At March’s Federal Conference, a motion was passed setting up the new Candidate Leadership Programme, designed specifically to identify and develop candidates from currently under-represented groups (i.e. everyone other than white men).
Candidates will be given structured support, development and training all the way through to the General Election, and it is particularly aimed at those wanting to take part in competitive seat selections. Further information and application packs will be available from late June.
So, what’s the hurry, I hear you ask? The catch is, you’ve got to be an approved candidate to get a place, and if you aren’t one already, time is running out. Contact the relevant candidates team for an application pack now!
Alright, commercial over (and I should thank Roxana Cimpeanu for sending the e-mail that provoked me into writing this). This is important, in part because those seats where we have prospects (and yes, I’m aware that things might be tough in 2015), won’t hold off from selection forever. And, if anyone has forgotten the firestorm that broke when David Howarth stood down in Cambridge, you never know when opportunity will knock. Last but not least, some of our existing MPs are, to put it politely, not in the first flush of youth.
And don’t forget, there are European Parliamentary selections looming on the horizon, with my money on applications being sought next summer. You wouldn’t want to miss out, would you?
Many thanks, ladies and gentlemen…
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26 Comments
Damn! I’m both white and male! D:
What about a white male who used to be a manual worker and left school at 16?
Hmmmm
From the preamble to the Party Constitution:
“Upholding these values of individual and social justice, we reject all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, colour, religion, age, disability, sex or sexual orientation”
except apparently when it comes to Parliamentary candidates
I agree with Dave Warren. Are women or men from working class backgrounds more under-represented on the candidates’ list? In fact, what about men or women from poorer backgrounds? I agree with Nick that social mobility in this country needs a big boost, that’s what our party should be setting its sights on.
Dave,
You raise a very good point. When diversity is discussed, it tends to be about gender and ethnicity first, then disability, but class is the one area where silence generally reigns. And perhaps we need to be more open about the fact that politics is seen to be a game for the middle-classes. Even when someone from a less-advantaged background makes it, the media tend to tag them as being an former miner, or whatever, as though this is worthy of comment. How often do you hear an MP being described as an former accountant?
Simon,
I do share your apparent doubts (unless I’m misinterpreting your comments very badly). However, the Party has been given plenty of opportunities to improve the diversity of its candidates and, more importantly, elected representatives, and has failed to take them, for a myriad of reasons. And, of course, there is no suggestion that anyone who gains a place on the programme will have any advantage in actual candidate selections other than an enhanced skill set.
Sucks being a white male knowing you’ll only get half arsed support from my party.
On another note, you’re saying that the deadline for applying to be approved as a candidate for the 2015 general election is approaching?
Well, the Lib Dem Voice comments threads look to be one place where white men aren’t under-represented 🙂
Whilst I understand and sympathize with some of the comments here about discrimination and white working class males, it only takes a second to look at our MPs to see why they are doing this… To my knowledge they are all white, most if not all are from middle class or “higher” backgrounds, and the majority are male. Add to that all of the senior ministerial positions when to men. AFAIK you can still apply if you are a white male, you just won’t be eligible for the extra support on offer. Personally I do think working class people are under-represented within the party’s MPs so there should be some focus there as well.
On this subject, isn’t this the first time the party has voted in favour of some form of affirmative action in the MP selection process?
Rich,
No, merely to be eligible for a place on the first round of the Candidate Leadership Programme. That said, if you are serious about wanting to be a candidate, and you think that you’re ready now, this is time to fill in your forms and send them to your State Candidates Office.
As I’ve said above, you never know what will turn up, and it is better to be ready if an unexpected opportunity emerges.
I think this article has got it all wrong. The purpose of the Candidate Leadership Program is to create a pool of representative and skilled candidates. Therefore, 50% of members will be male and a substantial proportion will be white (assuming I remember the motion correctly from conference).
bgb,
Not the first time, the Party voted to use zipping for the first list selections for the European Parliament elections in 1999, thus ensuring that our MEPs were roughly gender balanced. Ironically, I wasn’t keen on that, but it turned out to be effective.
George,
The motion said that at least 50% would be women, 20% BAME and 10% disabled. That makes having 50% of them as men fairly unlikely, although not impossible. And I didn’t say that they wouldn’t be white, more unlikely to be white men.
Rich,
One more point. The Party gives ‘half arsed’ support to white men, as you put it, because there are no signs that they are disadvantaged now. There is training available to them through various channels. You could argue that the support for candidates, regardless of background, is poor, but then we don’t have the means to provide support.
Rich, you dont need to worry. A thousand years of institutional and social bias in your favour will easily make up for any lack of support that you get from a political party.
I share Simon McGraph’s view about the party constitution. I’ll never be a parliamentary candidate again for this party.
I was a candidate in the 1992, 1997 and 2001 general elections – increased the share of the vote every time.
I wanted to be a candidate in 2010 but I attended a development day in 2009 and was informed by a number of party “no bodies” who haven’t been members for 5 minutes that I wasn’t experienced enough! Been a party member since 1985 (joined SDP) and a Lib Dem campaigner/councillor since then.
It’s not what you know its how you know in the Parliamentary candidates office.
In a way it is quite nice. Sometimes someone will say to me why don’t you stand for Parliament? And I say, no, not me, I think a woman should stand instead.
I kind of feel morally superior when I say that, although the reality is that I do not want to stand anyway.
I do not like kissing babies and having my photo taken.
Robert,
Interesting comment. I presume that you were specially licensed to run in 1997 and 2001, as the candidate approval system was up and running well before that – I became a candidate assessor in 1995. However, the English Candidates Committee decided that licensing should be kept to a minimum in 2005, used only as a last resort, and barred its use in 2010.
And whilst you may have increased our share of the vote on each occasion, without the context, it doesn’t indicate what your contribution is.
I won’t comment on your assessment day, except to note that the assessors are usually highly-experienced members and activists, and the fact that you describe them as ‘nobodies’ might lead one to conclude that your view of them is heavily coloured by the outcome of the day.
Finally, the suggestion that the Parliamentary Candidates Office has any influence on your result is a cheap slur without any merit or supporting evidence and, in my view, suggests that the decision of your assessors may well have had some merit.
I am (a) not English, (b) attended a state school, (c) didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, (d) don’t have an endless pot of money to support me without work, and (e) have actually worked outside politics.
I am white, however (as are 98% of Scottish residents) and also have a piece of my anatomy which will prevent me from applying for this course.
I actually think that this sort of training is good, though. What I have a concern about is that long-standing approved candidates like me might now be at a disadvantage because we haven’t had this training.
@Robert – I can only support Mark’s comments on the assessors. Those I know who are assessors in Scotland are certainly long serving members (30 – 40 years in some cases), often former local party chairs, candidates or senior councillors, and have actually gone through a selection and training process themselves to get there.
You should have been given some feedback on why you were unsuccessful in your application – for example, in dealing with the media, or leading a campaign – and given suggestions on how to address this. If not, then if I were you I’d contact the candidates office to ask for some (they should be a bit less busy than in previous years.)
Sorry, “than in previous years” should be “just before the election” – type in haste, repent at leisure…
I agree with much of what has already been said. What needs to be changed is the ATTITUDE of Local Parties! Too many of them are hide-bound and will only look at “certain kind” of people – in the case of where I live, people have been selected who have only been a Party Member for 1 year with no political experience (although they may have other experience) but they are “somebody” and therefore considered to be suiutable!
I am now 68 and have been a party member for many years (since 1964) and since 1995 in my particular area. I come from a working class background but have been a professional in my own field. I am also educated but, for the sake of this argument, did not have a PhD, I’m poor and I live in Social Housing, ERGO – I was never considered by my LP and never asked to go for the selection process nor to stand as an MP. Why was that? Apart from the aforementioned reasons, I’m also a wheelchair-user and “my face didn’t fit” – and it still doesn’t – in their minds I was and still am a “nobody”!
I found this rather galling, especially as I was completely dedicated to the LD cause, worked jolly hard “in the back room office” and was considered OK to do all the minor jobs, without which the others could not have gone around in the limelight much of the time. However I was unable to be flexible enough to move areas to find a Constituency Party which would ask me, nor to go round canvassing, door-knocking and campaigning. What is more, I very rarely had as much as a “thank you” for my efforts (except from the very few who did appreciate my work) and I certainly never had a “public thank you” in the LP Newsletter, unlike all the others who had left or demitted office.
I have now resigned from my LP and consider myself to be independent within the Party but still a Party Member. The problem is – now I am too old, too tired and not fit enough to do the job. That is a chance which the Lib Dems have missed and will never have again because of the narrow-mindedness of the Local Party “top dogs” who get into LP office and no-one can get them out again! They then dominate the LP with their own ideas and demands! They run everything their own way because they are not team players and don’t use the available techno9logy which is in place.
As I say – you need to look at Local Parties and their own internal politics to find out the reasons for some of them not having people queuing up to be MPs!
Just look at the occupations of the average Lib Dem candidate – absolutely zero representation from ‘working class’ communities. Yes we have too few women, pitiful BAME representation et al. But unless you’re middle-class or ‘better’ (sic) – forget being a LD standard bearer.
Social mobility ? Try practicing it within the party. Chippy, opinionated, hard working activist I may be, but LD parliamentary candidate even in an unwinnable seat – fat chance ! To be fair the other major parties, even Labour, are little better. No wonder disadvantaged individuals / communities often feel ‘you’re all the same’ when viewing all the parties.
As it happens, there is fast becoming little difference between the parties !
I put myself forward for approval once but was rejected on the grounds I was “poor at communication”. I think what they really meant was that I didn’t have that glib public school manner which those at the top of our party seem to value so much. Anyway, after that, I never bothered again.
Matthew,
With the greatest of respect, unless ‘those at the top of the Party’ formed the assessors on your assessment day, your comment seems a bit unlikely.
On the other hand, the ability to convey sometimes complex messages in simpler forms does tend to help in getting your message across. By your own admission, you’re not always great at ‘short and sweet’. And perhaps that was what went wrong on the day?
Mark Valladares
On the other hand, the ability to convey sometimes complex messages in simpler forms does tend to help in getting your message across. By your own admission, you’re not always great at ‘short and sweet’. And perhaps that was what went wrong on the day?
Mark, I am perfectly capable of “short and sweet”. The writing style I use here is what I use here. It is not what I would use in a press release, or in a “letter to the editor”, and I do have a pretty good record on those things. When I write here, I do not have time to sit down and collect my thoughts and insert the “ifs and buts”. I type as fast as I think and send right away. I do not have time to do anything else. Quite obviously, I use other styles of writing which are for more permanent communication or communication which is intended to be promotional rather than conversational. This is where I would sit down and work on the wording carefully for some period of time. I would use yet another form of writing for professional work, such as research papers. I would therefore appreciate an apology for what you wrote here because you have quoted me out of context, and in a way that could be personally damaging to me. I did NOT say that my writing style IN GENERAL is not “short and sweet”. What I think you are taking this from is from something that was referring ONLY to what I write in the comments columns of LibDemVoice and other blogging material. OK?
As for what happened when I went for approval to join the potential PPC list, it was some time ago,I forget the exact date, mid-1990s anyway, not that long after I was first elected a councillor in LB Lewisham. I wasn’t even intending to trawl round seeking to become a PPC, I just wanted to have that approval so I could step in should my local party find it difficult to get enough people to form a shortlist for its PPCs. Those were the days when Lewisham was still seen as Labour-Tory marginal, so if I had become a PPC it would have been very much a token campaign, I did not intend to push myself forward for anything more than that.
I felt the judgement made against me was unfair, and sorry, but yes I did feel it was done through a prejudice, which may have been unconscious, against my personality style and social class background. I am not the only one to have noted that there is a fair amount of class prejudice in our party – see, for example, Simon Titley’s recent Liberator article (Liberator 345), and I can assure you I have experienced several who joined the party from my sort of class background and left it in disgust at finding the higher you go in the party the more it seems to be dominated by people from high class social backgrounds who have a superiority complex on that basis.
Now that was a long time ago, my immediate reaction when it happened was that I didn’t want to stay in the party, but I swallowed and stayed on, accepting that after all as I wasn’t seriously intending to go for a winnable PPC position I hadn’t tried very hard, and that of course was a factor. However, it was sort of hard when dealing with the many people in my ward and elsewhere who kept asking me “Why don’t you stand for Parliament?” to make excuses rather than say “Because the Liberal Democrat party thinks I am not good enough”. I have also encountered many people who I think are very poor PPCs who it seems to me have sailed through the process because they DO have that “glib public school manner”.
The real point here is that the way I was treated, whether fair or not, left me just not wanting to try again. While there may have been perfectly good reason why I was not approved, the way it was handled left me feeling bitter and could very easily have led to me dropping out rather than, as actually happened, working hard as part of the team which pushed Lewisham from black hole for the party to winnable at Parliamentary level. And sorry, but to this day it means whenever I get messages like “You! Yes, you! Ever thought about being a Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate?” from the party, all I can feel like saying is something rude.
Does one have to have been a member for a year before applying?
TooOld/White/Female – You say no-one ever asked you. Why did you not apply? Very few people will ask you to apply for a job – but if you think you’re good enough then you apply anyway.
Barrie Wood – I disagree that there are no working class candidates around. There are plenty – you just don’t see them.
I’ve discussed with Mark and Ros before about the value of having training / support / encouragement for those from working class backgrounds, as unless you are very hard faced and ambitious becoming a candidate is incrediably hard to do. You have to put yourself forward to be THE best candidate for the job and be hard enough to face the criticism. Yet we must do more to have a more diverse set of candidates as if people of different races have all had the same education, same jobs, same social circle, same experiences in life, just because they are a different colour this doesn’t make a diverse group of people.
I’d like to see more support in place, but we have to start somewhere, starting with women, BME and disabilities is a good place to start and maybe the scheme – if a success – can be expanded in the future.