The latest British general election has delivered a more diverse Parliament with a record 220 women MPs and with one in 10 MPs from a nonwhite background.
The election, dubbed the Brexit election, resulted in a Conservative-majority government and a major mandate for prime minister Boris Johnson who is expected to go ahead with his plans to take Britain from the European Union unchallenged.
While the night was a crushing defeat for the opposition, the Labour party is leading the way on ethnic diversity and gender. Despite losing 59 seats overall, the number of Labour women MPs — a record of 104 — now surpassed the number of men in the party for the first time. The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) also has 41 candidates from a minority background — up from 32 in 2017.
Labour also elected Parliament’s first-ever woman MP of British Chinese heritage in Sarah Owen.
Among its newcomers is a former senior adviser and chief of staff to Diane Abbott, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who gained the Streatham seat previously held by Labour defector Chuka Umunna, who unsuccessfully stood in City of London and Westminster as a Liberal Democrat.
Thank you everyone, I am so humbled to have been elected as the MP for my home, Streatham 🌹
Ribeiro-Addy praised the party for giving women and black and Asian candidates the opportunity in safe seats. She told BuzzFeed News: “Part of the problem is that some of these parties are running diverse candidates but they’re not necessarily running them in seats that they can win and that becomes an issue. They will always boast that ‘we are running more people’, but it’s about not just running people but running them in places that you consider that they can win and that's where a lot of the parties have failed whereas Labour has succeeded.”
Speaking on the pipeline of political talent, the new MP believes that it begins with looking at who works within the party.
She explained: “The way to increase diversity is to look at the channels through which people usually become members of Parliament and to look at diversifying them. What I will say is that the current Labour leadership has taken quite a good look at how they diversify them so you have more people working in the party, more people working for MPs, more people like myself working as political advisors who are from diverse communities and that makes a difference.”
According to the think tank British Future, Labour selected ethnic minority candidates in 14 of their party-held safe seats, while the Conservatives did so in only four.
As it stands, the Conservatives welcomed three additional black, Asian, and minority ethnic group MPs to its ranks making a total of 22 BAME MPs in Britain’s largest party. The 80-seat majority gain means the proportion of those from an ethnic background has remained at 6%, with just a quarter of Conservative party MPs being women.
Tory rebel Anna Soubry was unseated in Broxtowe by the latest black Briton to join the Conservative benches: 51-year-old Darren Henry, a father of two who served in the Royal Air Force for 26 years.
With 2 days to go until the #GeneralElection2019, here’s the PM @BorisJohnson with why #Broxtowe should vote for me and @Conservatives 👇 We need to #GetBrexitDone, so that we can move forward to a better Britain! #VoteConservative #2DaysToGo
His win came as a surprise following a blunder early in the campaign when he was criticised for suggesting that people who used food bank users were simply struggling to budget.
A senior Conservative party source argued that it was a “slippery slope” to suggest that the party should be directly reflective of the country and maintained that the party continued to field more women and candidates from BAME backgrounds.
Frances Scott, director and founder of 50:50 Parliament, a cross-party campaign to reach gender equality in Westminster praised the Labour party for “leading the way” on recruiting women.
She told BuzzFeed News: “The Conservatives need to do much more, they have got 20 more women on their benches than before so it’s increased by 30% [29%] from 2017 but the numbers are nothing quite as good as the other parties.”
“Women should have equal seats and equal say,” Scott continued. “This is a democratic deficit that needs addressing, 100 years since the first woman took her seat in the Commons. The Conservatives need to be taking more action to allocate great women candidates winnable seats.”
Despite the increase in the number of women entering Parliament, the matter of public abuse continues to be a cause for concern. This election marked the departure of former cabinet minister Nicky Morgan and Conservative defector Heidi Allen who both cited a toxic culture of abuse as part of the reasons for stepping down.
On the matter of abuse, Scott said: “I think Conservative women have been getting a lot of abuse. Sadly, I think all women get a lot of abuse in public life and disproportionate than men, in fact, it’s three times as much and it’s quite frightening when a woman [Jo Cox] has actually been murdered. You’ve got to take it seriously but you can’t let it undermine our democratic right to speak and be protected so protection needs to be given to women in public life so that we are free to speak our mind whatever our political persuasion.”
While the Liberal Democrats lost its leader Jo Swinson, the party managed to turn its sole BAME MP (Layla Moran) into two with the addition of new Stockton MP Munira Wilson, who stood in former party leader’s Vince Cable seat.
As Parliament returns on Monday, with the clearest result of the last five years, the latest development of its makeup is a “rapid acceleration” when put into the context of time.
In 2009, there were only two black women sitting in Parliament. A decade later, this number is now 37, according to data from British Future.
One the plus side, there are now 65 MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds in Parliament. That's 1/10 MPs in 2019 vs 1/40 in 2009. Moreover, the majority of these MPs are BME women! It is worth noting, however, there are no ethnic min MPs in Wales, Scotland and NI; that's shocking. https://t.co/jHm1F5X3XA
Yet, even with the historic strides made, the number of women that make up the house overall (34%) falls short of being representative of the population at just 34% and there are no ethnic minority MPs from Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
The number of MPs who identify as LGBT also remains unchanged from the last Parliament, with a total of 45, according to Pink News.