It has been incredibly hard to complete this blog.

I have contemplated every word, pondered every sentence, and mulled over every paragraph. In the last two weeks I have felt intense anger, grief, outrage, and sadness. I have had moments in which I see the light, other moments in which I have felt completely helpless and hopeless. The only thing I feel able to do is reflect on my last 12 months, the lessons I have learnt - and tell my story.

Our committee member Anton Georgiou has led the way on this in the Labour fiefdom of Brent in January. Starting in a rather hopeless third place needing a 20% swing to win a by-election in Alperton ward, he put together a multiracial, multilingual canvassing squad and hit the whole ward.

One BAME resident told him he'd lived there 40 years and it was the first time a Lib Dem had asked for his support. Anton managed to achieve a 28% swing and is now the first Lib Dem councillor in Brent in four years.

LDCRE believes that engaging BAME voters across the country is essential to the future success of our party. To that end we intend to hold a local party members' Q&A in July (on Zoom) so that all those who want to build this future can come together and share knowledge of what's working in local parties round the country so we can all learn from each other.

After a huge amount of hard work by members of the LDCRE executive the review board for the 2019 election really had no choice but to accept that our targeting methods have written off BAME votes across the country, contributing to losses in key seats. You can read the full report here.

In our submission we pointed out that BAME communities are now 40% of the population in London and Birmingham and over 30% in many other cities. Our party has a proud record of fighting race discrimination but we have a long way to go to ensure that our local party membership is truly representative and integrated with our local populations.

The continuing failure to record the ethnicity of Covid-19 patients is risking the lives of BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) frontline NHS workers and citizens across the UK, according to the Liberal Democrat Campaign for Race Equality (LDCRE).

To date no record of the ethnicity of those with Covid-19 has been collected by the government. This is despite there being anecdotal evidence that Covid-19 is affecting a disproportionately high percentage of those belonging to BAME groups.