Elected Members of Legislative Council: The post-1962 era.

From the February 1962 election on, women were eligible to be elected onto the Legislative Council by the House of Keys. By the end of the 1970s the number of ex officio officers with a vote had sharply dropped, and the appointed members of the Legislative Council had entirely disappeared. Members of Legislative Council elected by the Keys (by this point largely synonymous with MLC) formed the majority, and then overwhelming majority, of Council. How did the Keys use their power to determine the membership of the Council?

Who did the Keys elect as MLCs?

A very significant theme in the pre-1962 era was that MHKs elected MHKs (or less commonly former MHKs), or sitting MLCs (who had normally become MLCs for the first time following being an MHK). How far did this pattern of electing from within Tynwald continue?

As mentioned earlier, there is no moment equivalent to the Keys General Election at which to take stock of the membership of the Legislative Council. It is useful however, to consider the election patterns of the Keys decade by decade.

	Number of seats elected to.	Number of sitting MHKs/MLCs	Number of former MHKS/MLCs.	% of Tynwald or former Tynwald.	% new to Tynwald.
1960s	7	7	0	100%	0%
1970s	12 (excluding 1 ruled invalid)	12	0	100%	0%
1980s	16	13	3	100%	0%
1990s	17	15	2	100%	0%
2000s	18	14	1	84%	16%
2010s	19	12	0	63%	37%
2020s (so far)	6	2	0	33%	67%

	Number of candidates, including being considered on multiple sittings for the same seat.	Number of sitting MHKs/MLCs	Number of former MHKS/MLCs.	% of Tynwald or former Tynwald.	% new to Tynwald.
1960s	14	14	0	100%	0%
1970s	29	28	1	100%	0%
1980s	39	25	11	92%	8%
1990s	41	23	9	78%	22%
2000s	67	31	10	61%	39%
2010s	58	24	0	41%	59%
2020s (so far)	16	2	1	19%	81%

A clear change, then, is the shift, first visible in the 2000s, of MHKs electing from outside of the House of Keys. This was preceded by a sharp increase in the percentage of candidates, albeit usually unsuccessful candidates, from outside Tynwald over the preceding decade. This had itself been modestly prefigured in the 1981 election, where a bye-election was triggered by the resignation of Kneale to join the Keys. No MHK stood, but four ex-MHKs did stand, and one (George Swales) was elected. The seat in Council, however, had very little time left to run, which may have accounted for no MHK wishing to be considered – certainly proposers stressed the short-term nature of the post, and the difficulty of filling it from within the Keys (a situation which, in the past, had justified an understanding that the successful candidate would be re-elected at the next normal election). Ex-MHKs and none-MHKs similarly dominated the 1987 election triggered by the death of Matthew Ward; and the 1988 election triggered by the death of Donald Maddrell. It was not until the 1990s that significant numbers of non-MHKs/MLCs began to be considered in the election process for full-term seats, but from the 2010s the majority of candidates for the Legislative Council had not sat in Tynwald before.

This is a significant change, and may be due to the erosion of two themes that I identified pre-1962.

Firstly, the idea that MLCs should be loyal partisans of the Keys in representing the democratic element in the Manx constitution, and that this was best guaranteed by electing an MHK known well to the House. This idea almost disappeared in the post-1962 era. There are occasional, rare, references to a particular candidate’s democratic legitimacy being derived from former electoral performance in the Keys – for instance the proposer of Mrs Cannell in 2010 indicating that she “still has a political mandate from the people of East Douglas given to her at the last General Election”. There are more common references to success in local government elections for candidates with no Tynwald experience, but these are normally deployed to show experience and therefore appointability, rather than democratic legitimacy (but see the reference to “an electoral mandate, albeit from a different college” in 2005).

Instead, we find repeated references to the Legislative Council having a complementary, secondary, role to the Keys. The distinctive contribution of the Council meant that “it should not be an alternative House of Keys”, and its special role in scrutiny of legislation resulted in particular candidates being endorsed because of their ability to contribute to the technical capacity of the Legislative Council as a scrutiny body. There is sufficient detail in the documentation for each election to allow us to explore what professions and life-experiences were seen as fitting a candidate for the Legislative Council (a project for another time); but loyalty to the Keys ceases to be a prominent theme.

Secondly, the idea that becoming an MLC was a reward for contribution to the life of Tynwald, and a form of semi-retirement, similarly almost entirely evaporated over the period. It can be seen early in the period, but the last flicker seems to be in the election of 1978. Mr Kermeen noted the demands of Tynwald and suggested that “regard should be given to the strain on any member [MHK] who has achieved his three-score-and-ten years”; while Mr Radcliffe noted the desire of two MLCs seeking re-election “to see one more year in this Chamber because of the Millenium”, leading Mrs Quayle to note that one of them “has given very long and very valuable service to this Island, and in my opinion if he wants one more year we should give it to him”.

Women join the Legislative Council.

	Number of candidates.	Number of woman candidates	Number of seats.	Number of women elected.
1960s	14	0	7	0
1970s	29	1	12 (excluding 1 ruled invalid)	0
1980s	39	6	16	1
1990s	41	2	17	2
2000s	67	7	18	3
2010s	58	13	19	6
2020s (so far)	16	8	6	2

As can be seen above, it was some time after the bar on women being elected was lifted before a woman candidate was first put forward. This was Betty Hanson MHK, who was nominated in the 1978 election. She went on, in 1982, to be the first woman to be elected an MLC; to be followed by a small number of other women in the 1990s and 2000s, all of whom had experience as MHKs before joining the Council.

There was a significant change in the 2010s, however, both in terms of the number of women being considered and appointed, and their prior involvement with Tynwald. Women were appointed to seats six times in the 2010s – the appointments between 2017 and 2020 being equal to the number of women appointed before 2010. Jane Poole-Wilson was appointed for a short term in 2017, not having previously  sat in Tynwald. In the 2018 contest, which included both her seat and four others, five women were appointed; with only Poole-Wilson having sat in Tynwald previously.

In conclusion, increased representation of women in the Legislative Council – even when legally possible – did not begin until the 1970s. It gained momentum alongside an erosion of the expectation that MLCs would previously have been in Tynwald as MHKs: an expectation that could have allowed the low levels of membership of women in the Keys in earlier decades to cast a long shadow over women’s membership of the Legislative Council. Although there have only been two processes in the 2020s, a focus on them tentatively suggests that this increase in women being nominated and elected, and in non-MHKs being nominated and elected, is continuing: 50% of the candidates in the 2020s processes were women, and 81% of the candidates had not previously sat in Tynwald.

(This blog also appears on the Women in Manx Politics blog).