Vaughan Gething won the Welsh Labour Party leadership contest on Saturday, and is set to become the first Black leader of Wales’ semi-autonomous government.
Gething, who is currently Welsh economy minister, narrowly beat Education Minister Jeremy Miles in a race to replace First Minister Mark Drakeford. Drakeford announced late last year he would step down once a replacement was chosen.
Gething, 50, won 51.7% of the votes cast by members of the party and affiliated trade unions, and Miles 48.3%.
Once he is confirmed next week by the Welsh parliament, the Senedd, where Labour is the largest party, Gething will become the fifth first minister since Wales’ national legislature was established in 1999.
I’d prefer we elect our leaders by merit, rather than demographic. His skin colour is irrelevant to me, his policies are what matter.
That is why he was elected. The point is not that we should elect the wrong people just to sort out the demographics ffs.
Let’s say that black people make up 5% of the European population - idk if this is true but the exact number is not important - and they make up 0% of the national leaders. This is unusual, we should expect that at least some of the black people have the “merits” needed to be elected, right? So either 1) they don’t for some reason or 2) they do but they don’t get elected for another reason.
Either of those points towards systemic issues. 1 suggests there might be biases in education, or cultural reasons that black people aren’t politically engaged. 2 suggests that the political industry is systematically racist in some way. Those are the problems that need to be solved… The demographics will naturally sort themselves out in a fairer society.
Sometimes so called “affirmative action” or “positive discrimination” is needed when 2 is the issue, because the good candidates exist but they are discriminated against by systems that are not easy to fix directly. Part of the reason is that diverse organisations are less likely to be institutionally racist (or sexist, homophobic, etc), so actually manually correcting the diversity repairs the root problem in the long run. Politics isn’t really the place for this, obviously, but I wanted to mention it because it doesn’t (when done well) mean that we aren’t choosing candidates for some position on their merits - we are, in fact, making it more likely that candidates will be fairly selected for their merits.
The number seems to be pretty important. With very low percentages, it would not be unusual at all not to have any black national leaders. And considering how much it varies, with it being 0.8% in Wales and even less in some places, the likelihood of them becoming national leaders, assuming random chance, is tiny.
I looked it up, the real number across Europe is between 1 and 1.2%. Source here, although this only considers those of African descent, not sure how that affects the final total.
Your point remains valid if you consider only one cohort of national leaders. 44 countries in Europe, it seems reasonable that none would be black if only 1% of the population of Europe is black. But there isn’t just one cohort of leaders to consider… There’s another cohort every, 4-5 years or so. Even going back only to the beginning of the century that’s over 200, suddenly it seems like we should have had at least one. Obviously demographics have changed over time, but nonetheless it remains significant that there has never been one.
Every year going backwards the percentage gets even smaller and smaller. So not at all surprising and whatnot that there haven’t been black national leaders before. There haven’t been that many black people in Europe.
Thanks for answering this better than I would have put in the time to
It’s certainly no bad thing, perhaps it is something of a milestone although he just looks like any other mixed race British guy to me. Although the cynical side of me says the Conservatives use race as a smokescreen or means to confound the public when pushing unpopular policies (I’m aware he’s not a member of that political party, I’m just highlighting a way in which I feel representation can be weaponised for “spin” purposes).