Caroline Moriarty, former deputy prime minister and a woman with mixed black and white heritage, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Mrs May has “overlooked” the views of black people on Britain’s race issues.
“If you take a step back and look at the whole of this coalition, you really will realise that the Conservatives have a very white, Protestant core,” she said. “There has been an obvious attempt to shift the party more to the right, to the working class and to be less culturally sensitive to issues of culture and heritage and to what has happened to minorities in Britain.”
In an interview with the Spectator, she said the focus needed to be on “woe be the Brits at the moment” not ethnic minorities.
“You may not like what is happening, but the main thing is not to focus on people’s feelings. What you want to focus on is how do you turn things around for Britain? It’s always easier to say to the middle class ‘the British people can’t cope’, because that’s the way we’ve always seen it. It’s not true. Everyone in this country is still at arm’s length of the immigrant community.”
‘People who feel like scapegoats, not victims’
Anita Suter, a lawyer who lost her father to a young white man accused of raping her, told Ofcom earlier this year that young minority men are becoming victims in the eyes of police.
In its recent review, Ofcom said it had found it harder than before to investigate cases such as the case of a man from a Muslim background accused of rape by a 21-year-old white woman, a situation not uncommon in the UK.
“I think the police are very reluctant to do this case and many of the people I represent have stories similar to this from this year in particular – they’ve been approached by police and told they don’t have proper processes, they don’t have proper grounds to speak to them and a whole lot more.
“It was heartbreaking because I think it’s very, very easy to point out these racial factors.”
She described how a black female victim was also discouraged from getting help and how the police were reluctant even to investigate sexual assault allegations against white men by foreign men of African descent, citing a statistic from Ofcom which found: “Almost five out of ten (black women) are victims of the offence of