Willie Rennie has made clear that he wants to see a more diverse team of parliamentarians elected at all levels over the next 5 years. Today, he has emailed Scottish Party members to set out the case for them to back his plans at Scottish Party Conference in three weeks’ time.
His email is copied below:
In periods of adversity organisations have opportunities to renew, refresh and reorganise to prepare for future successes. For the Scottish Liberal Democrats that opportunity is to build a team of candidates in winnable seats that is more reflective of society.
It cannot be a mark of a system of equality and opportunity that only five of the thirty six new parliamentarians in the last twenty years were women. Yet that is what our current system has produced and I am determined to change it.
Our conference in Edinburgh later this month will have a choice. We can try, yet again, to achieve more balance amongst our future parliamentarians with the same system that has delivered white, male dominated parliamentary groups since the war (No, I’m wrong. It’s forever).
Or we can back the proposals that I have developed with a group of wise and experienced campaigners. These campaigners were sceptical but have now developed a package that will get results. Sheila Ritchie, Sophie Bridger, Fred Macintosh and Jo Swinson were all against such action in the past. In fact many spoke up at conferences against such measures. The motion we will debate has been crafted by them and has their endorsement.
Why? Because nothing else has worked and we must change.
So what are these proposals?
- The top of the Scottish European List in 2019 will be reserved for a woman.
- The top five most winnable, but not currently held, Westminster seats in 2020 will be reserved for women.
- A new package of support (including financial), responsibilities, reporting mechanisms, training and mentoring for all under-represented groups including, but not exclusively, women and ethnic minorities.
- Additional measures for the Scottish Parliament in 2021 will be agreed in the autumn following the results of the May elections.
This plan requires a constitutional amendment in addition to a business motion so I need to convince two thirds of the hall to back me. It’s not an insignificant challenge but I know that party members are hungry to build a fresh, energetic and radical political machine that advances liberal values. By changing we can send a message to liberal minded voters that we are serious.
When we grow again I want us to be bigger, better and more powerful than before. Yet to do that we need to be more like the country we seek to represent.
If you are able to attend the conference I hope I can have your support for my proposals.
He knows it will be a challenge to persuade two-thirds of Conference to back him on this. Jo Swinson, who famously opposed All Women Shortlists in 2002, is now prepared to back their limited use and will be summating on the motion. There are some very strongly held views on both sides of this important issue.
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15 Comments
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Really, REALLY not happy about these proposals. Apart from anything else “reserved for a woman” does NOT increase “diversity”, it increases the number of women. We HAD women in winnable seats at the last election, including those of retiring sitting MPs with large majorities. It doesn’t matter a fig if no bugger votes for them.
This is really impressive & I hope it goes through. Whether it does or not this should show the way for the rest of us.
@Jennie
“Really, REALLY not happy about these proposals.”
Do you have any other suggestions, that might actually work?
I think I’m with Jenny on this. Diversity is more than just gender. When every citizen has equal access to the political process, regardless of race, disability or social background, then the problem of gender equality will have solved itself.
Having said that, W.R’s proposals seem like a reasonable compromise.
Sadly, the problem for the Lib Dems in Scotland isn’t getting more women MPs, MEPs MSPs or even councillors elected. It is getting any Lib Dem MPs, MEPs, MSPs or possibly even councillors elected. The Lib Dems in Scotland are looking more and more like the people on the Titanic. Winnable seats are almost non-existent unless you can get someone with real presence to stand. If Mike Crockart wanted to stand again for Edinburgh West again, would you tell him you didn’t want him, but wanted an AWS? But if Jo Swinson wanted to stand again in East Dumbartonshire she could?
So the question to Willie is quite simple – Will you fight for the Lib Dems survival or fight for women to get the best deckchairs while the ship goes down? Pretending you can do both is just an illusion.
Article doesn’t seem to tie up with the LibDem list selection for the NE of Scotland!
An effective, current female MSP is ousted by one of the old guard chaps.
Should not word and deed align?
David Evans hits the nail on the head. In the Liberal Democrats, strong local candidates are best placed to win seats. Quota candidates are much less likely to succeed. All-women shortlists could lead to the party’s extinction. In the Labour Party, the candidate is much less important. In 1997, voters were willing to put their cross by any Labour candidate within reason. It was the “New Labour” product they were supporting, not the candidate.
There is another nail that also needs hammering. All-women shortlists take power away from members and hand it to elites. It is stealth centralisation. Once a quota candidate is elected, she will give her loyalty to the party establishment that gave her the seat, not her local members and constituents. The so-called “Blair babes” proved to be lobby fodder of the most supine kind and helped deliver the Iraq War for Blair and his elite puppet-masters. Is that what we want to happen to what remains of the Liberal Democrats?
The very phrase “Blair’s Babes” reeks of misogyny. It actually justifies the process by which they were elected. Those women changed the political agenda – nobody, for example, talked about childcare pre 1997 – and even with that small number, it’s taken the best part of 20 years to get some decent action.
If the only people voting for the Iraq war had been Labour women elected by all women shortlist, there wouldn’t have been a parliamentary majority for it and it wouldn’t have happened. Your argument is completely undermined by the fact that so many male Labour MPs were more than happy to back that war.
Jennie and David are absolutely right on this. At a time when winning any seats at all has been near impossible for Lib-Dem candidates, stopping any talented individual from standing is madness.
Losing deposits in Westminster by-elections has been the order of the day recently and it does nothing to improve gender balance to have more women candidates losing elections or deposits. All energy should go into winning elections at all levels, with the best available candidate who is prepared to stand regardless of gender.
We should be under no illusion that finding candidates to stand at council and Parliamentary level will be a real problem for the party in the years ahead. The proposals will also undermine local parties where there is majority support for a potential candidate who is then not allowed to apply because he is male.
Saying that in my own constituency of Edinburgh West that the former MP cannot even apply to regain his seat, where he increased the vote at the last election, is bizarre.
If the best candidate happens to be male and the party stops them from applying for seats, the party of equality will then fail to provide equality of opportunity to our own members.
If Charles Kennedy was still alive today, would we really be so daft as to want to stop him from trying to regain his seat.
We now have only one MP in Scotland, who could possibly decide not to stand again. If so, we will have no incumbent MPs at all. If gender balance is the aim, why on earth do the first five seats need all women short-lists? Why not give men and women an equal chance in all seats.
The proposals being supported by Willie will result in him having the same level of electoral success as Nick Clegg, who led most of the Westminster party over the cliff edge at the last General Election.
The package of proposals is set to do more harm than good to the future electoral prospects of the Scottish Lib-Dems and should be thrown out by the party members.
It is worth noting that the person who defeated Mike Crockart in Edinburgh West was a woman, who has since been suspended by her party, is helping police with their enquiries and has yet to open a constituency office in Edinburgh West and whose voting record is pretty abysmal. Being represented by a woman does not automatically mean that they will be better than the man they have replaced.
Caron – I was there at the vote against the war in Iraq and can confirm that Blair’s babes were loyal to a fault and helped give him the confidence he needed to lead his party into anything he wanted them to do.
The problem with these proposals is that they don’t go far enough. There are the pedants led by the like of Jo Swinson who think lumbering along with a failed system, where the “best” candidate is almost always a white male is the way to go. (are we really meant to follow her advice or be grateful at a grudging acceptance of a tiny change)
There are but two “winnable seats” – Edinburgh West and Swinson old seat of East Dunbartonshire. The problem with both the proponents and opponents of these changes is that winning back any other seats won’t be done by a hard working local candidate and constituency based campaign.
Still not grasping the extent of the catastrophe that the party has been led to, both day dream of a return to circa 1983 when they can do a Paddy Ashdown – those days are gone.
For years the party talked the talk but failed to walk the walk on the issue – we were told it didn’t matter to the electorate, we were told discrimination was illiberal, (while practising discrimination) we were told women could get selected, although funnily enough they were overwhelming young and without children and not very representative.
If the Lib Dems are to have any relevance in the future, we need a set of PPC and Councillors and MSPs that represent the whole cross section of society. We should have led the way – the failure to do so is a stain on the party. Forget the excuses about the best local candidate – yes that helps a bit, but it has been tested to destruction in 2015.
Because all our members have a vote in electing candidates, I believe that the problem that needs to be dealt with is the image of an MP in the public’s mind – still too much a ‘white, middle-aged man in a suit’. Election of more diverse people, even when it is in other parties, does help change this. We have done a lot to train women and others to do the job. Perhaps, we also need to train our members to see that.
If Willie and the group of “wise and experienced campaigners” think that giving women the top position on the European list and the pick of Westminster constituencies is such a great idea. Why do they not also support changing the order of the lists in this year’s Scottish elections to give women the top position on every list, and asking party members to endorse this proposal at the forthcoming conference?
The only constituencies we hold have male MSPs, so following the logic of the ‘wise men and women’ the list should give the ideal opportunity to redress the balance.
Many have noticed that the existing list arrangements will actually make things worse in May, as the only female MSP has been replaced at the top of her list by one of the male ‘old guard’ as Gordon has already said.
Some cynics might think that this is because Willie himself is at the top of one list, or that his MSP colleagues on the list who might get re-elected are also male. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas.
This proposal has every possibility of combining a farce with an electoral disaster.
The problem with the party in Scotland isn’t that is Male & Pale its simply that its the same old faces – which happen to be Male & Middle Class – the Federal Party is now expanding the concept to include all Women – All BAME – al LGBT+ ( no idea what the plus bit means) – are we seriously suggesting that if we adopt these proposals the Parties fortunes will turn around and voters will return in there droves ?
This is simply an exercise in shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic – we are becoming so far removed from the views of our Core Vote and large numbers of Members its scary – what we are stating is that we have a Membership that’s discriminating against minority groups by not voting for them to be the Candidates in winnable seats – therefore the Leadership is going to correct this biase it the voting patterns of the Membership by imposing skewed voting options – so in effect the Members views are irrelevant – we will be told who we can or cant vote for – that’s fine but the electorate cant be told who they can and cant vote for and they will decide on the Quality of Candidate and the Quality of the Party Policies
– our Big Idea of a Penny on Tax for Education was a damp squib – it got minimal coverage and had zero impact in the Opinion Polls – so rather than deal with the real issues of poor policies we look internally and occupy ourselves with nonsense
The Labour Party is a carcrash and we cant pick up a single vote from them – the Tory Vote is Growing for the first time in 30 Years – SNP are going to have a landslide despite being useless and we haven’t landed a blow on them – but we are going to have a major debate which will split the Party on all Women lists just as we should be gearing up to fight for our Survival in May – what planet are the Executive living on
Maybe trying to reconnect with our lost Voters might be an idea before we worry about all Women lists
No-one since has answered Gordon Anders’s point. What has happened in NE Scotland?