There are no white people at the head of the British Cabinet. But the country still has a “diversity” problem, our British writers say.

Last Wednesday, Liz Truss celebrated the tradition of the first British Parliament. At 12 noon he faced questions – the so-called Prime Minister Questions – from his party colleagues and the opposition. The first is an easy one – and comes from a familiar face: Former Prime Minister Theresa May congratulates Truss on becoming the third woman to hold the post of Prime Minister – after herself and, of course, Margaret Thatcher. And she wonders, according to May, why all female heads of government are actually conservative – and why hasn’t Labor produced a female leader? The Truss’ Tories roared and chuckled. Opposition leader Kier Starmer also smiled, but he seemed a little uneasy.

Even Truss doesn’t have a good answer to that question – mainly due to another, more extraordinary fact: Among the three most senior positions in her cabinet – at the heads of the Home Affairs Department, State Office and Treasury – doing well. -known bogeyman, old white man, nothing to see. The new holders and new holders of this position – Suella Braverman, James Cleverly and Kwasi Kwarteng – are all children of immigrants; his parents are from India, Sierra Leone and Ghana.

The Cabinet thus reflects Britain’s diversity quite well: 22 per cent of ministers now come from ethnic minority backgrounds, compared to 14.4 per cent of the UK’s own population. This is the most diverse cabinet in Britain anywhere – and that is certainly good news.

Class divides English like no other

However, that doesn’t mean that Great Britain can relax and pat itself on the back because it has now officially solved its “diversity” problem. Because 68 percent of the ministers in Truss’ first cabinet were educated in private schools or studied at elite universities in Oxford or Cambridge. Just below Thatcher (91 percent in 1979) and John Major (71 percent in 1992) is this proportion higher. In contrast, only seven per cent of the UK population enjoy such a privileged career. It is ironic that in his first speech as Prime Minister Truss announced that he wanted to make Britain an “aspirational nation”. Yet class remains the country’s last major division, ruining everything – and Truss’s cabinet is unlikely to do anything to change that.

Why is this a big problem? Because as Jarvis Cocker sung in the Britpop hit “Ordinary People” in 1996: “You’ll never live like an ordinary person, you’ll never do anything that ordinary people do.” That means: The Tories have formed a government again, the reality of life for ordinary people in Great Britain is a complete stranger. And right now it’s dangerous – at 8.8 percent, inflation in the UK is even higher than in Germany; British charities have warned that next winter millions of parents will not be able to feed their children and parents could freeze to death in their homes.

Truss wants to fight the crisis with tax cuts that will benefit the rich far more than the poor. When he was asked on BBC television a week ago if he thought it was fair, he replied emphatically “yes”. Your answer to that question says more about what is expected of the Truss administration than Theresa May is trying to convey.