In\nthe 1990s I was an established equality practitioner and the term diversity had\njust been coined. My livelihood depended on my work; family to feed, mortgage and\nbills to pay and the like. As a paid-up member of the Labour Party, there was a\ntime when I wondered if the Tory Party came calling for advice whether I would\nsell my expertise to them. This was when they had selected a Black candidate\nfor the blue seat of Cheltenham. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Taylor was the son of Jamaican Christian immigrants, settled in Birmingham. His father was a professional cricketer and coach for Warwickshire and his mother was a nurse. Taylor attended Moseley Grammar School where he was head boy and later attended Keele University where he studied English Literature and law, followed by Inns of Court School of Law in London. So, the right material for a future Tory Member of Parliament! This was not to be. The safe seat was lost to the Liberal Democrats, for the simple reason the electorate could not stomach a Black candidate. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n I\nremember thinking at the time that if the Tories sorted their racism they would\ndo well given the many potential candidates like Taylor amongst the ethnic\nminorities. That was then. The Tories did manage to get there, without my\nadvice. In fact, alongside the women-only shortlists which brought many women\ninto Parliament for the Labour Party benches, the conscious way the Tories set\nout to bring in ethnic minorities to arrive at their current position offers an\nexample of good equalities recruitment practice. So, you would think that those\nof us who campaign for ethnic minority representation would be pleased. Whether\nwe are or not depends on our politics. What the exercise has told us is that\nrepresentation is not the only thing matters. We are (and should be) also\nconcerned with what the representatives do once they get there. We are even\nlearning that some ethnic minority Tories are even worse than White because of\ntheir use of their own ethnicity as a weapon to bring in even nastier policies.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\nproblem is not just in Parliament. After years of campaigning when I recently\nreported that a particular education board in Birmingham was no longer 100\npercent White because of its three ethnic minority candidates someone raised\nthe point: let\u2019s hope they are the right ethnic minorities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Well\nbefore the highly ethnically diverse Tory leadership list, the education\ncampaigner Rosemary Campbell-Stephens advised us to go \u2018beyond representation\u2019\n(in the Colin Diamond Birmingham Book 2022). In her view representation alone\nwas not enough. We should also ask: leadership for what purpose and in whose\ninterest?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Representation matters but is never sufficient on its own. We have to look beyond to assess the behaviour of the representatives and the positive difference they make to addressing inequalities. To quote Lord Simon Wolley, we need \u201cprincipled, all community serving politicians who won\u2019t pander to prejudice to elevate themselves\u201d ; \u201cethical leadership, not just ethnicity\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the 1990s I was an established equality practitioner and the term diversity had just been coined. My livelihood depended on my work; family to feed, mortgage and bills to pay and the like. As a paid-up member of the Labour Party, there was a time when I wondered if the Tory Party came calling … <\/p>\n