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- First time no white man holds any of the four highest offices
- Kwarteng carries the finance portfolio, smartly in the foreign office
- Diversity is now ‘normal’ in Britain, says expert
LONDON, Sept 6 (Reuters) – New British Prime Minister Liz Truss has selected a cabinet where for the first time a white man will not hold one of the country’s top four ministerial posts.
Truss appointed Kwasi Kwarteng, whose parents came from Ghana in the 1960s, as the UK’s first black finance minister, while James Cleverly is the first black foreign minister.
Cleverly, whose mother is from Sierra Leone and whose father is white, has spoken out in the past about being bullied as a mixed-race child and said the party needs to do more to attract black voters.
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Suella Braverman, whose parents came to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius six decades ago, succeeds Priti Patel as the second Home Secretary for Ethnic Minorities, or Home Secretary, where she will be responsible for policing and immigration
The growing diversity is partly thanks to the Conservative Party’s push in recent years to field a more diverse set of candidates for parliament.
British governments until a few decades ago were mostly made up of white men. It took the UK until 2002 to appoint its first ethnic minority cabinet minister when Paul Boateng was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Rishi Sunak, whose parents came from India, was Kwarteng’s predecessor in the finance job and Truss’ runner-up in the leadership context.
“Politics has set the pace. Now we treat it as normal, this diversity,” said Sunder Katwala, director of the non-partisan think tank British Future, which focuses on migration and identity. “The pace of change is extraordinary.”
However, the upper ranks of business, the judiciary, the civil service and the military are still predominantly white.
And despite the party’s diversity campaign, only a quarter of Conservative MPs are women and 6% are from a minority background.
HISTORY OF SONGS
However, the Conservatives have the best record of first policies among the major political parties, including the appointment of the first Jewish Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in 1868.
This is despite ethnic minority voters being far more likely to support the opposition Labor party and the ruling party facing accusations of racism, misogyny and Islamophobia.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson apologized in 2019 for describing Muslim women wearing burqas as letterboxes.
The Conservatives have elected all three female British Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and now Truss. The first legislator of Asian descent, Mancherjee Bhonnaggree in 1895, also came from the Conservatives.
Johnson assembled the youngest and most ethnically diverse cabinet in history when he was elected prime minister in 2019. Among his three finance ministers were two men of South Asian origin and one of Kurdish origin.
The changes followed a years-long effort by former leader and prime minister David Cameron.
When he took office in 2005, the party had just two ethnic minority members of parliament out of 196, and he set out to make sure his party looked more like the modern Britain he hoped to lead.
The following year, Cameron presented a priority list of female and minority candidates for selection, many for safe seats in the House of Commons. Truss was a beneficiary of this push.
“A key part of ensuring the strength and resilience of any group, including a political party, is to prevent everyone from thinking and acting the same way – to avoid groupthink,” said party board member James Arbuthnot. nomination committee when Cameron introduced the changes.
But Kwarteng downplayed the importance of his ethnicity. He has said that although he experienced racist abuse growing up in the 1980s, he does not see himself as a symbol of anyone other than his constituents in Spelthorne, which borders the south-west suburbs of London.
“I actually think it’s not very big,” he said after being named the first black Conservative minister in the bench. “I think once you make the point, I don’t think it’s something that comes up that much.”
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Reporting by Andrew MacAskill and Humza Jilani; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne
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