Cringeworthy stuff from Gavin Whenman on the topic of positive discrimination again:

To elaborate: Discrimination, of any kind, on a criteria which bears no relation to your ability to do the job, is wrong. It is fair to award party posts, such as PPCs, on the basis of merit only. It is not fair to award it on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity. To say that black or other people aren’t good enough to be MPs unless they have help from the white man is possibly the most patronising, shameful position we can take on this issue, and I hope Nick Clegg sees sense soon.

None of which is particularly inaccurate or misleading (even if it is intemperate), but it doesn’t get us very far, leaves us with a woefully unrepresentative party and begs the question: what would you do then? Clegg hasn’t backed positive discrimination - in fact he’s called a moratorium on imposing such measures within the party for at least two parliaments. What he has done though is back a system of training and support that will receive significant funds, warn the party that if this isn’t made to work then the debate on positive discrimination will need to be revisited and, today, backed enabling legislation to allow political parties to introduce all-black shortlists if they wish (just as we already have enabling legislation to introduce all-women shortlists).

How political parties select their candidates ought to be by and large a matter for them surely? If people feel they are having a candidate imposed on them there will be a backlash, as Labour discovered in Blaenau Gwent. Surely deregulation is a good thing in principle? Why does Gavin feel white guys need such stringent protection?

By backing this legislation, Clegg is supporting deregulation in principle and making a political point about the importance of parties doing more to recruit ethnic minority activists and politicians. I’m amazed that either of these things are regarded within the party as being a bad thing.

The bottom line is party politics is looking alarmingly white, male and middle class these days. In many respects we appear to be going backwards. The Lib Dems have particular problems. We have a few Asian activists and I can probably mention a token member of most established UK ethnic minorities, but within the black community particularly we are a joke.

But its the anger this all provokes that irritates me. I’ve got quite worked up about this myself in the past, and the establishment of the Campaign for Gender Balance was a result of a number of us trying to come up with an alternative to all women shortlists. But at least we were talking about alternatives - and now CGB is regularly cited by some with no sense of history as part of the positive discrimination agenda it was established to bypass.

We shouldn’t be blind to the enormity of our task though. If the television industry struggles to recruit visible black faces, as Lenny Henry was bemoaning last week, what chance has politics got? Expecting it to sort itself out however is simply ludicrous.

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I’ve been hard on Nick Clegg on this blog, mainly because I’ve struggled to find anything of substance that he has said or written during this campaign.

Thankfully, I now find myself in the position of endorsing something he has called for. To wit:

‘My approach isn’t about women-only shortlists or about A-lists. It isn’t about imposing candidates on local parties or picking winners. My approach is about nurturing talent. I will set up a Liberal Democrat academy to support, train and encourage candidates and aspiring candidates at all levels.

‘I will personally devote my time and energy to raising substantially more money for our diversity fund and will extend its scope.

‘But I believe this is our last chance to do it the purely liberal way, without any positive discrimination written into the rules. If, in two General Elections’ time, we have not sorted this out once and for all, we will have no choice but to consider positive discrimination. I want to discuss with other party leaders the possibility of allowing positive discrimination in the future.’

It remains to be seen how exactly this academy will be funded or will operate, but to an extent that is beside the point. Clegg is not only suggesting a positive way forward, he’s locking himself into a process that would result in the party adopting positive discrimination if we fail to meet our own targets.

Finally. Something of substance that isn’t merely flattering internal party prejudices. I agree with him; diversity is important enough of an issue for us to be prepared to adopt positive discrimination if all else fails. We can’t keep bucking the issue. But that does mean doing all that we can to make our preferred alternatives work in the first place. And that means cash - significantly more than we’ve been prepared to spend on diversity thus far - every penny of which the Campaigns Department will argue would be better spent on target seats (I know - I’ve sat in those negotiations). Both Kennedy and Campbell always liked to say what an important issue this is, but given the choice between diversity and defying Lord Rennard, they consistently chose the path of least resistance. In Campbell’s case last autumn, that meant a significant cut in the already underfunded Campaign for Gender Balance grant - the one part of the party’s diversity strategy that has a proven track record.

So it is odd that he chooses to end this piece with a quote from the current Party President - a man who has always talked the talk on this issue but repeatedly buckled under pressure. We must fervently hope and pray that Clegg doesn’t choose him to be the person to head up this academy project idea; otherwise we are all but guaranteed all BME shortlists in 6-7 years time.

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(argh! this post was meant to go out yesterday! why does Ming have to bloody resign during a heavy work week?)

Question: if you write an article about the Lib Dem leadership contest specifically on the issue of diversity and the fact that Huhne and Clegg are both white, middle-class males, should you a) talk to the various groupings within the party concerned with diversity such as the Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats, the Woman Liberal Democrats, the Campaign for Gender Balance and possibly even the party’s “diversity Tsar”? Or b) a couple of white, middle-class guys?

If your answer is (b), I suggest you’re doing something wrong. Okay, both Ben Ramm (yes, that Ben Ramm) and Lembit Opik have non-visible minority ethnicities, but then so does Clegg (and Huhne as well for that matter IIRC). What does it say about a journalist that he professes that such issues are important but can’t be bothered to reflect them in any meaningful way in his own article?

It’s not as if I disagree with his fundamental point, after all it is the subject of one of my standard-issue rants. But the ill-informed mudslinging of as partisan a journalist as John Harris won’t actually change anything, which is possibly his intention.

Bottom line, the reason there doesn’t seem to be any choice other than Huhne or Clegg is that both are bloody strong candidates. Last time around, until Huhne threw his hat in the ring I was in despair. I was torn between voting for Campbell as the anyone-but-Hughes candidate or Campbell as the anyone-but-Oaten candidate. A lot of other people agreed with me. While I have no doubt this campaign will become more bad tempered as time goes on, neither of the candidates, as far as I know, evoke that visceral sense that if he wins the party will go straight down the toilet in anyone. It’s just possible that we had a poor choice paradoxically because we have such a good choice.

And we don’t actually do too badly when it comes to not being lead by toffs. Neither Campbell or Kennedy came from arisocratic or even upper-middle-class backgrounds. The last Etonian to stand for party leader was David Rendel (a man, I hasten to add, I have a lot of time for) in 1999. He came fifth out of five.

Harris also presses another of my buttons, which I’ve only just blogged about, by referring to ‘meritocracy’ as an idea. Parliament is a meritocracy - that’s the problem. It is batshit crazy talk, the sort of batshit crazy talk that I thought Harris hated about people like Tony Blair, to suggest that you need a meritocracy to achieve equality of outcome. So why is he now stealing their rhetorical clothes?

If you want to write a serious article about the Lib Dems’ failure to internalise diversity and equality issues, John, you’re going to need to dig a lot deeper than simply having a quick chat with a celebrity boyfriend and the editor of a literary magazine.

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Just a bit of housekeeping from my appearance on 18DS’ Vox Politix on Monday (it’s still available to view at the moment), to follow up on an issue that has been bugging me.

Caroline Hunt took great exception to my reference to the various attacks that have been made about Boris Johnson’s views on black people in recent weeks. To be clear, I didn’t call him a racist; that isn’t an argument I’m particularly interested in having (I note however, that it was an argument the Tories were jonesing for a few months ago). What I was trying to say before we were moved on is that public figures are accountable for the words they say and write and that it is thus entirely justifiable for political opponents to attempt to make capital out of them.

Johnson’s feeble jokes about ‘watermelon smiles’ and ‘picaninnies’ may not count as explicit racism, but they are appallingly insensitive. It simply isn’t good enough for him to say that he didn’t expect to be taken seriously when he wrote that article while simultaneously demanding that we take him seriously now. There are far more extreme examples of politicians’ utterances being used against them. Jody Dunn springs to mind, and compared to her experience Johnson has got off lightly.

His views on the Macpherson report are more interesting. After 8 years, it is time we cast over this report with a critical eye. Its definition of ‘institutionalised racism’ and that effectively racism in the eye of the beholder are problematic for any liberal. It is hard to see what progress we have made in race relations over the past decade. But, to be brutally honest, it is a third rail issue and one that it will be difficult to tackle without being portrayed in the most unflattering terms. Frankly, if Johnson was serious about wanting to do something about them now, having a back-catalogue of less-than-nuanced articles behind him is not going to help.

The question is, will Johnson make anything of this issue in his campaign, or is he going to shy away from it completely? It will be a tough call. His rivals will pore over his every word and be eager to make hay if they can. If he tries to sweep it to one side on the other hand, then it will look as if he lacks the courage of his convictions; not a good thing to be labeled in a campaign if you are also a dilettante who has cultivated such a comical public image. And there’s a serious democratic issue too: if he runs away from the issue, we can have no idea what he would do if he got elected.

Ultimately, Johnson’s problem is not that he is a ‘colourful’ character. British politics could do with more mavericks and he is surely that. His problem is that he lacks authenticity. His stock in trade is vagueness and it will be tough for him to present himself as anything other than even more vague every time someone trots out another potentially embarrassing thing he wrote or said in the past. He’s also the top hatted toff to end all top hatted toffs. For a certain demographic that is screamingly hilarious and endearing. The same demographic thought that voting for Robert Kilroy-Silk would be a good idea and look how that turned out. Even if he won, he’s in danger of making the Conservatives look less like a serious party of government than they were before the election.

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Dawn Butler and Diane Abbott are having a pop at Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson:

Ms Butler highlighted a 2002 article in which Mr Johnson referred to the Queen being greeted in Commonwealth countries by “flag-waving piccaninnies”.

She claimed he also said that he expected, during a mooted visit by Tony Blair to the Congo, that “the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief”.

Hang on a minute; this isn’t a “claim” - it is a matter of public record. Why do the BBC persist in this policy of interpreting balance to mean that even established facts have to be treated as hearsay when they come out of the mouths of politicians?

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This is my favourite leaflet from the campaign (click on it to enlarge). It was being delivered on the morning of polling day in particularly leafy part of Southall near the Grand Union Canal (for the record, I picked these two examples up from the street).

Why is it in so-bad-its-good territory? Well, the message on it will mean nothing to non-Hindus; indeed I would imagine it would put a lot of their backs up. What’s more, I would have thought that a lot of Hindus themselves would feel patronised, being effectively advised that it is their religious duty to vote for Tony Lit (and not the Hindu Vivendra Sharma).

If you’re going to mix religion, ethnicity and politics up in this way, why not go the whole hog and include a Hindi translation? I’m sure there must be one or two individuals out there who would be receptive to the message but don’t read English.

But for everyone else, how is this leaflet worth delivering on polling day? What does it tell them? There isn’t a tactical message, information about polling, a phone number to request lifts… anything. I could come up with 101 things that you would be better off getting your activists to do on polling day.

In fact there was a better leaflet being delivered just a few streets away. Overall, the impression one gets is that the Tory campaign team were caught with their trousers down on polling day and were just flailing about in a vain attempt to keep people busy. A less generous person than myself would say that just about sums up their whole campaign.

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Over at Lib Dem Voice, I have a rant about the Lib Dems’ continued failure to sort out its diversity and gender balance strategy. Just to remind you: this is what Ming said he’d do.

It’s time to deliver Ming.

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You put your right leg in, your right leg out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about…

There is a serious side to all this. The degree by which the Tory and Labour camps in Ealing Southall are attempting to manipulate the Sikh and other communities is truly breathtaking. More to the point, I’m not sure it is all that effective. Throughout the 80s and 90s all parties, but particularly Labour, tended to treat minority ethnic groups as handy block votes that could easily be bought and sold by offering the so-called “community leaders” morsels such as a community centre here, a link with (read: money siphoned off to) a school in Kashmir there, etc. etc. It was the height of cynicism, but it generally worked and the minority ethnic communities themselves were the worse for it because they found themselves in a perpetual state of ghettoisation, with individuals emerging as major power brokers simply because the political class felt they were useful.

This has been slowly changing however. The Iraq War was a major corrective, at least as far as Muslims were concerned, but there have been broader generational shifts. Over the past couple of years there have been a growing number of initiatives designed to counteract this corporatist approach, such as the New Generation Network.

What I seem to be seeing in Ealing Southall is Labour coming a cropper of years of adopting the old approach. The Tories’ response however seems to be to walk into the same trap at precisely the time when it ceases to be useful. How impressed will Southall’s young second and third generation Sikhs be with all these shenanigans? Tony Lit started by trying to present himself as something new and fresh, but has spent the last week embracing the old guard. This tactic would surely be useful if the Sikh community was a homogenised block, but is that true?

More to the point, is the Sikh vote that important? In Southall, sure, but across the constituency they make up just 18% of the population. Are the Tories banking on the Hindus and Muslims (who, combined, make up another fifth) following in line with their turbaned neighbours? If so, then they are dafter than I thought. And what is the majority white population making of all this effervescent silliness that the Tories seem obsessed with?

We shall see, we shall see. But I can’t help but suspect that for all their noise, the Tories may end up in not that much stronger a position in the constituency after the election than they were before it. Either way, they will have a long term price to pay.

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The GLA candidate list has been causing a stink on Lib Dem Voice. On the plus side, and this needs stating because it is a genuine achievement, the list has a good gender balance with 2 of the top 3 candidates women and a good proportion of women further down the list. Indeed, in the case of Caroline Pidgeon (and Jeremy Ambache), she has managed to pip an incumbent to the post, a not inconsiderable achievement in a candidate selection. Notwithstanding this, the tone in the debate is far from self-congratulatory.

For me, there are two main issues. Firstly, there is a distinct dearth of BME candidates at the top of the list and just two, in eighth and eleventh place respectively (out of 11), on the list at all. Secondly, there is only one candidate from north of the river Thames.

There has been much wrangling about the calibre of candidates and the fact that the people at the top of the list, generally speaking, did the most to get elected. This may be true. But the bottom line is, the party will be presenting this list to a multi-ethnic, pan-London electorate. These candidates don’t reflect London, so why should London vote for them? However you dress it up, this is not helpful.

So, what can be done? The party has always opposed quotas and probably always will. While I agree with it, personally I have always felt that the party has to pay a ‘price’ for this position. It can pay this price in two ways: either it pays a political one, by being made to look bad by its opponents and losing out electorally, or it pays one in terms of resources - taking positive action to find, train and develop candidates from under-represented groups.

I’ve always argued for the latter. The party, from the grassroots to the top, has always paid lip service to it as well. But in terms of actually putting its money where its mouth is, the party has always failed to actually enact it.

So it is that the Campaign for Gender Balance has never been given an adequate budget and even that has now been cut. The Ethnic Minority Elections Task Force has never even got that far. Partly this has been because of a lack of leadership from within the nascent EMETF itself (CGB has always stood or fallen depending on who was at the helm), partly it has been because it was clear the party was never going to give it any money in the first place, which isn’t exactly very motivational. Even the much-vaunted new Equal Opportunities Officer in Cowley Street - which I am to understand will solve all the party’s failure to attract minority groups and women at a stroke - has not been fully financed by the Federal Party (the English Party had to chip in) and has either still not been filled or has only just been six months into the financial year.

What the party does have is a £200,000 ‘diversity fund’ but its funders have given explicit instructions that it must not be used to find, train or develop new candidates. Instead the money will be spent on BME and women candidates who have already been selected. Intriguingly we are to believe that this is simultaneously not a bribe for local parties to select the ‘right’ candidates, nor will it simply be spent on target seats that would get the money anyway. The analogy I’ve heard drawn is Solihull, where we had a female candidate and which was a ’secret’ target seat. This money then will be spent of lots more ’secret’ targets and we will only therefore be able to see if it was spent well or poorly after the election. Either way, what it will mean is that the successful BME and women MPs that get elected as a result will have much more marginal seats than their male counterparts. I don’t see this as a recipe for success, but only time will tell.

I don’t just blame the people at the top about this however. The party is a democracy and the complacency runs through it like a stick of rock. The party’s Federal Executive is au fait with it and conference is au fait with it. The party is committed to a uni-dimensional target seat strategy and until this strategy begins to fail (as opposed to under-perform, which I would argue it does), only a minority have an interest in rocking the boat.

The only real alternative is for interested individuals to take positive action themselves. And I have to plead guilty here: I have a long-standing promise to uphaul the Reflecting Britain website and turn it into a proper resource to help find, encourage and develop candidates from under-represented groups but have thus far failed to find the time necessary to fulfil it. Hopefully the fallout from the GLA selection will give me a sufficient kick up the bum to start working on it.

The South - and South West - bias of the GLA selection does give rise to another issue however, and that is a discrepancy in the party’s constitution. The Liberal Democrats are a federal party, and we have always worked on the basis that if you give the large local parties too much dominance over decision making, the party will only ever reflect the wishes of the large local parties. This is why the party has a degressive system for apportioning conference representatives.

The smallest local parties, up to 100 members, have 1 conference rep roughly for every 25 members. By contrast, local parties with 400 members have 1 rep for every 40 members. The more members you have, the more representation you get, but at a diminishing rate. This system has existed since the party was created: selections for list elections are a much more recent innovation.

My question is, why don’t we apply this rule to selecting list candidates for multi-constituency regions such as the GLA list? In recent years, the party has accepted that the gender balance rule in the constitution (that a third of committees must be of either gender - not that this rule needs to be enforced very frequently) should be applied to party lists: surely this would be little more than an exercise in consistency?

It would be easy to do - simply weight the votes from each local party according to size. The ballots are counted electronically anyway, so this wouldn’t be difficult to do (obviously you would have to add a different code to the ballot papers from each local party - again, elementary). It would make the votes of members in our less active areas worth more, but not dramatically so. It wouldn’t be a panacea, but it would mean that campaigning in smaller parties - which are disproportionately in the north - wasn’t a complete waste of time (as a member in Finchley, I never got a leaflet through my door - just a never ending stream of uninspiring emails from people who were clearly too busy in Richmond to help in the Scottish or Welsh elections).

What of the argument that if we want London better represented, small local parties should simply go out and recruit new members? These local parties don’t have the infrastructure which our held seats in South West London take for granted, and the party nationally hasn’t run a vaguely ambitious recruitment strategy in twelve years. Nor is it likely to for the foreseeable future (for the same reason it won’t invest in training and development: see above).

The bottom line is, the party is failing desperately both to look like modern Britain and to deal with modern British electoral systems. We can’t afford to be complacent. It is clearly time I pulled my finger out and started on my Reflecting Britain revamp; what will you be doing?

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Some Lib Dem bloggers have been very keen to crow about the reported ‘failure’ of the Tory A-list at attracting ethnic minority candidates. Personally, I’m not so sure we should be quite so triumphalist.

According to the statistics published in the Telegraph today, of the winnable Tory seats that have selected thus far, 5% of candidates have been BME and 39% have been women. This compares to an 8% UK BME population and 51% women. Clearly it isn’t parity, but it is undoubtably progress. And as these are candidates in a party that is resurgent, as opposed to Labour women and BME candidates, they have a real chance of becoming MPs. By contrast, Labour’s all women shortlist policy is liable to barely scratch the surface at the next election as they lose seats regardless of the ethnicity or gender of their candidates.

What the Tory experience has shown is something that some of us in the Lib Dems have known for a long time. For all the anecdotal horror stories about candidates being discriminated against, the real problem is a lack of candidates. Just like white men, some women and BME PPCs are excellent and some are awful. The Lib Dem experience is that, broadly speaking, they get selected in proportion to the total number of approved candidates we have at the time. The problem - which the upper echelons in the Lib Dems are completely disinterested in - is finding and getting more candidates from diverse backgrounds approved. The A-list has done a very good job at artificially narrowing the field simply by knocking 70% of while male candidates off the top list. This approach isn’t ideal as far as I’m concerned, but at least it is tackling the problem at source, unlike most other forms of positive discrimination.

So the fact that Ali Miraj feels discriminated against matters far less to me than the number of BME Tory candidates who eventually get elected. The jury is still out, but the numbers of candidates selected do suggest that progress is being made. Lib Dems should hold their tongues until we have something more tangible to shout about ourselves.

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