Monday, July 02, 2012

European Selection Diary: Day 2 - now that we've found love, what are we going to do?

An application pack for a European Parliamentary Selection consists of a number of elements. The Selection Rules, obviously, and an application form, of course, form part of it. However, from the perspective of the Selection Committee, the elements that require most work are the Selection Criteria and the Regional Profile.

The Selection Criteria, for those of my readers who don't get involved in the details of candidate selection, are basically a list of attributes that we, the Selection Committee, deem to be most necessary in a candidate. You will note the potential flaw here, in that a good candidate might not necessarily make a good MEP. However, that's never really proved to be a problem, and given that we've never elected more than two candidates in any European Region, one must acknowledge that nearly all of our applicants, and most of our candidates, will need campaigning skills first and foremost.

Theoretically, the criteria are used to achieve two things - to inform the candidates as to what we're looking for, and to use as a measure during the longlisting and shortlisting phases, assuming that we have either. They should be fairly standard across the English Regions, although there is scope for variation, depending on local circumstance. You might, for example, want particular knowledge of a specified policy area, or of a particular type of campaigning.

The Regional Profile is designed to inform applicants about the Region, the Regional Party and activity around it at local level. This helps applicants to campaign, by indicating informally where most members are, where we have councillors, key issues and the like.

So, we have started work on these documents as a priority. Actually, I've sent out a first draft of the Selection Criteria, in the hope that everyone will accept them, and asked for volunteers to write parts of the Regional Profile. At least this way I'll find out how engaged my fellow Selection Committee members are...

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