Need to encourage U.K. Indians to join politics

Keith Vaz (left) has been appointed Labour’s Vice-Chairman for minority affairs

The appointment of Keith Vaz, the senior Labour Party leader as vice-chairman in charge of the party’s BAME (Black Asian Minority Ethnic) engagement is a sign of the growing realisation across political parties of the ever-increasing weight of minority groups in deciding electoral outcomes.

Mr. Vaz was re-elected for the seventh time in the 2015 elections from his constituency of Leicester East.

The 2015 elections returned 41 Members of Parliament from the BAME grouping, a significant rise from 27 in the 2010 elections, and just four in 1987. This apart, BAME voters are also a sizeable voting group in the constituencies from where white British candidates stood and won.

In 2013, India (followed by Poland and Pakistan) was the country of birth of the highest number of foreign-born U.K. citizens, accounting for 9.4 per cent of the total.

According to a survey conducted by Survation for the think tank British Future, nearly one million minority votes (out of an estimated three million minority voters) helped the Conservative Party return to power in the 2015 elections.

Shift in loyalties

An interesting finding of the survey provides quantitative evidence for what has long been noticed by commentators, namely that the shift to the Conservatives is taking place largely among Asians, of which grouping Indians are by far the largest component.

Fifty per cent of Asian voters support Labour and 38 per cent support the Conservatives. By contrast, 67 per cent of Black voters support Labour and only 21 per cent support Conservatives.

Therefore Indians clearly are the largest and most empowered grouping within BAME. It was to articulate the concerns of this group vis-à-vis both the British establishment and the government of India that a round table of leading representatives of U.K. Indians, organised by Lord Bhikhu Parekh and Asian Voice and Gujarat Samachar , Britain’s largest Asian newsweeklies, was held on May 27 in the House of Lords.

Mr. Vaz emphasised the need to encourage young Indians to enter U.K. politics. “Breaking down barriers, making this a profession worth considering, is extremely important and healthy for the psyche of the people from ethnic backgrounds,” he said.