2015 Election: The scramble for Black votes

Lester Holloway takes swipes at all the Party leaders in what he sees as the scramble for the crucial BME vote. His answer for real change seems to suggest that we need to wrestle democracy away from the leaders and ensure BME voters voices lead the debate for greater race equality

I’m fully expecting Home Office vans to tour the inner cities before the general election urging the public to report any suspicious politicians seen courting black communities.

David Cameron should be the first politician shopped. He hasn’t shown an iota of interest in the condition of black communities since, err, just before the last election.

Back then he wrote in The Guardian how he was going to “change Black Britain.”

Closer inspection of that phrase reveals a slight ambiguity on the question of whether he intended to change Black Britain for the better or worse.

With under 100 days to this years’ general election, the very same David Cameron slightly fatter and with an even shinier brass neck - told The Voice how he is “taking black voters concerns seriously.”

Only a few months ago he was posing with black-faced morris dancers behind a “Dave’s Flowers” sign but now he thinks a few warm words will wash away a record in office that has been devastating for black communities.

He’s not the only one. Back in 2011 Nick Clegg was talking about he was going to “unleash black talent for the good of all of us” Having singularly failed to live up to his words over the last four years, he now says there are “voices that aren’t heard.” Tell us about it, Clegg.

At least no-one can accuse Ed Miliband of saying one thing and doing another. He failed to say anything serious about race equality until last October, a long four years after becoming leader. It wasn’t worth the wait.

In fairness, Labour’s Sadiq Khan has developed a race equality strategy and promised to put “race equality at the heart of decision-making”, a pledge which Jon Cruddas MP says will make it into their manifesto. But will Labour’s promises be any less of a mirage than the Conservatives or Lib Dems? I’m not holding my breath.

“Fool me once, shame on you, Fool my twice shame on me," an intellectual statesman once said. Well, you get the point.

The question is how long will black communities be hoodwinked and bamboozled, led astray and run amok? How long will the socially and economically disenfranchised maintain their blind faith in a system which has the whip hand over us?

Black unemployment continues to rise during this with austerity disproportionately throwing yet more black workers on the scrapheap, yet the choice is between the blue, red and yellow pro-austerity parties. How much more evidence do we need that this set-up just isn’t working for us?

If further evidence were needed, a leaked memo from the Conservative Party revealed eleven highly winnable seats were not being targeted. Including currently-held ones. An extraordinary revelation.

Perhaps we should have a system where spoilt ballots count as a ‘party’ and if there are more spoilt ballots than the highest candidate nobody gets elected.

Or at the very least every rude comment on a voting slip about a particular party or candidate should lead to an equivalent deduction of a vote for them. And anyone scoring a minus figure gets banned from ever running for public office again.

Last year I was commissioned by OBV to write ‘The Power of the Black Vote’ report.

It showed 168 marginal or swing seats where the BAME population was larger than the majority of the sitting MP.

Sadly this electoral power has not been translated into community confidence to make demands or party policies to tackle race inequality. What we are seeing instead is a scramble for black votes. And, like the scramble for Africa, we are not benefiting.

Surely it is time to organise like never before at the grassroots, not just to register to vote and use that electoral power but devise new systems of holding Black politicians to account, and organise better within party structures to get the right representatives in the first place.

Instead of hearing promises of change before elections only to experience more pain afterwards surely the time has come to take our destiny into our own hands, organise on our own terms, and be bamboozled no more.

Lester Holloway

Lester is a former Editor of the New Nation newspaper and presenter on BEN Television. He tweets at @brolezholloway