David Lammy: London’s minority vote should cross party lines

Yesterday’s news of different voting patterns across London’s ethnic groups is no surprise. Both economics and identity explain why, according to Demos’s latest research, Labour does better, comparably, with ethnic-minority voters than those who identify as white British.

First the economics. It has long been the case that wealthy voters are more likely to vote Tory, while families on lower incomes lean towards Labour. Ethnic-minority families are more likely to be positioned lower down the income scale. That goes a long way to explaining their propensity to vote Labour.

The identity part requires some history. When my father first arrived in Britain from Guyana in 1956, he and his contemporaries experienced a very different London to today. Just two years after his arrival there were race riots in Notting Hill, when landlords refused to rent rooms to black families. Signs would appear in windows declaring simply “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs”.

Throughout the Sixties and Seventies race discrimination law was introduced, and strengthened, mostly by Labour — a tradition continued under the last Labour government. It is this, I think, which also explains why ethnic-minority voters tend to stick with Labour even when their economic circumstances change.

This still leaves Labour the challenge of earning more votes among those who identify as white British. Winning just one in five votes among this group in London is not good enough — and nor is it healthy for any party to see its vote skewed along ethnic lines.

But there is nothing to be gained from the old strategies of pitting one community against another based on crude calculations of which will deliver the most votes. Instead, Labour must build a broad coalition of support, spanning geographical divides, social class and, yes, ethnicity. When people of mixed race, such as my children, constitute Britain’s fastest growing minority group, any narrative that focuses on traditional ethnic dividing lines is doomed to fail. Even the Conservative Party, which has long had a problem when it comes to race, has a new intake of ethnic minority MPs and is slowly beginning to win more support from non-white voters.

The idea that different ethnic groups have radically different interests or concerns is not one I have ever recognised. Rising rents are not simply a problem for one race. A lack of affordable homes creates difficulties for all ethnic groups. Childcare costs affect parents of all backgrounds. Offering clear solutions to these problems is the answer for all parties.

We saw the evidence of this in May’s local elections. In both Hammersmith & Fulham and Barnet, fewer than one in three residents are BME yet Labour enjoyed a stunning win in the former and came within a few hundred votes of taking the latter. Similarly, in newly-Labour Merton, only 35 per cent of voters are non-white. The politics of race cannot explain those results.

What we must not do is talk ourselves into a problem. The London Olympics showed how cohesive our city is; Londoners of all creeds came together to celebrate the city and its successes. The Olympics may have gone but London’s diversity endures and its togetherness is as strong as ever. No data I have seen would make me believe otherwise.