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.
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.