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Cameron's reshuffle creates even more of a white, male-dominated monoculture

This is now a cabinet even less representative of British society.

A roadsweeper outside Number 10 Downing Street. Photograph: Getty Images
You might think the reshuffle would have changed politics, but it hasn't. Photograph: Getty Images

There’s only one political subject in the news today: Cameron’s cabinet and ministerial reshuffles. You might think there were political plates shifting, that the shape of British politics was changing – but of course it isn’t – it’s just drifting ever further rightwards. (Yes, apparently this is still a coalition, though it’s the most right-wing Lib Dems like returnee David Laws who have any impact – reinforcing Tory ideology.) And it’s a move even further towards a white, male-dominated wealthy mono-culture.

Chancellor George Osborne is still firmly in place, whether David Cameron likes it or not, together with his clearly failed Plan A of government cuts and austerity. There’s no sign – even though the IMF (that usual champion of cuts and social pain) is clearly signalling its opposition.

Britain desperately needs government investment – in housing, in public transport, in energy conservation and renewables – that would create jobs, help relocalise the British economy, and prepared for the essential low-carbon future. It doesn’t need more government cuts to through more into unemployment, with all of its economic and social costs. But this is a government wedded to failed 20th-century neoliberalist ideology – not open to any form of economic sense.

Despite the growing opposition to the savage, destructive, inhumane benefit cuts, Iain Duncan Smith is still in place in Work and Pensions - pushing on with changes that can only see a further explosion in the work of food banks, a fracturing of communities by housing benefit changes, and many more rightful protests about the failure to provide people with disabilities with the support they need.

And this is now a cabinet even less representative of British society than before. Look at the full list, and you’ll see that we’re now down to four women. As the Fawcett Society has pointed out, men now outnumber women five to one in the cabinet. And there’s not one single member from an ethnic minority, as Andrew Sparrow pointed out in his live blog of the day's events.

So Cameron has managed one feat that could hardly have been thought possible. He’s taken his cabinet of millionaires and made it even less representative of the British public than it was before. And his pledge to ensure a third of his ministers would be women by the end of the government’s term looks further away than every – and that’s a pretty weak pledge anyway, given Francois Hollande’s gender-balanced team, for instance.

I was elected this week as the new leader of the Green Party – its second ever leader after Caroline Lucas. You might notice that makes us the only national parliamentary party now led by a woman – and the only British political party to have only ever have been led by women. I’m sure that will change eventually – but given that of the four candidates for leader, three were female (contrast that with Labour’s contortions to see that they had at least one female candidate out of five in 2010), perhaps not soon.

But back to the new cabinet – there’s individual causes for concern too. The forcing of Justine Greening out of Transport at the behest of the airport lobby, the appointment of the firmly anti-abortion Murdoch-mate Jeremy Hunt to health (surely one of the most surprising rewards for failure in recent politics), and the pushing of Ken Clarke, who sought to make sensible cuts in the number of incarcerate Britons, out of Justice.

Overall, however, there should be one top story. We’re governed by rich white males with an agenda of economic destruction in the cause of ideology.

Natalie Bennett is the leader of the Green Party in England and Wales

6 comments

Posh Tosh's picture

They do not have many ethnic minorities running Africa!

They do not have many ethnic black women running countries in Africa.

You do not have any white women there or in Saudi Arabia running the countries.

Get over it and grow up.

When Peter Tatch campaigns for the rights of others in both Countries; instead of targeting soft - targets here then maybe there will be movement.

Mind you you cannot get a Bible into many Arab countries!

Religion causes too much starvation via wars in Africa, and people that could fight for their countries and make both countries better living in often £2, 000,000 subsidised housing, and unpaid benefits that match.

Whilst many British that have worked 50 years have to subsidise others fares for free, and our children in many cases cannot afford to eat - their mother is on her eye-phonie and chatting up the next date for more child allowance - of course there are genuine poor here in the UK, mostly British.

But there it is wrong to campaign for the rights of the British poor as we move back into Dickensian times as full speed.

Anthony (Little Englander and Proud)'s picture

"Cameron's reshuffle creates even more of a white, male-dominated monoculture"
Change the words "cameron's" and "Male" with "Green Party" and "Female" and you have just described your appointment as the leader of the watermelon party.

But hey , i'm more than okay with that .

Davidaslindsay's picture

The Department that ostentatiously sends out Bibles to schools, Bibles featuring both a preface by the Secretary State and a reference to his very person on the cover (why not a photograph?), now has both David Laws and Liz Truss as Ministers.

But it would be wrong to pick on one Department. In After The Party, a collection of reminisces published last year to mark the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Andrew Pearmain writes: "I started sleeping with other women on my trips to London, other Communist students and even a Tory member of the NUS Executive whose taste for rough sex really shocked me; she later joined the SDP." Well, she is not in the SDP, or even the Lib Dems, now...

plain john snith's picture

A few years ago, some US magazine wrote a spoof headline: "End of World Happening Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hit Hardest."

Who bloody cares? The cabinet looks pretty much like the last Labour Govt if you ask me. Will the feminazis ever stop whinging?

Inkstersco's picture

Article confuses representation with resemblance. No ethnic minorities in cabinet? Who cares? Can't the New Statesman think about anything else? What on Earth is the point in having a cabinet which resembles the people?

Mark Braund's picture

"an agenda of economic destruction in the cause of ideology" is far too generous Natalie, it makes them sound like idiot nihilists. Their agenda is the defence of elite wealth and power, and they know full well that that an economy scraping along at the bottom serves that purpose perfectly well.

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