The Guardian has a series of articles today on the “ethnic minority vote”. This idea of a single block of ethnic minority voters always makes me itchy - it’s very hard to simply lump together the 5 million (or so) non-white people in this country into this single block (aside - do any gay people who read this blog feel similarly narked every time someone mentions the “gay vote” or the “pink pound”?) This point is almost touched on (but not quite) in the cover article:

They’re not from Middle England, nor are they the Basildon man, Mondeo man or Worcester woman

What the author fails to realise is that neither are white people. These ‘typical’ voter caricatures are nothing more than a focus-group built, dumbed-down approach to crass generalisation. No such depiction exists for non-white voters (maybe political correctness has saved us from any pollster doing so), nor should there be. Rather than trying to come up with a similar construct for “ethnic” voters, any attempt to address the particular needs and agendas needs to look beyond simple catch-alls. The vast spectrum of opinions that accompany the piece show that it’s next to impossible to come up with a single unitary policy.

Undaunted, but bound by this silent restriction, the Guardian has come up with a manifesto which has plenty of good ideas (except the one about all-minority MP candidate shortlists in minority areas, which is absolutely stupid - what we need is minority MPs for white areas). But it can’t be much more than a high-level strategy, a set of guiding principles which are easy to talk about but much harder to enforce. The under-achievement of black pupils in schools will need a set of different approaches to the ones needed to combat the threat to civil liberties of young Muslim men, or the exploitation of Chinese immigrant farm workers. Problems may span multiple communities, or only a subset of one community; other factors such as gender, class, age, location etc. may play a significant part in addition to race. A manifesto is nice but intelligent targeted policies are nicer.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2005 at 22:10:03 and is filed under General.