LONDON: The head of Britain's main equality watchdog said a politician like Barack Obama would struggle to succeed in the country's governing Labour Party, in an interview published Saturday.
Trevor Phillips, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: "If Barack Obama had lived here I would be very surprised if even somebody as brilliant as him would have been able to break through the institutional stranglehold on power within the Labour Party."
Phillips, a former television presenter and prominent race relations campaigner, also said in an interview with The Times of London that many institutions dodged responsibility for promoting ethnic minorities.
"The parties and the unions and the think-tanks are all very happy to sign up to the general idea of advancing the cause of minorities but in practice they would like somebody else to do the business. It's institutional racism," he said in the interview.
The Labour party said in a statement that it continually reviewed its procedures to make sure elected positions reflected British society.
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Only 15 out of 646 lawmakers in the House of Commons are from ethnic minorities, and 13 of those are in the Labour party.
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