Throughout western democracies, centre-left parties face challenges in trying to hold together their increasingly fractious coalition of the white working class, middle class graduates, and ethnic minorities. An influential argument holds that these parties have lost a lot of support amongst their traditional white working class base through their efforts to promote and cater to ethnic minority interests. While the extent of a trade-off between white and non-white voters has been extensively discussed in the context of the United States, empirical evaluations of this subject are much more scarce in Europe, where the sizes of different race and class groups, as well as the histories of racial and class politics, are quite different. Furthermore, the possibility that social democrats might compensate for the loss of white working class supporters by appealing to the growing graduate professional electorate, who might be assumed to feel less threatened by ethnic minority interest promotion, has not been thoroughly explored. Our paper uses the long-running British Election Study as well as the more recent British Election Study Internet Panel to explore these topics. We assess the extent to which voters see working class and ethnic minority interests as compatable and how perceptions of Labour's absolute and relative success in looking after these groups' interests shapes voting behaviour for different parts of the electorate. Our paper helps fill a notable gap in empirical studies of the politics of race and class representation in Europe.