In December, Labour faced a devastating wake-up call. Across the country, communities that have voted for our party for generations rejected us, telling us in the clearest terms that they did not trust us anymore. This was made all the more shattering because this defeat came after a decade of derisory Conservative rule. The party that stabbed the Windrush generation in the back, utilised austerity to decimate and atomise our communities, sit by as climate crisis enveloped our planet, and pursue an unambiguously elitist agenda now appear stronger than ever.

As we dust ourselves down and get ready for the serious task of rebuilding our party, we must also recognise the decisive role that BAME communities played in supporting Labour loyally over the years. A huge section of our social base are those workers who have not only suffered the brunt of austerity alongside their neighbours but have suffered the vile racism peddled by the Conservatives to protect their own interests, divide workers, and strengthen the rule of the one per cent.

As the politicians and talking heads attempt to peddle a “sensible” politics of division, our movement must be unequivocal – there is only one working class and Labour fights to represent it. The colour of your skin doesn’t make your hunger feel any different. The path to rebuild a dignified future for working class communities must be a collective effort that resists any Conservative provocation to create racial division to distract most people from their elite-driven agenda.

In 2015, Labour lost 1,000,000 BAME votes to the Conservatives. This significant shift should dispel once and for all the myth that minority communities instinctively, and always, vote Labour because of the party’s self-proclaimed – but not always justified – commitments to equality, diversity and liberation. After the war on Iraq, and the increasing persecution of British Muslims on our home soil, our party’s rhetoric became increasingly untenable, and our party’s conduct in government did irrevocable damage to the party’s reputation among our BAME voters.

Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for socialism at home and peace abroad finally challenged that. His leadership offered a vision of a Labour Party that would fight for BAME diasporas at home. His history of being on the frontline of anti-racist struggles spoke to besieged communities whose only political experience were being scapegoated by a desperate, discredited political elite.

For BAME party members, the official party rhetoric of being a “proud history of anti-racism” strikes far too many as superficial, considering the efforts of former right-wing Labour apparatchiks to hamper and undermine black organising in the past decades. Each milestone – from electing four black parliamentarians in 1987 to winning the argument on legitimate and autonomous structures in the labour movement – were the results of powerful black self-organisation, and in the face of considerable opposition.

As such, when the Democracy Review was initiated in 2017, thousands of BAME members built on this organising tradition to demand an end to BAME Labour’s chokehold on the anti-racist movement. After I was elected an NEC member in 2018, I organised consultation events across the country to ensure members had the agency to dictate the parameters of our future section.

This resulted in the creation of the BAME Representative Structure – and this NEC election will be the first to preside over a new committee that will be both democratic and representative. During this period, I also fought for increased powers of BAME officers, and to combat the outsourcing of BAME power and representation to BAME Labour as an outside organisation who were totally unaccountable to our movement.

Other candidates will say they’re more grassroots than me. They’ll say they’re running on a platform of ‘bringing the members to the table’. But I know this doesn’t come with just one person – but as a functioning democratic structure of our party, fundamentally connected by our experiences and our oppressions. We have to think bigger.

Over the last thirty years, we’ve had a BAME representative on our national executive committee (NEC) and a socialist society that’s commanded serious institutional legitimacy within the party. BAME Labour has held its own conferences, is entitled to conference delegates to annual conference, hosted events, runs a website, social media accounts, a membership list and a bank account. In theory, it was everything our members are demanding, and many are standing on a platform of delivering.

We have to be clear – this is not enough. Without serious structural change right from the root – change that I have been fighting for, organising both members and unions as a CLP rep – this seat risks becoming as tokenistic and irrelevant as it has been for decades.

This is incredibly personal to me. I came into politics through the shopfloor and found my feet in the unions – and I know the potential that exists for our movement to create a whole new generation of BAME activists in the industrial and political wings of our movement. I’m standing because I believe fervently that the creation of this BAME structure needs to be seen through to the end, and I’m the only candidate standing who has fought for it from the beginning.

Once we have secured and enshrined our rights to self-organise in Labour, I’ll step aside for the next wave of BAME socialists to come through, who can stand on their own two feet, confident in their abilities to organise along political lines and decide their own positions, no longer be a token face at the table – but a machine that’s able to fight for our people in the darkest of times.