Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats

Equality and Contribution

It has taken a while but the signs are that the Liberal Democrats are beginning to flex their muscles and risk causing their senior coalition partners a degree of unease.

Not for the first time Baroness Warsi has accused Simon Hughes of trying to wreck the Coalition. Simon will wear this as a badge of honour because he sees himself as the champion of his party activists and not as a mouth piece for the coalition government. He is of course absolutely right to do so. Whilst the majority of Lib Dem members supported the decision by the leadership to enter into a coalition with the conservatives, there is no hiding the fact that a growing number have recently started to ask if the party was paying too high a price for the privilege of being in government. The Party's poor showing in the polls and the battering the party took in last year's local council elections served only to increase this sense of unease.

Liberal Democrats members are a loyal bunch. Despite their sense of unease there have been few defection notwithstanding both private and public overtures to them particularly from the Labour Party. They have chosen instead to talk up the Liberal Democrats influence on government policy and boast that but for them over one million lower paid people would not now be paying less income tax, nor would thousands of children be benefiting from the pupil premium let alone the fact that ID Cards would almost certainly have been introduced and trial by jury could well have ended.

But internally the membership has continued to be critical of the Party's failure to champion more vigorously one of the central tenets of their philosophy - the development of a society where all sections of the community are treated fairly. Many were concerned that the leadership appeared to have let slip its claim to be the Party of Equality and Fairness There was dismay that the concerns expressed by community groups over the coalition government's watering down of Race Relations legislation were not heeded. There was anger too at the speed with which government moved to implement changes to the benefits system whilst dragging its feet on closing tax loop holes used by the well to do.

Now it seems the message from the grass roots has got through to the leadership. Simon Hughes as Deputy Leader is becoming increasingly more out spoken as are a few other MPs. Even Nick Clegg has stepped up his game and started to stand up to David Cameron if his recent statement on Europe is anything to go by.

Nick has also increased his standing in the BME community by the message he gave to the country through his Scarman Lecture.

"We have moved forward on a number of fronts: legal rights - where we have seen the most success. Political representation is better - though of course there is still a very, very long way to go. I say that as a leader of a political party that is still too male and too pale.." he said.

His candour in admitting that the Liberal Democrats have further to go than the other two parties when it comes to political representation is something the membership is accustomed to. It is a matter of record of course that the Party has made more progress on this issue under his leadership than at any time in its history.

Three key messages in the speech stand out for me:

* The lesson from the last thirty years is it is not enough for a society to reject bigotry. Real equality is not just the absence of prejudice. It is the existence of fairness and opportunity too.

* If you assume the state has all the answers, you absolve other parts of our society from playing their part. You treat black and ethnic minority communities as passive recipients of state help, rather than empowering them as strong individuals.

* I want to send out a clear signal today: the Equalities Act is a cornerstone of the UK's rights architecture. It isn't there for employers to pick and choose from. And it is not going away. So I have asked Andrew Stunell to work with the government's own Ethnic Minority Advisory Group and the EHRC, and to bring together some of the best experts in finance with individuals who understand the problems of building businesses. To look at the barriers preventing black and ethnic minority groups from accessing loans. We have to work out what is going wrong, and then we have to fix it.

Driving forward the equality agenda on the back of the contribution it can make to the economy rather than patronage to under privileged groups must surely be the right thing to do. I know most Asian Businessmen would embrace such an approach.