British Tamil Conservatives Receive Message of Congratulations and Support from the Party Chairman, Ministers, MP’s and MEP’s at their Celebratory Drinks Reception held Party Conference 2012.

The British Tamil Conservatives (BTC) launched their first drinks reception as an affiliated body of the Party on Tuesday 9 th October at the ICC Castle Fine Arts Gallery, Birmingham. BTC is the first ethnic specific group to be affiliation by the party.

The event was attended by the Party Chairman Rt Hon Grant Shapps, Cabinet Minister, Rt. Hon. Theresa Villiers, MP’s, MEP’s and Steve Bell, the vice President of the National Conservative Convention.

Speaking at the event, Lee Scott, MP for Ilford North, Hon. Patron of the BTC and Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Tamil congratulated BTC in securing the affiliation organization such as BTC and global Tamil Forum whose representatives were present amongst other Tamil community leaders who attended.

Dr. Arjuna Sivananthan, the Vice Chairman of BTC and Executive member of Convervative Way Forward (CWF) said ”our objectives, are twofold. Take the party’s message to the Tamil community ensure we, the Conservatives, have an outright majority in the next parliament, and continue our advocacy work of bringing the plight of Tamil to Party members and Conservative Member of Parliament. We will not stop until these two objectives are accomplished. He pointed out that two of the PPC’s Dr. Rachel and David Gold who we had helped during the 2010 elections were present at the event and that we will work harder next time to ensure that they become MP’s at the next election. Arujuna went on to state how proud the Tamils are to be British and recognized the achievements to the community in the UK. ‘We will continue our work with Global Tamil Forum and other Tamil organizations”

We were delighted when Theresa Villiers, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland spoke and congratulated the BTC on affiliation. She acknowledged the hard work that had been put in by the organization to get affiliation status. She also spoke on how disturbing the Channel 4 documentary on Killing Fields of Sri Lanka was, and the need for credible, thorough, independent investigation.

Liam Fox the former defense secretary also attended. He stated ‘that he was very worried about the state of affairs in Sri Lanka, and that if the Government of Sri Lanka were not prepared to at least the little changes already in the constitution the situation would worsen.

The BTC would like to thank Lee Scott, MP Ilford North, Hon. Patron of BTC, Robert Halfon, MP, Gavin Barwell, MP, and Andrew Rosindell, MP for all the support to both the Tamil community and BTC in their role as Vice President of the BTC.

We would also like to thank Charles Tannock, MEP and Syed Kamal, MEP for their support. We grateful to the members of the Global Tamil Forum, British Tamil Forum and TGTE for joining us in celebrating our affiliation.

With Affiliation, BTC hope to organize more high profile events on both the national and local level using the community media to get the conservative message to the Community and actively partake in conservative activities