Dear Ethnic Minorities,

Surface-level appearances may make it seem like I am different from you, that we are not alike at all. However, here’s a little-known fact about me: I was born and raised on Granby Street, Liverpool, in 1982. Do you know that area? Are you familiar with its history? Let me share some context.

Toxteth, Liverpool, was, and perhaps still is, one of the most financially deprived areas in the city. It’s where the city’s poor people and immigrants lived. The police despised us. Granted, there was a lot of criminal activity — mostly drugs. But one summer day in 1981, a young Black man was beaten by the police. The community rallied around him, and thus the Toxteth riots began. I was conceived during those riots, and I grew up in their shadow.

These riots are often described as a race riot, likely because the young man they beat was Black. But you know what? The officers who came in were from all different backgrounds. Many White people were beaten by the police during that time — including my own family members and neighbours. The police didn’t distinguish based on colour when they were swinging their batons.

But history has chosen to remember it differently. History insists that only the Black community was targeted and denies that White people were even there — or if they were, it was only as the police. But I know that’s not true. My neighbours knew it wasn’t true. We all knew it. We were all the same. We were all poor, we were all Scouse, and we were all treated with disdain by the government and the police, our skin colour didn’t even come into it.

Don’t let them divide us now. Because they will try. They are going to try to tell you that this party right-wing, possibly even far right. That the party is racist, that it sees people’s colour as a reason to treat them differently. What they don’t know is that I grew up in possibly the most multicultural place a person could. I went to Eid parties and ate so well. I went to Jamaican carnivals, where I was taught to play the steel drums and was given curried goat and rice and peas. I learned Hungarian, Arabic, and French, all taught to me by my friends’ parents whose mother tongue was that language.

Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English – none of these means exclusive “white”, though white people are by far the majority. But we have had families of different ethnicities here for generations, some for hundreds of years. And not in a “Welsh choir boy” sense, but in an actual, real and true sense. Those families I grew up with. There are people even before them. People whose families were here, defending the island in World War 2 and building the foundation of the welfare system afterwards. This party thinks these people are entitled to all the provisions of our society far above a newly arrived white immigrant. Skin colour is not something that comes into our decision making, at all.

But I understand that these are just words — “You’re racist.” “No, I’m not, my childhood friends were Black.” However, look at our policies. Show me where one of them separates people by colour, religion, or any other factor and treats them differently. You won’t find it, because it doesn’t exist. See if we ever propose anything like that. It won’t happen. It goes against everything I was raised to believe. It goes against everything I still believe. We are all tired of government treating us differently by our skin colour. This is the ONLY party that will ensure that is the case.