Scottish Labour party to vote on using more women-only shortlists

Submitted by Mastodon on Sun, 2018-01-28 13:09

Article here. Excerpt:

'Scottish Labour is expected to introduce all-women shortlists to fight key target seats in a fast-track selection process to prepare for a second snap general election.

The party has identified 20 key Westminster target seats, including all seven Glasgow constituencies, after coming far closer than expected to winning back former seats in last June’s snap election.

The party’s Scottish executive will meet on Saturday to vote on plans backed by its new leader, Richard Leonard, to choose many candidates from all-women shortlists. Leonard told the Guardian in December he was “very open to ideas about positive action.”

Labour sources say a majority of the party’s MSPs at Holyrood, including senior women MSPs, oppose all-women shortlists because local parties would object to having that imposed on them by the central party.'

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RIP democracy. By banning a class of representatives, even only in a small way, from holding office based on birth characteristics, you do a number on the people's right to choose their own representatives. Arguably large party systems do this when they choose their own candidates not by a primary vote but instead by fiat from the party managers. Fiating candidates is undemocratic but further limiting candidates by birth characteristics makes it worse.

The Democrats here in the US tried a woman-only short list strategy not long ago in a sense by rigging the 2015 presidential primary vote with paid-for superdelegates for HRC. Look how that turned out.

You essentially sink your party's future when you start rigging primaries and similar elections or in this case when you use fiat criteria to determine who will be a candidate.

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2018-01-28 17:29