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Liz Truss, who won a bitter battle to succeed Boris Johnson as Britain’s Prime Minister, will preside at a historic moment: for the first time, a white man is unlikely to hold one of Britain’s top four political seats Energy.
Truss is reported to have James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary, Suella Braverman – whose parents came to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s – as Home Secretary and Kwasi Kwarteng as the country’s first black Chancellor of the Exchequer, or chief financial officer of British media outlets.
Cleverly, whose mother is from Sierra Leone – his father is from Wiltshire, about 90 miles outside London – has spoken publicly about being bullied as a mixed-race child and has spoken at Conservative Party conferences on how the party can gain the support of black voters. Kwarteng, whose parents immigrated to the UK from Ghana, has written a book examining the rule of the British Empire in the former colonies of Iraq, Kashmir, Myanmar, Sudan, Nigeria and Hong Kong.
The diversity of Truss’s ministerial posts has received praise from some quarters in a country where Conservative Party members – about 0.3 per cent of the UK population – are generally older, wealthier, 95 per cent white and more right-wing politically than Britain all in all. (Nearly 85 percent of people living in England and Wales identify as white, government data shows.)
“The new cabinet is another reminder that people of all backgrounds can go far within the Tory party,” Samuel Kasumu, a former race affairs adviser to Johnson, told the Guardian newspaper.
Not everyone seemed convinced. A headline in Britain’s right-wing Chron tabloid ruefully declared: “Liz Truss puts the finishing touches to a diverse new government: No place for white men in big offices of state.”
Her predecessor, Johnson, also had a fairly diverse composition of senior ministers. Home Secretary Priti Patel was the first British MP of Indian origin to take up the appointment, while among the three chancellors during Johnson’s tenure were two men of South Asian origin and one of Kurdish origin. Truss was Johnson’s Secretary of State.
Some have pointed out that Truss’s likely frontrunners, while ethnically diverse, are on the party’s right wing. Kmacheng had urged Britain to leave the European Union quickly, while Braverman said schools may be legally able to ignore gender-nonconforming and transgender students’ preferred pronouns.
Truss, 47, has pledged to cut taxes and increase borrowing to fund spending even as inflation climbs above 10 per cent and the Bank of England forecasts a protracted recession by the end of the year. Truss has also pledged to make reducing illegal migration a key priority and ensure the continuation of a policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda who enter the UK on small boats.
Liz Truss succeeds Boris Johnson as British Prime Minister
The left-of-centre opposition Labor Party has more ethnically and gender-diversified MPs, but they hold a smaller proportion of the party’s highest offices.
said Labor politician Shaista Aziz on Twitter, in response to news of Truss’s potential appointments, that “it’s not enough to be a black or ethnic minority politician in this country, or to be a cabinet minister. That’s not what representation is about. This is actually tokenism.”
Ahead of the leadership vote, Aziz wrote an article in which he described the Conservatives as failing to represent the causes of ordinary people.
“Despite all the talk about diversity and inclusion, Tory candidates of color and all running the race support the party’s right-wing immigration policy, which includes deporting asylum seekers from the UK and returning them to Rwanda while their asylum claims are being processed.” , she wrote last month.
Employment lawyer Marsha de Cordova said that while Truss’ cabinet will be diverse, “it will be the most right-wing in living memory, promoting a political agenda that will attack the rights of working people, particularly minorities.”
William Booth and Karla Adam contributed to this report.