ABSTRACT
The Conservative Party in the 1990s continues to have a checkered and uneasy relationship to ethnic minority politics in Britain. It has been generally reluctant to incorporate black and Asian politicians in any significant numbers and has preferred to keep ethnic minorities at arm’s length. Alhough on occasions the Conservative Party in the late 1970s and 1980s was seduced to play the “race card” in party politics, there have been signs of a newer tendency towards the incorporation of small and relatively compliant sections of the Asian and Afro-Caribbean middle class elite. This process has proceeded gradually with the party leadership anxious to avoid as far as possible letting race and ethnicity becoming a sectarian issue within the party like that of “Black Sections” in the Labour Party in the 1980s. The issue of race has threatened to unmask underlying tensions between the party leadership in Central Office and constituency organizations fiercely determined to preserve their political autonomy. It is unlikely that the party will make any major new initiatives in this area for the foreseeable future and will probably prefer to go down the road of increasing the number of female Tory MPs in Parliament rather than black or Asian ones.
