Liz Truss Appoints Most Diverse Cabinet In History – With One Big Exception

In her first day on the job, new prime minister Liz Truss appointed the most diverse cabinet in the U.K.’s history – apart from one big exception.

For while the top team includes more women and people of color than its predecessors, it is also one of the most socially exclusive of recent times, with the highest proportion attending private school in more than 25 years.

Prime Minister Truss has won plaudits for nominating the most diverse cabinet the U.K. has seen, even though many of those crowing the loudest are also the first to decry identity politics.

Of the four leading roles, including that of prime minister, two are held by women, and three by people of color, while the post of deputy prime minister is also held by a woman. Of the 31 attending cabinet, 10 are women and seven are people of color.

While British politics has not exactly distinguished itself in recent years, it is hard to imagine another European country even approaching this level of representation.

This is testament principally to the efforts of David Cameron, one of Liz Truss’s predecessors, to give a new face to the Conservative Party, at a time when, despite being the party of Margaret Thatcher, it seemed dominated by white men.

But there is one key aspect where Truss’s cabinet represents a step backwards, and that is in its social and educational diversity.

More than two thirds of the cabinet attended a private school, compared with just seven per cent of the population as a whole.

This means that cabinet members are nine times more likely to have gone to a private school than the people they serve.

This makes it far less diverse in this respect than its predecessors. Boris Johnson, himself an alumni of Eton, one of the U.K.’s most prestigious private schools, appointed a cabinet where slightly fewer than two thirds of its members went to a fee-paying school, which itself was more than double the proportion in Theresa May’s first cabinet.

You have to go back more than a quarter of a century to find a less socially diverse cabinet, appointed by John Major in 1992.

It is easy to argue that this doesn’t matter, especially as most children don’t get to choose which type of school they attend.

But whether those making the decisions can relate to those affected by the decisions does matter. And it matters if the decision-makers have an investment in the outcomes of the decisions they make.

It is also a question of visible representation. Politics is hardly a socially exclusive outlier among the more prestigious professions, but as one of the most visible occupations a lack of representation has a greater impact.

According to Sir Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, the charity that carried out the analysis, the findings “underline how unevenly spread opportunities to enter the most prestigious positions continue to be.”

But it would be wrong to conclude from this, as some commentators have done, that class is the new dividing line. The dividing line is where is always has been, with a whole bundle of characteristics, rather than race or class alone, which make the difference.

You only have to look at education to see how this works. Children of Black African ethnicity are excluded from schools in England at much a similar rate to the average among all ethnicities, but the exclusion rate for children of Black Caribbean heritage is almost three times higher.

While some use these figures to argue that there is no evidence of racism in school exclusions, this misses the point. There is rarely one single factor in play, and racism, like sexism, often operates in tandem with other prejudices.

Students from ethnic minorities now make up around 38% of all U.K. students in private schools, a big increase from the 23% in 2009, but this figure conceals as much as it illuminates.

The Independent Schools Council, which compiles the figures, does not publish a breakdown of the heritage of ethnic minority students in its schools.

But pretty much any education indicator you choose shows the range even when the categories are ‘Black’ or ‘Asian’ students, much less when they are ethnic minority students.

The latest attainment figures for students at 16 in England, for example, show that Black African students have above average attainment, while Black Caribbean students have among the lowest attainment of any ethnic group.

Similarly, the proportion of Indian students gaining a ‘pass’ in English and math is 20% higher than for Pakistani students.

Even these categories are far too broad, of course. Among Pakistani students, for example, there will be a vast range of backgrounds, which affect levels of aspiration, attitudes to education and the myriad other characteristics that feed into educational attainment.

This multiplicity of factors is not confined to ethnic minority students. Attainment rates for white students conceal vast differences between middle and working class students, and particularly working class boys.

So while we can applaud Liz Truss for appointing a diverse cabinet, we should also be wary about the signal it sends to those who are still being excluded from the top table.