Race And British Electoral Politics

Shamit Saggar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135359461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This text examines key themes pertaining to the study of race and electoral politics. Addressing an issue which is of immense topical interest, it offers comprehensive coverage of key topics. Providing both an historical and theoretical analysis of race and ethnicity in politics, the contributors examine the participation and influence of ethnic minorities in electoral politics at both ends of the political spectrum. "Race and British Electoral Politics" should be of value for students studying British politics, particularly those taking course options on electoral politics, race, ethnicity and comparative politics.

PART ONE

Examining race and ethnicity in the British electoral context

CHAPTER ONE Introductory remarks

Shamit Saggar

RACE, ELECTORAL CHOICE AND POLITICAL RESEARCH

The electoral presence of ethnic minority voters in British politics has been noted, scrutinized and debated for more than two decades. The stuff of “black and brown votes”, as one commentator once put it, has never been far from academic discussion of race and political participation. Indeed, with the swelling of nonwhite numbers following post-war immigration and high levels of residential concentration, the theme of ethnic minority voting quickly emerged as a specialist area of psephological inquiry. There is little doubt that in recent years it has grown into a significant cottage industry in its own right.

Yet, the substantive content and product of this work have yielded a mixed picture of empirical findings. These data have not always been well understood at a theoretical or conceptual level, and there have been a number of problems associated with linking voting studies to related research on nonwhite political mobilization. In sum, an ever growing volume of quantitative evidence has not necessarily added to the understanding of the electoral process, nor has it contributed much to what is known about the political choices facing ethnic minorities.

The two essays in Part 1 of the book are devoted to re-examining and rethinking this imbalance from a conceptual, methodological and empirical perspective. The approaches taken by, and within, each of these perspectives are not only underpinned by theoretical understandings of the politics of race but, crucially, themselves drive theoretical debate and controversy. Whatever is known or surmized about participation, representation and party strategy can be disputed, but only to the extent that contrasting theoretical schools of thought are identifiable and engagable. This degree of transparency has not always been obvious in the research and debate conducted on race and electoral politics. It is a void that this volume aims to address and, specialist colleagues willing, to develop in future research efforts.

A further set of problems has arisen in the research work done on political parties. These are taken up in the contributions making up Part 2. Here two approaches have been taken, one dealing with ethnic minority political elites and activists within the mainstream parties, and the other concerned with party strategies on questions of race and ethnicity. The two approaches share an interest in themes of representation, noting that racial questions have been mirrored in growing party sensitivities over “who represents whom?” in contemporary British politics. To be sure, no-one seriously argues any more that representative democracy in British politics can be measured by the yardsticks of party loyalty and Burkean thought alone. That is not to say that ethnic group membership has become the new yardstick, because even fewer would or could credibly claim that it has. Rather, the old orthodoxies about the essence of political representation have been rendered less certain. The new political discourse of representation at the very least recognizes racial and ethnic identity as one factor among many in the equation.

Extant work on party members, activists and representatives has tended to highlight the glaring fact of low or modest participation. Shortcomings have been identified in party structures, internal policies and attitudes, which have contributed to this picture. At the same time, different priorities, orientations and participation styles amongst ethnic minority activists have also influenced the roles and relationships they have played in the political parties. However, very little has been understood about how party-structure-specific factors have interacted with nonwhite, activist-specific factors in shaping these relationships. The chapters by Geddes and Shukra both tackle these points and represent important extensions to our understanding of parties and nonwhite activists, both in terms of access to elective office and ideological controversies over black autonomy.

Of course the central focus of writing on parties and ethnic minorities has tended to be on questions concerning party competition, strategy and campaigning. This is the most familiar face of the politics of race as a specialist area of scholarship. Its presence in this volume has been deliberately restricted to the core coverage provided in two chapters: by Messina and by Rich (excepting Chapters 2 and 12 where discussion by myself of these themes is advanced at a macro level). The parties, according to these writers, have continued to pursue an interest in courting the votes—and money!—of ethnic minorities,continuing a twenty-year pattern first initiated on the back of a largely mythological “ethnic marginals” thesis from the 1970s. These efforts, whilst colourful and sometimes sensitive, have, however, tended to miss the point, namely that the Labour Party has held on to and even consolidated its overwhelming lead in capturing this electorate. Labour has undoubtedly benefited from this electoral fact, though it is easy, perhaps, to exaggerate the importance of this asset. As Messina reminds us, seepage of support away from Labour has been minimal and can at least partly be explained by the continuing legacy of hostility to immigrants and ethnic minorities in the ranks of the Conservative Party. Rich’s essay on the Conservatives, meanwhile, focuses on post-Thatcher developments and suggests that the fault-line on racial attitudes persists, although frequently manifested in altered and unfamiliar terms.

Away from direct discussion of parties and voters, there is a need for specialist research to examine variances between national and sub-national levels of participation more rigorously, as well as non-party mobilization and influences upon the policy process. Part 3 of the book takes on these tasks with contributions on Westminster, local politics, community-based politics, and a normative argument on the policy agenda. Interestingly, the pictures sketched of ethnic minority elites in national and local politics reveal few dramatic breakthroughs (perhaps as expected), but at the same time fail to support arguments for ethnic minority non-participation or anti-democratic channels of activity. The prospects for these elected (and would-be elected) elites may be bleak, but clear alternatives to ballot-box-style politics are hard to see from the evidence. Where traditional participatory politics based on parties can be, and often is, supplemented, it is through community-based organizations and initiatives that may work alongside parties and sometimes even rely on them for patronage, influence and informal access to decision-making. These efforts can not only deliver benefits and influence for their nonwhite constituency, but they may tell us a great deal about the limits of party politics in mobilizing large segments of the ethnic minority population. All told, it is important to remember that electoral participation, however well-tuned and focused, amounts to only one aspect of policy influence in an ethnically-plural society. It is, I would argue, important for any book devoted to race and electoral politics to recognize this point.

TWO-PARTYISM AND ETHNIC MINORITIES

The electoral behaviour of ethnic minorities is a remarkable phenomenon in modern British politics. To begin with, it is true that voters with a recent Afro-Caribbean or South Asian ethnic ancestry support the Labour Party in overwhelming numbers. In 1992, around four in every five nonwhite electors backed Labour. More recently, in 1997, there was barely any reduction in this proportion. Additionally, this picture of impressive loyalty has remained much the same over more than twenty years, encompassing half a dozen elections. These voters, in other words, have stuck with the embattled Labour Party throughout the period for which reliable data are available (1974 onwards) and, in particular, they remained largely unaffected by the corrosion in Labour’s electoral performance between 1979 and 1997. Moreover, Asian voters, especially, have exhibited remarkably high registration and turnout rates, factors which have counted for quite a lot, given the long winter of Labour’s Opposition. Finally, as if this were not enough, it should be remembered that ethnic minorities have been a geographically-concentrated population and their voting muscle—such as it is—has been largely confined to the urban areas of the electoral map. It is these areas in which much of the Labour Party’s electoral strength is to be found. One consequence has been that, whilst Labour has been indebted to nonwhite supporters, it has tended to attract their votes in constituencies where it is already well placed to win. Though many may be unhappy with the suggestion, it is not hard to see how the opportunity for neglect has arisen.

All of the above features of ethnic minority electoral behaviour (EMEB) demonstrate that the relationship between nonwhite voters and the Labour Party has been both novel and the subject of intense debate. Not even the traditional British working class (a group which, incidently, overlaps significantly with ethnic minorities) has remained loyal to anything like the same degree. The relationship has tended to foster both positive and negative by-products. On the plus side, the Labour Party has been quite clearly the most active of the major parties in shaping its policies toward the (perceived) needs of ethnic minorities. The party has justifiably earned a reputation for periodic warmth and sensitivity on race relations questions, particularly when compared with the Conservatives’ lingering anti-immigrant posture. However, on the debit side, some nonwhite Labour activists have begun to doubt the depth of their party’s commitment. Specifically, these critics have made the charge that the interests of ethnic minorities are widely thought by party managers to be vote losers. This kind of prejudice, they feel, lies behind: a) a neglect of racial injustice and disadvantage in the development of party policy, and b) the poor progress made by nonwhite Labour candidates, especially in parliamentary elections.

Consequently, the link with Labour can seem to many observers rather puzzling. The Labour Party succeeds like no other party in capturing nonwhite votes, but its de facto “ownership” of this vote has been dogged with difficulties. For example, as Shukra’s essay in this volume observes, the attempt, first begun in the mid-1980s, to establish a Black Section in the party revealed just how tense relations had become. Even in the late 1990s fairly substantial pressure is exerted on the Labour Party—both from within and beyond its ranks—to, in some way, “speak” for Britain’s ethnic minorities. Students of the British party system will sense that this is an enormous task for Labour, and one in which it is almost bound to fail or, at the least, cause offence. But it is not necessarily failure that counts, in the sense that the party is likely to lose its voters’ support. As Messina’s essay stresses, if not to Labour, where are these voters to go? Moreover, the challenge may also be rather meaningless if ethnic minority voters are shown to be influenced by factors other than their ethnic origin or identity.

Meanwhile, the past two decades have been alive with speculation about Conservative strategies to lure ethnic minorities into their ranks. These voters’ Labour moorings, argued Tory tacticians, were beginning to loosen and some groups, such as middle-class Asian voters, were thought to be ideal recruitment material. As several of the following chapters note, by and large the defection from Labour has been overplayed by the other parties and the media, but this has barely dented the enthusiasm of both Conservative and centre party attempts to go after the so-called “ethnic vote”.

One notable upshot of all of this has been that the factors underpinning EMEB have come under scrutiny. It is clear to (almost) everyone that relatively little is known about: a) why ethnic minorities behave as they do at the ballot box; b) what they think about political issues; c) whether they are motivated by the same forces as their white counterparts; and d) to what extent influences common to all ethnic groups take on a different and distinctive meaning for ethnic minorities alone. The challenge that this presents to academic research is important because so many of the answers to these questions depend upon the interpretation of empirical evidence. For that reason, it is of the utmost importance that we first understand and try to map out explanations for patterns of EMEB. This task is the central one in my own extended contribution in Chapter 2.

RACE POLITICS AND BRITISH POLITICS

As has already been suggested, the specialist literature on the politics of race has been dominated for many years by electoral and party matters. The insights and limitations of this body of work have been partially rehearsed here, but the rationale of this volume has not merely been built on filling gaps in a specialist literature. Many of the chapters in this book certainly take on this task and provide a number of fresh insights into racial and electoral themes. There is an additional reason for the book which has to do with: a) synthesizing knowledge and understanding of specialist race/politics and broader political participation questions, and b) bringing the consideration of ethnic minority electoral behaviour into greater focus within established psephological inquiry.

Despite a number of empirical studies on ethnic minority political participation over twenty years, it is quite striking how little of this work has left any residue in the mainstream research literature on political participation in general and electoral choice in particular. No doubt one could debate endlessly the causes behind this fact, but in a sense it is of little importance. What is clear is that political-science research activity on citizen participation has, in general, either overlooked the ethnic minority electorate or else relegated it to a minor descriptive footnote. This body of knowledge, with only a tiny handful of exceptions, has certainly not been informed by ethnic minority behaviour, except to note its heavily-skewed, pro-Labour character. Equally, the bulk of specialist publications on EMEB have made little effort either to utilize existing psephological work or draw upon recent debates over multiple political identities, motives and messages. The specialist volume on the politics of race and ethnicity has, in the view of this commentator, been thinner and less rigorous as a consequence.

In essence, therefore, and despite extensive empirical effort, the volume of research on EMEB remains immature and lacking in analytical depth. This is not an easy criticism to make, nor is it advanced lightly, since the collective work cited naturally contains elements of strength and incisiveness. That said, the work has generally avoided or failed to grapple satisfactorily with several central points of dispute, whether conceptual, methodological, theoretical or empirical. Let us take an example of each to make the point. All are reflected in contributions to this volume and without doubt are well tackled by the authors in question.

First, starting with the empirical, it has frequently been claimed that ethnic minority elected politicians at local level have been the product of an electoral landscape in which there have been few political spoils. Additionally, Westminster held few promises for nonwhite representation owing to the difficulties in competing for scarce single-member vacancies. As several chapters on local politics and participation have demonstrated, it is clear that the scale and dynamics of elected repre sentation have come to be driven by a new set of factors. Ethnic minorities have organized, or been organized, to press for candidates, policies and commitments, particularly in Labour’s ranks, in enough places to show that the local election option has amounted to more than just a consolation prize. It may still be premature to draw grand general conclusions from this point, but fresh empirical research in this volume shows that the picture is changing. This amounts, at the least, to a very good case for further empirical work in the future.

Secondly, in the past most theoretical questions have stemmed from arguments over class, race or ethnic-based strategies for politic...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF TABLES
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• PART ONE: EXAMINING RACE AND ETHNICITY IN THE BRITISH ELECTORAL CONTEXT
• PART TWO: POLITICAL PARTIES AND “RACE POLITICS”
• PART THREE: LEVELS OF PARTICIPATION AND POLICY INFLUENCE