It has been observed elsewhere that this website has not been updated in a while. Mea culpa. Worse, it would unfortunately be wholly mistaken to assume that no news is good news. In fact, personally speaking, it has more been a case of what to say if you haven’t got anything nice to say.

Taking things in turn, the Gender Balance Task Force / Campaign for Gender Balance (as it is now known) has been without an administrator for six months. Technically, this has not been because of a lack of funding, but it has been subject to the Party’s Finance and Administration Committee dragging its feet over whether to approve the advertisement of a vacancy. On the positive side, the new administrator has begun working today.

The motion on ethnic diversity debated in the Spring at the Party’s conference in Harrogate was passed overwhelmingly. However, a rider was added at the insistence of the Party’s President (Simon Hughes) that most of the substantive parts of the motion would only be ‘considered’ by the party’s Diversity and Equality Review.

That review met for the first time as recently as July. The motion that it has presented to Party Conference is, in my personal opinion, both entirely unobjectionable and entirely unsubstantial. In short, more warm words.

Meanwhile, the Party Leader has appointed Steve Hitchens to serve as his ‘Diversity Czar.’ As leader of the Lib Dem council group in Islington, Steve was extremely successful in helping to create a council group that was both gender balance and diverse in terms of ethnicity, sexuality and disability status, so I’m not dismissive of this move. But from what I’ve been told it is to be mainly focused on ‘head hunting’ strong candidates rather than working to increase the number of candidates from under-represented groups overall.

In my view, the party’s fundamental problem is not in finding strong candidates from under-represented groups or in local parties discriminating against them. The main problem is we don’t have enough of them. The approach of both the Campaign for Gender Balance and the Ethnic Minority Election Task Force was to provide a mechanism for proactively going out and finding candidates in significant numbers. Replacing it with a ‘favoured sons and daughters’ approach will have limited success. It is also open to the charges of ghettoisation - selecting (eg) BME candidates for areas which are ethnically diverse rather than supporting them wherever they choose to stand - an approach which the party overwhelmingly opposed last year.

It isn’t entirely bad news. The party has launched a new website - LibDems4Parliament - which aims to better co-ordinate the work of the candidates’ office and other stakeholders. The party has had a welcome recent spate of female candidates selected in winnable seats. My problem is that any attempt to set up a large scale and adequately resourced campaign to proactively find, train and support candidates from under-represented groups has been resisted and democratic attempts to introduce such measures have been bypassed by senior party officials for their own purposes (about which, please read my article in the last issue of Liberator).

Personally, I am intending to speak and vote against the “Diversity and equality” being debated on the Monday of Conference. It calls for almost nothing, and only the embarrassment of a defeat is likely to stir the party at a senior level into action on this issue. I would be grateful if others would join me.

Finally, there is the question of what to do about this website. It is wholly owned and paid for by myself. Would people be interested in continuing the website in some form - either as a focal point for campaigns or as a networking website for potential candidates? Add your comments below.

James Graham is writing in a wholly personal capacity and his views should not be inferred to be shared by those supporting the Reflecting Britain campaign set up earlier this year.

Leave a Reply