The causes of failure?

A committee under the speaker is suggesting that political parties should be made to declare some characteristics of applicants rejected as parliamentary candidates, in particular what percentage are women, disabled or members of ethnic minorities.

No it is not 1st April, it is 26th November. We have to ask, "Why?"

Wouldn't it be better to ask the backgrounds of all applicants, accepted and rejected, if you wish to embark on a social engineering politically correct investigation?

What will it reveal, in any case, almost nothing which matters in selecting a good candidate? If I were selecting a candidate, I would want to know how well he/she communicates, deals with questions, understands party policy, how long a member of the party, and other political activity earlier in life, willing to live in the constituency, and skeletons in the cupboard, etc, etc. None of this is likely to be revealed in collecting these politically correct measures.

Someone from one of these groups who has been rejected is probably not rejected because of these declared characteristics but because it was felt that they did no meet the many other attributes.

We have now plunged into the Harman political correctness so far that we are in danger of selecting poor candidates because few women, or handicapped people or minority ethnic groups membershave applied that we have to scrape the barrel to put one on the final shortlist.