Revised gender arithmetic

The decision by Sarah Wollaston to join the Liberal Democrats came as no surprise to those who have followed her career since being elected for Totnes, one of two MPs having been selected as candidates following an open primary. The only surprise is that she lingered so long in the half-way house of The Independent Group. It seems that she was taking her time to make sure that she was accepted by her local Liberal Democrat party and possibly to explain her position to those close to her who had supported her as a Conservative. In April, before she even left an increasingly reactionary Conservative party, she made clear to the House that she moved from soft Leave to Remain as a result of chairing:
the Health and Social Care Committee, I heard the evidence of harm week in, week out, and I came to the view that I was wrong. I was not afraid to say that. In fact, many colleagues said to me, “Don’t tell people that you’ve changed your mind. Just put a cross in a different box. It will be very bad for your political career if you change your mind.” It is astonishing that we have come to that—that parliamentarians are not honest and are not prepared to change their mind when they have looked at the evidence. We focus on the idea that this is all about a WTO Brexit and trade, but from chairing the Health and Social Care Committee it became obvious to me that there is clear evidence of harm to social care, science and research from unpicking a close relationship that has brought enormous benefits for more than four decades. I looked at the harm that Brexit would cause to science and research. There is no version of Brexit that will benefit science and research, improve the situation for our health and social care workforce, or do anything positive for NHS funding.

Anyway, I make it that the Liberal Democrats now have fourteen MPs plus Stephen Lloyd who for complicated reasons currently sits as an Independent. Of those, six are women, a percentage of 40%.