International Women’s Day

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I gave the Minister advance notice that I will speak about the need for a feminist UK foreign policy. She may be expecting me to major on the cutting of foreign aid below the 0.7% of GDP that is set in our law, but I assume that the Government will eventually have to stop breaking the law and bring a Bill to the House. While I am often thinking of the desperate women, men, and children of Yemen, pounded by our weapons and denied our aid, for the moment I will put that issue to one side.

Since this is the International Women’s Day debate, I want to think and speak more conceptually, particularly in the light of the announcement from the Biden Administration that their intention is to:

“Protect and empower women around the world”.


Across the channel, the French Government declare explicitly that they have a feminist foreign policy. I am not hearing the same terminology from the UK. But it is not really terminology that I am interested in, but policy and action.

Around the world, women and girls are increasingly using human rights law to try to force climate justice, from the Union of Swiss Senior Women for Climate Protection going to the European Court of Human Rights to the case that 16 children are taking to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

However, a feminist foreign policy goes well beyond protective action and positive action. It goes beyond steps such as those outlined to me earlier today by the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, in supporting access to modern methods of contraception. It is about a transformation of our economic and political systems. It is not just a case of doing some positive things but of reversing centuries of damaging choices and policies; millennia of assuming that humans and the natural world exist to serve that creation of a few—mostly male—humans: the market. It means not operating for the military-industrial complex, or the fossil fuel-finance complex, but making a world that creates a decent life for every individual, from every newborn baby to every centenarian, and that allows ecosystems to flourish and wildlife, for a start, to survive. A feminist foreign policy must be guided by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. It means ending what the academic Karen Warren has called the “logic of domination”.

Some global progress is being made, notably in the increasing operationalisation of the rights to universal healthcare which have long been contained in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—not, however, in the UK, where access to healthcare has been taken backwards for many non-citizens. But there is a growing understanding that we need to go beyond medicine and talk about the need for care societies—a concept with enormous potential, as demonstrated by the Women’s Budget Group’s plan for a care-led recovery from coronavirus.

I have talked largely in big abstract terms. What does all this mean in practice? It means caring for and welcoming refugees as survivors of our disastrous policies, large parts of their wealth having been robbed from them, rather than treating them as threats. It means stopping pumping vast quantities of arms into a world choked with them. Last year the UK was the world’s second-largest arms exporter: £11 billion of exported destruction. Many women, children and men will die as a result. It means acknowledging the historic and continuing massive damage of colonialism, and paying reparations for it; the frame of “loss and damage” at the COP 26 talks provides an important potential way forward.

What has been called the malestream—millennia of thinking of the planet as a mine and a dumping ground and people as an exploitable asset—has produced a maelstrom of destruction and a world on the edge of disaster. A feminist world can be one that lives within the physical limits of this one fragile planet while caring for all. Caring is key.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Healy of Primrose Hill) (Lab)]

I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. Please can you unmute, Lord Bradshaw? We still cannot hear you. I will move on to the next speaker while we try to sort you out. I call the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth.