LONDON: Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives would lose next year’s election because they had neglected ethnic minority voters, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister who resigned over the government’s Gaza policy, warned on Sunday.
Sayeeda Warsi, a former Foreign Office minister who has played a key role in the Conservatives’ appeal to Muslim voters, last week embarrassed Mr Cameron by resigning via Twitter over what she said was the government’s “morally indefensible” approach to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
On Sunday she dominated the front pages of Britain’s newspapers again, this time warning that what she called Mr Cameron’s neglect of ethnic minority voters would cost him an outright victory at next year’s national election.
“The electoral reality is that we will not win outright Conservative majorities until we start attracting more of the ethnic vote,” she said in an interview with the Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday newspapers.
“We’ve probably left it a little too late to take this part of the electorate seriously.”
The criticism from Ms Warsi, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants to Britain who speaks fluent Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati, will hit a sore spot for Mr Cameron.
Poor support from ethnic minority voters — which make up around 14 per cent of the electorate — was one factor that cost Mr Cameron an outright win in 2010, forcing him into a coalition government with the left-leaning Liberal Democrat party. An academic study showed that only 16 per cent of ethnic minority voters backed the Conservatives in 2010, while Labour, the main opposition party, won 68 per cent support.
Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2014
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