All Women Shortlists

Mark McDonald, over at LabourHome, is having a whinge about all women shortlists:

"I also wonder whether Sedgefield and Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath would have been AWS under the current system!"

This isn't quite as good an argument as he might think it is.

If they had been, i.e. if Labour had operated all women shortlists back in the 1980's, then by now roughly half of the Parliamentary Labour Party would be women, and would have been since at least 1997, hence no need for all women shortlists and all the benefits which even people who don't support all women shortlists claim to agree would flow from having a set of representatives which look more like the general population. I also have a sneaking suspicion that if Gordon Brown and Oxford East-reject Tony Blair hadn't been selected in those particular seats, they'd have found somewhere else.