I Thought They Said ‘Diversity Is About More Than Colour’..?

It looks like that idea's gone out of the window now...

As Ursula von der Leyen sweet-talked and bullied EU leaders to send more women to Brussels over recent weeks, I kept hoping she would also make her incoming team of European commissioners more racially diverse. Thanks to an unexpected twist of fate involving (very) complicated Belgian politics, Hadja Lahbib, Belgium’s foreign minister, could soon make history as the first ever EU commissioner who is also a person of colour.

The person writing an anguished column in the 'Guardian' about the awful fact that a lineup of EU Commisioners is nearly all white (but could have gay or non-visibly disabled members) is none other than Shada Islam (a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company). 

We can just imagine what sort of 'advice' you get from such a company...

If she gets the parliamentary thumbs up, Lahbib and the incoming EU Council president, Portugal’s former prime minister António Costa, who is of Goan and Mozambican heritage, will give a much-needed reputational tweak to an EU that boasts about being “united in diversity” but whose institutions still keep no data on their staff’s ethnicity and are visibly and notoriously “all-white”.

Now do Nigeria's government.