Monday, March 31, 2008

Belle Vale - great name for what will be an all-women ward

Belle Vale is aiming to become the first ward in Liverpool with three women councillors.

We have had and still have lots of all men wards, but this will be the first all women ward if Claire Wilner is elected.

What a great story about Liverpool, about the representation of women in local politics, about how well women are doing in the city. Labour now has 17 women and 19 men in the Labour group. How many will it be after May 1st?

Women are just slightly more than half the population of the country, or the city, it will be a great day when women are slightly more than half the population of the city council, but the LibDems are going to have to start joining in with the campaign to get more women elected as councillors if we are to achieve this. I see the Greens are looking for a 50:50 split in their representation come May 1st if they are to be successful in winning a second seat.

The Tories are of course nowhere, with no chance of being anywhere, despite Chris Grayling's wild optimism. And the Liberal Party is on 1 out of 3 which is not unreasonable given their poor base.

In the name of all the strong women Liverpool has ever produced, let's get a few more elected!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I make it 43 male seats and 47 female seats if it is to be representative of the total gender split in population in Liverpool according to the 2001 census.

However, we then get into the discussion about how many young people there should be, how many of different ethnicity, what about parrticular religions, socio-economic backgrounds and so on!

It would all depend on how people identify themselves I suppose. Not everyone identifies themselves by their sex, age or ethnicity.

Anonymous said...

And it is worth highlighting that Liverpool has 3 female and 2 male MPs!

Louise Baldock said...

Well of course J, you are right. We need to be representative of the community in all ways, by gender, by age, by race, and all other ways.

Hopefully the Operation Black Vote exercise I have mentioned before will help with some of this too.