Will parties be fined for lack of female MPs? Commons committee wants at least 45% of candidates to be women.

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Mike Buchanan

Our thanks to Mike P for this, in the Daily Mail. A link to the Women and Equalities Committee web page on this matter is here. The committee’s report summary is here, the report’s conclusions and recommendations here, the full report here.

The start of the Daily Mail piece’s headline, ‘Will parties be fined for lack of female MPs?’, betrays ideological sympathy with the ridiculous Maria Miller MP, the chairwoman of the Women and Equalities Committee, and other feminists on the committee (i.e. all members other than the newly-appointed Philip Davies MP).

There is no lack of female MPs. It has long been known that the vast majority of people applying to be prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) are men. When I worked as a consultant for the Conservatives (2006-8) 90% of applicant were men. There is no question that women are over-represented as MPs compared with the proportion of applicants who are women. This has nothing to do with gender equality, and everything to do with privileging of women to give them well-paid high-profile jobs, regardless of merit.

Excerpts from the article:

The report also calls for an extension of the law on all-women shortlists to guarantee the selection of more female candidates…

Tory Party chairman Patrick McLoughlin told the committee that all-women shortlists caused ‘resentment’ and would not be adopted…

The committee says its ultimate goal is to achieve 50 per cent female MPs. But it says a legal target of 45 per cent is ‘reasonable’.

It also calls for an extension of all-women shortlist legislation, which is currently due to expire in 2030, and which does not cover new elected roles, such as police and crime commissioners.

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About Mike Buchanan

I'm a men's human rights advocate, writer, and publisher. My primary focus is leading the political party I launched in 2013, Justice for Men & Boys (and the women who love them). I still work actively on two campaigns I launched in early 2012, Campaign for Merit in Business and the Anti-Feminism League. In 2014 I launched The Alternative Sexism Project, aiming to raise public understanding that the sexism faced by men and boys has far more grievous consequences than the sexism faced by women and girls.
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  • Such poor things the women are, too. Truss, for example, shames the office of Lord Chancellor.
    Maybe the funny weather we are having is the likes of Cardinal Wolsey, St Thomas More and Lord Hardwicke turning in their graves.

  • Hey.. what a progressive idea…!?..?!…Can I provocatively suggest schools and education departments are fined for having an inequal ratio of men to women in the educational provision available to boys…or is the education system better off as a secure career path primarily for women?
    God knows the boys are getting the benefit… :-/

  • epistemol

    I can only think of one Westminster MP of any any sex (all 32 of them!) who consistantly speaks out on behalf of men.

    Many of the rest are feMarxists or manginas.

    Add to this that three of the most powerful figures in the political establishment, the Head of State, the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary are female and it becomes clear that there are far better examples of the “democratic deficit” than the OVER represented female interest.

    Realise too, that the claimed figure of 45 or 50 % of MPs who ‘should’ be women is not a final one, just a starting point – a stop along the way.
    If acheived, it would soon start creeping upward towards who knows what.

    The thin end of the wedge, or boiling a frog principle will apply here, for as always, deceit will be a major part of part of the attack.

  • How can it be the party’s fault if it doesn’t have enough female candidates ? It is the fault / decision of the female candidates whether they apply in large enough numbers. This whole political correctness is becoming really comical and tolerating it on whatever grounds is stupid.
    Good manners or traditions should not help propagate pure idiocy.

  • Ireland already has a quota system whereby at least 30% of candidates (with this to be raised to 40% in the near future) representing the main political parties in parliamentary elections must be female, with the parties being liable to fines for not meeting the quota.
    My own response to the quota was simply not to vote for any female candidates representing the main political parties in last February’s Irish general election. It’s interesting to note that while approximately 30% of all candidates in the election were female, as the quota required, 22% of those elected were.
    The very existence of such a non-merit-related quota makes it practically impossible to know which candidates are chosen primarily on merit and which are chosen primarily because they have the ‘correct’ sexual organs to qualify them for inclusion in the quota. Under these circumstances, the rational and reasonable thing to do is not to vote for candidates chosen to comply with such a system.
    Of course, the Irish electoral system, with its combination of multi-seat constituencies and the single transferable vote, makes it easier to avoid voting for candidates chosen to fill a gender or other non-merit-related quota than is possible under the UK’s electoral system.

    • epistemol

      I don’t think I can see the funny side of it…

      • Neither can I.
        Having worked in London several years ago and voted in UK general elections, I’m familiar with the differences between the voting systems in the two countries and know that it would be practically impossible to use the UK electoral system to lessen the effects of a gender quota for parliamentary candidates on the outcome of general elections. Hence the importance of defeating this proposal – which seems to me to be a near-copy of the worst features of the Irish quota system, with financial penalties for non-compliance – before it gets off the ground.

  • Of course this is actually unlawful under the Equality Act. As you’ll know a special law had to be passed to go against the Equality act to protect Party’s from being taken to the courts for direct discrimination (which was illegal and now is only legal in this instance of political quotas because of this special law).