All-black shortlists: a clarification
Here’s the Sunday Times’ eminently confusing and confused article on Harriet Harman’s plans for getting more black and Asian people into Parliament. A sample:
A report commissioned by Harriet Harman, the equalities minister, recommends a change to the race discrimination laws. It proposes introducing the shortlists for four consecutive general elections to redress the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities at Westminster. [...]
Under the plans, which would enable all political parties to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities, white candidates would be barred from standing in about 10 winnable seats at each election.
Now, I’m in favour of all-black shortlists; that shouldn’t surprise you. So the element of shock! horror! that the Sunday Times inserts into their coverage (it may lead to Roma MPs!) doesn’t bother me. But one thing does about this article: I’m sure the admirable folk over at Operation Black Vote, who wrote the report for HH, are not proposing the abolition of the party system in British elections. In which case, Marie Woolf, the Sunday Times’ Whitehall Editor no less, has missed an important point: HH is proposing to change the law to make possible *the consideration by political parties* of adopting all-black shortlists. No white candidates will be barred from standing anywhere and there will still be white people on every ballot paper in every area, I’ll wager. No, these proposals will make all-black shortlists legally possible to enable a discussion by all political parties about whether this mechanism would work for them.
OBV think about ten ABS would be needed per election; I’ll defer to their greater knowledge on this, but the crucial point is that we only get all-black shortlists if one or more parties agree that this is how they will choose some of their parliamentary candidates. And, realistically, only one party is anywhere near thinking about this: while Liberals and Tories pay lip service to women’s representation in Parliament, only Labour has worked out how to actually increase it at any speed. Why would increasing black and Asian representation be any different?
This is an idea I have a tremendous amount of time for in principle (I would dearly love to see more BME MPs) but I rather think might be near-unworkable in practice.
That someone is or is not a woman is usually fairly simple to establish: the difference is clear and has a relatively straightforward and neat biological basis in almost all humans (for Turner & Kleinfelter syndrome sufferers it is as far as I am aware accepted that the former are women and the latter are men). Transsexuals present an interesting case but not exactly a problem.
But for “blackness”, or ethnic minority identity, it becomes much more difficult. If you think (as I do think, this being in part what my DPhil thesis concerns) that ‘races’ are not a useful scientific concept in the taxonomy of humanity but a social construct of relatively recent origin, and that there can be no objective view on whether someone is “black” beyond the colours of the light reflected by their skin, and you also believe that racial discrimination is not simply about skin colour (albino people of West African ancestry are probably not markedly less oppressed than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters), then you are left with a problem - there is no straightforward objective criterion of BME identity.
BME identity then has to come either from (subjective) self-identification as BME or through some sort of (intersubjective) certification.
The former is fine up to a point but becomes problematic both in terms of entrenching through legitimation differences that really don’t exist, and because it is immensely liable to abuse when to abuse it is personally advantageous - and when to upbraid people on suspected abuse runs the risk of being thought racist.
Is someone whose father was Nigerian but is, as it happen, exceptionally pale-skinned and always taken for ‘White British’, BME? Is her Home-Counties-born mother who has learnt Hausa and dresses in the traditional styles of northern Nigeria, BME? Is her darker-skinned brother, who cannot stand Nigerian culture, BME?
All of these are actually horrendously objectionable questions. My concern about all-BME shortlists is that the practicalities of their operation will leave us with no options but to find answers for too many of them to establish who can legitimately take advantage of the privileges they are designed to afford for the people they are intended to benefit.
The alternative - some form of external (i.e., not self-) certification of people’s ethnic origin as the key to certain forms of privileges is (in my view) grotesquely inappropriate, at best pseudoscientific, and at worst almost fascist.
I can think of only a few modern states that have (or until recently have had) as far as I understand a constitutionally-enshrined or legally-enshrined system of defining the identities of their citizens to determine their privileges (pre-1994 South Africa, Fiji and Israel are the ones that spring to mind) and they’re not any of them really states I’d like British society to resemble any more than it does already.
I self-define as ‘White British’ on forms, because that’s how I look to most people, insofar as that constitutes a cultural background it’s one I suppose I have, and that’s how people have always treated me.
But neither my mother, my sister nor I would have had the right to vote in apartheid South Africa, because a practised eye notes at once that there are features of our facial morphology that are hardly ever found in ‘White’ Europeans (at the age of nine my classmates voted me “boy in the class who looks most like a Neanderthal”, which reveals rather a lot both about their prejudices and my appearance). Am I BME? Not in my view.
If political parties rather than the state do the certification, it may be slightly less obnoxious, but no less problematic or perverse. Will there be a Minority Ethnic Origin Definition Subcommittee of the NEC’s Org Sub, ruling on difficult cases where the Regional Director’s view of someone’s ethnicity has been appealed? Do we want that?
I would be genuinely fascinated to know whether you (or anyone else) thinks there are solutions to these problems, whether these problems are not in fact serious ones for all-black shortlists, or whether you would share my view that the structure (rather than the existence) of human diversity makes all-black shortlists desirable in principle and unworkable in practice.
Antonia,
women are less likely than BME candidates to be selected in an open shortlist.
BME are ~8% of the populations and get selected about 13% of the time.
Women are ~52% of the population and get selected about 11% of the time.
Arnold - substantive response coming tonight.
Pregethwr - I didn’t know that. Very interesting. Thank you.
Thought I had already commented on this but it doesn’t seem to have come up.
I think I have had this discussion with Arnold before. I don’t think the problems raised are in any way serious. Clearly the only way to go with this is self-definition. In itself that will narrow the field down to BME candidates plus those who are willing to abuse that process, which will mean a field with a much higher percentage of BME candidates and a higher chance of a BME candidate being selected.
But I don’t actually think there will be many who try to abuse the process. It’d be a terrible reputatation to get yourself and probably destroy chances of getting another seat somewhere else, so it’d be a hell of a risk. Unless the percentage of BME-only shortlists is very high (and from what Antonia’s said it’s more like 10%) that risk just seems too high for many people to take it.
And Pregethwr - what’s to stop us running both AWS and BME-only shortlists in different seats?
“I can think of only a few modern states that have (or until recently have had) as far as I understand a constitutionally-enshrined or legally-enshrined system of defining the identities of their citizens to determine their privileges (pre-1994 South Africa, Fiji and Israel are the ones that spring to mind”
Isn’t it Lebanon where the President has to be one ethnic group, the PM another and the Speaker a third? I know technically they’re religious groups, but I doubt the reaction to installing a convert would be universally positive.
You are a racist and sexist. You only care about other gay people and or black people. In your world a white, straight male is scum to be destroyed. You are the worst sort of bigot in that you do not even acknowledge your own bigotry.
Arnold and Pregethwr make excellent points. But I think the real problem is an under-representation of discriminated groups right across the board - lower socio-economic groups, women and ethnic minorities. This can only be addressed by changing the electoral system (party list systems are most representative - Scotland has achieved near 50% female representation in no time) and hopefully to follow this we can change cultural prejudice that is the root cause.
Although under the present electoral system I can support all-women-shortlists in the short term to quicken access for women - it does have many problems. Not least is that the women selected are still overwhelmingly middle and upper class. It is class bias that is the real problem - if we really wanted to increase ethnic minorities and remain under the present dysfunctional electoral system - an all C2DE socio-class shortlist might be more practical and effective.
C4 breaks the comments policy. Deleted.
There are more disabled people in the population than ‘black’ people. So in fairness (and in law) all-disabled shortlists should be a priority.
No new law is needed. The Disability Equality Duty enshrined in the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 requires all public bodies to, in effect, discriminate in favour of disabled people.
Can we look forward to all-disabled shortlists at the next election, led by those constituencies where the present sitting MPs are government ministers?
As politicians these days seem to prefer to attack the man rather than debate the issue I would prefer to remain anonymous should you decide to publish this letter.
Regards.
I agree with Neil (except for the bit about introducing proportional representation). I would love to see all black working-class women shortlists (maybe all-disabled shortlists too - it would at least have the likely effect of making various conditions including mental ones less taboo).
I am often astonished at how worked up people like Peter get over this issue - we are talking about additional procedural obstacles making it more difficult for a handful of highly ambitious party hacks to get a specific job (and where there is an overriding public interest in what kind of person gets the job, too) of which there are only a handful available at any one time. We’re not talking about making it more difficult for men or white people as a whole to get a job. Stop taking it so personally.
NB I only say maybe with the all-disabled shortlists because I haven’t had a chance to think it through but intuitively it sounds like a good idea.