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.
Secondly, we must select our Westminster candidates earlier in the election cycle. In Leeds, we have elections every year. If I can commit to having a Westminster candidate selected for the next election by 2026, we can run them in the same ward every year until the election. Combined with including them in any other campaigns running in development wards in that constituency and stand a much better chance come the next general election.
This isn’t an argument that we should’ve campaigned in any of the seats where we lost our deposit. It almost certainly would’ve cost us more to retain it than we lost on it, anyway. But if we can save £4,000 by selecting early, why not?
There are concerns that if we move ahead with a push for early selections we will lose out on opportunities to increase our diversity before selecting. For this reason we should make sure to expedite the applications of diverse candidates to ensure they enter the pool as quickly as possible. We should also see early selection as the norm but not compulsory. There are some areas where selecting a representative candidate is more important than others, for these we shouldn’t push for selection until we’re ready. Finally candidates do drop out once selected, for these reselections we should consider all young members (or other categories such as first time or disabled candidates), shortlist to ensure we make the most of the pipeline of candidates we’ll be recruiting over the next four years.
In short, we did really well at the general election and should be proud. We did really well because we adopted a culture of continual improvement. One of the areas we didn’t do well enough last time was candidate diversity and deposit saving. By providing paid staff to support the candidate selection process we can increase the diversity within our candidate pool. While selecting candidates early will allow local parties to improve their chances of retaining their deposits which can then be spent on campaigning.
For these reasons I’m going to be backing F10 (Constitutional Amendment: Implementing the Lessons of the General Election Review) at the Federal Conference this weekend and would implore you too as well.
* George Sykes is Chair Leeds Lib Dems (writing in a personal capacity and is former Parliamentary Candidate for Leeds South.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Labour MPs revolt
Edward Street of old #dundeewestend
Tens of Thousands
A Puffin Books profile of Joan Aiken
"Could you be the one to help a care leaver?"
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Mike Peters
Simon R
Steve Trevethan
Peter Martin
nigel hunter
6 Comments
In many councils, more and more women LD councillors are stepping down with not as many stepping in, in part, due to the toxicity of politics. Women of colour receive the worst harrasment, so I find the argument that asking members of unrepresented backgrounds to be the public face of an unwinnable constituency for 4 years will improve our diversity.
You also mention administration. There is nothing stopping the federal party from funding staff to remove admin from current process. Both centralising the process and making it staff-run seems to give senior members an undue level of power, staff are less likely to be independent from HQ (we see this with campaign staff already, with London HQ staff taken away from GLA campaign, costing us a 3rd assembly seat). Democratisation is weaken when powers of processes and shortlisting are put closer to leadership, we had a review in 2019 talking about the detriment of leadership bunker mentality and the focus on defection seats like Kensington and Chelsea, which cost us Wimbledon back then.
The arguments for F10 are also consistently ignorant of start up seats. In London, half of the boroughs have no councillors, they advise is to target 1 ward, but you can’t target 1 ward if you’re expected to identify and build 3 Westminster constituencies one year before the locals.
I am nearly 80 , a member since 1977 and have done almost everything at constituency level that’s possible excluding being a ppc. I sometimes think that I seem to have spent more time on candidate selection than on candidate election. It can absorb everybody’s available energy, especially in non target seats with few activists.
It’s essential to select early and get on with what we are in business for , ie winning elections.
If 2 general elections seem certain to be close together e.g. Feb 1974 (followed by Oct 1974, ) then I suggest an automatic carry forward of all ppcs would be an excellent idea. That decision would need to be taken centrally.
George,
Your article is, in the nicest way, indicative of the general debate here.
By providing paid staff to support the candidate selection process we can increase the diversity within our candidate pool.
And how will that be exactly? What will these new people do that hasn’t already been happening? A deafening silence follows…
Will centralising the process generate more Returning Officers, more candidate assessors? Will it oblige Local Parties to select earlier in the cycle if they don’t want to? Will we suddenly find six hundred plus people who want to commit to three years or more fronting the campaign in hopeless seats, knowing that there will be little meaningful central support and that they’ll be expected to pass what resources they have to the seats we want to defend and (hopefully) a bunch of new target seats when the campaign reaches its crescendo?
The motion says nothing, the proposers likewise. It will simply, we are promised, be better if someone else does it.
Frankly, I’d like a bit more certainty before I blithely offer up power and responsibility to the centre.
The problem I have with F10 is that it is yet another step in a process, begun by Nick Clegg with the Bones review in 2008 but recently put on steroids under Mark’s presidency. We all know that Mark is a totally committed party man, phenomenally well driven to make the party’s internal processes as efficient and fast responding as possible to cope with the pressures of modern politics. However the consequence of that has been a massive centralisation of power in Federal Board, which now only has 3 members directly elected by party members, thus massively concentrating power in the hands of those closest to the centre.
Similarly, there was further a substantial increase in central control over the party disciplinary process at our most recent conference in Brighton. There it was determined that the disciplinary process, in order to be “independent” had to be removed from any connection whatsoever with bodies in sphere of control of the members through elections. Instead, it should be in the control of some independent body, selected as being independent by those few who are allowed to make such a decision. I spoke against.
We all can see what is happening in America as Trump, using centralised executive power is rapidly dismantling and by-passing the democratic structures of the USA. We however, a party founded on a belief that diversity is a strength, are setting up similar ever more centralised and unaccountable structures in the name of efficiency.
Finally, I know Mark and all the others on Federal board absolutely have the best interest of the party at heart, but we may find successors do not. Of course, people may consider the chance of that happening as being vanishingly small. However up to 2016 virtually everyone regarded it as a vanishingly small risk that America’s democracy would be being dismantled any time soon or that America’s commitment to NATO was anything other than absolute.
Concerning saving deposits, early candidates that are given sufficient resources to campaign is the best bet. 5% as a minimum vote share is a reasonable baseline for being a credible nationwide party. So those constituencies who lose their deposits should be made target seats for increased campaigning at least until they reach this threshold.