Alok Sharma has been appointed Tory vice chairman and charged with improving the party’s standing among ethnic minority voters. He certainly has a big task ahead of him. According to the Ethnic Minority British Election Study, the Conservatives received just 16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote in 2010, to Labour’s 68 per cent. The Tory vote share among Black voters was actually in the single figures:
Lord Ashcroft has suggested that this weakness prevented the Tories from picking up the extra seats they needed for a majority, noting that:
‘The average non-white population of the constituencies the Tories gained from Labour in 2010 was 6 per cent. In the twenty of Labour’s one hundred most vulnerable marginals that the Tories failed to win, the average non-white population was 15 per cent. In the five of those that were in London, it was 28 per cent.
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