Liberal Democrat leadership hopefuls last week revealed radical measures to encourage more ethnic minorities to become involved in the party’s politics.

On the hustings on Valentine’s Day, candidates Sir Menzies Campbell, Christopher Huhne and Simon Hughes unveiled a raft of measures including a minority-only shortlist for peers, a trust fund for BME candidates, and a policy of “headhunting” BME activists.

Read the full report here.

The Times today reports how a third of Conservative Party candidates so far selected are women, as part of a strategy which heavily borrows from Liberal Democrat campaign techniques:

Seven of the 19 hopefuls selected to fight the most winnable seats for the Tories are women and most of them just missed out on Westminster in the 2005 election, The Times has learnt. They were selected at such an early stage in the electoral cycle — another election is not expected until 2009 — after an analysis of new MPs who won with the biggest swings at the 2005 poll.

In an interview with online women’s lifestyle magazine nuts4chic, Jo Swinson MP gives this advice to anybody thinking of a career in politics:

Do it. I think that a lot of people get put off and think it’s not for them. And the one thing I have always said is ‘If you really care passionately about your local area, about political issues, you’re half way there.

The other stuff you can learn – you can learn how to make polished speeches, you can learn how to write a press release… you can learn how to interpret legislation. I’ve been doing a fair bit of that over the past six months. But you can’t learn to care if you dont.

So, if you care about issues, and generally if someone is considering a career in politics you would imagine they do, then really the advice is to go for it, but with your eyes open in that there’s no guarantees.

Jo has further advice for potential candidates in the interview. Reflecting Britain will be launching a new campaign to encourage people to put their names forward soon.

Natasha Walter writes in the Guardian today about how women appear to be vanishing from public life.

A few years ago, when [Naomi] Wolf published Fire with Fire and I wrote The New Feminism, there was a sense of optimism about how women could become more equal and make freer choices in their lives. Those books chimed in with the early years of the Clinton administration and the start of New Labour, when the centre-left seemed to have a mandate for real social reform.

Although some advances were made and no ground has been lost, that optimism has now dissipated. This is not just about what has happened at Westminster, though part of the new cynicism is about that, since the promise that the beginning of the 21st century would see a more women-friendly politics has foundered in the macho, centralised culture of New Labour. It is symptomatic of these depressing times that people have stopped even drawing attention to the absence of women at Westminster. Now we can move from one leadership struggle to another in which women do not even come within touching distance of the robes of power and nobody seems to get angry about their absence.

Muslim News reports:

The next leader of the Liberal Democrats must take into account and address the lack of ethnic minority in the British parliament, according to Muslim representative Fiyaz Mughal.

“The party has single handedly failed to take issue on of the most important aspects around political inclusion and democratic participation,” Mughal warned in a statement obtained by IRNA Monday.

“The Liberal Democrats have no MP’s in the House of Commons from a black or minority ethnic community,” said the chair of the Liberal Democrat’s Black and Minority Ethnic Forum.

The BBC have covered our launch:

A group of Liberal Democrats has launched a campaign to make the party “more representative” of the UK’s ethnic diversity.

MP Jo Swinson said the Lib Dems, whose 62 MPs are all white, “urgently” needed to draw “on a wider pool of talent”.

The Reflecting Britain group is calling on the party’s next leader, who will be named in March, to tackle the issue.

The three leadership contenders are being set questions on how they propose to make the Lib Dems more diverse.

Keep those supporters coming! 15 31 at last count and growing!

UPDATE: The launch has also been covered by DeHavilland.