Lists of ethnic minority politicians in the United Kingdom

A research briefing published by the House of Commons of the United Kingdom Library in 2023 notes that:

There is no official list of the religious or ethnic background of Members of Parliament. MPs are not required to declare this information and we therefore rely on external sources and any records of self-identification by MPs. Differing understandings of and attitudes towards ethnicity mean it is difficult to be certain about when the first MP from a minority ethnic background entered Parliament and how many MPs from minority ethnic backgrounds there have been since.^[1]

According to a research paper from House of Commons Library, published in 2020, the first ethnic minority MP was elected in 1767^[2] – excluding Jews, who a House of Commons Library briefing paper states generally considered themselves to be a religious rather than an ethnic minority in the 18th/19th century.^[3] This was James Townsend, a Whig MP who was of one-eighth African ancestry and who later went on to become Mayor of London in 1772.^[4]

Following the election of Anas Sarwar as Scottish Labour Party leader in February 2021, he was described as the first person from an ethnic minority to lead a major British political party,^[5] which led to debate about why Jewish party leaders had been excluded from this comparison.^[6][7][8] Stephen Bush, the political editor of the New Statesman, wrote that "As far as British law is concerned, the answer is open-and-shut: we count as both an ethnic and a religious grouping for the purpose of equalities and employment law." He stated: "Whether Benjamin Disraeli would feel today that he were an ethnic-minority Briton is unknowable: but we can say with copper-bottomed certainty that he and other ethnically-Jewish Britons faced what we would now recognise as workplace discrimination in addition to the open dissemination of racist tropes about Disraeli and his family by his political opponents."^[8] The House of Commons Library briefing paper notes that the first practising Jew to sit in the Commons was Lionel de Rothschild, who was first elected in 1847 but who refused to take the Christian oath that MPs are required to swear. He took his seat once the rules had been changed, allowing him to swear on the Old Testament.^[3]

Commenting on an initial estimate of the number of ethnic minority MPs elected in the 2024 general election published by think tank British Future, academic Maria Sobolewska notes that this estimate defines "ethnic minority" by "Using the 2021 Census primary criterion of ethnic minority as anyone who identifies as other than White".^[9]

In 2001, Muhammad Anwar of Warwick University wrote a paper titled "The participation of ethnic minorities in British politics" that was published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2001) that in part examined the representation of ethnic minorities at national levels of the British political system.^[10] In a chapter in the edited book Race and British Electoral Politics (Routledge, 1998), Andrew Geddes, now Professor of Politics at University of Sheffield, explored the question of "what factors contribute to low levels of ethnic minority representation in the House of Commons".^[11]

At the 2001 general election, the Parliament of the United Kingdom had twelve ethnic minority Members of Parliament (excluding Jews), and after the 2005 general election; that number increased to fifteen.^[12] With the 2010 general election, the Parliament of the United Kingdom reported that the number of ethnic minority MPs increased by nearly three-quarters, to a total of 26.^[13] The first three Muslim female MPs were elected.^[13] All ethnic minority MPs were either Labour (15) or Conservative (11).^[13] In October 2013, the UK Parliament reported that the number of ethnic minority MPs stood at 27, or 4.2% of the total.^[14]

After the 2015 general election, 41 MPs from an ethnic minority background were elected to Parliament. 25 of the previous 27 ethnic minority MPs retained their seats and were joined by 16 new ethnic minority MPs. 23 were from the Labour Party, 17 of them were Conservatives and one from the SNP.^[15] In the 2017 general election, 52 ethnic minority MPs were elected, including 32 Labour MPs, 19 Conservatives and one Liberal Democrat, according to British Future^[16] and the House of Commons Library.^[3][17] In the 2019 general election, this figure rose to 66, with 23 Conservative, 41 Labour and two Liberal Democrat non-white MPs.^[18] After the 2024 general election, the House of Commons had 90 ethnic minority MPs according to initial calculations,^[9] including 66 from the Labour Party, 15 Conservatives, five Liberal Democrats and four independent MPs.^[19]

Based on data from unofficial sources including Operation Black Vote, the House of Commons Library estimated in a research briefing published in September 2022 that there were 55 ethnic minority members of the House of Lords as of September 2022^[update]. Of these, 11 were affiliated with the Labour Party, 16 were crossbenchers, 16 were Conservatives, six were Liberal Democrats, and six were unaffiliated.^[18]

On 16 March 2024, when Vaughan Gething was elected to lead Welsh Labour, and became First Minister of Wales, it meant that three of the four governments in the United Kingdom were led by ethnic minority leaders as Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousef were concurrently serving as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and First Minister of Scotland respectively. ^[20]