Chair's message

New faces - and how to get involved!

The last few months have been extremely busy for LDCRE.

We have been working with HQ, with Parliamentarians and councillors, working for Conference. As if to highlight the importance of centreing race equality in the Party, we then had to sadly work on how to reclaim the race equality narrative nationally after the appalling comments coming out of the recent Torbay scandal.

Many will have heard about the appalling comments from the Torbay Council Leader, the subsequent poor retraction, and many will have been deeply worried about what this says for the Party's trust with BAME communities and members, and the effect on campaigning up and down the country. There has been much concern about the cover this can give to those who are opposed to race equality or just outright racist across the political spectrum, up and down the country.

It has shaken many BAME and non-BAME members. LDCRE have heard the hurt, anger, and pain from many members and non-members up and down the country around this.

It is clear that change is needed. This change must be systemic, effective, and genuinely placing race equality at the centre of the party's priorities for gaining electoral success and remaining a liberal force.

You can read our statement calling for the removal of the Torbay Council Leader here:

You can read press coverage of the outrage over the comments here.

We have made clear that the Council Leader's position is untenable.

We are also clear that reform is needed not only locally to Torbay, but also nationally, by the Party.

The Torbay scandal highlights the sheer urgency of implementing the reforms to the Party's strategy, resourcing and priorities to centre race equality that LDCRE and others have been fighting for many years.

Incremental gains are not enough - and the pace of reaching race equality in the Party must be accelerated.

We are in high-level discussions with multiple senior leaders at HQ raising your concerns, hurt, and anger over this. Change must occur. We will not shy down in holding the Party's feet to the fire on this.

Joint Statement across the Party's race equality organisations:

We are pleased to announce a joint statement from LDCRE, BLAC Liberal Democrats, Chinese Liberal Democrats, and Liberal Democrat Muslim Forum about the gravity of the need for the Party to centre race equality in its strategy and resourcing, and to implement the various race equality reviews that have gone before. This statement was drafted prior to the Torbay scandal - but the scandal highlights its need even more.

It is extremely powerful to have so many race equality organisations united in expressing their legitimate concerns to the Party. We are very grateful and pleased to have worked with our colleagues across the party's race equality organisations.

You can read the statement on Lib Dem Voice.

Fighting for Race Equality:

* Our race equality business motion, highlighting the importance of implementing the Alderdice and Thornhill review with proper resources behind it, was not accepted for Conference. We are instead putting it forwards as an amendment and have been working with others to improve its chance of being accepted for debate. If nothing else, Torbay has highlighted how much work still needs to be done on this.

* Earlier in the summer, we had meetings with Party President Mark Pack, to raise our concerns over implementing Alderdice/Thornhill. We also had meetings with LDHQ on developing a training programme around this, and we worked up an initial project plan for a subsequent working group that is being set up to create this as a result of our lobbying. We have further meetings with senior HQ officials on the back of the Torbay scandal and to further develop training programmes. The Party must sustainably ensure that local and regional parties can campaign in BAME communities effectively and that they do so in an anti-racist manner. This is crucial if we are to ensure our campaigns and policies are responsive and inclusive, and to build our electoral gains.

* Chris, our Communications Officer, has touched further on this in this piece about what the party has forgotten from the lessons learnt in Chesham & Amersham.

And our Treasurer, Michael Bukola, has written about the lost opportunity from Batley & Spen for us.

* Putting race equality at the heart of the Party is also about the Rooney Rule. This is the principle that when shortlisting candidates, at least one BAME individual should be on the final shortlist. This does not mean they are necessarily selected - it's not like an all-BAME shortlist. Fundamentally, the Party needs to be willing to make a political decision around backing the Rooney Rule. Waiting for 100% certainty is a political choice against race equality. We are continuing to push this forward and will be publishing articles explaining this further. This principle was backed by both Leadership candidates via our Race Equality pledge.

Conference:

* We will be announcing a packed Conference LDCRE fringe agenda for the Federal conference - watch this space. Roderick, our Vice-Chair, has led on organizing these and will be sending out a notice of the events shortly.

* LDCRE have drafted a Race Equality amendment to the strategy motion for Federal conference. We have been working to gain widespread support - please do put in a speaker card if it is accepted for debate.

* There are many motions on the agenda that are particularly relevant to race equality - do put in speaker cards and add your voice to them. Motion that have a particularly relevance for much of race equality policy include motions on children in care/care leavers, climate change, Ugyhur genocide, party strategy, Israel-Palestine lasting peace, violence against women and girls, helping people against fraud and scams, and and ties with Europe. And the conference is virtual this year too!

* LDCRE has worked with the other SAOs on an emergency motion around Afghanistan going to Conference.

Open Meetings:

On the back of our recent members' meetings with Munira Wilson MP and Daisy Cooper MP, we had a further open meeting with Layla Moran MP earlier in the summer. We heard about Layla's work in Parliament, her work on the Coronavirus cross-party APPG, and her work as a spokesperson for foreign affairs. Layla, as have other MPs as well, backed the Rooney Rule as a principle. She also spoke about the importance we all have in finding BAME candidates to stand, backing them and supporting them, and how to help local parties with this. We will continue to work with Layla's office on this.

Campaigning:

Congratulations to Nancy Jirira who won her by-election in Fortune Green. LDCRE held several campaigning days there - Anton Georgiou, a Brent councillor who is also on the LDCRE Executive, worked tirelessly campaigning, and was joined by many of our Exec on the doorsteps there.

In early July, Black Pride occured. Nadya, our Secretary, has written further on the importance this has. Nadya is also our rep to LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, and we have continued to work closely with them on LGBT+ issues.

We've continued lobbying Parliamentarians and attending regular diversity committees with Parliamentarians. Our Vice-Chair Janice has helped work on a letter to the Secretary of State on mandatory reporting on ethnicity pay gap and equality monitoring.

Thanks to outgoing Exec members:

We are extremely grateful to James Belchamber and Michael Bukola who will be leaving their Executive roles as we approach the AGM season. James and Michael have contributed significantly to LDCRE's work over the past year. James has helped reform our membership administration and has worked with Chris and Gaelle on improving our communications strategy, as well as on aligning our comms with our strategic priorities. Michael has for many years run the accounts (an oft-forgotten but nonetheless vital role to ensure an organisation like LDCRE can continue to exist) and been a sage source of advice for the Executive over the years. We wish them all the best in their future roles.

Do you want to help LDCRE:

As always, do get in touch if you want to volunteer or get involved in any area of LDCRE - helping us with our accounts, helping with policy, comms, or campaigning, or if you have ideas for policy or campaigning work. We are particularly on the look-out for new recruits as we head into autumn to help with communications and membership. You do not have to take a formal post to help - we are grateful for all offers of help and can work with you to develop your skills further as per your interests. Please just pop us an email via info@ldcre.org.uk

Following on from the party's sensational election of Sarah Green in the Chesham & Amersham by-election there has been a lot of debate about the lessons that can be learned from this victory.

Lessons about what worked in the campaign, about how fragile the Conservatives' popularity really is and how this fits into the wider realignment of British politics have all been acknowledged and hotly debated.

Indeed, the surprising retention of Batley & Spen by Labour has only served to intensify these debates.

But as someone who knocked on hundreds of doors in Chesham & Amersham, I think our party has completely missed another key lesson from these by-elections:

Actively engaging with ethnic minority communities must be an essential part of a successful British political party in the 21st Century, not a token luxury.

Now, anyone who follows politics will have seen how much importance was placed on engaging British Muslims in Batley by George Galloway and Kim Leadbetter in Labour's victory. That seemed to be the only story the media was interested in covering.

But equally, if you look beyond the media's characterisation of Chesham & Amersham you will realise that similar lessons can be learned from here too.

Whilst Chesham & Amersham is indeed part of leafy remania/the Commuter Belt/the Blue Wall - whatever you want to call it, such a simplistic characterisation of the seat misses out on the diversity of its constituents. It really isn't all leafly mansions.

ONS Census data shows that around 15% of Chesham's population is of Asian heritage, and a day spent door knocking there quickly reveals that there is a significant South Asian Community in Chesham with a mosque and many inter-generational families from diverse backgrounds living there.

Myself and my fellow LDCRE Executive Members who joined the campaign trail, identified early on that any victorious Liberal Democrat campaign would have to successfully include these communities in our activity. So we set out about doing just this, working with the local party and campaign staff to make sure our campaign was inclusive of ALL of Chesham's residents, not just those who fit the traditional demographics of Lib Dem voters!

Our Executive Members helped support and attend a visit from Sarah, local councillor Parveiz Aslam and Ed Davey to Chesham Mosque, to speak to the community at Friday Prayers. We also held an LDCRE Action Day where joined by London Assembly Member Hina Bokhari, we recruited a diverse campaign team, who were passionate about the issues of equality and human rights that are often of greater concern to ethnic minority voters and had experience of canvassing ethnic minority voters and those with English as a 2nd language, and campaigned in Chesham's most diverse areas.

Now I know many Liberal Democrat campaigners, including some very senior ones I know well and respect, will be thinking: "That's all very nice and well a good thing to do, but it isn't going to win us an election, let's focus our scarce resources on the leaflets and hyper-refined Mini-Van lists that will win the seat for us."

But, how wrong this attitude proved to be. We knocked on hundreds of doors in these areas during our action day, encountering many and many voters who hadn't yet engaged with the campaign's literature but told us they were appreciative of Sarah's visit Mosque but wanted to know about her position on issues that particularly, and crucially not exclusively, mattered to them, asking us questions about the party's position on Palestine as well as fixing potholes. On that day we helped secure the votes of many residents' who don't normally consider supporting the Liberal Democrats as they are unaware of our party's values, but after campaigners who understood their lived experiences and how this influences their politics had spoken to them were passionately excited to back Sarah.

Indeed, when I returned to Chesham to knock-up voters on polling day, I was delighted that two of my lists took me to roads that had been covered at the heart of our action day.

Where only a week and half earlier I had first encountered a warm but unfamiliar response to our party on the doorstep, on polling day I enjoyed possibly the two best canvassing lists I have ever encountered. Whole roads of homes, now covered in stakeboards, were on my list and 95% of the residents of the households, which were often intergenerational and so including up to 8 voters, were actively excited to be voting for Sarah and the Liberal Democrats, informing me they had texted all of their friends and family members to do the same.

So as we look back on the Chesham and Amersham Campaign, I hope that our party and the senior campaigners that run it behind the scenes, who often display an attitude that whilst diversity and inclusion is morally important and something they support, it doesn't contribute to the core purpose of the party, namely winning elections, and so can't be a priority for resources or our strategies, learn two lessons.

First: Running diverse and inclusive campaigns can't be treated as a luxury that we do if we have enough resources and once we have finished the "proper" activities that help our party win, but rather it helps us win. The Thornhill Report identified this key lesson but unfortunately, we are yet to see it be implemented.

Second: Running diverse and inclusive campaigns matters everywhere, not just in your Brents, your Lambeths and your Southwarks where are a majority of residents are ethnic minority, but also in your Cheadles, your Wimbledons and of course, your Chesham & Amershams where a small, but significant, proportion of residents are from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Chris Annous is the LDCRE's Communications Officer. He has previously been the party's London Assembly Candidate in Greenwich and Lewisham, the Young Liberals BAME Officer and a staff member on the London Liberal Democrats 2021 Mayoral & Assembly Campaigns.

If you would like advice on how to run diverse and inclusive campaigns with your local party then please email info@ldcre.org.uk

Amongst the fallout of the Batley & Spen by-election, previously a safe Labour seat, the Lib Dems reflect on our own campaign where we finished 4th with 3% of the vote, behind both the Labour and Conservative candidates and George Galloway's Workers Party. The only televised hustings aired on British Muslim TV was represented by our very own Cllr Shaffaq Muhammad, former MEP for Yorkshire and Leader of the Opposition in Sheffield, 30+ miles away!

Restricting the campaign to Cleckheaton, 10 miles from Batley, largely due to where the party has councillors, we resisted the temptation to engage with a rather disgruntled Islamic community based in Batley who were fed up with the Labour Party who they had given loyal support for 25 years in return for an area which had seen better days.

On the face of it, the place would have been good hunting ground for Liberal Democrats with a Labour-run council closing the local Police station, in favour of unaffordable housing, and potholes galore - classic community politics.

Notwithstanding that, we made no real attempt to engage the Islamic community of predominately South Asian heritage (pakistani and gujarati backgrounds). Our lack of self-confidence in engaging ethnic minorities is palpable. This has allowed a vacuum to occur where famously dubbed, the party of "community politics" have made way for populist parties to infiltrate the community. Previous Parliamentary by-election victories from Labour like Leicester South in 2004 and Brent East in 2003 were won by engaging South Asian voters on issues like the military invasion of Iraq. We could have detoxified the whole situation by sticking to the issues by working all-year round and not just when elections come round. Some of our earliest victories doing community politics was in Yorkshire back in 1983 General Election in Leeds West.

The constituency itself, is well documented for previous community tensions not least due to the tragic murder of former Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016, killed by a far-right and neo nazi terrorist. Now, Jo Cox's sister, Kim Leadbeater becomes the new MP for Batley & Spen against a backdrop of controversary surrounding her own selection where she was 'parachuted' into the winning the Labour candidacy, waiving the minimum requirement of 1-year party membership for candidates seeking to stand for public office, to the detriment of long-standing party members, many of them, Asian, who would have wanted to stand but were not able to given the circumstances.

The 'Blue wall' strategy has given us a much needed narrative but it also just hides behind our failures in 'Red wall' seats whether that be in the North West, West Midlands or Wales. We need to get our "mojo" back, we have good story to tell while in Government on protecting civil liberties - stopping ID cards then, and campaigning against vaccine passports now, preventing the creep of a surveillance state.

Michael Bukola has been a Party member since 2003 and former ward councillor in South Bermondsey ward of Southwark Council from 2010 to 2014 where he stood against and won against the BNP. Michael is also a former Diversity Co-ordinator (Champion) for London Lib Dems (2011-2013) and accredited Party trainer. He served on both Federal Party policy working groups for Crime and Policing (2018/2019) and Immigration and Identity (2017/2018).