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Young, BAME and Ready

What a difference a year makes! In January, I remember writing about how following the Stephen Lawrence verdict we had a real opportunity to put race back on to the mainstream agenda, and get this coalition government to realise the need for greater racial and social justice.

Now, as the rate of unemployment goes up amongst young BAME individuals, the ever increasing disproportionate use of stop and search, stories breaking about the racism in every day society, from the football pitch to the police station; the Coalition government prepare to water down the remit of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, while removing the only Black and Muslim commissioners, all of this, for me to points to the Government slashing any commitment to equality and rewinding the equality agenda back years.

All of this makes it all the more important that young, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic members of the Labour Party come together on the 25th of November, for a unique one day conference. The day will aims to focus on developing policies and the organisation needed to recruit young BAME members to our party. The day will discuss how to empower our BAME members to take our messages back to their communities.

I believe that this is vital as we build towards the 2015 election, where, once again the BAME community will be the key to winning the election – holding the balance of power in the key marginal seats as with previous elections. So, for me, the day presents a real opportunity for young BAME members to feed into the on going process of rebuilding our party and regaining the trust of those 5 million lost voters.

We’re all more than aware that this will be crucial to ensure a Labour win in 2015. For too long now our party has taken the BAME vote for granted and the day will provide an opportunity to put race back on the agenda.

More information about the one day event and how to register can be found here

One Comment

  1. john reid says:

    Labour has not only taken the BAME vote for granted we’ve put out literature saying Vote labour or a racist party like UKip Will Win, or looked up every asain Person in the phone book send them letters saying dear labour voter, or when we haven’t got hold on them ,put then down on our data base as identified labour voters, It brings home Trevor Philips view that the Labour party is institutionally racist as we assume Black people vote labour, the police identified themselves as Institutionally racist 13 years ago and did something about it so now Cindy butts David Lammy Paul Boateng and trevor philips say that the police aren’t institutionally racist anymore, come On labour party, the police changed, why can’t we do something to stop assuming that BaME people vote labour and we can stop being institutionally racist and Institutionally anti white racist too,

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