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• All women could lose their seats, says Fabian Society • Report suggests grandees give up safe constituencies The Liberal Democrats face the prospect of having no female MPs after the next election if their current poll ratings continue, the Fabian Society says. The society, affiliated to the Labour party, suggests radical moves for the Lib Dems such as making former leaders Charles Kennedy and Sir Menzies Campbell offer their safe seats to female candidates to reverse the trend. Only seven of the 57 Lib Dem MPs are female and in the last couple of months the party has created a “leadership programme” to ensure more women and members of ethnic minorities become MPs. A list of 50 candidates – 50% of them women and 30% ethnic minority – will get strong support to stand for some of the party’s safest seats. The party will not introduce all-women or all-black shortlists since its structure means it cannot impose decisions on local parties; but in recognition of the scale of the task, its central office will stipulate that if one candidate from the leadership programme is asked to stand, the local party must also ask another from the programme. Lib Dems say this provides a high chance that there will be 50 more candidates from under-represented groups at the next election than would otherwise be the case. In the Fabian Society report, its authors, Sunder Katwala and Seema Malhotra, show how the Lib Dems’ seven female MPs include five in the party’s 10 most vulnerable seats. There are no women in the party’s 20 safest seats – those with the largest majorities. The Fabian Society points out that the majority of all seven women Lib Dem MPs put together (17,224 votes) is only just greater than that of Nick Clegg in Sheffield Hallam (15,284). Most vulnerable is Lorely Burt in Solihull, whose majority is only 175 votes, followed by Annette Brooke in Mid Dorset (269) Katwala and Malhotra write: “If the current polls were even half right, not a single Lib Dem woman MP would survive. An early election where they held four out of five seats (a result they would bite your arm off for) could mean 43 men and two women.” They add: “It seems almost certain that the party’s currently poor 12% of women MPs will now fall to below where the Liberals were in the 1930s (one out of 10).” In his speech to the Lib Dems’ spring conference in March, Nick Clegg read out all the Lib Dem ministers in government, and asked the audience: “Do you notice something about that list? There are only two women on it. Our party is too male and too pale. I wish it wasn’t the case, but it is.” The report suggests that women in the Lib Dems face a “toxic triple cocktail”. If they fail to recover in the opinion polls, then both women and men will lose out. But the party’s unpopularity is made worse by the planned shrinking of the Commons from 650 MPs to 600, which will see the smallest new intake in any postwar election, slowing down progress because new intakes have tended to have a better gender balance than the whole house. “The Lib Dems would have expected to select six or seven new candidates to replace retiring MPs; this will probably now fall to two or three – even if all current seats were deemed winnable.” The third factor is that woman are often selected in less safe seats compared with men and “are proportionately more electorally vulnerable than their male counterparts”. The authors propose that the party drop its opposition to all-women shortlists for the two or three constituencies where it is certain to replace a sitting MP. They also suggest encouraging a “retirement or two” and, failing that, a swap: “Tinkering will merely limit the damage unless the Lib Dems respond to new boundaries by reopening every selection, with the aim that women candidates should contest a quarter of the party’s 20 most defendable seats, rather than none of them. “This might mean Sir Ming Campbell or Charles Kennedy swapping their safe seats with a colleague to defend a marginal. If this seems too difficult or painful, the party should admit it’s willing to run the risk of only electing men in 2015.” A Lib Dem spokesman said: “We have made steps towards positive discrimination in favour of women and ethnic minority candidates because we are the most under-representative party.” However, the spokesman added that “much more must be done”. Liberal Democrats Women Equality Allegra Stratton guardian.co.uk