Black History Month: 30 October 2020
Paul Yaw Boateng is a Labour Party politician, who was the MP for Brent South from 1987 to 2005, becoming the UK's first black Cabinet Minister in May 2002, when he was appointed as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Boateng was elected to the Greater London Council for Walthamstow in 1981, which was then under the leadership of Ken Livingstone. Boateng was only the second person of Afro-Caribbean descent to be elected to the GLC. As chair of the GLC's police committee and vice-chair of its ethnic minorities committee, he advocated greater accountability in the Metropolitan Police and spoke out against racism in relation to their dealings with the black and Asian communities. In 1992, he became shadow minister for the Lord Chancellor's Department, a post he held until the 1997 general election, where he was a strong advocate for increasing pro bono legal services among UK law firms.
Boateng became the UK's first black government minister as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health, where he was responsible for social services and mental health. In that position, he published guidelines to end the denial of adoptions purely on the basis of race. Boateng is credited with building a close relationship to South Africa's ANC government, and it was reported that he privately worked to bring together bitter rivals in the crisis in Zimbabwe, although he publicly condemned the Zimbabwean government's illegal occupation of land from white farmers and the resulting turmoil, which Boateng labelled a "human rights crisis." On 28 May 2010, it was announced in the 2010 Dissolution Honours that Boateng would become a member of the House of Lords.
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