The attitudes of Britain’s ethnic minority population

Welcome to the 130th edition of The Week in Polls (TWIP), which takes a look at a major new report, based on polling data, into the views of Britain’s ethnic minority population.

Then it’s a summary of the latest national voting intention polls and a round-up of party leader ratings, followed by, for paid-for subscribers, 10 insights from the last week’s polling and analysis. (If you’re a free subscriber, sign up for a free trial here to see what you’re missing.)

This is also the week in which my latest email newsletter debuted, taking a look at the books about the 2024 general election one-by-one:

Taken As Red: Anushka Asthana

Finally before we get to the main business, this week’s mild stare of disapproval has to be directed at myself for that classic typo, writing “not” when I meant “now” in the conclusion to last week’s piece about the Conservative leadership race. Thankfully the context made the error clear to readers (I hope). But yes, I am a dolt.

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The attitudes of Britain’s ethnic minority population

I’ve commented before about what a shame it is that high quality political polling of Britain’s ethnic minority communities is so scarce, especially given the headlines that can be grabbed by lower quality data.

So it’s very welcome to see a new report, Minorities Report: The Attitudes of Britain’s Ethnic Minority Population, from Focaldata and UK in a Changing Europe. It’s written by Sophie Stowers, James Kanagasooriam and Zain Mohyuddin, and available in full for free here.

As ever, bear in mind that its conclusions are heavily based on data from one set of polling, and that accurate polling of Britain’s ethnic minority communities can be technically challenging. That said, the credentials of the researchers are strong, with the most famous being those of James Kanagasooriam, inventor of the Red Wall. Focaldata itself had a decent general election too, with its MRP model performing respectably although it was not quite so successful at picking up the scale of the Lib Dem advance.

There is an oddity about one of its other recent findings, in that Focaldata and YouGov tell the opposite story from each other about whether Lib Dem support rises or falls as you go up through the age bands. But until we have more detailed data, we don’t know if that is an issue for Focaldata or for YouGov. This new report did however make me wonder again about Focaldata’s Lib Dem data given the table (p.17) that shows Lib Dem support at the 2019 general election being more than twice as high among ethnic minority voters than among white voters. That again is different from other people’s data (which puts it at more even). But even if it is Focaldata rather than others whose data is off, data about the Lib Dems is a little niche in the context of this research report, and is unlikely to have significantly impacted its findings.

Focaldata also kindly provided me with a free test of their new polling technique earlier this year.

With those notes of caution out the way, what does the report find?

We can start on a positive note, echoing a point I have previously made about how people are more similar to each other than you might think given some of the headlines that media likes to run:

Ethnic minority and white Britons share common diagnoses about what is politically important, what they want out of a government, which cultural institutions are important, what British culture is, and what it means to be British. Whilst the purpose of the paper is to alight on important and unique aspects of non-white Britain, there is far more that unites Britain than divides it…

Non-white voters are just 3% more likely to say race and discrimination is an important issue than those who are white.

There is also widespread agreement on what being British means:

The public have an open approach to what ‘Britishness’ is, with few believing that being white, Christian, or having British ancestry is important. Instead, respondents think it is more important to appreciate British institutions, laws and culture, and contribute through work and paying taxes.

Ethnic minority respondents tend to share this ‘open’ approach to British identity, with few feeling excluded on the basis of their race or religion.

We may be approaching a tipping point at which Labour’s historical domination of voting support from ethnic minority communities seriously fractures:

Ethnic minority opinion now spans the entire political spectrum. The political, social and economic values of British Indians and British Chinese voters, and to a lesser degree Black African voters, are structurally different from other minority groups - in particular British Caribbeans and British Muslims. These differences are not yet fully expressed in terms of voting behaviour (particularly due to the Conservatives’ staggeringly bad defeat in 2024, where proportional swing hid large changes in voting behaviour), but will be in time as the former camp drifts rightward, and the latter to the left.

I was a little more cautious in my wording introducing that quote than the definitive prediction in the quote’s final sentence. That is because there is a long backstory of ‘but now the Labour dominance might be about to break’ predictions over decades. So far, they have only been true in limited degrees. The Conservative Party’s senior ranks have certainly changed but their progress in securing votes from ethnic minority communities has been much more sporadic, and probably the biggest electoral blow to Labour’s dominance, its seat losses at the 2024 general election, was primarily to candidates and parties to its left rather than to its right.¹

But James Kanagasooriam was right about the Red Wall ahead of everyone else, so perhaps this time it will indeed be the case.

What really caught my eye though was something that definitely runs counter to my usual refrain of ‘different groups aren’t all that different’. It turns out that the demographics of political support are very different between white and non-white voters:

Amongst non-white Britons, graduate level education makes you proportionately more likely to be Conservative.

Class cleavages and patterns that have disappeared from the voting patterns of white Britons exist and are indeed getting stronger amongst non-white voters. The Conservative Party will continue to have its esoteric coalition of affluent minorities and nongraduate whites and Labour the opposite.

Another finding may make that future Conservative progress challenging to achieve given the party’s current rightward trajectory:

There are a clutch of issues - immigration and multiculturalism - where ethnic minorities are much more positive than the rest of Britain.

Although:

We also see that non-white Britons tend to be more concerned with Britain getting ahead economically and with material success than those who are white.

However, talking about ethnic minority communities all together misses important variations:

British Indians and British Chinese voters tend to be right wing on the economy, expectations of the nation state, and views on welfare. Other minority groups sit much more firmly on the left. If politics reorients to be based primarily around economic divisions, this may lead to even greater fragmentation of minority opinion…

There is a wide difference between minority groups on their experience of racism and of representation. The British Caribbean and British Chinese populations represent two ends of the spectrum. British Caribbean respondents see themselves reflected much more in popular culture and positions of power, but personally perceive much higher rates of personal racism. Meanwhile, British Chinese people feel culturally excluded, but do not perceive anything like the levels of racism that other groups do. Certain ethnic groups are almost invisible from our television, radio and cultural spaces whereas Black Britons are not, with this gap confirmed by minority groups’ own assessments.

Less happily:

There is evidence of some prejudice among certain ethnic minority voters toward other minority groups. Clear and neutral data is needed to expound on these findings. Among some non-white groups, a minority - but in some cases a sizable minority - express anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, which is not reflected to the same extent amongst the wider white population.

Overall, the report in many ways reminds me of the original Red Wall thesis: take an apparently permanent pattern of British politics, point out that the underlying factors supporting it have significantly eroded and predict that as a result dramatic changes are coming.

That was the outcome with the Red Wall. We’ll see if that happens again.

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Voting intentions and leadership ratings

Here are the latest national general election voting intention polls, sorted by fieldwork dates:

Next, a summary of the the leadership ratings, sorted by name of pollster:

For more details, and updates as each new poll comes out, see my regularly updated tables here and follow The Week in Polls on Bluesky.

For the historic figures, including Parliamentary by-election polls, see PollBase.

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Last week’s edition

Is Kemi Badenoch still in the lead?

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The people who say the Chagos Islands are in Scotland, and other polling news

The following 10 findings from the most recent polls and analysis are for paying subscribers only, but you can sign up for a free trial to read them straight away.