The Conservatives should be the party of immigrants — and here’s how they can be

For a long while, the Conservatives have been puzzled about their lack of popularity among immigrants. In theory, the Conservative party should be the natural home of new voters who are ambitious, entrepreneurial, hard-working and family-orientated. The immigrant vote — to the extent it can be considered a coherent block at all — ought to be fertile Tory territory. By and large, these are families who have moved to Britain to get ahead and to avail themselves of what Michael Howard called ‘the British dream’.

Yet at the last election fewer than one in five ethnic minority voters endorsed Conservative candidates and the party is unlikely to fare much better in May. Sajid Javid, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, admits that his friends and family were amazed when he joined the Tories rather than Labour. The objection was not ideological, but because they suspected — as do many other immigrants and children of immigrants — that the Tories just don’t like them.