Labour and the end of all-women shortlists

Labour will not be using controversial all-women shortlists to select its parliamentary candidates for the next general election.

HuffPost said the decision came after the party had received legal advice late last year warning that the system would be “unlawful” for Westminster seats because the majority of its MPs are female.

A paper, seen by the news site, highlighted concerns that the all-women shortlists (AWS) system might not comply with the 2010 Equality Act and cited “estimates from the Office of National Statistics which show that there are now fewer men in the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] than in the general population while the reverse is true for women”.

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The paper, which was produced by party officials, added that if Labour were to “find itself in court due to the use of AWS… it is highly likely the party would lose”.

The party has confirmed that the practice will be ditched for the next general election, but that the system will still be used for other, unspecified elections.

How AWS began

Labour first used AWS to select candidates for certain target constituencies in the 1997 election, when the party elected 101 women to parliament. Just 19 other women were elected to parliament on behalf of the rest of the parties put together.

Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner and MPs Jess Phillips and Stella Creasy – who are among the highest-profile politicians in today’s parliament – were all selected as constituency candidates under AWS. But the practice has been controversial and the Labour Party was even judged to be in breach of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1996.

As a consequence, the practice stopped in the run-up to the 1997 election, with only those already selected through the shortlists retaining their position. It wasn’t used to select candidates for the 2001 general election either, although 50-50 lists were used then. The number of female Labour MPs subsequently dropped to 95.

Later, the Sex Discrimination Act 2002 was brought in to allow parties to use AWS “to select candidates for parliamentary, European, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and most local government elections”, said the BBC. The practice has been used by Labour to select its parliamentary candidates in certain seats for the two decades since.

The Liberal Democrats also introduced AWS after the 2015 election, when the party membership “took a long look at itself… and a rather longer look at the eight white, middle-aged middle class men” who then formed the parliamentary party, said Richard Morris in The New Statesman.

Pros and cons

AWS has been credited with levelling up the gender imbalance in parliament, to the point where the Labour Party and the Lib Dems have a majority of female MPs. Labour has the highest number of women MPs, who make up 104 of the party’s 199 MPs (52%).

However, some argue that the use of AWS can pose a threat to merit and can lead to the election of sub-par or unqualified MPs.

That said, studies have shown that AWS can result in “better” and more ethnically diverse MPs, said political scientists Mary Nugent and Mona Lena Krook on the Democratic Audit blog in 2016.

AWS, added Nugent and Krook, have reduced “the barriers for well-prepared women to stand as candidates and produced diligent and active representatives”.