Women

Politicians are voted into office to represent people's opinions, not their anatomy. If a person is particularly good at representing the opinions of their fellow constituents, then their fellow constituents should vote them into office, irrespective of their race, age, height, gender or creed.

Easier said than done.

It would be hopelessly dim to believe that we live in a society free from prejudice, and as there those amongst us who are racist, so there are those who are sexist too. For that reason, women have until quite recently found it very difficult to get into places like golf clubs and parliament. For that reason, rather than win the day through reasoned argument, some thought it better to resort to more compulsive methods of getting women into the top jobs. Thus 'positive discrimination' was born. Brilliant! Don't give them a choice. It's woman or woman, so make your mind up! The inevitable result was that the number of women in the Assembly, amongst other institutions, increased markedly from what it otherwise would be.

Now the problem. You see 'positive discrimination', however you dress it up, is still discrimination. In this context, if a man applies for a position, he will be flatly turned down because he is a man. Thus one has simply replaced popular sex discrimination in favour of men with institutional sex discrimination in favour of women. The only way this stands even the remotest chance of achieving moral acceptability is if for every seat you reserve for a woman, you also reserve another, equally winnable seat for a man. This only stands up to scrutiny if one believes that politicians are there to represent anatomy as well as opinion. This also goes against the idea of a meritocracy, where it is individual ability that allows for progression, since one would thereby sacrifice ability for gender and so ensure we have a perfect 50/50 gender split of second rate politicians. 'Positive discrimination' is also undemocratic, since it does not permit a pure expression of will. It may also be the case that an extremely able female politician who was by far and away the best candidate finds her credibility somewhat undermined by observations that she only had to contend with a fraction of the possible number of competitors for her position as a result of 'positive discrimination'.

Of course, the final say is with people, and one Peter Law showed what could happen in these circumstances. The irony of it is that events conspired to see a woman hold that seat (Blaenau Gwent) in the assembly, a woman who got in without the direct of help positive discrimination and in fact would not have become an AM if the original reaction against 'positive discrimination' had not occurred. So in a haphazard and roundabout fashion, 'positive discrimination' did get a woman into office in a legitimate fashion after all.