Sajid Javid is the first British Pakistani MP to lead a government department
Comedian Lenny Henry has led the campaign for greater diversity in the media this year, and so grabbed the opportunity to speak to Culture Secretary Sajid Javid on the issue.
“I didn’t think about media as a career opportunity,” Culture Secretary Sajid Javid told Lenny Henry, the guest editor of Radio 4’s Today programme.
“In fact, I joke, but it’s a true story – the closest I ever came to working in the television industry was when my careers adviser, when I was 16, said that I should think about becoming a television repairman.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it but I’m a bit worried about how much work I would get nowadays if I just specialised in that.”
But the TV repair industry’s loss was the banking industry’s gain.
Today, after a career that includes a spell as the youngest vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank and managing director of Deutsche Bank, Mr Javid finds himself at the heart of the UK’s media industry.
‘Remarkable achievements’
The man some have tipped as a future Conservative leader is insistent there should be better representation for black, Asian and minority ethnic(BAME) people in the creative industries.
“You have to look at numbers to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
Around 6% of people working in the media industry as a whole are from ethnic minorities as opposed to 14% in the UK population as a whole.
“We’ve had some remarkable achievements of ethnic talent but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s not enough.”
Mr Javid refused to be drawn on his thoughts about any commitments to BAME representation which might feature in the BBC Charter, due for renewal in 2016/17, but said the corporation had “woken up to this more than ever …read more
Source:: BBC Entertainment
