The Monstrous Regiment marches on

Following last week’s dramatic events (link to previous blogpost) I am now free to apply myself to the campaign trail. As I keep pointing out, I am not campaigning for New Labour or Lord Mandelson or even the much-maligned Prime Minister; I am campaigning for our local candidate. He is not a sitting MP and therefore untainted by scandal, local, hard-working, honest, decent, intelligent – and male.

Does the last element matter? I’m afraid it does. Not that I have any objection to female candidates; it’s the All-Women Shortlist issue. As well as barring able men from some of the most winnable seats, it will tend to deter women from applying to those seats with open selection. They will consider their chances will be much better in an AWS seat, and male rivals might be heard to grumble “Why can’t she run for one of ‘their’ seats and leave this one to us?” I would be interested to know how many female candidates have been chosen from mixed-gender short-lists.

One would imagine, therefore, that in the Parliamentary Labour Party shortly to be elected the majority of the women MPs will have been chosen from all-women shortlists. They will not be able to escape the charge of tokenism, however unjustified. All this will be forgotten if some stellar performers arise from their ranks, but the experience of the Blair Babes of 1997 hardly predisposes one to optimism. Debarring the majority of party members from running in a constituency is hardly the recipe for ending up with the best candidates. The whole point of All-Women Shortlists is to get candidates elected who would not have got in under an open selection policy.

I was delirious with joy when I read last year that the Cameroons were considering imposing All-Women Shortlists on their own constituency associations. The Tory vote decimated at one fell swoop, and Gordon to go on and on and….you get my drift. A shame that Dave re-engaged his brain at the last moment. A disastrous policy, both for the party and for the cause of more equal political representation; women MPs will look more, not less, like second-class representatives, however unfair that may be. But, as you can imagine, my view is somewhat easier to put over in a blog on the Daily Telegraph than in a Labour Party committee room. As Orwell almost said: both genders are equal, but one is more equal than the other.