Women's Conference Motion and Campaign's Over #Lab26

Over #Lab26 we will focus on a few campaigns. We have submitted our motion to Women's Conference that presses a Labour Government on Protecting and Extending Women's Representation and will be campaigning AGAIN (sigh) on 'Manels' - which is campaigning for the end to all male panels at Labour Party events.

Women's Conference Motion
Protecting and Extending Women's Representation

Below is our formal Motion to Women's Conference

Women's Conference notes that:

1. Labour has outperformed other major political parties in the representation of women in elected office because it has recognised that systemic barriers require sustained action and political commitment.

2. The Labour Party has a proud history of advancing women's representation through positive action measures, including All Women Shortlists.

3. Increased representation of women in elected office has helped secure real improvements in women’s lives. This progress is neither inevitable nor permanent.

4. Women continue to face disproportionate levels of abuse, intimidation, and harassment as candidates and elected representatives, and online misogyny and abuse are creating additional barriers to women's participation in public life.

5. Such abuse poses a threat not only to individual women but to representative democracy itself by discouraging participation, inhibiting diversity among candidates and creating barriers to public service.

6. The legislative provisions that enable positive action measures such as AWS are currently due to expire in 2030.

Women's Conference resolves that:

1. Women's Conference welcomes the Government's commitment to implement Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010 and calls for this to be delivered at the earliest opportunity, ensuring the regular publication of diversity data by political parties.

2. The Labour Government should commit to ensuring that positive action measures to improve women’s political representation remain lawful so that progress is not reversed.

3. The Labour Government should implement, monitor and, where necessary, strengthen recent legal changes to protect candidates and elected representatives from abuse, intimidation and threats.

How To Support Our Motion

Can your CLP, Women's forum or Women's Conference delegate support our motion?

If you are a delegate to Women's Conference and IF our motion reaches Conference floor, and you'd like to support it during the debate - get in touch and we can help.

Our long-standing 'MANELS' Campaign!

This year we have a two pronged approach: we will be writing to all the Labour male MPs and asked them to come to our stand and take our pledge not to take part in any event that has an all male panel at any Labour Party event (while we would like them to carry this forward to all other events they attend, Labour Party events would be a start).

We've told them that we call out all male panels on our socials, and their pledge will be on our socials forever!

Then as usual, we have our campaign board where women can show their support for the end of all male panels at Party events!

If you are coming to #Lab26 or people you know are coming along, please ask them to get involved and visit our stand.