Just two weeks after the excellent Sarah Yong was selected to fight his Somerton and Frome constituency next year, retiring MP David Heath has been writing in the Frome Standard about the need for more women in Parliament.
He will be slightly red-faced to have under-estimated even our lowly number of women in the MPs, saying we have five, rather than seven, but that doesn’t undermine the premise of his piece.
But I think there is still an issue for all political parties in ensuring that parliament better reflects the make-up of the country at large. Instead, there is a huge over-representation of white, male, middle-class, middle-aged men. I know – I’m one, and there’s not much I can do about it other than by particularly drastic means!
However, we do need to look at what we can do to improve the balance. I’m particularly pleased that the candidate selected by the Liberal Democrats only last week to seek to succeed me, Sarah Yong, is a young woman, who also happens to be a highly energetic and highly able individual.
You can read the whole article here.
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2 Comments
Odd that in his article of only about a dozen sentences David Heath should get the principle fact wrong ( unless this was a typo by the Frome Standard ). Just goes to show that a woman would be better at the job!
The same goes for leader of the party. Maybe David could take a positive step before he stands down at the next election and help elect a woman leader of the party to replace Clegg.
like John, I was a tad disappointed at the brevity, I was expecting some incisive remarks and vision as to possible routes to better representation. But at least the electorate within the Party have their heads on straight, with their superb choice in Sarah.