Labour’s ‘woman’ problem

There are plenty of things you could say about Labour’s All-Women Shortlists (AWS). Tony Blair called them ‘not ideal at all’ in 1995. In 1996, Peter Jepson and Roger Dyas-Elliott – two men who’d been rejected as Labour candidates – called them sex discrimination. An industrial tribunal agreed with them, and Labour was forced to suspend the policy until 2002, when it was able to bring in the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act, permitting positive discrimination in candidate selection. In 2002, Owen Jones called them ‘most successful at expanding the career options of a tiny elite of professional, university-educated women’, Blair’s hesitancy forgotten and AWS rewritten as a tool of centrist hegemony.

This, though, is the most important thing to be said about them: they work, and they’re the only thing in our first-past-the-post system that has worked when it comes to getting more women into parliament. Before Labour used AWS, the party had 37 female MPS out of 271 total; after, it had 101 out of 418.