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Hi guys I'm going to tread carefully on this one because I think it could be easy for the thread to get heated.
Firstly, does the UK have a lot of black citizens? I'm not sure what counts as a lot and what counts as black. If you exclude people who are Asian and look at only people who class themselves as black African, black Caribbean or black other then they account for 2% of the UK population - on that basis I would say that no, the UK does not have a large black population and therefore that makes it all the harder to get a decent candidate to elect.
National Statistics Online (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=273 - broken link)
I sense the implication of the question is that the UK must be more racist than the US because hey, look the US has a black man as President (I have heard some grumbling from black people in the UK that he is no more black than he is white but lets save that for a whole new thread). Leaving aside the fact that we elected a woman as our leader 30 years ago (so the US is obviously sexist) and as mentioned above we have had a Jewish PM (so the US is obviously anti-semitic), I think the real reason is that non-white immigration in to the UK is a very recent phenomenon. It wasn't until the 50's that black people started to arrive in numbers in the UK and it takes time to get people established at the top level in a society (unless you actively discriminate for them which is a hot potato over here).
Frankly, I suspect that an Asian (in this context meaning somebody whose heritage is from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh) is more likely to hit high public office first; the evidence where I live is that the Asian community is much more highly organised/politicised than the local black community.
Anyway, the real problem we have in the UK is that all our politicians are crap and unelectable, regardless of the colour of their skin!
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