Kanishk Tharoor (London, oD): It's a measure of Barack Obama's global impact that his candidacy for the top job in Washington triggered soul-searching in Whitehall. In a bid to accelerate the production of "British Obamas", Keith Vaz (with Harriet Harman's encouragement) has introduced a bill that would allow parties to positively discriminate in favour of minorities, encouraging the development of "all-minority shortlists" for parliamentary seats. Though ostensibly not "colour-coded", the shortlists could conceivably lead to the tagging of constituencies with large immigrant populations as available only to minority parliamentarians.
Sunder Katwala has a sound critique of the proposal in this week's New Statesman: 'Ethnic faces for ethnic voters' is a depressing step backwards (implying white MPs for the majority community, too), Yet Ashok Kumar has spent a decade as an archetypal hard-working, undemonstrative northern MP for his 98.6 per cent white Middlesbrough constituency. In 2001, Parmjit Dhanda was able to thank the voters of marginal Gloucester for disproving the local paper's prediction that they 'lacked the advanced consciousness' to elect a 'foreigner'. Now, future Dhandas and Kumars fear being packed off to Leicester or Ealing and told to wait for one of 'their seats' to come up. Many believe that minority-only contests would focus more on ethnicity - and which community's 'turn' it is to win a seat - than the candidate's qualities.
Katwala's on the right track; all told, this is a pretty wretched idea. Harman's plan will only intensify ghettoisation and throw up higher obstacles to meaningful "integration" in the UK. Minority seats will buttress the creeping sense of both a politics and a geography fissured by race, strengthening the hand of strident identitarians while weakening the integrity of citizenship.
The parliament's lack of diversity should be a source of disquiet and agitation, but rushing through minority MPs simply creates cosmetic change. As Sunny Hundal notes on CiF, “shortlists almost let political parties off the hook by examining why people of diverse racial, gender and class backgrounds do not come up the ranks. If our political parties are to become more representative, they need a bottom-up change, not a superficial one at the top.”
That Vaz cited Obama as an example of the necessity of this strategy is quite bizarre. Obama emerged as the first viable black candidate in US history after over two centuries of tormented race relations. Britain's history of entanglements with racial issues is certainly many centuries in the making, but the history of race within Britain is relatively short. So is the history of race in the UK – despite numerous ugly convulsions – far less brutal and acrimonious than that of the US. Admittedly, the American experience of race doesn't make the happiest model, but a cynic could readily ask Harman and Vaz, "Why the rush?"
More importantly, Obama's politics would not have been possible if he'd climbed up to his candidacy on a separate, racially-demarcated ladder. His message lies in the transcending of differences. He is seen as a viable option because he accepts his race at once as a reality and as a distraction that must be overcome. Such bold ventures must take place in the entirety of the public sphere. Why should leaders be encouraged to appeal to the few instead of the whole, the minority instead of the totality? Democracy and equality are wed through rigorous inclusion, not by the allotting of fiefdoms of colour.
