New members of the Women's and Equality Committee announced - not much hope there

Christine Jardine MP Liberal Democrat Edinburgh West is a very ardent TA.

A lot of of the others are pretty new MPs.

Why there are no Tories ? Committee posts are assigned by number of MPs per party so with a Labour landslide they dominate all the committees usually with about 70-80% of the members. There are 26 committees. The Tories have a certain number of committee posts they can trade around which committee to focus on with other opposition parties if they want.

The Tories for whatever reason are MORE interested in getting people on other committees. For instance there are 2 Tories on the Treasury select committee, Home affairs etc. The decision of what committees to prioritise comes down to the Tory whips directly, presumably advised by other senior Tories. If Kemi was in charge she probably would have opted to get one Tory on Women's committee I guess, but who knows the Tories are spread very thin because they lost so badly.

It must be a bit of a poisoned chalice at the moment. It feels like anybody who signs up to this particular committee (unless leaders allocate these positions and people get no say?) must be passionate about one side or the other (TWAW or GC), naive or ignorant.

I can’t imagine it’s good for your career in the Labour Party, the Lib Dems, the Greens etc to express GC views - see the shunning of Rosie Duffield, Natalie Bird, Shahrar Ali etc. So I imagine the committee on women’s rights will inevitably attract TWAW types and “I will say whatever you want/whatever the party line is to get promotion” types.

Oh FFS 🤦‍♀️

Does no-one in the Commons give a toss about women?

One wonders if any of them have heard of Nicola Sturgeon and what this did for her career...

The truth will out.

I think some of them are brand new MPs. It'll be interesting to see how their views unfold in the public arena.

I'm going to take the assumption that any Lib Dems and Labour MPs on the list are going to follow the party line....

The party line in the Lib Dems (my own natural choice) seems to be fully TWAW 🤦‍♀️, whereas Labour are more split at a senior level - Wes Streeting is now TWANW, Bridget Phillipson and Keir Starmer seem clueless and rudderless, Angela Rayner seems to be mostly TWAW. However, perhaps more importantly huge, Anneliese Dodds seems to wield influence, despite not being a cabinet minister... and is actively and passionately TWAW.

If this committee is a careerist move for the members - I assume so - the path of progression is unfortunately obvious: declare that TWAW, advocate for full acceptance of the conversion therapy Bill as written and a successful career in politics will be yours.

It seems ironic that the best chance of stopping this ridiculous train from running along its inevitable track is Wes Streeting. I say ironic because of his previously expressed views on women who spoke out. Hopefully he's now had a proper epiphany and has realised just how damaging this Bill is for LGB people 🤞

Let's hope one or two of them know what a woman is.

Samantha Niblett is a great name, though.

Select Committee membership by convention broadly represents the party balance in the House overall, so obviously in this parliament it’s heavily Labour on them all. I assume the Tories have done some trading with the Lib Dems over their allocation here - possibly they’ve bagged a seat from them on a different committee in return for an extra one here. Presumably no Tory backbencher was that keen.

Anyone interested might want to read this discussion (political nerds only I imagine). constitution-unit.com/2024/09/12/select-committee-elections-how-should-a-proportional-allocation-between-parties-be-calculated/

Just what I was thinking. Are there rules about this?

Hmm. Bit odd to have no Tories at all.

As far as I know there's no specific regulation on numbers of members from each party - unlike committee chairs - but they usually try to get a spread don't they?