LONDON (Reuters) – Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservatives will lose next year’s election because they have neglected ethnic minority voters, Britain’s first Muslim cabinet minister, who last week resigned over the government’s Gaza policy, warned on Sunday.
Sayeeda Warsi, a former Foreign Office minister who has played a key role in the Conservatives’ appeal to Muslim voters, last week embarrassed Cameron by resigning via Twitter over what she said was the government’s “morally indefensible” approach to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
On Sunday she dominated the front pages of Britain’s newspapers again, this time warning that what she called Cameron’s neglect of ethnic minority voters would cost him an outright victory at next year’s national election.
“The electoral reality is that we will not win outright Conservative majorities until we start attracting more of the ethnic vote,” she said in an interview with the Sunday Times and Independent on Sunday newspapers.
“We’ve probably left it a little too late to take this part of the electorate seriously.”
The criticism from Warsi, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants to Britain who speaks fluent Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati, will hit a sore spot for Cameron.
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