Selecting candidates: who do we want, and how do we get them?

By Mark Rusling

Political parties may face mandatory quotas for selecting female Parliamentary candidates if the representation of women does not improve at this year’s general election. Monday’s proposal from the cross-party Speaker’s Conference on increasing the representation of women, ethnic minorities and disabled people in the House of Commons is certain to be controversial, particularly in Labour.

We remain the only party to have tried seriously to increase our number of female MPs. 27% of current Labour MPs are women, which compares well with Lib Dems’ 14% and the Tories’ disgraceful 9%. This welcome rise in the number of female Labour MPs has been achieved partly through a deeply controversial all-women shortlist policy. The Speaker’s Conference suggestion takes this party policy one step further by adding quotas to all-women shortlists.

Responding to the proposal, Harriet Harman recognised “the real need to build on the desire for greater representation in our democratic structures”. All-women shortlists have certainly increased the representation of women (Labour women, anyway). But have they increased democracy? Those of us who back all-women shortlists must surely accept that they are a trade-off: representation is enhanced at the expense of democracy.

Taking it further, how democratic would it be to impose candidate quotas on parties? This goes to the very heart of the way in which we select our candidates. We want to maintain the right of local members to select local candidates, but we also want to achieve a representative gender and ethnic balance. The two frequently conflict: it is impossible to achieve a national balance from 650 separate local selection processes. Achieving a national balance will require a national strategy, not ad hoc responses to local selections.

While all-women shortlists may be good for improving representation (and nobody has found a more effective way of increasing the number of female MPs), they do not enhance democracy. Equally, 650 local selections may be paragons of internal party democracy, but they also produce a list of candidates entirely unrepresentative of the country as a whole.

At the moment, the decision to go for an all-women shortlist is neither transparent, nor democratic. We adhere to the notion of internal democracy, yet subvert this in what often appears to be a random edict from on high. Nobody doubts that securing greater numbers of female MPs is a noble aim, but we need to have a debate over where we draw the line between representation and democracy.

If we are serious about presenting voters with 650 candidates who are truly representative of the country as a whole – and we should be – we will have to accept the inevitable trade-off that this will entail for internal party democracy. The decisions which are taken out of the hands of local parties must be made for reasons which can be debated, by individuals who can be questioned.

The Speaker’s Conference proposals are a decent starting point for this debate. They may not be the final word on the issue, but they at least shine a clear light on a decision which can be fudged no longer – we need a national strategy for achieving a representative PLP. And we must accept that the purest internal democracy will not lead us to a PLP that looks like the country we seek to serve.