International Women’s Day

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Stansgate. How wonderful it is to have a full day’s debate marking International Women’s Day. I pay tribute to all those who made it possible, especially my noble sister Lady Gale. As the first woman general secretary of the Welsh Labour Party, she is a legend in that beautiful land of male voice choirs and anthems for peace. I also look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Casey of Blackstock, and to her no doubt many more outstanding contributions to your Lordships’ House in the years ahead.

A story in yesterday’s Guardian begins as follows:

“A document from Prevent, the official scheme to stop radicalisation, includes believing in socialism, communism, anti-fascism and anti-abortion in a list of potential signs of ideologies leading to terrorism”.


What on earth are the Government thinking? I am no communist and I am pro-choice. I am the product of my own personal post-war human rights journey, but the idea that those I disagree with are inherently dangerous is as ridiculous as it would be for me not to acknowledge the significant contribution of British Conservatives to international human rights-building in the second half of the last century.

I want to pay tribute to Clara Zetkin. A political refugee from Bismarck’s Germany in the late 1800s, she later returned to become an organiser, a dear friend of Rosa Luxemburg and the driving force behind International Women’s Day. Later still, as the oldest deputy in the Reichstag in 1932 and at considerable personal risk, she presided over the opening session, using her address to call for working people to unite against fascism. Sadly, we still need acts of such courage in too much of the world today. I am all for the many corporate events now associated with International Women’s Day, but let us never forget its roots in working women’s struggles for suffrage, including when some of their wealthier sisters were happy limiting the franchise to propertied women, and for equal pay in particular.

This Motion is to take note of

“the steps taken to promote the economic inclusion of women”.

We should take no prisoners in identifying the steps not yet taken and the iniquities yet to be addressed. So long after the first Equal Pay Act in the United Kingdom, our gender pay gap is still embarrassingly wide. I hope noble Lords will forgive me for boring them with this previously, including in this debate last year, but equal pay law contains a fatal flaw. There is no enforcement mechanism other than relying on individual women, with or without the help of their trade unions, to investigate what their male colleagues are being paid for the same or equivalent work and then to sue their employers. We would never take this approach to food, school or environmental standards or any other regulatory framework that we even attempt to take seriously in our complex modern world. We must have not just more pay transparency but state enforcement mechanisms involving our trade unions.

AI presents many challenges to our rights and freedoms, but an obvious opportunity lies in the relative ease with which it might be deployed to analyse payroll and other financial information already in the hands of, for example, HMRC. It would allow spot-checking and targeted investigations of companies’ equal pay practice, whatever they claim on their websites and parrot once a year on 8 March.

I am delighted to say that, as of last summer’s National Policy Forum document, this appears to be embryonic Labour policy, thanks to the advocacy of young women senior trade unionists, such as Rhea Wolfson of the GMB, putting these issues on the agenda and transforming the face of our trade unions better to reflect our rapidly changing world of work. She is the final woman to whom I pay tribute today.

Rogue employers beware: these contemporary feminist trade unionists are on the case. Yes, we want more women at the top tables of power in boardrooms and Cabinet rooms, but we must also take care of the women who serve at those tables and build them, who care for the children and the elderly right across the supply chain. In the economic resettlement that must come, as a result of climate change and technological revolution, there must be no gender gap at all. Can the Minister agree? Or is this considered so radical as to be branded extreme by the thought police of the Home Office and the ironically titled Department for Levelling Up?