suggests that minority voters are also more likely to report being satisfied by co-ethnic representatives.
This is not insignificant. For the most part, Western centre-left parties’ elected officials are unrepresentative of their increasingly diverse vote. 12 per cent of the British Labour Party’s MPs are BME, versus about 20 per cent of their 2017 voters. In America, almost half of Hillary Clinton’s 2017 voters were minorities (including Hispanics); just over a third of the Democrats in congress are.
In New Zealand, however, 21 of the governing Labour Party’s 46 MPs are members of minorities—it is likely a lower proportion of their vote comes from minorities. 13 of the 21 are Maori, and one might guess it is their native status which has led to their abundant representation. But other settler colonies, like the USA (which has no native American Democrat in congress) and Australia (which has no aboriginal Labor representative in the lower house) prove indigeneity does not suffice. Seven seats in the country’s unusual, proportional electoral system are reserved for Maori. But this alone does not explain the Party’s make-up.
What happened in New Zealand
Matt McCarten, formerly chief of staff at the New Zealand Labour Party (and my former boss) is probably, in recent times, the most influential Maori never to have held elected office. His political journey, which takes in four political parties and the trade union movement, exemplifies his explanation for the success of Maori in the New Zealand Labour Party. This, he suggests, is down to their independence from the party—in particular from its white-dominated establishment—and their willingness to organise outside of formal party structures.For those invested in creating a more representative UK house, it is worth considering how this situation came to be. Until the 1930s, most Maori voted for centre and centre-right parties, gradually winning concessions from the governments of the day. From 1928, however, seats began to be won by Rtana, a syncretic religion and political movement. Contemporaneously, black voters in the USA were beginning to vote in large numbers for Roosevelt’s democrats, but were polycephalous and weakened politically by Jim Crow. They consequently achieved little from the New Deal, which permitted organised labor to continue freezing out minorities.
By contrast Rtana, which by 1943 held all Maori seats, negotiated their 1936 alliance with the New Zealand Labour Party from a position of strength and cohesion. Their new ally, Labour Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, made a sincere commitment to ameliorate the historic inequalities Maori faced. Very quickly his government moved to equalise unemployment relief, which had previously been less generous to Maori.
The understanding between Maori and Labour began to fracture in the 1970s. Many Maori MPs of that era were, McCarten tells me, “useless”—elected off the back of a famous family name. McCarten argues that, as with rich families, so it is with political families: the first generation earns it, the second generation indulges, and the third generation loses it. The cracks widened in the 1980s, when many Maori lost their jobs due to the Labour government’s experiment with neoliberalism. In the 1996 election, Maori voted in droves for the populist New Zealand First.
A new relationship
The relationship between Maori and Labour reached its nadir in 2004 when new Labour Party legislation deemed the country’s foreshore and seabed to belong to the crown—not to Maori, as some groups claimed.McCarten recounts being in the capital on political business, touring trade union offices. Functionaries went about ordinary business whilst outside 20,000 people (equivalent to more than 1 in 10 of the capital’s population) protested the legislation. The union apparatchiks had completely missed the importance of the march, and the legislation prompted the creation of a new centre-left party, the Maori Party. This new group succeeded in the 2005 and 2008 elections, and Labour accepted it could no longer take Maori votes for granted.
Popular new Labour MP Willie Jackson, a former top Maori broadcaster who was courted by several parties, tells me that Maori reconciliation with Labour is down to Labour’s renewed focus on bread-and-butter issues like housing, health and education—inequalities in which disproportionately affect Maori. (The former centre-right government, in which the Maori Party participated, failed to deliver on these issues.)
But there remain threats to this accord. Many of the Maori Labour MPs are scions of elite families and have little understanding of the lives of urban Maori, who are disproportionately impoverished, incarcerated and unemployed. Repeating the same mistakes, Jackson says, would be disastrous. “We rubbished the previous government and the Maori Party for not delivering. If we don't, we’re gonna get it.” Being in government and with 13 Maori MPs, there is no excuse.
A lesson for the UK
What can we learn from this when it comes to the UK? Dent Coad’s comments, after all, reveal a wider view within some UK Labour circles that it is somehow abberative for ethnic minorities to stand, campaign or even vote for the Conservatives. But interrogate that view, and you will often find the explanations are focussed more on the racism of (particularly) the post-war Conservative party, rather than anything specific Labour has done for minority voters.While this reading is perhaps slightly uncharitable to both parties, it is true that the Tories’ track record has left minority voters with few places to go. Coupled with First Past the Post, the effect has been to reduce their power to bargain for policy concessions from Labour.
But it is far from clear that an explicitly minority party, like the Maori Party, could succeed. Bird, for instance, says at least two of the following three conditions must obtain for ethnic parties to succeed: geographic concentration of minorities; a proportional electoral system; and the longstanding presence of that minority in the country. While the first of these may be true in some parts of the UK, the electoral system forecloses any possibility of such a party’s success in the UK.
In Houellebecq's novel, antagonist Mohammed Ben-Abbes and his Islamist party win the election, but in reality, minorities’ political participation in both the UK and France will have to go through the mainstream parties.
But there is hope. Efforts from within the parties to recruit more minority MPs have had some success (although it is notable Labour has only four visible minority MPs in majority white seats). Whilst, as we have seen, they are few in number, the presence of high-profile black and minority ethnic MPs on both sides of the aisle is also not to be under-estimated. Chuka Umunna has carved out a role as perhaps parliament’s leading anti-Brexiteer. Kemi Badenoch is surely destined for a great office of state.
Just as women like Margaret Blondfield and Ellen Wilkinson emerged through the trade union and suffragette movements a century ago, new ethnic minority leaders will come to prominence through extra-parliamentary movements like Black Lives Matter, and, again, through the increasingly diverse trade union movement—black Britons are the ethnic group most likely to belong to a union.
As white Labour MPs in seats with large minority populations, like Stephen Timms in East Ham and Lyn Brown in West Ham, retire, ethnic minorities will be well-placed to benefit from the Labour Party’s member-led selections—and, incidentally, the tighter spending limits suggested by the Collins review of the party's constitution. Finally, something to thank Eric Joyce for.
