Quilliam report: Skin-Deep Democracy

New research has found that underlying racialised attitudes are still prevalent withn the UK’s political parties. Report co-author George Readings explains.

How far has British politics really come since 1964, when Peter Griffiths, a “Tory nonentity”, shot to victory in Birmingham’s Smethwick constituency under the racist slogan "If you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour”?

This was the question that my colleague Anya Hart Dyke and I wanted to examine by conducting 70 in-depth interviews with MPs, parliamentary candidates, councillors and party members in the run up to the 2010 election. The result of our research is Skin-Deep Democracy: How race, religion and ethnicity continue to affect Westminster politics (pdf), which was published recently by Quilliam.

Unsurprisingly, press coverage of our report focused mainly on the racism which some of our interviewees reported experiencing. For example, one candidate claimed that another party member had said:

“People like you clean toilets in Heathrow.”

Of course, such examples of outright racism are worrying, but they were reported less often by our interviewees than more subtle instances of racialised and ‘religionised’ behaviour. For example, several interviewees complained that their race or religion had led to them being ‘typecast’ as only suited to contesting seats where they shared the same background as many of the electorate, effectively limiting them to contesting a handful of seats.

But this racialisation of politics was just one of the issues raised in Skin-Deep Democracy. Our report also explored how parties seeking ‘bloc votes’ risked damaging integration and representative democracy. That is to say, our democracy may have actually been damaged by some politicians attempts to ‘reach out’ to Britain’s diverse population by manipulating controversial issues or by engaging solely with leading figures within religious institutions  and traditional clan-type structures. We found that such ‘engagement’ tended to be divisive and more likely to produce ‘community gatekeepers’ than real engagement with voters as individuals.

Our report also found a number of examples of where campaigning had the potential to be divisive, for instance one interviewee described how a candidate in an area with a large Asian population was “hit” with negative campaigning for having an East African Asian heritage. Likewise, Shabana Mahmood MP has complained that, in the days before her election, some individuals “decided to spread lies about me in order to defame my character as a Muslim woman.”

What can be done about such problems? Many of our interviewees said that their negative experiences in politics were most often the result of the prehistoric racialised attitudes held by members of local party branches. Based on the reported experiences of our interviewees, we therefore think that parties should address such underlying racialised attitudes head on. Many of our interviewees said they thought that positive discrimination would only sidestep this issue, not address it. We are inclined to agree.

The only way to guarantee equal opportunities within Westminster politics for everybody who has the desire and talent to get involved, whatever their background, is by creating long term cultural change within the parties.

George Readings is a research fellow at Quilliam, the world's first counter-extremism think tank. He is co-author of Skin-Deep Democracy: How race, religion and ethnicity continue to affect Westminster politics.