Jonathan Calder, aka ‘Lord Bonkers‘, wrote on his Liberal England blog that all-women shortlists are better than the party’s candidate leadership programme.
The problem with that view is the leadership programme – which was an idea first mooted by Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats – covers several ‘strands’ of under-represented groups (Black and Minority Ethnic; gay and lesbian; disabilities; socio-economic and women). All-women shortlists, by definition, only cover women.
Calder’s blog is pretty typical of the ‘one-strand’ thinking which views gender in isolation from other forms of under-representation and suggests dealing with one area solves all equalities deficits in one go.
In 2011 I wrote that the candidate leadership programme was not a “silver bullet” and needed to be supplemented with other initiatives, but was is still potentially useful in taking the party forward towards a more representative Commons team. Lib Dems need more than a one-track strategy as well as having more than a one-strand mentality.
The notion that the party need to replace one action with another rather than allow them to work in parallel is bizarre logic.
The two criticisms I have of the candidate leadership programme, which is effectively an ‘A’-list, is that firstly it selected a very small exclusive group to develop, whereas the party need to develop a much larger cohort of talent. And secondly, there are wider changes that a mentoring and training programme cannot deliver by itself including improving the way the party at large view and approach diversity.
I have long been in favour of all-BAME shortlists for a limited period of time for all the reasons Calder mentions in his blog concerning women.
We are having this debate because Nick Clegg told the Independent he was prepared to consider all-women shortlists in 2020 – the election after next – if the party does not make progress in achieving more women MPs.
Back in 2009, Clegg told a Speakers Conference on under-representation that he would consider all-BAME shortlists if the party had not seen Black and Asian people elected as Lib Dem MPs by the election after next. That election is the forthcoming one, in 2015.
Having selected a high proportion of our winnable seats, the Lib Dems have two candidates who define as BAME; Maajid Nawaz in Hampstead and Kilburn, who hopes to move from third to first place in what was in 2010 a three-way marginal, and Layla Moran, of Palestinian and white heritage who is running in Oxford West and Abingdon, a seat lost to the Conservatives at the last election. This a small step forward but not nearly enough.
So far seven sitting Lib Dem MPs have announced their retirement. Three of them already have successors in place defending held seats, all of them white, however I remain hopeful that one seat – Brent Central – could have a BAME candidate, and there is a possibility of an eighth retiring MP not yet announced where a BAME activist is well-placed.
Traditionally there have always been retirements of sitting MPs. Clegg himself is a beneficiary of this process, replacing Richard Allen in Sheffield Hallam. So too David Laws, who succeeded Paddy (now Lord) Ashdown in Yeovil.
Yet BAME hopefuls are expected to transform a ‘development’ seat, where the party are in third place, into a winnable one in incremental stages through a series of general elections without support or money from elsewhere. As a result BAME PPCs tend to remain in third place while favoured sons parachute into already-held seats.
It is commonly said that there is no such thing as a safe Lib Dem seat but my research for Operation Black Vote found almost a third of Lib Dem held seats are not marginals, so regardless of the definition of ‘safe’ they are highly unlikely to be lost.
Currently we have more knighted MPs than women MPs, and over half of our Commons team are privately-educated. And of course there is not a single MP of color.
This is why we need both all-women and all-BAME shortlists for winnable and held-seat vacancies, as well as initiatives like the candidate leadership programme and other schemes to move the grassroots approach to diversity in general. It should all be part of a wider picture of moving forward.
As I mentioned in the Lib Dem Voice thread on this issue:
“I find it strange that people still argue that the quality of candidates will go down with AWS. Several Labour women selected through this method have gone on to achieve ministerial rank on their own steam after making it to the Commons, including a former Home Secretary. If anyone wishes to tell Maria Eagle, Meg Hillier or Anne Begg they shouldn’t be there, they’d be most welcome but I suspect they’d come under furious attack from the many who are impressed by their quality. The current Labour MPs include many who have been selected through AWS including Rachel Reeves, Gloria De Piero and Stella Creasy.
When Labour introduced AWS in 1997 the number of women MPs rose from 37 to 101, and although the Tories have never run AWS’s they instigated their own form of unofficial positive action for the 2010 election, applying pressure behind the scenes to select a more diverse collection of candidates, and the number of Tory women MPs rose from 17 to 49.
Labour have also run shortlists which have just happened to be all-BAME, in Brent Central and Ealing Southall. These haven’t required legislation because the local party has opted to shortlist who they consider the best, and in those seats none of them were white.
However the greater the opposition to this the more that schemes are necessary to make progress. My experience of the Lib Dems is that while our values suggest that we don’t need all-AWS or all-BAME selections, the reality and practice of how we operate as an institution mean that sadly we do need it if we want to make serious progress. It is all about levelling out the playing field, making the goals the same size and the rules clear and equally applied. Ultimately it is about acknowledging and addressing the extent of unfairness and the extent of wasted talent that is overlooked.”
By Lester Holloway @brolezholloway
