Clik here to view.
What seemed signed and sealed 10 years ago now appears to be a chimera that fractured a progressive coalition
This week could and should have marked a transformation in the politics of the United Kingdom. The elections to English councils, to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies, and above all the AV vote, taken together, add up to a Super Thursday. It should also have been the moment when it became clear that women belonged at the heart of devolved politics. It could have been a truly progressive moment. The souring of the promise of electoral reform, and the probable demolition of a new politics, have many different sources – but both warn of the daunting conservatism of British political culture and its institutions.
Hope is not entirely dead. If everyone who wants political change turns out to support AV on Thursday, the bookies now raking in the cash for a no vote could yet have an expensive night. There is no such prospect for gender balance in Wales and Scotland. What seemed signed and sealed 10 years ago now appears to be a chimera that, with the premature belief that it was won, fractured the progressive coalition which had fought for the cause. Last month research for the Guardian confirmed what the Hansard Society had already anticipated, that less than a third of candidates were female. In Scotland, all five of the Labour women constituency MSPs who are retiring have been replaced by men, and if the very male SNP does as well as the polls suggest then the number of women in Edinburgh's parliament will tumble to a new low. As in Scotland, so in Wales, even though in 2003 half of its assembly members were women – setting a world record. So much for the idea that with critical mass comes change that cannot be undone.
Experience in Scotland and Wales has revealed an ineluctable reassertion of the values of the old politics, where conflict and confrontation are scored above compromise and conciliation, and reporting is too often about style and not often enough about substance. And then there is the relentless day-and-night news agenda, the morale-sapping personal scrutiny and the basic level of political debate in which, at Westminster, "calm down, dear" can be hailed as a side-splitting example of Commons repartee.
Into this traditional political culture, in the words of the Edinburgh academic Fiona Mackay, the new politics was temporarily "nested" – and found to be more or less defenceless. For this is a culture so robust that not even the glorious new buildings , with their non-confrontational, hemispheric debating chambers, nor their soft architecture of family-friendly working and gender-balanced electoral systems, have been able to survive its corrosive embrace. Worse, the effort to institutionalise reform – through, for example, all-women shortlists – merely set up a headline-grabbing backlash that in 2005 cost Labour Blaenau Gwent for the parliament.
Electoral politics merely reflects the wider world. The apparent triumph of education that sees slightly more girls than boys go to university, train as doctors and qualify as lawyers is immediately undermined at work, where the culture into which they graduate can be reflected in the sentiments of Simon Murray, the Glencore chairman, who claimed last week that women just don't try hard enough to get to the top.
But constitutional and cultural conservatism does not only hold back women. Black and minority ethnic groups are at least as disadvantaged by it. It excludes difference, whether of class or creed or colour. This is the big lesson from the reverse in electoral politics' gender wars: advance was achieved not by women alone but by a progressive coalition, and it is undermined the moment that progressive coalition fades. Meanwhile, electoral reform has not even had a clear run at building a progressive coalition. The decline of women in the political heartlands is the miner's canary: a symptom of an even graver failure of progressive politics.