The UK Parliament is currently holding what it calls a 'Speakers Conference' a very rarely used tool to debate key issues facing Parliament. The current Speakers Conference has been set up to "Consider, and make recommendations for rectifying, the disparity between the representation of women, ethnic minorities and disabled people in the House of Commons and their representation in the UK population at large".
In laymen terms, Parliament is looking at how to boost the numbers of women in Parliament, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except when it means putting barriers up to stop men from having an equal chance of serving in Parliament and serving a constituency and our country.
Just to recap, the Labour Party has used the blunt instrument of All-women short-lists since the 1997 General Election. They were temporarily stopped because a number of male Labour members who wanted to stand for Parliament took the Labour Party to an industrial tribunal and won. The response by Labour was to introduce the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act in 2002 which meant they could start using All-Women short-lists again because political parties were exempted from the original Sex Discrimination Act.
This site has long highlighted how it continues to be used by Labour, effectively banning man from standing for the Labour Party which means that Labour supporting men who want to be a candidate at the next General Election are politically disenfranchised right across the UK.
The Conservatives under David Cameron have been going down a similar-ish route. Firstly they had an A-List of preferred candidates (that is, chosen by the Party centrally) which had more than 50% women. Only if you were on this list could you apply for a winnable seat. Then they abandoned this after 18 months when most of the winnable seats had selected their candidates from this list and moved to a system where each local Conservative Party had to ensure they interviewed equal numbers of men and women in each selection round. That is, if they wanted to interview 20 people there had to be 10:10 then narrow that down to 2:2 for the final selection round. It was irrelevant how many women or men had applied (there are 7 men for every 3 women on their 'candidates list'.). At the European Elections they also introduced a system for choosing candidates which made it far harder for a man to be elected.
The reason for raising all of this is that this week, the Conservatives have declared that from January 2010, if a MP decided that he/she is standing down from their seat, the seat will only be available to female candidates. That is, they are also introducing all-women short-lists and this was announced by David Cameron this week when he spoke at the aforementioned Speakers Conference.
This announcement has been met with a real backlash from within the Conservative Party (the party of meritocracy supposedly) and has engendered a massive amount of column inches and print ( a list of key articles are below). Part of the reasoning is that they are still not getting enough women in good seats (30% of their candidates are women, thereby matching the make up of their Candidates List so what's wrong?). In addition, they have recently been selecting candidates in winnable seats and all have been men but that has been becuase they are the best candidate at the interview.
John Maples MP, who heads up candidate selection, said this week "All 8 selections have produced male candidates. The only woman selected has been Sarah Wollaston, in the all postal primary in Totnes. This trend is not acceptable." Of course, all of the selections were independent of each other and the local parties pick their candidate based on who they think is the best person for the job.
What this all shows though is that the two major parties in the UK have been active in politically disenfranchising men. They have been doing all they can to stop men form being selected to stand for them atn the next General Election to boost the numbers of women. This is anti-democratic and undermine the liberal democrat 'unwritten constitution' which is the founding principle of modern Britain.
While there are more men standing at the next General election for the Conservatives at the next General election than women, this forgets that the issue that each person wanting to stand for Parliament or public office is an individual first and foremost. Their gender or anything else is irrelevant under the liberal democratic constitution.
Instead of trying to get more good women into Parliament by making it more attractive for high calibre women to become candidates (high calibre in terms of meaning they can beat/compete against high calibre male candidates), instead the two main parties have chosen to boost female numbers by sexually discriminating against men.
A travesty and the ultimate act of discrimination, and if the UK political system is meant to be the 'Mother of al Parliament's' then men across the world who want to stand for Parliament in their own country had better watch out.
Key Articles
Conservative Home 1, CH 2, CH 3, CH 4, CH 5, CH 6, CH 7, Iain Martin, Simon Heffer, Amanda Platell, Virginia Blackburn, Daily Mail, Ann Widdecombe MP and Google News
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