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What Comes After Boris Johnson’s `Reactionary’ Vision for Britain?

(Bloomberg) -- After the collapse of Boris Johnson’s premiership, more ethnic minorities are lining up to take the helm of the UK than at any time in history.

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Of the 10 candidates, four are women and six are from ethnic minorities, and many were Cabinet members under Johnson. They include Attorney General Suella Braverman, former Minister of State for Local Government and Equalities Kemi Badenoch and former Health Secretary Sajid Javid.

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Current Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi is also in the running. His predecessor, Rishi Sunak, is leading the pack with the most publicly-declared nominations from his fellow MPs.

When it comes to representation, the Conservative Party has fared much better than the Labour Party. The UK’s two female prime minsters, Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, were both Tories, as was the country’s first ethnic minority chancellor, Sunak.

But the track record of Johnson’s government on issues affecting ethnic minorities mean many are not hopeful when it comes to his successor, and the diverse list of candidates isn’t necessarily viewed as a watershed by all.

“Johnson has this quality of not owning various decisions because he has a whole coterie of people who surround him who express this very ugly and reactionary view about what Britain should be,” said Akwugo Emejulu, who researches inequality at the University of Warwick. “Who cares about the color of one’s skin, in a sense, if they’re actually delivering policies that target and make people of colors’ lives worse?”

Among those policies was the decision to send asylum seekers without permission to Rwanda, which was criticized by Conservative MPs, peers and the Archbishop of Canterbury. As part of a new raft of laws, the government has also made it harder to claim asylum as part of a two-tier system, which legal professionals have called discriminatory.

Other policies criticized for their outsized impact on people of color include legislation which cracks down on Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities and extends police stop and search powers, a practice used disproportionately on Black people.

After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the issue of race exploded to the forefront in the UK.

In response, Johnson acknowledged there is “so much more to do,” but a report on inequality the government commissioned was met with criticism on a plethora of points, including a comment that suggested looking at “the slave period not only being about profit and suffering,” which was later amended.

United Nations experts summed up their response by saying, “in 2021, it is stunning to read a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact.”

As the Conservative Party narrows their number of candidates down to two in a process beginning Tuesday, it remains to be seen how the potential leaders will approach the issue of race.

“No doubt I would not be alone in feeling massive disappointment if our great country’s first ethnic minority prime minister was someone who rides on a populist ticket that harms minorities,” said Halima Begum, chief executive at the Runnymede Trust. “The next PM needs to be a consensus-builder, a unifier.”

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