Tag Archives: candidate selection

Mark Valladares

Diary of a Returning Officer: Week 1 – the Regional Candidates Chair has called, and I’ve said yes…

By Mark Valladares | Tue 17th June 2025 - 1:00 pm

There’s been a lot of debate, dare I say controversy, over the recent proposal to Federal Conference regarding how Parliamentary candidate selections are managed. But perhaps it might be interesting to see how the process actually works…

I’ve been a Returning Officer for the Party for a very long time, more than thirty years. My “patch” has generally been the South East of England, covering four of the Party’s Regions – London, South East England, South Central and the East of England. There was a time when I “had ballot box, will travel” but, for a variety of reasons, I’m not willing to take on too many these days. On the other hand, the modern processes don’t actually require me to leave my home office, so I can theoretically cover more territory.

A few days ago, I had a phone call from our Regional Candidates Chair. That’s not totally unusual, as I was foolish enough to stand for the Regional Candidates Committee which, of course, she chairs. And, as a veteran of the candidate selection processes, she apparently values my opinion – or humours me, you’d have to ask her that. She had a request, would I take on a selection? I thought about it for a moment, but agreed readily enough. She promised to put me in touch with the Local Party and, after a quick chat about general business, we said our goodbyes.

So, I need to do some preparation. First of all, there are new Selection Rules, approved by English Council in March. As I’m not a member of English Council, I hadn’t read them. And now I have. They are, it must be said, a streamlined version of what had previously existed which, in turn, was a streamlined version of its predecessor. The new version runs to just nine pages plus some Appendices, which cover another ten. They aren’t as daunting as they might have been.

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Posted in Op-eds, Party policy and internal matters and Selection news | 20 Comments
Richard Flowers

What Happened at the English Council?

By Richard Flowers | Thu 29th May 2025 - 4:56 pm

There is a substantial debate taking place within the Liberal Democrats at the moment, though you may have heard nothing about it: should the Party be a member-led, volunteer-based organisation or become professionalised, organised by a paid staff funded mainly through high-value-donor contributions?

You may remember that at Spring Conference in Harrogate, the Federal Party adopted a constitutional amendment to take on the responsibility for candidate approval and selection (item F10 on the conference agenda), putting these into the hands of the paid campaigns team.

In that way, F10 was a step towards the “professional” Party route.

Whereas, the current system for candidates, which in England consists of regional candidates’ chairs working together though the English Candidates Committee, with the elected English Candidates’ Chair, represents in this case the “member-led” approach.

As the Liberal Democrats are a Federal organisation, the F10 amendment will only come into force if it is approved by the three State Parties: England, Scotland and Wales. (Here we should recognise Matt McLaren and other members of the English Council who were able to confirm this in the meeting.)

Therefore, on Thursday last week, there was a meeting of the English Council, the 150 members elected to govern the Liberal Democrats in England, with the main item on the agenda being a constitutional amendment submitted by the Chair and officers to transfer those responsibilities to the Federal Party.

If you are a member of the Liberal Democrats in England you may already have read an email from the English Chair, Caroline Pidgeon, laying out the result.

There were 132 members of the Council present.

80 (60.6%) voted for the amendment (as amended).

52 (39.4%) voted against.

Leaving the motion 8 votes short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution.

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Posted in News | Also tagged | 10 Comments
Stephen Harte

Selecting and not selecting people

By Stephen Harte | Mon 7th April 2025 - 1:21 pm

As I never tire of telling people, I’ve been in the Party all of my adult life, having joined, as a teenager, the Scottish Liberal Party (Livingston Constituency Liberal Association, to be exact, for that is how we did things back then) in the febrile months between the 1987 General Election and eventual merger and the creation of the Liberal Democrats.

I have stood under the Party banner in student elections (I once stood for Glasgow University SRC President against a certain Nicola Sturgeon – whatever happened to her? – we both lost!). However, I have never been a candidate in a proper election – not even in a euphemistically described “development” seat. So I don’t really know what it’s like to offer yourself for selection.

In Scotland (as in Wales) we are working hard to select first rate candidates for a General Election due next year. That’s got me thinking about what it means to seek to be a candidate – but, don’t worry, this is not a reflection on the rights and wrongs of motion F10 at the recent Federal Spring Conference in Harrogate or the diplomatic (or otherwise) skills of Tim Farron.

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Posted in Op-eds | 3 Comments
George Sykes

Making the cement for the yellow wall – how candidate selection reform will make us stronger

By George Sykes | Wed 19th March 2025 - 1:48 pm

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.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 6 Comments

Why Liberal values require us to vote against the Federal party’s conference power grab

By Thomas Prince | Tue 18th March 2025 - 6:02 pm

The F10 function key on my keyboard serves as a Mute button.

And that, unfortunately, is what the F10 motion up for a vote this Saturday in Harrogate would also do: mute the voices of all those that want to be able to choose their candidate for Parliament in their hometown.

You know when the Federal Party is worried because it takes a sudden interest in what ordinary members think, and uses the same skills it directs at the electorate in an effort to win votes.

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged and | 5 Comments
Callum Robertson

We are a major force in British politics again – let’s update elements of our support processes to reflect this

By Callum Robertson | Wed 31st July 2024 - 10:25 am

We have 72 Members of Parliament, it would be the easiest thing in the world to sit back and be a bit smug for six months. However, that would be a mistake – with the Conservatives hell bent on internal warfare and Labour in a honeymoon period, we are the de facto opposition. Consequently we have to start acting like it. To my mind we succeed where there is local leadership and being blunt, our selection process is unnecessarily slow in getting candidates in place.

Parliamentary Selections – including seats where we are third, should take place in the next 18 months.

The most effective way of electing MPs remains selecting early and embedding those candidates in as genuine local champions, ready to hold their local Member of Parliament to account.

We are second in 27 seats, selecting these seats early will allow us to bed in candidates ahead of time and give us a more realistic chance of building on the incredible gains next time.

However, there are also a large number of seats where we are a good third (15-25% of the vote) and should be challenging for second place in 2029. We know that in these seats, credibility can be a challenge – so equally building our vote in these seats is important too.

Understandably there needs to be some time for reflection – however post 2019 we were far too slow in selecting candidates. We can grow on our success if we have all our target seat candidates and most of our moving forward seat candidates, selected by December 2025.

Large Seat Selections – these should be treated as advanced seats are, or we will not be able to prove what we would do differently.

We have built clusters of victories in seats around Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Gloucestershire and Surrey. This concentration of parliamentary seats should help us win some larger seats such as Mayoralties and Police (Fire) and Crime Commissioners at the next election for those seats.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 3 Comments
NewsHound

Alison Alexander selected as Welsh Liberal Democrat Senedd candidate for Montgomeryshire

By NewsHound | Tue 15th December 2020 - 9:24 am

Montgomeryshire Liberal Democrats have selected local councillor Alison Alexander as their candidate to contest the Montgomeryshire seat at next year’s Senedd Election.

Alison lives in rural northern Montgomeryshire with husband Alastair where she is a Llanfyllin Town Councillor.

Alison has degrees in botanical horticulture from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and in Mandarin Chinese, French and Spanish from the University of Durham and is currently completing a Masters degree in Ecology. She paused her career in horticulture and community education to raise their son, who now attends the nearby village school.

Alison is co-founder of Repair Café Oswestry and Borders, a board member of the inclusive environmental group BRACE and a parent governor at her local school.

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The Voice

6-8 April 2019 – the weekend (plus) press releases

By The Voice | Mon 8th April 2019 - 11:27 pm

Tories guilty of ‘shocking intransigence’

Responding to comments from Andrea Leadsom on the Marr show, Liberal Democrat spokesperson Tom Brake said:

What we saw this morning from Andrea Leadsom was shocking intransigence.

There is absolutely no clarity on what sort of deal the government is seeking with Labour and no real plan to move forward.

The country will never accept backroom deals done at the 11th hour to push through Brexit.

It is time for the Conservatives to compromise and by giving the people the final say in a vote on their deal with an option to stay in the EU.

Jaguar …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 5 Comments
Rajin Chowdhury

Always Speak up to be Selected

By Rajin Chowdhury | Wed 17th October 2018 - 7:32 am

On 15th October, Sheffield South East selected me as their parliamentary candidate. The city has six constituencies. Sheffield Hallam members selected Laura Gordon to replace Nick Clegg last year, leaving five Sheffield constituencies needing candidates selected that evening. Though Sheffield Central was contested (congratulations to Shaffaq Mohammed), the remaining four were not.

Sheffield South East is not a target seat. Although 40 members were present, only two were eligible to vote in my selection. Had I not attended, I may still have won.

In uncontested selections at both council and parliamentary level, candidates understandably do limited preparation for their speeches at hustings. Why bother when you know you’ll probably win anyway and you’re essentially doing the party a favour? Well, I chose to do things a little differently, and I think you should too.

Firstly, the standard of public speaking (even amongst some of our MPs, somewhat shockingly) is often poor. This is a chance for you to practise. Set-piece political speeches are not the same as delivering a work presentation or running a seminar – they are all about persuasion. It’s a different art and one that takes practice.

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Posted in News and Op-eds | 9 Comments
Alison Eden

Payday politicians, please!

By Alison Eden | Mon 10th September 2018 - 3:05 pm

If you haven’t been in this situation, you do not know at all what it feels like for your four walls to start crashing in on you, the poignancy of your little girl, leaving her pocket money on your desk because she wants to help and heard you crying in the night over the bills. People who have not ever had to picture for themselves the reality of no money, no job, no home, cannot easily appreciate the paralyzing terror, the feeling of time and hope slipping through the cracks leaving you trying not to vomit as you brightly slap …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 21 Comments
Jeremy Hilton

Liberal Democrats must fight every PCC election in 2020

By Jeremy Hilton | Mon 4th June 2018 - 12:30 pm

Like most Liberal Democrats I opposed the introduction of Police & Crime Commissioners, and I still do. I would support abolishing them and returning the governance of our local police constabularies to boards of elected councillors.

In Gloucestershire where we have co-terminus boundaries with the county’s constabulary we could be even more radical and hand back the governance of police to Gloucestershire County Council.

Under this government we know major governance changes won’t happen and that in 2020 we shall have elections for the PCCs in England and Wales. In 2016 Liberal Democrats only stood candidates in 30 out of 40 PCC …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 14 Comments
The Voice

Liberal Democrats select new Parliamentary candidate for North Devon

By The Voice | Sun 3rd June 2018 - 9:00 am

North Devon Liberal Democrats have selected their new prospective parliamentary candidate to try and win the seat back at the next election, and the news is of particular cause of celebration for all of us on the Liberal Democrat Voice team

Kirsten Johnson – a county councillor, professional musician from Oxfordshire and Thursday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice – was chosen at a meeting of party members in Barnstaple yesterday. She will be moving into North Devon shortly to enable her to devote maximum time and effort to her campaign.

Kirsten Johnson emerged …

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Posted in News and Selection news | Also tagged and | 17 Comments
Mark Valladares

Want to fly the Liberal Democrat banner in 2022 (or maybe sooner)?

By Mark Valladares | Fri 6th October 2017 - 2:45 pm

It is easy to forget sometimes that a majority of Liberal Democrat members have joined since the 2015 General Election. Even in my rural corner of England that is Mid Suffolk, membership numbers have increased by more than 150%. What that means is a huge infusion of new blood, potentially willing to hold aloft the Party banner in elections, if only they could find out how. Perhaps I can help…

It may surprise some readers to hear that the process of selecting Parliamentary candidates is already underway in some constituencies. In some cases, they might represent potential target seats for 2022, …

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Posted in Party policy and internal matters | 6 Comments
The Voice

David Ward removed as a candidate

By The Voice | Wed 26th April 2017 - 3:45 pm

Controversial former Bradford East MP David Ward has been removed as a candidate by Tim Farron. He had been re-selected as candidate for the seat and earlier in the day Tim Farron had said that he was not in a position to be able to remove him.

I am fully aware of the comments David Ward has made in the past and I find them deeply offensive, wrong and anti-Semitic. I think his decision to stand again, and the local party’s decision to select him, is wrong and I disagree with it completely.

I don’t select our individual candidates and nor should I. But let me be clear, I won’t tolerate anti-Semitism in my party.

A few hours later, some constitutional geekery had clearly been done because Tim released the following statement about an hour ago:

I believe in a politics that is open, tolerant and united. David Ward is unfit to represent the party and I have sacked him.

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 59 Comments
News Meerkat

Emails go out to start voting on our Greater London Authority candidates

By News Meerkat | Fri 28th August 2015 - 11:36 am

The ever-energetic and helpful Dr Mark Pack, formerly of this parish, has published a very informative update this morning on the subject of the election of our Greater London Authority candidates:

Emails with online voting links have been landing in London Lib Dem members’ inboxes over the last day.

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Posted in London, News and Party policy and internal matters | Also tagged | 4 Comments
Caron Lindsay

Willie Rennie backs all women shortlists

By Caron Lindsay | Sun 23rd August 2015 - 2:37 pm

Willie Rennie has announced that he supports the use of all women shortlists and quotas to improve the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ appalling record on gender balance. He is to lead a group which will draw up specific proposals for the 2019 European, 2020 Westminster and 2021 Holyrood elections.

The Scottish Party looked on in shock when members in the North East did not place highly effective Justice Spokesperson at the top of the list when it was selected at the end of last year. Since then, and particularly following the General Election, there have been strong calls for much stronger action on gender balance. Willie has consulted widely within the party and he announced his plans at the Scottish Party’s and Scottish Liberal Democrat Women’s Everyday Sexism Open Mic event in Edinburgh yesterday.

The Working Group to be led by Willie will consider all options including:

•         All women shortlists

•         Making gender a part of the party’s electoral strategy

•         Quota systems

Willie said:

I have lost patience with the current system and its inability to ensure proper representation of women.  It is now time to take the necessary action to deliver change.

A fresh start for the Liberal Democrats requires us to change.  We need to be more reflective of the people we seek to represent and to perform at our best we need to deploy our best people to make the case for our cause.

Despite an abundance of talented women the party has been unable to put enough in positions to get elected.   It is difficult to make the case for opportunity for everyone when only one of our parliamentarians is a woman.

Twenty years ago my party agreed in the Constitutional Convention to work towards a gender balance in our Scottish Parliamentary representation. Yet since the Scottish Parliament was created we have elected no more than two women at the four elections to Holyrood.   I determined to finally deliver the commitment made to the Constitutional Convention.

Encouragement and organisational support is simply insufficient to overcome the barriers to electing women.

That is why I will lead a working group to finalise proposals to put to the Spring Conference of the Scottish Liberal Democrats that will break down those barriers and increase the representation of women Liberal Democrats in Parliament.

It is my intention that the new arrangements will be in place for the European Election in 2019 and will also apply to the 2020 General Election and 2021 Scottish Parliamentary Election.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 57 Comments
Siobhan Mathers

Opinion: Time to address our “Woman Problem”

By Siobhan Mathers | Wed 24th June 2015 - 1:19 pm

Two out of four candidates for the UK Labour leadership are women. This remarkable fact has arisen with little comment. It seems normal and there is no suggestion that either Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall’s names on the ballot are tokenistic.

In contrast, no women are eligible to stand for leadership of the Lib Dems as we have no female MPs. We have two strong candidates for leader in Tim Farron and Norman Lamb. I feel, however, that it’s unacceptable to have got ourselves into a position where there is no possibility of voting for a woman leader.

The front-runner to be next Labour leader in Scotland is a woman. The Scottish First Minister is a woman, as is the leader of the Scottish Conservatives. The Scottish Greens have Co-Convenors with a man and a woman jointly holding the post. So it is likely that in Scotland we will soon be the only party not to have a woman leader. Indeed, unless there is a considerable change in our fortunes  before the Holyrood elections next year we will soon have no women in the Scottish Parliament either. Our current sole female MSP, Alison McInnes, has been voted number 2 on the North East list and there is only 1 region, out of 8, where we have a woman at the top of the list.

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 50 Comments
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