Liz Truss’s cabinet is the U.K.’s first without a white man in any of the so-called “Great Offices of State.”
She named Brexiteer Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor of the exchequer, a role that will be pivotal as the country grapples with a cost-of-living crisis. On Tuesday evening, he tweeted that it was “the honour of a lifetime” to be appointed and promised to announce a “package of urgent support to help with energy bills.”
Kwarteng, whose parents migrated to Britain from Ghana, is the first Black Briton to hold the role. A decade ago, he wrote the book Ghosts of Empire, a somewhat nuanced critique of British colonialism.
Britain’s new foreign secretary is James Cleverly, a mixed-race army reservist whose mother hails from Sierra Leone and who has spoken publicly about being bullied as a mixed-race child and has given talks at Conservative Party conferences about how the party can win the support of Black voters.
The new home secretary is Sue-Ellen Cassiana “Suella” Braverman, a former Attorney General for England and Wales, and whose parents came to Britain in the 1960s from Kenya and Mauritius.
Labour MP Shaista Aziz said that it is “not enough to be a Black or ethnic minority politician in this country or a cabinet member. That’s not what representation is about. That’s actually tokenism.”
Meanwhile…
The package of measures referred to by Kwarteng appears to involve raising a sum of money – possibly £100-150 billion – to give to energy companies which are currently enjoying record profits in return for their undertaking not to raise energy costs by too much, at least not just yet.
The money is likely to be raised through public borrowing, meaning that future generations of taxpayers will pick up the bill.
Follow EU Today on Social media:
