How do we each make 2017 a better year for race equality in the UK?

2016 has been one of the worst years for race equality which I have lived through in the UK. It is quite frankly a stain on our country's record which every liberal, whether a member of the Liberal Democrats or not, would not wish to see repeated ever.

It is up to us to create a better future, up to each of us personally. We need our political parties to be fit for purpose for race equality campaigners of all backgrounds. Imagine my surprise when I read Roy Lilley's words below on the NHS (in an email from nhsmanagers.net) and saw how well they apply to our party and increasing the involvement of a wider range of people in politics.

As we nudge our way out of what, by any standards, has not been the health and care services' finest year, there's some stuff we would do well to leave behind.

The first is a word.

The ugliest word in the NHS lexicon… 'engagement'. I don't want to 'engage' with people, do you? I want to talk to them. Better still; listen to them. I want to hear their views, have a conversation, ask what they think.

Engage is what gear boxes do, to drive an engine and what old telephones sound like when someone else is talking. People who are interested in other people's ideas don't 'engage'. They have a chat.

If they have something to explain, clarify, demonstrate, make a case for… they do it, face to face, eyeball to eyeball. Politely, with passion and purpose.

If you would like to see a wider range of people from a greater range of backgrounds involved in politics, please start those conversations. There's no need to think of grand strategies for involving people, just monitor the number of meaningful conversations which you have with people from a variety of ethnic groups, where you are able to really listen and spot not only where they agree with your liberal view, but where they differ too. Agree with the people you're speaking with whether you should be taking action on the basis of those conversations.

Listening goes much further than one to one conversations- monitor your local party, regional party and other Liberal Democrat organisations you might belong to. How much opportunity do you have to listen to people from diverse backgrounds of all gender identities at meetings? Look up on the Office for National Statistics website the ethnic diversity of your ward and its neighbours, your parliamentary constituency and your region and make sure that your local, regional and national Liberal Democrat organisations, give you the chance to really listen to the wide variety of people we have in our country. I'm asking you to root out the race bias in your own local party and to start asking for speakers who represent all the groups in the UK.

It is only by listening to people from a wide variety of backgrounds, by choosing to give people our attention no matter who they are and no matter where they are from and by truly enjoying that experience and taking action where necessary, that our party can lead the way to race equality in the UK. We all have to start by listening and to do that you need to start inviting people to speak to us all and ensuring that your representatives issuing the invitations are doing so too.

* Marisha Ray is vice-chair of Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats and PPC for Chipping Barnet, in north London. From 2002 to 2010 Marisha was a councillor in an inner London ward, and she was a London Assembly list candidate in 2012 and 2016.