Author Archives: Victoria Collins MP

I want us – as Liberal Democrats – to select great candidates, improve diversity in the party and empower our local parties to elect the best candidates to represent them. That’s why I’m backing motion F10 at conference – the one that seeks to implement the recommendations of the General Election Review around Westminster candidates. 

I am doing so for two reasons:

• By reducing three committees to one it makes it easier to address the problems in our current candidates system;
• By creating a place on the committee for the Vice President responsible for increasing engagement with ethnic minority communities, candidate diversity finally becomes a keystone in our Westminster candidate system.

Now, I am sure many in the party can give you verbatim – in probably the most intricate of detail – the constitutional intricacies and implications of the motion. However, I wanted to share with you my personal story of my journey to becoming a candidate and how this has led me to strongly support real reform of our candidates system.

From the top, I wish to say that none of this is criticism of individuals involved in the process. This is criticism of the process itself that volunteers spend hours dedicating their time to administer and deliver. I am truly grateful to them for this, but I want the system -those volunteers have to work with -to be better for them and for candidates.

I am in the incredible position of writing this post as the first Liberal Democrat MP of East and South East Asian origin, and the first MP for the newly formed seat of Harpenden and Berkhamsted. When my mother arrived from Malaysia 50 years ago, I don’t think she could have imagined that such a thing was possible. And yet here I am.  

Becoming a candidate is not easy. I should quickly add that nor should it be. It is right that we are put through our paces. But becoming a candidate shouldn’t be made harder by the inadequacies of our own systems and processes, inadequacies which frankly stand in the way of us improving our candidate diversity.