On May 7, 2015 Britain will hold a general election. Under the terms of its Fixed Term Parliament Act, this date, which forms a part of the agreement that established the coalition government, may not be varied other than by new legislation.
One consequence is that the campaign has virtually begun with the UK’s political parties seeking to score points well before their manifestoes have even been written or a full slate of candidates named. So intense has political campaigning already become that the feeling is that once the Scottish referendum and the party conference season is over, the general election campaign will begin and run from November 2014 through to May 2015.
As is now well understood, this may well be the first British general election in which minorities in marginal seats play a role. In 2001, one in 10 voters in the United Kingdom was a member of an ethnic minority; by 2050 the number will have risen to one in five. Put another way, demographic change is set to permanently alter the nature of political power in Britain, as it has already done in the United States. Until recently the implications of this had not been widely understood, but over the last year a plethora of reports and comments from the British Prime Minister and others have made clear the political importance of minorities.
In 2010 the Conservatives managed to obtain only 16 per cent of the minority community