The announcement earlier this year of a Spanish Cabinet that is majority women should cause everyone involved in British politics to stop and wonder why we’re doing so badly.

We know that the under-representation of women in politics is a bad thing - and that this applies to the Liberal Democrats as much as anyone else, even if we do have a good heritage of standing up on issues of inequality.

But how many more women do we really need to stand for us if we’re going to get a more equal party?

It turns out that the answer is at least 100 - and that we need to identify them, persuade them to stand and get them selected in the next three years.

Working on the assumption that we want to have over 30% of our representatives as women and that we double our MPs over the next two general elections then we need the following.

Around 25 women are needed to replace MPs who will stand down at the next two elections (assuming that at each election roughly one in five MPs continues to stand down). This assumes that every MP who stands down is replaced by a woman - which is the only way we’ll make rapid headway. While in practice this will be impossible to achieve, we need to aim this high if we’re going to make significant headway.

We will need to make sure that as many as possible of the 63 seats we aim to gain are gained by women. Only 10 of these don’t currently have a PPC. But many of these 63 seats will reselect after the next election, and in many of those we won’t have an incumbent PPC. Realistically this probably means another 30 women PPCs in the most winnable seats in the election after next.

Then there are the other elected levels of the party. To increase or maintain gender balance if we are aiming to double our representation we will require:

• 6 more MEPs
• At least 15 more MSPs
• 3 more Welsh Assembly Members
• Several more Mayors
• Over 2,000 councillors

Just to make this more difficult we know that the biggest factor in success for candidates is early selection. If we assume that there is a May 2010 election this realistically means that most of these candidates have to be elected by late 2011.

Excluding the council candidates this means that we need to recruit, motivate, train and get selected around 100 women in the next two and a half years for the most senior positions alone. Add in councillors and we need well over a thousand new women candidates.

Centrally, run by Cowley Street, this is impossible. But if every Liberal Democrat Voice reader made it their mission over the next two years to find one woman candidate each it would be easy.

So to encourage us all to do this I’ve set up a pledge on pledge bank - where I have pledged to find and get a woman selected in a winnable seat in the next two years - but only if 50 other people pledge to do the same:
http://www.pledgebank.com/womenlibdemmps

I occasionally get very angry when Labour’s sympathisers in the media talk about Labour’s liberalising of Britain.

Quite apart from the fact that it will soon be illegal to go to the shops without an ID card in your pocket, the Labour party is deeply illiberal in its campaigns. I’m sure many of you will have experienced campaigning at local level that demonises asylum seekers, gays or gypsies. We should be more willing to attack Labour for their disgusting campaigns - and make an issue of the character of the people who run them.

Anyone who has read The Political Brain (a study of the neuroscience of politics - the best political book of this year in my opinion) will remember that smears work because they are semi-conscious. Drew Western, the book’s author, makes the point that if you want to beat a smear (assuming it’s worth mentioning) then you have to take it head on and make an issue of the person doing the smear.

We successfully did this in the Cheadle by election when the Conservatives used some outrageous smears against our candidate, now MP, Mark Hunter. We should do it more.

I challenged a Labour activist friend on this recently, and he said that while this might have happened in the past he was sure it didn’t happen these days. Well here are some examples from the last couple of years: Read more »