I was recently asked by a new think tank to write an essay about how the Conservative party can win more votes from ethnic minorities. The need for us to win over such voters is acute. At the last General election Lord Ashcroft found that "not being white was the single best predictor that someone would not vote Conservative." As a result just 16% of ethnic minority voters chose to vote for us in 2010. Yet polling shows that ethnic minorities support Conservative party policies, just not when the Conservative party is associated with them. In my essay I therefore suggested that we needed a bold emblematic policy, to convince ethnic minority voters that we are worth listening to. As I say in the essay, an amnesty for illegal immigrants, which would grant them leave to remain without access to benefits, not citizenship, could be that policy. However if we were to adopt such a policy, we would have to ensure that our borders and immigration system are tightened. This would mean significantly strengthening sanctions on employers of illegal immigrants, overhauling the immigration survey and introducing proper exit checks so a new rapid reaction UKBA force could chase down visa overstayers from the day they overstayed. I also think that it would have to be accompanied by a British Bill of Rights to ensure that in the future illegal immigrants could not use the human rights act to delay their deportation seemingly without end. We'd also need to ensure that anyone applying for the amnesty met certain criteria. In my view they would need to have no criminal record and have passed both an English language test and the Life in the UK test. They'd also need to be restricted in their ability to bring spouses and dependents to the country following their legalisation. As I have said this is just a suggestion and not one that I suggest should be in the next Conservative party manifesto, but it's clear we need to do something about both the issue of why ethnic minorities don't vote conservatives and on how to deal with the large number of illegals already in the UK. You can read the full article below The Article At the 2010 general election just 16 percent of ethnic minority voters ticked the box marked Conservative while more than two thirds voted Labour. Our failure to appeal to ethnic minorities should send loud alarm bells ringing in Downing Street and Central Office. As Lord Ashcroft points out, ‘not being white was the single best predictor that somebody would not vote Conservative’ at the last election’, more than age, gender, geographical location or household income. Unless we act now this electoral penalty will only get worse. Ethnic minorities make up 8 percent of the electorate, a figure which is on an upward trend and predicted to grow to at least 20 percent by 2051. More importantly, we cannot claim to be the Conservative and Unionist Party if large numbers of non-white Britons continue to believe we aren’t capable of representing them. It’s a cliché of this debate that many ethnic minority voters are naturally sympathetic to the Conservative values of hard work and free enterprise but still find themselves unable to support the Conservative party. I recently commissioned some polling to test this idea out, asking a sample of BME voters what they thought about flagship Conservative policies. On the benefit cap, our poll saw 55 percent of the sample in favour with only 15 percent opposed. Support for raising the personal allowance to £10,000 saw 75 percent in favour. 72 percent agreed with our decision to ring-fence NHS spending, and 57 percent supported devolving planning power to local authorities. As you might expect, immigration was further down our sample’s list of priorities compared to the population as a whole, but there was still support for Conservative positions. 41 percent were in favour of reducing non-EU immigration with only 23 percent opposed, while 66 percent were in favour of charging non-residents to use the NHS. Finally, when we asked which political party was most in touch with the needs of ethnic minorities 6 percent said the Conservatives, compared to 53 percent citing Labour. This suggests to me that the problem isn’t primarily the Conservative policy platform. It’s far deeper than that, a gut feeling which says ‘these people aren’t on my side; they don’t have my best interests at heart.’ Partly this is a legacy issue. Though both were repudiated by the party, many non-white Britons have never forgotten Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, nor the notorious slogan from the 1964 Smethwick election ‘if you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour’. The handling of the Brixton riots, as well as the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, convinced many others we were indifferent at best, downright hostile at worst. Given this history, it’s not going to be easy for us to gain the trust of ethnic minority voters who’ve never considered voting Conservative before. Under David Cameron the Parliamentary Party has become more representative of modern Britain, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that this alone will fix our problem. Lord Ashcroft’s research suggests that some voters believe Tory MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds have only been accepted by the party because they are ‘rich’ or ‘posh’. Combating one stereotype can reinforce another. It’s small comfort that we’re not alone in this predicament. The centre-right parties of Germany, France, Australia, and of course the United States, all face the prospect of long term electoral irrelevance. One nation does stand out from the international trend however: Canada. In 2006 an ethnic minority voter was three times more likely to vote Liberal than Conservative. In Canada’s 2011 federal election 42 percent of voters born outside Canada voted Tory, a greater than Canadian born voters. Just as in the UK, the Canadian Tories conducted polls and focus groups which showed that minorities were often conservative in outlook, but strongly averse to voting Tory. The Canadian Conservative Party’s answer was simple: start a dialogue. Party strategists would work to identify small, symbolic issues which mattered a lot to particular communities. The party would then get behind those issues to show it was listening. To gain the trust of Vietnamese-Canadians who’d arrived as refugees in the 70s for example, Conservatives issued a strong condemnation of Vietnam’s one-party state. As a gesture to the Croatian community the process of visa applications for the relatives of Croatian-Canadians was sped up, and so on. This wasn’t about dispensing patronage, it was about opening up a conversation. Once the party had got the attention of a particular community it then became much easier to get a hearing for its core messages on tax, crime and enterprise. The same approach, a strategy of genuine dialogue rather than empty platitudes about ‘shared values’, should be tried here. One example of how this can work comes from my own community, the British Kurds. Earlier this year Conservative MPs led a debate in Parliament to formally recognise Saddam’s war against the Kurds as an act of genocide. This had a huge impact, I received hundreds of emails from British Kurds thanking me and the Party for our support and I firmly believe those people will now tune in when we engage them on other issues. Yet some of the polling makes for such grim reading that you wonder if a more seismic shift in policy is needed to signal our good intentions. We shouldn’t be afraid to think outside of our comfort zone. In the United States Republican Party senior figures like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio now openly champion the idea of a temporary amnesty for illegal immigrants, as has Boris here in the UK. Economically, a one-off amnesty would make sense. There are an estimated 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK; this vast hidden economy cheats the Treasury out of billions while undercutting the pay and conditions of low income workers. At a time of austerity, moving these people into the legitimate economy has obvious attractions, not least because the state of UKBA’s backlog means they already enjoy effective amnesty. Of course the objections are equally obvious: that we would be rewarding criminal behaviour and potentially putting further pressure on public funds. The latter could be solved by giving those under the amnesty some form of leave to remain rather than full citizenship. Such leave to remain would give them restricted or no access to the benefits and housing system and no ability to bring spouses and dependents to join them. They would also have to meet certain criteria such as having no criminal record and the ability to pass an English language test and the Life in the UK test. For the former, I would suggest that the amnesty was part of a comprehensive reform of our borders policy, with more and tougher enforcement action against businesses employing illegal workers, and crucially, overhauling the long term international migration survey so that we finally have a realistic idea of who is actually here. We should also ensure proper exit checks are carried out to provide a new UKBA rapid reaction team with the information required to start searching for visa overstayers on day one of their overstay. At the same time a British Bill of Rights could ensure that overstayers and fresh illegal immigrants can't use the Human Rights Act to continually delay and put off their deportation. This would be on top of the significant changes to the immigration system we've already made. In fact it’s only because we’ve been so robust on immigration in government that we’re able to have this conversation with the electorate. We’ve earned the credibility to think outside the box. This is not to say an amnesty should be in the next manifesto, but we do need a serious debate within the party about what needs to be done to improve our standing with ethnic minority voters. That’s why I’m delighted that David Skelton, the former deputy director of Policy Exchange, is founding a new campaign group under the working title Right Revival, officially launched next month, to focus on winning Tory votes in the North, ethnic minority communities and urban areas. What’s clear is that on their own the A-list and photo-ops of Cabinet Ministers at their local temple or mosque, are not enough. If we want to recreate the electoral triumphs of the 1980s we must be Thatcher-like in our willingness to think brave and think big. My Contribution to the Tributes to Lady Thatcher Debate Thursday 11th April 2013 Not only Britain but the whole world has lost a fierce champion of human liberty. A son and daughter have lost a mother. Our thoughts are with her family and the people who cared for her. The great lady has gone to a better place, and we know who will be there waiting for her, whisky in hand. I was not close to Lady Thatcher personally, yet she had an enormous influence on me and on my family’s life. We arrived in the UK in 1978. I grew up with my father and mother admiring the new Conservative woman PM, as they referred to her. Beneath that admiration was the recognition of her background, which led us to the belief that, if we, as a new Kurdish family, worked hard and did our bit for our community, as her grocer father had done, we could do well in our new country. When I was selected as a parliamentary candidate in February 2010, Margaret Thatcher was one of the first to send a handwritten letter of congratulations, with an invitation to join her for drinks. I turned up in London—she had invited a handful of new candidates—and she wanted to know how things were in Stratford-on-Avon. I explained that the people were worried about the state of the country’s finances. Her sound advice was this: “We need to win, Nadhim, to ensure that we can fix things again, and make the tough decisions the country needs.” Lady Thatcher’s gift to this country was to make it great again. Her gift to the world was to confront aggressive communism and the cold war. Many colleagues have spoken eloquently about what Margaret Thatcher meant to them. I want to end by quoting two short notes I have received that show what she meant to those whom she cared most about: the people of her country. The first is from a serving soldier in the Household Cavalry, who writes: “She was a real legend who walked her own path, stirred passions on both sides of the fence and made a sick Britain great again.” The second note is from Dr Naeem Ahmed, who works in the NHS. He writes: “My dad is a 1st generation Bangladeshi who arrived here at 13.” Dr Ahmed’s dad was upset at Margaret Thatcher’s passing, and said: “She was a leader on the side of the small businessman”. The testimonies of those young men prove that the great lady will live on. Margaret Thatcher made this country understand the importance of living within its means. She knew that only when we achieve that can we be ambitious for, and positive about, our position in the world. Next week, the country she loved will mark her passing. It is right that we do so with the full ceremony of Church and state, because 30 years ago, in a storm-lashed corner of the south Atlantic, she stood up for the inalienable rights of British citizens, despite coming under great pressure to look the other way. In doing so, she showed the world that we are not yet finished, and that Britain’s name and Britain’s word still matters. She gave us hope that our finest hour lies not in the past, but in our future. For that, the nation owes her its thanks.