'Kwarteng backed away from his entire heritage': Caller slams Truss's 'diverse Cabinet'
7 September 2022, 15:19
This caller said she "would not swallow" the celebration of a 'diverse' Cabinet, when members such as Kwasi Kwarteng are "backing away from their entire heritage."
Liz Truss announced her Cabinet on Tuesday, rewarding her closest allies including Kwasi Kwarteng, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly with top jobs.
Hailed as the most diverse Cabinet in Westminster's history, none of the top four jobs are held by white men.
Lola from Shirley told LBC's Shelagh Fogarty, "I keep hearing that we should be happy about the 'diversity' of Liz Truss's Cabinet.
"Speaking as a black woman myself, African heritage, I find it very difficult to swallow - and I won't swallow it frankly...that somehow because they look a particular way or a different shade of melanin that somehow they are representative of the communities that they come from."
Caller Lola continued: "I'm not interested what their origins are, I want to know about character and what they've said before and what they stand for."
She used newly appointed Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng as an example who, like her, is from Ghanaian heritage.
She explained his name is not pronounced "KWAR-si" as Westminster and the media say, it is pronounced "KWAY-si."
"He's literally backed away from his entire heritage," she said.
Shelagh countered that the pronunciation of his name may be a awful journalistic errors, to which Lola said: "He's never corrected it. I don't know anyone who would let their name be repeatedly mispronounced.
"The level of job he's got right now, don't you think he should fix that?"
Shelagh said that due to his education at Eton, then onto Cambridge and Harvard, he may not have had an upbringing where he was stopped on the street by the police.
"You don't need to be stopped to be able to recognise that others who look like you may be being stopped, and may not be experiencing a life that is good or beneficial," Lola said.
Instead of saying, 'political Cabinets can be diverse', the caller said the real message is: "If you work hard and are lucky enough to get to this position or are funded, then you can become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
"It's not an accident that he is where he is, he's said the right thing to the right people to be in that position."
