Is Labour’s ethnic minority vote holding up?
The focus on ethnic minority voting trends is often on the Tories and their failure to connect with BME voters. But there are signs that all is not stable in every part of Labour’s ethnic minority vote.
Look at the graphs for voter identification and you see voters of Afro-Caribbean and African background still pretty staunchly Labour – in these communities the problem for Labour is voter registration levels.
In the Pakistani community you see a drop off in identification with Labour after the Iraq war and then a stabilsing or levelling off.
But look at the Indian community and you see a very different graph. Identification with labour drops off after 1997 and in an almost equal decline does the same again from 2010 to 2014.
This is the sort of graph you would expect to see if a core vote was showing signs of crumbling.