Tory All-Women Shortlists
Eee gads. Dave is doing his best to lose this election isn’t he. It’s his for the taking, and yet he’s just trotted out another retarded idea.
No doubt inspired by “Blair’s Babes” of 1997, he’s announced some constituencies will have all-women shortlists for the post of Tory Prospective Parliamentary Candidate.
In 1997 this was fine, but since then we’ve had 12 years of Harriet Harperson and Jacqui Smith lecturing us and singing the “praises” of positive discrimination like the harpies they truly are.
People want the best person for the job to be their Tory candidate. If that person happens to be a white, middle aged business man with a wife and 2.4 children, then so be it. We shouldn’t be trying to vote in Nigerian transgender paraplegic lesbian muslims (think I got every minority group in there!) purely for the sake of quotas.
Indeed, dissent has already arisen from within the party:
Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said they were an “appalling” idea and would make women MPs “second class citizens”.
How can a woman hold her head high in the Commons if she came from a constituency where not everyone was eligible to be voted in as the Tory candidate?
Indeed this has backfired on Labour in recent years when a male Labour MP - prevented from re-running after his first term because Labour HQ wanted an all-women shortlist - ran as an independent MP and retained his seat.
Positive discrimination will chop out the best man for the job 100% of the time, and will cut the best person for the job 50% of the time (assuming the workforce should be 50% male, 50% female).
It goes against every principle of meritocracy. If someone is the best candidate and truly deserves a post, they then they won’t need a poxy “Equal Opportunities” policy to get it. And in their position, I would not want to think I only got it because of such a policy - in trying to make people “equal”, it actually infers that certain groups are “inferior and so need help to reach the same standard as everyone else”. A gross insult I think you will agree, and indicative of the twisted thinking and all-pervading doublespeak that has infiltrated our government, media, businesses and lives.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 12:48 am and is filed under Media, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
