Author Archives: George Sykes

On May 22nd last year, I watched Rishi Sunak announce the general election. Little did I know that a few hectic weeks later, we’d be celebrating having 72 MPs, an enormous achievement that is a testament to the hard work of volunteers and staff across the party.

However, we did not achieve that success by continuing to do what we had always done; we did it by ruthlessly introspecting and improving. Just because we have won does not mean we should stop our self-reflection. By my calculations, if we introspect as hard as we did last time, we should end up with 468 MPs at the next election…

As the chair of a Local Party that covers ten constituencies (with two being shared with other local party’s) in a labour facing area I had a few key aims at the election:

• Stand a candidate in every constituency
• Campaign in the seats we had existing campaigns in to ensure our voters had their views represented in the general election debate
• Win in our designated local target seat

I’m proud to say that with the hard work of a team of volunteers across Leeds and the whole region, we achieved all of those. However, all was not entirely rosy for the following reasons:

• Failed to stand a single women candidate across all ten seats
• Lost our deposit in all but two seats (costing the party £4,000)

This is far from ideal, and if we are serious about being a diverse, representative, national party, we need to fix it.

Firstly, we need to enable our amazing volunteer teams to focus on what they can do best, identifying the members in their areas who can be recruited as parliamentary candidates. We know that proactively identifying and talking to potential candidates rather than waiting for them to come to us is key to increasing diversity. Who is better placed to do this than volunteers drawn from and embedded in our local parties?

By offloading the administration element of candidate recruitment, we can enable our volunteers to focus on building connections with potential candidates. This will develop a deeper pool of potential candidates more representative of the communities we seek to represent.