HuffPo: Women Our Parliament Still Needs You!

Posted on June 17, 2017 by Mike Buchanan

A ridiculous piece in Huffpo.

Largely because of Labour’s all-women shortlists which have given us geniuses such as Jess Phillips and Paula Sherriff, 45% of Labour MPs today are wimmin, and Comrade Corbyn will probably meet his target of a minimum of 50% of MPs being female in the 2022 general election. Of course if the figure exceeds 50%, there will be no ‘problem to be addressed’ e.g. by all-men shortlists. This train only ever goes in one direction, female privileging.

When I worked as a consultant for the Conservatives (2006-8) the ratio of men to women applying to be prospective parliamentary candidates (PPCs) was 10:1, and I doubt it’s very different today. The issue of the gender balance among PPCs is, of course, never mentioned by the women seeking 50:50 balance of MPs. By their twisted logic, if the gender ratio among PPCs is 1,000:1, 50% of MPs should still be women. Just think of the number of talented men who must have been cast aside so that idiots like Jess Phillips and Paula Sherriff (and so many others) had the opportunity to become MPs.

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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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  • William Gruff

    ‘ … Comrade Corbyn will probably meet his target of a minimum of 50% of MPs being female … ‘

    Note ‘minimum’ meaning that ‘under representation’ of men in parliament is fine.

    As for the 2022 election: we could see the next before the end of the year or early in the next, so who knows how many before 2022, when things could be very different.

  • jb

    Women are of course over represented in parliament since more men aspire to be MPs but are discriminated against by all woman shortlists both official and unofficial.

  • AFP

    ‘ … Comrade Corbyn will probably meet his target of a minimum of 50% of MPs being female … ‘

    But none of the other parties are any better, not the Tories, Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP…

    From the piece linked to: “All the political parties agree a gender balanced, 50:50 Parliament would be better,”

    • Mike Buchanan

      Only the Labour party has AWSs, but other major parties have long been manipulating things so that the proportion of female PPCs is much higher than the proportion of applicants who are female.

  • Fred Neecher

    In fact, the proportion of female Parliamentary candidates has exactly matched the proportion of elected female MPs since 1997 (actually, in 2015 there were 26% female candidates and 29% female MPs). If the ratio of men to women applying to be candidates is even 2:1, then that means two thirds of the potential talent has been eliminated by women-only shortlists. No wonder our Parliament is so badly served by its current MPs.