Former Africa Minister and MEP, Baroness Glenys Kinnock has recorded a brief video endorsing the Labour Diversity Fund. Baroness Kinnock, whose husband Neil Kinnock led the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992, is also currently Opposition Spokesperson for the Department of International Development in the House of Lords:

Labour MP for Streatham, Chuka Ummuna, has recorded a brief video in support of the Labour Diversity Fund:

Ed Balls MP has recorded a new video in support of the Labour Diversity Fund, which is now available to view on the campaign’s homepage.

In the video, Mr Balls comments:

I think one of Labour’s great achievements in the last 10 years is to see the number of women in Parliament rising, although there’s still more to do: we need to double numbers to get to fair representation. The same is true with the rise in BAME MPs as well: we’ve still got to double the numbers. But one of the areas which really worries me is the absolute decline we’ve seen since 1997 in the number of MPs from a working class, from a skilled or unskilled manual background. Part of the reason is that, these days with one-member-one-vote, it’s much more expensive to be a candidate for selection as an MP. If you think of it… time off work, potentially hiring a car, 300 members to see, all the letters to send out and maybe printed materials… It’s going to cost two or three thousand pounds to be selected as a candidate, and if you find two or three, before you get there, ten thousand pounds. And there aren’t many people with ten thousand pounds and an understanding employer around. That’s why I think we need to think about this hard. I’ve proposed a Diversity Fund in this leadership election to divert some of the money we raise from our fund-raising to support people who want to be candidates: women, BAME, but also those from low-income backgrounds and middle-income backgrounds who want to be MPs. To give them financial support so that they can break through some of those barriers… I think it’s the best way to make sure our politics is properly representative. I think this Diversity Fund is a really good idea, and I hope we can take it forward in the coming months.