The Lib Dems moved closer to being able to count our election results this afternoon.

In an email to candidates, party Chief Executive Mike Dixon said:

We have now received legal advice from a second King’s Counsel who specialises in election law and discrimination cases. We asked them to review the recent Federal Appeals Panel judgement about the internal elections and recommend how to proceed at a detailed operational level.

The KC advice is that in the light of the Supreme Court judgement and our Federal Appeals Panel judgement, we must suspend rule 2.5 and rule 2.6(c) in the Federal Constitution for these counts.

We will now arrange with our supplier for the count to take place as soon as possible. (The date will now depend on their team’s availability.)

I want to say a huge thank you to everyone for bearing with us through this process. It has been important that we get this right, both to ensure the results are fair and to protect the party from potential legal risks.

This outcome breaks my heart. I worked hard for years to argue for these quotas and helped put them together back in 2016 as I wrote recently.

They have helped make our party more diverse over the years and I want to see them continue. And I will be fighting alongside many colleagues in the party to ensure that the law is changed so that they can be reinstated.  It’s so infuriating that anti trans groups with the means to take legal action have forced this on us. They have harmed women and LGBT people and, perhaps, when we see the outcome of the elections, the diversity of our party.

LGBT+ Lib Dems issued a statement this evening saying:

We are disappointed that, due to legal pressure from transphobic campaign groups following the For Woman Scotland decision, two eminently reasonable quotas in our party’s election regulations have been suspended. These suspensions are profoundly anti-queer, anti-trans and anti-feminist, and those threatening to sue clearly care about trans exclusion and not women’s liberation.

Several months ago, well before the elections, we advised the party that we supported the existing trans-inclusive gender quotas and that the only viable alternative in the face of legal threats would be to suspend gender quotas, despite this being completely against our values. The attempt to instead third-space trans people has wasted a huge amount of staff and volunteer time and effort, not to mention money that should have been spent on Liberal Democrat campaigning.

We continue to advocate for changing the law to reverse the effects of the For Women Scotland decision. We are also working across the party to develop constitutional proposals to bring back the suspended quotas, particularly the LGBT+ quota, to the fullest extent possible.

We will bring you further news when we get it.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social