Election 2010: Wolverhampton

It’s half past five on a sunny weekday evening and on the doorstep of a large house on a suburban street in middle Britain, a Conservative candidate in a sky blue shirt is complaining about Gordon Brown, his prospective constituent, a middle aged doctor, is nodding in agreement, and a journalist and newspaper photographer are recording the exchange.

It’s a scene being repeated across the country. But there are two details that make this exchange notable. First, we are in one of the Tory Party’s key marginals in the West Midlands, one of the traditional swing regions of British general elections. Second, the 42-year-old Tory candidate, Paul Uppal, the constituent, Dr Saeed, and, for that matter, the journalist too, are all Asian.

Frankly, I never thought I’d see the day. This is my home city of Wolverhampton, you see, where party politics has been playing out along racial lines since 1968, when Enoch Powell, Uppal’s predecessor in the Wolverhampton South West constituency, made his “Rivers of Blood speech”. I don’t think it would be too much of exaggeration to say that in the decades that have followed white Wulfrunians have basically tended to vote Conservative because they were the party most likely to send the darkies back, and the darkies have basically voted Labour because they were the party most likely to let them stay. When I was growing up here, political campaigning in Asian areas essentially took the form of lines of men standing outside the polling station shouting “Second box, second box,” at immigrants who couldn’t, due to illiteracy or lack of English, identify candidates on the polling card. It was taken for granted they meant Labour.

Such has been the shadow cast by the speech that as recently as the 1997 election, the late Nicholas Budgen, Powell’s successor in the seat which was Conservative from its inception in 1950 until Tony Blair took over as Prime Minister, was campaigning strongly against immigration and in 2007, Nigel Hastilow, was being forced to stand down as the Tory candidate for nearby Halesowen and Rowley Regis after writing in a Wolverhampton newspaper that many locals believed Powell was right top say mass immigration would change Britain “irrevocably”.

But if we are to believe Uppal, a Birmingham-born Sikh businessman, whose family came from Kenya, and whose own father was a member of the Labour party and even tried to become a Labour MP, all this pain and bitterness is in the past. “The Conservative Party’s door is now well and truly open to everyone,” says the man reductively described by the Mail on Sunday as a member of David Cameron’s “Obama Army”. “From talking to people who knew Budgen, I think his problem was that he just disliked people generally.” A laugh and a smile. “My own experience of the Conservative Party has been positive. Race relations in Wolves are good. There is a large settled Asian community here, most people don’t raise race as an issue, and second and third generation Asians feel they can be part of the Conservative party’s process, especially with DC in charge.”

DC? It turns out he means David Cameron. The matey abbreviation makes me cringe. And then the cringing inspires guilt. My upbringing has made the idea of a black or Asian Tory feel as improbable as a meowing rabbit. But I realise thinking so is in itself prejudiced, and that Uppal’s existence should be embraced as a sign of progress. The question is, does the commercial property manager and father of three, who experienced intense racism when attending a school in Edgbaston in the seventies (“you’d get called “filthy smelly dirty paki” six or seven times before you got to school, then it would carry on”), and who was a Marxist as a teenager before becoming Conservative while studying politics university, have a point?

At first glance, he does. Party politics in Wolverhampton appears to have become de-racialised. I spent two days this week following Labour and Conservative candidates around the City which has an ethnic minority population of around 27 per cent, and which was recently (unfairly) listed as the fifth worst city in the world by Lonely Planet, and the main issues that came up on the doorstep were the economy, the NHS, and education. Race didn’t come up once. I saw Sikh Temples, previously the preserve of Labour politicians, being visited by politicians of all three main parties. On the very few occasions immigration was raised as a concern it was perfectly possible that it was an ethnic minority complaining about all the eastern Europeans “flooding” the area. And while you can spot Asian homes from non Asian ones a mile off – they’re the ones with paved over lawns, railings and shoes in the porch – everyone seems to live in harmony in the suburbs. Plainly, Enoch was wrong.

But it is possible that this harmony is superficial. The Labour/Conservative black/white dichotomy may be breaking down, with the aforementioned Asian Doctor and his doctor wife promising Uppal their vote, but most Asians still vote Labour. Emma Reynolds, the 32 year old former special adviser to Geoff Hoon, who hopes to inherit Labour’s solid majority in Wolverhampton North East, where MP Ken Purchase is retiring, tells me she has come across just two Asian Tory supporters in weeks of campaigning. And while it is a very basic point, it’s important to note that Uppal has not yet been elected. Wolverhampton South West might not be ready for an Asian Tory MP yet, as they weren’t in 2005, when businesswoman Sandip (now Baroness) Verma ran in the seat and lost to Labour’s Rob Marris by just 3,000 votes, amid rumours, according to the BBC “that Old Guard traditionalists in the Wolverhampton South West party had simply not turned out for her during the campaign.”

There remains an impression that while the Conservative Party may have changed nationally, it remains unprogressive at association level, a point which Uppal concedes reluctantly. “Look, is it perfect? No. I’m smart enough to have lived a life in this skin to be able to pick up on a vibe. Have some people been more welcoming than others? Of course they have. But overall it has been a positive experience for me. Maybe having a Christian name of Paul neutralises it for me. And with Powell you are talking about something that was nearly 40 years ago.”

True, but his spirit has been kept alive locally by the likes of Budgen and Hastilow, and elsewhere, more recently, there has been the controversy of the Bolton Tory councillor uploading a picture of a gorilla on his blog next to a photo of an Asian Labour councillor, the Bromley councillor sending out a string of emails to colleagues complaining about Asian Tory candidates not having “normal” English names, the Pendle Borough Tory councillor declaring there were “too many Pakis” in his town at a public meeting… “Well, on the doorstep, I’ve only had two experiences of direct racism. In this election, someone said “I’m not going to vote for you because you’re not of Anglo-Saxon descent”. And in the election before [Uppal contested a constituency in Birmingham at the last General Election] someone said “I can’t vote for you because of your skin colour”. But that’s not much.”

It’s not much, but people are hardly going to voice such views to him directly. Especially when he’s being followed by an Asian journalist. Who knows what is being discussed being closed doors. And there are a lot of closed doors. Not only in Wolverhampton South West, but also in Wolverhampton North East, where Emma Reynold’s campaign basically seems to involve repeating the phrase “it’s a global recession”, emphasising the prospect of Tory cuts and pointing out that her Tory counterpart is not, unlike her, originally from Wolverhampton.

Indeed, while there is a certain amount of engagement with Reynolds, who looks so young that she confesses to visited a local department store to have a makeover to look older, with some constituents even taking posters (“We’ll be voting labour, all four of us”), and expressing a striking amount of loyalty to Labour (“Mr Brown gave me a new kitchen, it’s the knees’s bees and I’ll be voting for him,” said a elderly council tenant), the most striking thing for me was how few people wanted to discuss their voting intentions.

At one point a passing taxi driver shouted “Vote BNP” in our direction. And the one Asian constituent we came across all afternoon didn’t have a particularly cheerful happy tale to tell. “I’m having problems with my neighbours,” he said to Reynolds. Why’s that? “I’ve built this extension”. Right. Anything else? “People don’t like me much around here”. Why? “I’ve had people calling me Paki, throwing eggs.” Reynolds offers to look into matters for him and asks which way he’ll vote. “I’ll vote Labour.” Will he take a Labour poster? “I wouldn’t want to bring that kind of attention to myself.”

He doesn’t make a direct link between his voting choice and his problems and the possibility of violence but it is implicit. Ken Purchase, the MP who is retiring from the area, and who appears at the start of a Sikh procession at a nearby temple with Reynolds, makes the point more explicitly. “Overt racism has subsided, but underneath, there’s a lot of prejudice in Wolverhampton. Straight forward prejudice. And it informs the politics. People now just realise now it’s not acceptable to talk in overtly racist terms, they have learnt to be more subtle.” Though, in Wolverhampton, even this is progress, of a kind.