Scottish parties again face pressure over women and black election candidates
|
Version 0 of 1. Nicola Sturgeon faces a significant test of her quest to modernise the Scottish National party this weekend, when its spring conference votes on a new, tentative, plan to allow all women shortlists for the next Holyrood election. This has proven to be an intractable problem for feminists and reformers in the SNP – including Sturgeon herself; ever since proposals for positive action in candidate selection were rejected by members in 1999, this agenda has struggled to win support. And with the SNP now the dominant force in Scottish politics, its actions matter greatly to campaigners. An analysis by the Guardian of the final number of women candidates standing in May’s general election for Scottish seats shows only 28% are women – the same ratio, according to our data, as stood in 2010. Earlier this month, before candidate selection was entirely complete, a BBC Scotland report using data from the Electoral Reform Society, and a separate study from academics Dr Meryl Kenny and Fiona Mackay, who run a gender politics blog hosted from the University of Edinburgh, reported similar figures of 28% and 29% respectively for 2015. And deeper analysis shows that in 15 of Scotland’s 59 seats (where in every seat the incumbent is male), no women have been selected to contest them, reducing further the chances of female MPs being elected. Indeed, in 24 seats, there are two or more women candidates, again reducing the overall proportion of women able to win across Scotland’s 59 seats. But if the latest opinion polls are right, the SNP surge could see the number of Scottish women MPs jump from the 13 elected in 2010. It has selected 21 women candidates (36% of its slate). According to a seat projection by the Guardian, 18 women MPs could be elected in Scotland chiefly because the current polls imply 17 women standing for the SNP could win seats (without positive action policies), with just one for Labour. But on black and minority ethnic representation, the picture is likely to be far poorer. The Guardian survey has found there are only seven black and minority ethnic candidates standing for parliament this year, across all six main parties. That’s 2% of the total standing, half the ratio of BME residents in Scotland (the 2011 census found that 4% of the population was from a minority ethnic group). Only Labour, with 5% of its candidates coming from minority ethnic groups, has reached a BME population share. And in theory only two of those people – Labour’s Anas Sarwar (son of Mohammed Sarwar, who was elected the UK’s first Muslim MP and Scotland’s first BME MP for Glasgow Govan in 1997) and the SNP’s Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, stand a realistic chance of election. But our seat projection suggests only Ahmed-Sheikh will be elected, beating Gordon Banks in Ochil and South Perthshire, giving Scotland just one non-white MP. Again. It’s an issue causing UK-wide concern: the campaign Operation Black Vote is hoping to bring its voter registration coach to Glasgow, the city with Scotland’s largest BME population, to push the message home closer to election day. The Scottish Greens, which prides itself on its progressive politics, has no BME candidates at all. Nor, it appears, does the UK Independence party but Ukip, particularly its MEP David Coburn, has refused repeatedly to help provide information on its candidates for this survey. While its competitors on the centre and centre left, Labour, the Scottish Greens and the Lib Dems, have all introduced positive action policies including zipping, all women shortlists and quotas (the Greens insist on 40% of candidates being women), the SNP has so far refused to do so. Until Sturgeon’s election as leader, it was a topic feminists inside the party were very reluctant to discuss in public: many felt bruised by the hostile reaction during the last internal debate on positive action; other senior women in the party disagree with the policy. They argue that women ought to be promoted on merit, not quotas. It remains one of the biggest gaps in the SNP’s image as a progressive, centre left social democratic party. Reformers hope the post-referendum surge in SNP membership with many more younger, urban activists could help swing the vote this weekend when the topic is again debated, but in private session, on Sunday morning. The SNP’s national executive committee has put forward a cautious, gradualist motion because, as Scotland on Sunday’s Tom Peterkin reported at the weekend, the NEC faces “vocal opposition”. The core proposition of all women shortlists is too great a step for some. The SNP’s Avondale branch of Clydesdale constituency association has tabled a motion to delete the proposal “in its entirely”. So the NEC’s proposal asks for the power to introduce all women shortlists if a sitting MSP stands down, and where there is a selection contest for a Holyrood constituency, to ask for a woman to be shortlisted. But this power is conditional: it says the NEC “may” use that power, and it’s time-limited, to just cover the 2016 Scottish parliamentary election. It’s a deliberately incrementalist approach, said one party official: I’m certainly not going to second-guess how the debate will go; I think it will be a genuine debate. In 1999, [the vote against] was relatively narrow. Illustrating perhaps how resistant parts of the SNP actually are to this initiative, this tentative step is in stark contrast to Sturgeon’s vigorous push for quotas in Scotland’s public sector boardrooms and her installation of a 50:50 cabinet after her appointment as first minister. And as the biographer David Torrance points out in his new biography “Nicola Sturgeon: A political life”, the first minister has been pushing this within the partysince the late 1990s. It is only now that she has returned to it publicly, He reports that as early as October 1997, Sturgeon was openly discussing the prospects for a new Scottish parliament being more inclusive and diverse than the “alien culture” of Westminster”. She is quoted by Torrance arguing: An Edinburgh parliament because it is a new institution, being created in the late twentieth century, hopefully is going to be more friendly, not only to women but to people of ethnic background. Torrance adds: Sturgeon had spoken out publicly in favour of the SNP adopting a policy of gender balance when it came to selecting candidates for the Scottish parliament but the party decided otherwise. In the event, however, the choices of local constituency associations meant around 40% of the party’s MSPs [for the 1999 Holyrood election] were likely to be women. Earlier this month, Sturgeon became more explicit about this, telling the BBC: We’ve got some fantastic talented women in winnable seats. I am pleased with that progress but it’s not good enough. I want us to do more. I am determined to lead by example, which is why I lead one of the only gender balanced cabinets in the world. Scottish Labour’s deputy leader, Kezia Dugdale, a signatory to a recently-founded campaign for equal representation, Women 50:50, said the problem for women politicians went far further than their membership. Citing a widely-criticised Sun cartoon potraying Sturgeon as pop singer Miley Cyrus, Dugdale said: Time and time again we hear that ‘women don’t want to come forward to be candidates, if we consider the media sexism we have witnessed of women leaders just in the last few weeks, this is hardly a surprise. It’s time to put positive measures for women into action, to hold media to account for its sexism and tackle sexist attitudes at every level of politics; from the grassroots to the debating chamber. Gavin Corbett, convenor of the Scottish Green party’s elections and campaigns committee, said its gender ratios were the best amongst Scotland’s parties. Its failure to find any non-white candidates this year was, however, an issue it had to address: On reflecting Scotland’s ethnic diversity within our candidates, we are clearly much less-advanced. The massive surge in membership numbers over the last six months includes people from all of Scotland’s diverse communities, which is hugely welcome. But that surge is still so recent that it has yet to percolate up to our candidate profiles. That is something we shall have to work hard on, as our thousands of new members build their activity in the party. Talat Yaqoob, the founder of Women 50:50, which was set up with backing from SNPers like Marco Biagi, the MSP for Edinburgh Central, and Jean Urquhart, the former SNP MSP who now sits as an independent after resigning over the party’s pro-Nato membership vote, is deeply disheartened by the current gender ratio. She said: To have the same number of women candidates for the general election this year as in 2010 is a woeful state of affairs. In five years we could have made progress for women in Scotland, in so many ways we have and yet the status quo in politics remains. To have only 28% women candidates across parties is an insult to the women who will be going to the ballot box, we make up over half of the population, it’s time we were half of the candidate list. The research illustrates exactly why quotas are needed, why they need to be legislated for not simply voluntary and why the Women 5050 campaign matters. And on the lack of black and Asian MPs from Scotland, Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote had this to say: Scotland has quite rightly prided itself over the referendum, in rejuvenating democracy and being more inclusive so it’s bitterly disappointing that whilst there’s a general theme of inclusivity and greater representation, that clearly hasn’t been afforded to BME communities. What worries me is that without improving the level of equitable voices being heard in Scottish politics, tackling persistent risk of inequality in Scotland is unlikely to be properly addressed. With our Scottish partners and individuals we’ve already been alerted to rising Islamophobia, including racist attacks and abuse; it’s also about finding decent jobs and being afforded equitable healthcare. |