Sayeeda Warsi’s resignation shows why most people like me will never vote Conservative

If you wanted one iron rule about British elections, it’s that most non-whites will avoid the Tories and vote Labour. It has happened throughout British history and it will happen again next year. What’s even more extraordinary about this iron rule is that the Conservative party isn’t even trying that hard to change it.

I’ve never voted Conservative in my life, and I can say with certainty that I never will. I joined the Labour party four years ago, so you’d think I was quite happy with this state of affairs. But I’m not. A Conservative party that ignores non-white voters, and a Labour party that sometimes takes them for granted, is not for our democracy or those voters.

What’s clear is that the much-touted ‘modernisation project’ that David Cameron started in 2005 was dealt its final nail in the coffin when Sayeeda Warsi resigned last week. Even she admitted, a bit politely, that the Tories had “left it a little too late to take [ethnic minority voters] seriously.”

This raises an important question: why would a party choose to ignore voters who, if they voted like whites, would have helped them win outright in 2010? At the last election they earned the vote of just 16% of ethnic minorities. As Tim Wigmore points out, in 2015 there will be 50 Tory seats where their margin of victory is smaller than the number of ethnic minorities living there.

This says more about the Conservative party than it would like to admit. 30 years ago, a left-leaning pollster in America went to stay in a white working-class suburb in Detroit to find out why so many of them had abandoned the Democrats and voted for Ronald Reagan. What he found was very revealing: most of those white working-class voters interpreted politics through the prism of race. They saw the left’s campaigning on economic justice as an excuse to send their taxes to African Americans.

Ronald Reagan was able to make those appeals to white working class Americans through dog-whistles about race and welfare benefits, referred to more casually as his ‘Southern Strategy’. It worked, albeit for a while. The problem for the Right in America is that non-whites still remember it all too well and their growing share of the population has made it much harder now for the Republicans to win an election.

Of course, the Conservative party in Britain has played the same awful game. From Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” to Margaret Thatcher’s claim that Britain was being “swamped”, to Michael Howard’s “are you thinking what we’re thinking” posters, and David Cameron’s “GO HOME” vans, the drum-beat remains consistent.

The Conservatives have played this game for so long that they know no other way. This is why Sayeeda Warsi isn’t alone in feeling frustrated; many other non-white aspiring Conservative activists have also walked away from the party.

The point of the dog-whistle isn’t to reflect white concerns, but to racialise their frustrations and their politics. Its aim is to break down social cohesion and convince whites that a fair economy is code for transferring money to poorer non-whites. This is why its so pernicious. And this is why I will never vote Conservative.