by LORD SIMON WOOLLEY
After more than 25 years of encouraging, and inspiring Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities to register to vote, and vote at Operation Black Vote (OBV), I found myself the extraordinary position where I can’t vote! Not in this or any other any other General election, ever again.
I only found this out a few weeks ago.
It was just after I’d finished my maiden speech as a Cross Bench peer in the House of Lords where I made the point that my life’s work had centred around voter registration when a fellow Peer congratulated me, adding, “But you do know, young man” - the average age of the Peers is 70 - “that Lords and lunatics cannot vote”. A Baroness leaning into the conversation nodding in confirmation.
So, there it is: the price for parliamentary scrutiny has been to personally lose my democratic franchise to vote. But of course that’s not going stop me from doing what I’ve always done: Get BME (Black Minority Ethnic) individuals to register, vote and engage in the democratic process
After all these years campaigning getting individuals registered is still one the most challenging things we do at OBV; a challenge that gets harder when marginalised communities are particular victims of austerity or are vilified within the more toxic Brexit debates around immigration, and about who genuinely belongs .
Given the mountain yet to climb and the present divided nation we are, we decided in our collaboration with the world beating ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to adopt a different approach to who would be target our audience, and how we might approach them.
Our starting point was to go back to the late 70’s and early 80’s when tackling race inequality and bigotry was spearheaded by young Black and white musicians and activists: The Rock against Racism movement with bands such as Steele Pulse, Elvis Costello, Aswad, Tom Robinson brought together a cultural youth unity that stood up to extreme racism, and fascists. Harking back to this golden era of activism we decided we should focus on young people coming together to confront bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, and climate change deniers.
The next phase was to expose politicians and commentators in the political space who had used either their parliamentary privilege or platforms to spew bile and bigotry. The plan was to lay bare their poisonous comments with the mantra: If you don’t speak for yourself, others will speak for you. Register to vote, and have a voice.
Top of my list of targeted bigots was the foul mouthed queen of hate, Katie Hopkins, who has spoken and written a litany of racist comments from which to choose? Her reference that likened migrants crossing the Mediterranean to cockroaches, adding the way to stop their boats would be to confront them with Gun boats was particularly nauseating. However, Saatchi’s lawyers informed us that incredibly we might need her permission to use her racist bigotry, but with politicians we didn’t need their agreement.
Our only consideration then was to ensure we – as always - used parity in how we targeted politicians, which we’ve tried to do. The final piece in the jigsaw was to find young talent Black and white celebrities who would be willing to repeat bigoted comments made by politicians, with the end strapline; if you don’t speak for yourself, others will speak for you.
Rising Hollywood stars Nathalie Emmanuel and Will Poultry, singers Nadia Rose and Jermaine Jackman and writers Ash Sarkar and Gok Wan agreed to play their part to inspire a young generation to register to vote.
Our publicity around getting individuals registered is always predicated on demonstrating just how powerful the BME vote is and having a set of demands that people can coalesce around.
The power of the BME vote has never had such potential clout. Altogether there are 100 seats in which the BME vote could decide who wins and who loses. Furthermore, 40 or so with majorities with less than 2000 votes, with many in the hundreds. In these parliamentary targeted seats, literally every vote will count.
And lastly all these votes and the politicking comes down to what type of society do we want. BME communities like mainstream society want decent education for their children, jobs when they leave academia, and health care that will help them in their hour of need. But within that there are specifics that can only be addressed by race equality focused policy. For example, how do we stop the horrors of knife crime, or ensure, at the other end BME talent can flourish in education? How do have a more level playing field in the job market? And wow do we get the monstrous numbers of BME youth incarceration to fall, instead of its steady rise? Amongst our many demands is a call for a consolidation the Race Disparity Unit, that lays bare ethnic inequality gaps within Whitehall data with the mantra: ‘Explain or find policy change’.
A more tangible demand is the call for 50, 000 BME teachers over a five-year period. This, we’re convinced will help shut the pipeline to school exclusions and criminality, whilst on the upside we’d hope to see more BME students being inspired to great excellence. Finally the employment inequality can only be solved by first laying bare the BME pay gaps, followed by an action plan to close them.
Raising voter registration awareness, highlighting our political clout, then having a set of demands that could transform our society has been our modus operandi for this campaign.
The first step is still very much in play. Until 26th November midnight. That is registering to vote, which by the way takes three minutes online, as long as have/know your national insurance number.
After that we make our demands for equality, dignity and a pathway for future prosperity.
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