Liberal Democrats, candidates and diversity (part 1) - a look back over my shoulder

It's been about a decade since I returned to what I would describe as active involvement within the Liberal Democrats after a partly, but not wholly, self-imposed exile, and one of the common threads in that time has been the issue of diversity, especially in relation to Parliamentary candidacy. This can be broken into two parts - gender and ethnicity.

In some ways, gender has been easier to deal with, even if the results have not reflected the efforts made. All of the data that I saw in my time as a member of the English Candidates Committee indicated that, the rate at which women were approved and selected was broadly reflective of the rate at which they applied. Indeed, women appeared slightly more likely to succeed in getting approved, and marginally more successful at getting selected, than their male counterparts. It just appeared that, for reasons that have never become clear to me, that they weren't able to get through the one process that the Party doesn't control, i.e. the electorate.

In 2010, a number of excellent women candidates were selected to contest either top target seats or held seats where a male incumbent had chosen to retire.  And, had they been elected, the gender balance of the Commons Parliamentary Party would have been radically better than it now is.

Ethnicity, on the other hand, has proved to be more difficult. Given that the gender split amongst the population at large is broadly even everywhere, getting the processes right should mean that the outcome is broadly reflective of the community in the most simplistic sense. However, ethnicity is not homogeneous, nor are BAME communities evenly spread across the country. There isn't even a satisfactory definition of BAME that, in process terms, you can comfortably rely upon.

In Brent North, where I grew up, the various South Asian communities form nearly half of the population and Brent as a whole is a white minority borough. You might reasonably expect BAME candidates to be prominent and highly likely to be selected and elected. I now live in Bury St Edmunds, with a BAME population nearer 2%. If you believe that politics should reflect the community, then having one BAME district councillor might be a reasonable statistical outcome.

Therefore, if you want to take affirmative action, the nature of that action might be different in London than it might be in Suffolk. And yet, the Party's first effort at affirmative action, for the European Parliamentary selections in 2012, offered up the blunt instrument of a guaranteed place on the list in every Region. Worse still, it offered the illusionary benefit of being selected to be a candidate whilst offering no guarantee that any such candidate could be elected.

History shows that, even if you were top of your Regional list, you weren't going to get elected given the catastrophe that was the Liberal Democrat result in 2014, but even if our vote had trebled, it isn't clear to me that any BAME candidate would have been elected anyway. One might have given respectable marks for trying, but I would have failed the initiative for proportionality, process and outcome.

So, what are the problems, and are there any possible solutions out there?