By Paul Goodman
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The Sun reports that Sayeeda Warsi will say in a speech today that –
"Tories have a “brand problem” with ethnic minorities and will not win
future elections until they solve it…The Foreign Office minister believes her party must learn from President
Barack Obama’s recent triumph. And in a warning to David Cameron, she ups his call for an Aspiration Nation
with the need for “an Integration Nation”.
She will also say:
“This issue has gone from a moral imperative to an
electoral reality.” By 2050, minorities will make up a fifth of all voters but only one in six
of them voted Tory at the last general election. And she will cite Obama’s success in attracting 70 per cent of Latino and
Asian voters, and 90 per cent of the black vote".
Baroness Warsi will cite Lord Ashcroft's research, and say that “we need to ensure our language and our tone reaches out to and is relevant to
people from different backgrounds".
She is right. As I pointed out last week on this site, the party is facing demographic marginalisation if it can't win more than 16% of the ethnic minority vote – our average in 2010.
To repeat: in 2001, ethnic minority members made up under one in ten of the population in
2001. By 2050, they will make up a fifth.
The Republicans have become the natural party of opposition in Presidential elections. We will share their fate in general elections if we don't have a change – and swiftly.