Once upon a time ‘everyone’ agreed that only aristocrats and landowners, of the male and pale persuasion, were fit to be in Parliament. Then we had a very British set of polite revolutions.  Firstly, we agreed that middle class men could do the job, and after a struggle middle class women. Then we let a few well-connected working class people in. And every so often, we didn’t get too bothered when a few BaME folk got involved – although not too many.

That’s a fairly roughshod run through of a few centuries of British political history, but we hope you get the point. While our country’s demographics and cultures have changed, our Parliament, local governments, and internal elections processes are still based on ‘one person, one post’.

But let’s be a bit heretical for a minute. Is politics a regular job? Do we believe that only folk who can commit to full-time campaigning and ‘politicking’ are our best representatives? And if yes, is it simply because its the ‘status quo’, and so easier to follow than to change? Well we think not. We think politics should embrace the modern world and explore part-time and flexible working and we are not the first to call for this.  Even Tom Brake has written a post for this site advocating job-share for MPs.

We appreciate this may not be to everyone’s taste and we’re are not advocating that every Lib Dem should, but we do think our party should think about how job-sharing might change the way we meet our wider political goals. We believe that it can take us much further to achieving Tim’s aspirations for BaME, Disability, LGBT+ and Gender equality than our current strategy of asking folk to apply and to hope for the best.  At a time when we have so few opportunities to give people experience and responsibility, wouldn’t job sharing help to support a wider range of candidates into positions of visible leadership and generate that amazing exchange of knowledge that Lib Dems thrive upon?

Although this piece began discussing publicly elected roles, we end by looking at internal posts. This is because we understand that the electorate may take longer to convince.  We also recognise that our internal roles are not subject to public scrutiny and provide a fantastic opportunity to change our party from within – to turn the ‘pale and male’ into the ‘vibrant mixture’ of genders, nationalities, heritages, sexualities, disabilities and social class.

This worked well in Hackney  where we used job share to support a new member in the role of membership secretary.

So here’s the call. We are opening this debate just in time for the London Regional Elections and our annual Local Party Elections, and hope to inspire our new members to apply for these roles. We believe the #libdemfightback will be stronger and fairer if more people share the load. Unless it says you can’t, go find a like-minded Lib Dem and apply for these party roles as a job share!

* Mark Platt and Teena Lashmore are Liberal Democrat candidates for the London Assembly.