The party’s efforts to have a more diverse Parliamentary Party have long suffered from the historic legacy of an all white and all male House of Commons Parliamentary Party. Whilst the gender balance amongst newly won constituencies has vastly improved, the overall balance of the party was kept heavily male by the party’s failure to ever select a woman to succeed a retiring man in a held Parliamentary seat. For the 2010 general election the party had finally cracked the problem – with half the retiring male MPs succeeded by female candidates.
But in a cruel twist, all of these women were defeated. There’s no evidence I’ve seen that being female was a disadvantage (and evidence from past elections is that, if anything, female Liberal Democrat candidates have a slight advantage in appealing to the electorate). Yet the result has been that all the hard-work by the Gender Balance Task Force and others to train and encourage more good quality female candidates got so close to breaking that historic burden – but not quite close enough.
This failure is compounded by the way the coalition arrangements mean that for the next few years the party’s five most prominent politicians – the Cabinet members – are all white men. Taken individually, each of those people make excellent and obvious choices. That should not though blind us to the collective impact of those individual choices.
Does it matter? I think it does – and for three reasons. One is that, taken collectively, I just don’t believe that the best talent amongst Liberal Democrats is so heavily concentrated amongst white men as you would take from looking at their dominance amongst the Commons Parliamentary Party. The second is that amongst any group of people a greater diversity of life experiences, characters and interests almost always makes for better decision making. Gender and race are by no means the only relevant criteria – but they are important ones. The third is the one that is perhaps least appreciated by some in the party: the collective impression, deliberately or not, the party gives to outsiders of the sorts of people it welcomes and values.
There is clearly much work to be done – and also a significant opportunity for not only does the coalition agreement point to Liberal Democrat ministers outside the Cabinet, it also points towards the creation of a group of Liberal Democrat members of the Lords in the near future. Those are two opportunities that should not be squandered.
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30 Comments
Well said Mark.
AV will also make it easier for us to select BME candidates. Some of our voters are racist – just look at the way people with non-white names (almost) never top the ballot in a 3 member ward. Look at Shaun Bailey and the self-styled “Black farmer” for the Tories – there is racism out there, and so long as there is, parties will be reluctant to select BME candidates for marginal seats. Sadly (almost) all of our seats are marginal, certainly when you subtract the personal vote. Harrogate is an example, or see how the Eastleigh and Sheffield Hallam majorities fell last time.
You must be really celebrating the diversity in your new cabinet PM Eton, deputy Westminster, Chancellor St Pauls. A truly diverse selection of public schools
It’s certainly troubling however I’d like to here solutions coming from those who aren’t, like me, white and male.
The party doesn’t have a dilemma as I see it, I know we all want to see a diverse selection of LibDem MPs running the country but surely the way to achieve that is to foster an environment where all sections of society feel comfortable with getting involved and standing.
AV (or any ranking system) – Should broaden the support of candidates that are attractive to a wide range of people and mean that more women and ethnic minorities are elected
Selection Process – “Local Jobs for Local People”, I know it sounds really right wing but the essence is to build candidates in the local area rather than parachuting from central office. If I was to stand as an MP I would stick to Manchester/Salford because that’s where I’m from and I can connect with the local population. Any perceived differences can be eroded by making people more familiar.
Parliament (and politics in general) – is seen by many as too advisorial and will put off certain people who prefer compromise, moving towards PR and consensus government should help (is this the real reason that PR based system elect a higher percentage of Women)
Anyway, back to work…
N Makhno – if you’ve bothered to read the article, you’d realise that’s exactly the point Mark was making.
Why do people in our party go on about gender and race but never class? I don’t think N Makhno is a party member, but he has a point. When nearly half our MPs had private education, which only 7% of the population have and that 7% tend to be the wealthiest people, that’s a BIG problem. How many of our MPs really know what it is like to be struggling to pay bills for the necessities, or to be living on benefit, or to be discriminated against because of your accent, or to know you can never afford a house, or to be scared because the next round of cuts will throw you out of employment and you have NOTHING to fall back on when that happens?
If there is one thing that scares me more than anything, it’s the extent to which now our politics, I mean not just the politicians but the “commentariat”, is so dominated by people who haven’t a clue about how most of this country lives. So much of what I read, even at the more liberal ends of the media and other commentary, is written by people whose vision becomes blurred once it goes beyond the wealthiest 10% or so of the country, and the poorer half is almost completely invisible. Look, for example, at the one thing that has always angered me most, all this talk of “southern voters” as if everyone in the south of England has a well paid job in the finance industry and would be seriously scared by a “mansion tax” on houses with a price of a million. The people who say this just CANNOT SEE the poor in the south. The upper class of old were so used to having servants around them that they treated them as if they were invisible, non-people, just part of the infrastructure you did not have to think about. That is how it is with the poor in the south of England today.
Mark your points are spot on.
Diverse organisations tend to be more successful – so the case for diversity is not just about equality and representation, it’s also about widening the talent pool.
You are also right to highlight the impression others have of our party. I’ve faced scathing questions from journalists about under-representation of Lib Dem women at Westminster. After the depressing experience of seeing so many talented women candidates lose last week, we will be even more vulnerable to attack on this front.
You’ve highlighted CGB’s success in getting more women than ever before selected in winnable seats. But our biggest problem remains that not enough women come forward to be parliamentary candidates.
I’ve already argued on Lib Dem Voice that to attract more women we need to make politics fit women’s lives: https://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-make-politics-fit-womens-lives-not-viceversa-18285.html.
Our results last week make this more urgent than ever.
Speaking as a member of LDDA, there is one section of the community that is not only completely underrepresented but is rarely discussed or mentioned.
It would be nice to see disability in the same position as race and gender, not a distant second.
I think there is a serious problem with local party members and BME candidates. I was involved in Tower Hamlets party early on, and I noticed a lot of mistrust between party activists after a BME candidate was selected for these elections. Traditional party members did not know how to deal with the new BME volunteers that came on board and were extremely uncooperative with BME members and kept to their own clique. Although I think they did somehow manage to put aside their differences as the candidate came second and doubled his vote share.
I was disappointed that Lynne Featherstone didn’t get Equalities Minister. Theresa May is a joke in that post.
In direct reply to the article, part of the problem with our General Election results must be related to the failure of our targetting strategy – it’s not that our diverse candidates weren’t in seats thought winnable, it’s that they were in seats which turned out not to be winnable.
Matthew, just because you’ve been privately educated doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve never been on benefits, or worried about losing your job, or being discriminated against because of your accent… I agree that class diversity is important, but I’m not sure how prevalent the problem is. It’s certainly not as obvious a problem as our race and gender balance, because it’s less visible. Other diversity issues, like sexuality and gender identity (wearing my DELGA hat) or disability are also important, but less visible.
Ali, I think you’re right that there are still cultural difficulty between ethnic groupings; I don’t think it’s a matter of racism. Language barrier is part of the problem, as is the fact that many BME communities campaign politically in ways which don’t fit in to the traditional Lib Dem campaign tactics. I live in a culturally diverse city and our party members come from all backgrounds, and despite my best efforts I still struggle at times.
I believe that the statistics show that in general, Lib Dem candidates get selected in rough proportion to the people who stand, i.e. that there isn’t bias in the selection process, but that there’s not enough diversity in people standing as candidates. As a local party chair, I will encourage a wider range of people to consider standing as candidates and to go through the appropriate training processes.
I should point out that Issan Ghazni, the party’s Diversity Adviser, runs excellent basic diversity training at Conference. This covers the essential matter of why diversity matters, and how it benefits our local parties quite aside from arguments about representation. I’m wondering whether it would be useful for ALDC and EMLD to work together to provide ethnic diversity awareness training at Conference… and whether those most in need of it would attend!
Except the party hasn’t said “yes to a 55% confidence threshold”. I think you’re confusing vote to oust a government (50pc + 1) with vote to teminate fixed term Parliamemt early and call a general election?
Southwark had a report-back meeting with Simon Hughes last night, about 100 people there I think & diversity was raised. Simon said he would raise the idea of putting a lot more Women & BME Libdems into The Lords. Incidentally I dont think we shoul assume that all our 5 Cabinet members will want to stay for the whole 5 years, the deal allows them to be replaced with other Libdems.
Lliberal: The 55% threshold protects us – without it, the Tories would make us take unpopular moves, wait for our poll ratings to go into freefall, call another election and get their own majority before making their own far more disastrous decisions.
with the 55%, we know we’ve got 5 years to implement liberal policies, many more of which are in that document than would be if we’d simply shrugged and walked off, against the will of the electorate who didn’t want a one party government!
@ Dave, I agree – I don’t think it’s racism either – I do think we need to reconsider our BME targetting strategy in areas like London. It is ridiculous that Labour is considered the traditional home for BME voters, considering their record.
Mark: spot on article. Hopefully STV to the elected Lords will allow us to elect a truly diverse slate. Certainly the MEP group is well-balanced in gender terms.
Matthew Huntbach: If there is one thing that scares me more than anything, it’s the extent to which now our politics, I mean not just the politicians but the “commentariat”, is so dominated by people who haven’t a clue about how most of this country lives. So much of what I read, even at the more liberal ends of the media and other commentary, is written by people whose vision becomes blurred once it goes beyond the wealthiest 10% or so of the country, and the poorer half is almost completely invisible.
So true! I remember the Sunday Times slammed our plan to get rid of higher rate tax relief, quoting an “expert” (ha!) who said that this would “hit middle income earners [sic]”. No one at the Sunday Times seems to realise that only the top 12% of income tax payers are in the higher rate band, so by definition “middle income earners” would be untouched. The Economist wrote an excellent article about the real middle class, far from what the journalists think is “middle England”: http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15777629
Even here, what do we get? Comments nearly all coming from men….. Love you all, guys, but just maybe you could occasionally stay quiet long enough for some other voices to come through.
I was a Lib Dem candidate at the last election (and in 2005) in the seat where I live and where I am opposition group leader on the council. It is not easy territory for Lib Dems. I am not into hawking myself around constituencies to get a political career.
Has it occurred to anyone that instead of changing what we do with/to women to get them into the current system, maybe we should change the system so that it fits women?
Sorry to sound tetchy, but I am still dazed and confused after the past week’s political earthquake. And perhaps I should make up for the tetchiness by saying that I don’t feel discriminated against by the party or its members at all. And that after we gained a seat from the Tories last Thursday my council group has 5 men – and 6 women.
The answer is Proprtional Representation by the Single Transferable Vote
Prue, that’s exactly the point I’ve been making.
We need to change politics to fit women’s lives, not vice-versa – do have a look at the piece I’ve linked to above.
I do wish the party would do more work on the retention of female candidates. Just for starters, off the top of my head I think I am right in saying that women stood down in East Hants (me!), South-West Surrey, Basingstoke, Maidenhead, Oldham East and Saddleworth and Filton and Bradley Stoke. Does anyone ever ask how those candidates could have been retained or whether they would be interested in standing elsewhere in the future?
80% of women in the real world are mothers.The Lib Dems have as many MPs called Steven as we have mums in the Commons!
I’ve been interested in candidate attrition for a long time, and agree with you that we need to do much more to ensure that experienced female candidates don’t fall by the wayside at just the point when their male contemporaries are getting elected…
FYI Here are the stats on % of women MPs for the 3 parties. Depressingly, we have now fallen behind the Tories.
The number of Conservative women MPs has risen from 18 to 48 – an increase from 9% to 16%.
The number of Labour women MPs has fallen from 94 to 81 – but the fall in the overall number of Labour MPs means that there is a percentage increase of 4% (from 27% to 31%)
The number of Liberal Democrat women MPs has fallen from 9 to 7 – a decrease from 15% to 12%.
Dinti,
This has been bothering me all day too and I just went and did the same calculation you did above – yes, we’re behind the Conservatives! As noted above, it’s not just women though… if I can figure out reliable sources I’m also going to try try figure out the same statistics for LGBT, disabilities, ethnic and religious background and any other power minorities I can think of.
Notably, in the coalition document that’s been published, equality is not mentioned. Did it even come up in negotiations?
Dave Page
Matthew, just because you’ve been privately educated doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve never been on benefits, or worried about losing your job, or being discriminated against because of your accent…
No, but it makes it highly unlikely.
Sorry, but I just find it so hypocritical that we go on and on about how bad it is that our MPs are not representative of the country in race and gender, but seem to care nothing that they are so unrepresentative in class. The fact is that we just do not have enough people amongst our MPs who have direct exeprience of what it is like to be poor. Not just temporarily, but born and brought up and living a lifetime on a low income and no savings to fall back on. If you haven’t lived that way, you just don’t know what it is like. We accept this with women and ethnic minorities, we say a white man can’t really know what it is like. So why if I try to raise it on clas am I dismissed as you have dismissed me?
On the question of gender equality and ethnicitiy, I can add to the debate by describing my personal circumstances. People in my sphere of life see the Liberal Democrats as being a very diverse party. You see, it isn’t only the leadership base that acts as a collective ambassador for the party. Grassroots activists are flag fliers too. People generally identify more with those whom they know personally. The general public is more likely to be closer to a Lib Dem activist than the top ranks. I am an Asian female. I sit on the party’s committees and am rather open about my political affiliation. People, therefore, tend to see the party as being an inclusive one. There’s a sense of thinking that If someone ordinary like me can be accepted into the party then so can others. That’s a good starting point. Let’s build upwards then from it and encourage activists to take stronger roles within the party as time goes on.
This is a complex issue with no simple solution. Broadly, there are three areas that need to be looked at in order to increase the number of female MP’s:
1. Encouraging more women to come forward to stand as MP’s. There is research from the US (http://thewhitehouseproject.org/, applicable here) that shows that women need to be encouraged to run for public office rather than going for it themselves. There are several reasons for this, confidence being one, culture being another. (Yes I know there are examples of women who come forward, but this is the tendency) Addressing this would require a campaign not unlike an election campaign, reaching women in their homes and social lives. We would need to expand the scope of CGB and empower them with budget to get out and about, round the country to encourage women to stand. Now that we are in government we might find money for that.
2. Changing the perception of women as leaders in the party, in politics and in society. This is even trickier. Research shows that people automatically think of a man when you use the word ‘leader’. Our concept of leadership is masculine, gendered, which obviously makes it harder for a women to get elected, promoted within a company etc. They have to work a lot harder to prove that they can lead, rather than it being assumed they can, the position men find themselves in. (yes I know there are examples of the opposite,,, etc) The solution here is, paradoxically, to create role models of female leaders. We need to develop and promote the female MP’s we have to be seen more obviously as leaders. We need to actively encourage local parties to do the same and we need to encourage the media to run stories that portray female leaders in a positive light. Less of the shoes and handbags stories on female MP’s. This will make it easier for women to come forward to stand and will decrease the numbers of female MP’s leaving.
3. We need to change the nature of the job of MP. It’s currently set up for a man. Well, really for a person who has someone else at home looking after the kids and house full time. That tends to still be men. If a woman wants to be an MP currently, she has to fit into this mould. Hence the point made earlier about there being few mothers in parliament. If we are serous about making room for women, then we need to understand that women bear the burden of raising our future generations. We need to make it possible for them to do this (and dare I say for men to be able to do this too) and become an MP. We need to work out what parliament would need to look like for women to be able to contribute their thinking and their time, as well as taking care of community and family. This is not a simple task and yes, is the redefinition of society but it is basically what needs to happen.
So, you see, we should not moan about the numbers of women we currently have in parliament without a recognition of the deep systemic issues affecting a women’s chances of being successful at the job.
I’m up for changing this and will be making an offer to the Lib Dem government to that effect.
I agree with Lee analysis of the situation that the issues are broadly systemic and I also agree with Dinti that we need to make politics change to fit women, not the other way around. A big ask as that means men changing the way they do things as well!
The Campaign for Gender Balance & WLD have worked incredibly hard around the encouragment and training issue but it is clearly not enough on its own.
My concern with the party approach to date is that is the only thing it’s seen prepared to do. I sat on the Diversity Engagement Group for about half the year last year, leaving because I was the PCA rep and I stood down from the PCA, but I am really keen to understand what is happening with it now. At that time the DEG was focussing on measuring the problem – where are we with respect to diversity across all the regions. Understanding where we are is vital to understanding how we’re going to get to where you want to be but we need to start taking steps to change things now, not just measuring the status quo.
So, what do we need to do to address the issues that Lee outlined above?
I think we need to go back and do some really radial thinking and not lull ourselves in a false sense of security because we’re doing a lot of encouragement and training.
This would include review our organisational approach to campaigning so that we can look again at what we need in PPCs.
Lee, you are totally right and I look forward to working with you on this when you get back from Australia!
Prue Bray
Love you all, guys, but just maybe you could occasionally stay quiet long enough for some other voices to come through. I was a Lib Dem candidate at the last election (and in 2005) in the seat where I live and where I am opposition group leader on the council. It is not easy territory for Lib Dems. I am not into hawking myself around constituencies to get a political career.
Neither am I. I would have loved to have been able to build a political career which might have included a serious stab at winning a Parliamentary seat. But having reached myself the position of Leader of the Opposition in a council where our trajectory was up, I could not afford to go on. I could just about fit in being a ward councillor with the job that pays my salary, I could not fit in the time taken for serious political leadership. I did once try to become an approved Parliamentary candidate, but again it became clear that to do it seriously meant I would have to give up the job I rely on because I have no private income or wealth to fall back on. One of the reasons I was not approved was because I was told I was no good at media contacts. Hmm, is that true?
One of the main reasons for our failure to attact female or BME candidates stems from the Party’s lack of resources. This is compounded by the Regions three line whip which forces any prospective candidate to travel often many miles and devote many hours to assist in target seats or else they will get a “black mark” against them.
I will not name the local party but one reason given to not select a BME woman for the next council elections was that she would not be able to do much active doorstep campaigning and wasn’t mobile enough. The same sort of argument goes for most women with families who tend to be selected as paper candidates only. The ideal candidate for the ward… a white thirtysomething male because he can deliver a lot of leaflets.
Put simply the hours required in the Liberal Democrats to campaign excludes those who don’t fall into the healthy single male or those who want some semblance of a normal life. As long as the party relies on shoe leather rather than getting an equal opportunity to put our policies to the voter we will never overcome the obstacles to equal representation. Until the macho-campaign culture within the party is addressed then don’t expect much to change.
Yes, there is always a problem when all the different groups are keeping ’score’. Many companies do this as well in order to meet certain ethnic hiring quotas. The big danger here of course is that often racial backgrounds become more important than actual pure qualifications and organizations whether corporate or government, do not get the best people for the right jobs. Ideally of course, we should take all factors into consideration.