Impact on the Political Sector Free Essay Example

As immigration features very highly and cannot be ignored on the political agendas, it is crucial to study immigrants’ participation and their impacts on various political arenas. When looking at the minority ethnic groups’ engagement in the national and local politics, it generally occurs that minority ethnic candidates are under-represented and they only favour participation at the grass-roots level (Anwar, 2002). Primarily, the Conservative Party which had racial discrimination history like Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham (Savage, 1968), usually faces a serious challenge when it comes to securing the support from non-white voters.

According to the British Election Study of ethnic minority voters live in three major gateway cities of UK, London, Birmingham and Manchester, there was 76 per cent of non-white voters backed Labour Party, while only 17 per cent voted Conservative (Green et al., 2018). One interesting thing to notice here is that although the majority of non-white ethnic groups in Birmingham has always been voting for the Labour Party, the demographic was completely reversed in the recent general election.

Birmingham, one of Britain’s most diverse cities, divided over immigration and helped tilt the vote towards Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party with Brexit’ as political agenda. The growing number of upwardly mobile migrant voters must have thoroughly convinced by the Conservatives by their stronger reputation for sound economic management, then became a more palatable electoral choice for a greater number of Birmingham-based ethnic minority voters. As Bloomfield puts, ‘There are lots of ethnic communities that are at the lower end of the labour market, and it is fair to say that the vote for Remain was not as solid in those areas as it was expected’ (Bloomfied, 2019).

Beyond that, the number of minority ethnic candidates in Birmingham was increasing towards the end of the twentieth century (Garbaye, 2002) as efforts had been made by the Conservative Party and Liberal Democrats to support minority ethnic candidates to gain a substantial share of the vote. However, Dr Fieldhouse, in his study of minority ethnic politics in Birmingham, stated that ‘political parties that exclusively represented minority ethnic groups have had a little electoral impact’. The attempts to involve minority ethnic groups in specific advisory and consultative bodies were unsuccessful as they were more likely to participate in interest groups focusing on specific community issues. Over the years, many large ethnic minority organizations had become actively associated with Birmingham City Council’s urban regeneration programmes (Council, 2019). Hence, much bigger migrants’ participation is to be found at the local grassroots level as compared to the mainstream national level.

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