LDCRE's "substantial" submission to the election review changes the debate

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.

So as a member of LDCRE we would like you to accept this challenge: to work in your local party to ensure that it is truly representative, take up the concerns of your local community and try to address them.

We are getting reports in from round the country of local parties getting started on this challenge. Our urban parties have BAME members who are either running with this already or who could be invited to join in and play a leading role. Research is being done locally to find out what local issues are affecting BAME residents and discussing how they could take this forward.

And LDCRE wants to emphasise that, when fighting elections in multiracial communities, we should be reaching out to all groups rather than merely focussing on 'getting out the vote'.

In particular, the report made the following two recommendations:

1)To include the main change that the review calls for, which is changing the culture of the party to
embed at all levels the concerns and interests of BAME communities and issues in all its activities,
reaches out to the BAME communities and actively plans how it will achieve real integration at all
levels.

2)Ensure resources - paid staff and investment - are in place to implement this.

Let us know your ideas about how the party can achieve these two recommendations and the specific resources and actions which you feel are needed to deliver this change so your thoughts can be incorporated into the party's action plan by emailing us at info@ldcre.org.uk