As if Brown wasn't bad enough...

So Harriet Harman wants the Labour leadership rules changed so that out of the leader and deputy leader, one must be female and one must be male? Consider this:

The Labour party contains 2 excellent politicians who will lead the country out of every problem its got (far-fetched, I know but bear with me). We'll call them Nick and Vince to make it as believable as possible.

There is also 1 woman, completely hopeless as an MP and not fit for cabinet government. For simplicity, we'll call her Harriet.

So Nick and Vince both run for leader and deputy leader respectively. Harriet, being the ambitious type, runs for leader. 2 more male MPs run for deputy and 1 bloke runs for leader.

So we have leadership race:

2 men, 1 woman.

Deputy leadership race:

3 men.

Under the new rules, 1 of the two posts must be filled by a woman. It can't be the deputy role as no women want that job. So the hopeless candidate gets to be leader of her party simply because she's a woman.

Now imagine this happens in 2007 just after Tony Blair resigns. The new leader would be an unelected Prime Minister. Unelected by her party and unelected by her country. Bit like Brown but... worse.

Its obvious that something needs to be done, I know. A stat I saw is that in the past 90 years we've had 5000 men MPs and 292 women MPs. This is disgraceful. But you are not going to help the country or politics by forcing women into the job. Don't deal with the problem, deal with the causes of the problem and the problem will sort itself. Start an investigation into why there aren't many women MPs. I don't know the reasons, I'm sure there are many, but you're not going to solve the problem until yoiu look into why its there and deal with that underlying issue.
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