LDCRE Launches 10 Anti-Racism Pledges for Party Leadership Candidates

The LDCRE has today launched a 10-point plan to improve racial equality both inside and outside the party. We call on both Layla Moran and Ed Davey and their campaigns to pledge their support for all 10 of these policies. We believe all these pledges are deliverable and will work with the successful candidate to introduce them.

Campaigning

Despite being a party which has a commitment to fighting discrimination at the heart of our ideology and having strong anti-discrimination policies, we have failed to gain relevance amongst many ethnic minority voters. Multiple reviews have found that a failure to incorporate race equality into our campaigning is the cause of this. We therefore call on the party to properly incorporate ethnic minorities and our issues in our campaigns and to reach out to ethnic minority communities in our campaigning by:

1) Ensure that the party hires paid outreach staff to train local parties and regions on how they can engage and represent ethnic minority communities to help implement the recommendations of the Alderdice and Thornhill reviews.

2) Conduct an audit of the ethnic diversity of party representatives and staff, both HQ and parliamentary, and implement a strategy to increase ethnic minority representation in these areas.

3) Ensure that the party's communications integrate 'BAME' issues and/or people into everything the party does with a specific strategy for this for all election campaigns.

Candidates

Whilst we welcome the successful election of 2 'BAME' MP's for the 1st time in 2019, their success must not be used to paper over the party's failure to promote more 'BAME' candidates into winnable seats. For example, only 4 of the party's 40 next closest parliamentary seats had 'BAME' candidates, we've never elected a Black Lib Dem MP and our councillor base is unrepresentative of modern Britain. We call on both candidates to adopt the three following feasible solutions:

4) Implement a 'Rooney Rule' for all parliamentary shortlists by reforming the candidate's selection procedures sections in the party's constitutions.

5) Protect and continue with the existing "zipping" arrangements that the party uses such as for the London Assembly List.

6)Implement and fully fund, a leadership programme of mentoring, training and support for aspiring ethnic minority candidates.

Key Policies

Whilst we recognise that implementing the below policies would be only the tip of the iceberg in the fight for racial equality, with 11 MP's we must focus on fighting for the change which has cross-party support. We believe that all four of these policies has the potential for a parliamentary majority and so call on both candidates to lead the fight for these:

7) Campaign to get the 2010 Equality Act equalised to allow for all-'BAME' parliamentary shortlists.

8) Lobby and pressure the Conservative government for the full implementation of the Windrush Learned Lessons Review recommendations.

9) In order to bring faster integration within the workplace, campaign for legislation requiring all companies with more than 50 workers to publish their equality monitoring data.

10) Actively campaign locally and nationally to ban suspicionless stop and search, and to address the adverse effects of discrimination in other stop and search and screening activities by police and transport officials