This week, the Counting Women In coalition published Sex & Power 2014: Who runs Britain? To hardly anyone’s surprise, it found that the answer is ‘men’. On the same day, the social mobility report said that those men lacked diversity, and that more needs to be done to improve access to power across the board.

The figures are damning – women are 22 per cent of members of parliament, 23 per cent of peers, 33 per cent of local councillors, 13 per cent of council leaders, and 18 per cent of elected mayors. Women do best in Europe (41 per cent of the United Kingdom’s members of the European parliament are women) and the devolved bodies, where women are 35 per cent of members of the Scottish parliament and 42 per cent of Welsh assembly members.

The Labour party has much to be proud of in its record in getting women from all backgrounds through selection processes at all levels, and indeed it is true to say that many of the stats quoted above would not be as good as they are if it was not for the party’s positive action measures. In fact, we are so far ahead that it is tempting just to rest on our laurels and wait for everyone else to catch up.

It is a temptation we should resist, and here’s why.

First, we haven’t yet reached 50 per cent women at all levels of elected public office, and until we do we can’t afford to relax. That means not just 50 per cent women in the parliamentary Labour party, but also in every council group, in the devolved bodies, in the European parliamentary party, and, yes, even on parish and town councils.

In other words, stopping when we reach 40 per cent, or some mythical ‘critical mass’, is not good enough. There is no real evidence for the idea that once you reach 30 per cent the momentum women themselves create will carry you through; in fact, the evidence from Scandinavia is that once you stop doing what works you go backwards again. So we need to keep going.

Second, we need to wake up to the fact that, until we have far more women in leadership roles at local level we will be kidding ourselves about how successful we are. In England, just 18 (16 per cent) of our 115 council leaders are women, and the position is worse in Scotland and Wales. This cannot and should not be acceptable.

Third, we need to create local parties and local authority Labour groups which are welcoming, not just to women, but to everyone, of whatever background, and with whatever skills and abilities. There is good practice out there, but we all know that there are also places where complaints of bullying, harassment and unacceptable behaviour emerge from time to time. We need to deal with that openly and honestly if we are to be the kind of party people want to join, work for and represent.

Fourth, we need to make sure that women are both audible and visible at every level of our campaigning, and involved in work on the economy and foreign policy as well as equal pay and sexual violence. It is not good enough to have platforms and panels without women on them, and if we would not do it ourselves we should be making it clear to people who run events at our conferences that it is not acceptable for them, either. And when the election comes, we should find women front and centre in the campaign, not pushed to the side as they have sometimes been in the past

Finally, we have to ask men to step up and be heard. It should not be left to women to campaign about what are so often regarded as ‘women’s issues’. We need to see and hear prominent male politicians talking about improving rape convictions, prosecuting and preventing domestic violence, condemning sexual assault and harassment. We need to hear them speaking about these things, not just to women who fear, suffer or survive them, but also to men, the majority of whom would also like to see something done but do not always see it as their job to do it. In other words, brothers, we need to hear the things we know you think privately said publicly; we need a feminist leadership which is not afraid to describe itself as such.

Of course none of these things are easy to achieve, but they are all worth fighting for. Otherwise we will simply reduce women’s presence and representation in our political life to part of the yah-boo of politics that everyone hates, with the intermittent and unedifying spectacle of male party leaders arguing about how many women they can muster on their benches.

As a party, we are better than that, and resisting the temptation to rest on our laurels is one way of proving it.

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Nan Sloane is a member of the Labour Women’s Network management committee and is a former regional director of the Labour party. She writes in a personal capacity

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Photo: gaelx