David Cameron doesn't care about black people

to paraphrase Kanye, that is pretty much the impression that I got from Lord Ashcroft's interesting new report on ethnic minorities and the Conservative Party.

At the 2010 election, only 16% of ethnic minority voters supported the  Conservatives. More than two thirds voted Labour.
...
by polling white voters alongside those from ethnic minorities, we demonstrated that the Conservative Party’s unpopularity among black and Asian voters is not simply a matter of class and geography. There were sometimes strikingly different results between white and non-white voters living in the same area, and between different ethnic minority groups. Among ethnic minority voters the Conservatives’ brand problem exists in a more intense form. For many of our participants  – by no means all, it is important to state  – there was an extra barrier between them and the Conservative Party directly related to their ethnic background. If Labour was the party that helped their families to establish themselves in Britain, had represented people who did their kind of work, and had passed laws to help ensure they were treated equally, the Conservatives, they felt, had been none to keen on their presence in the first place. Enoch Powell was often mentioned in evidence, as was the notorious Smethwick election campaign of 1964 in which a poster appeared – not distributed by the Conservatives, but remembered as such – saying “if you want a n****r for a neighbour vote Labour”. The failure, on the Conservatives’ watch, properly to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence was also cited. Most thought that if prejudice had been widespread in the party, then  the  Conservatives had changed in recent years, whether through principle or necessity. But significant numbers  – which particularly included people from a black Caribbean background  – felt the Tories remained indifferent or even hostile towards ethnic minorities. Many felt the Tories, and David Cameron in particular, had unfairly blamed ethnic minorities for last summer’s riots. 

Via Rob Ford