The Jeremy Corbyn project wants to hear from people within minority communities across Britain. At last. Speaking at the Labour party’s annual conference in Brighton, Dawn Butler, the shadow women and equalities secretary, said, “I need help with my race and faith manifesto” and asked for ideas. The plan is for “nationwide listening events” with ethnic minority groups, intended to help shape party policy.
And Labour wants to get the ball rolling with issues ranging from political representation to making public services more inclusive, as well as examining the legacy of slavery, colonialism and empire. Butler said a better understanding of this British history was a “vital component in the fight against the far right”, which she added was the fastest-growing terrorist threat in the UK. Her words are backed up by the police. In 2018, figures showed that hate crimes had more than doubled in the past five years. And earlier this year, a leading children’s charity found that children were whitening their skin to avoid this terrifying increase in racial abuse.
You might expect such issues to be home turf for a Corbyn-led Labour party – but even his most adamant cheerleaders would likely concur that this has not been the case. With Brexit dominating politics, Labour strategy appears focused on a particular demographic of white working-class supporters in leave-voting areas who may harbour bigoted views. These electoral calculations were perhaps behind Corbyn’s damaging and erroneous past claims about EU workers undercutting wages, and the party’s mealy-mouthed abandoning of free movement – a deeply unpopular move among the party membership, which has prioritised debating the issue on this year’s conference floor. Then there’s the stark paucity of parliamentary candidates from ethnic minorities – just six of 99 Labour candidates for marginal seats. And we haven’t even started on the inability to grapple with antisemitism, or to locate it within a wider struggle against racism.
All this is particularly glaring in the midst of a nativist right resurgence, when British minorities face a hostile environment on the streets, in our political conversation, in the workplace and at the receiving end of racist government policies. Corbyn himself has a history of standing up for racial equality, supporting refugees, and for international socialism – but none of these have been at the foreground of Labour’s domestic policies. Maybe because anti-racism is assumed to be self-evident among the Labour left, it can obscure the pressing need to discuss historical legacies and structural causes.
The party focus on retaining Labour leave voters belies an internal party struggle fraught with troubling premises over who counts as “ordinary workers”, and by extension who does not. The vocal championing of certain groups creates the sense that some voters, including those from minority communities, are being taken for granted.
If, for example, you are a person of colour and working class, disproportionately hit by austerity and subjected to the kind of vile racial slurs last lobbed at you or your parents some 30 years ago, you might wonder why your views aren’t being heard in debates about how Labour can best service its traditional heartlands. In this context, it’s not a coincidence that Butler’s community consultations are set to target marginal constituencies with relatively large ethnic minority populations, including in the Midlands and parts of London.
It would hardly be surprising – or unjustified – if this call for nationwide discussions was met with jaded cynicism, given that the interest has come late in the day and with an election looming. But it could be the start of something more substantial, not least because it chimes with Corbyn’s often-stated aims of democratising the party, and building participation and engagement. It also makes sense to harness the knowledge that people in minority communities have, as well as that of people working in public services such as education and health, where new anti-discrimination policies will be implemented.
Meanwhile, with Labour now explicitly a second referendum party, it could use the political space created to examine how misunderstandings over the legacy of empire, or supposedly “legitimate concerns” about immigration, played their part in the Brexit vote. Such discussions are already in full flow between party members, among its supporters and MPs. Giving these exchanges a platform and the power for minority communities to shape policy is a welcome next step.
• Rachel Shabi is a writer and broadcaster
