Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 25th February 2021 Lords Chamber

The 2007 legislative guidance was a move in the right direction. I see no reason to change that guidance. I look to the Minister to continue to defend these open and democratic principles. I assure him that in doing so he will have strong support from the Liberal Democrat Benches, and sharp criticism if he should falter.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am glad to be following the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. I welcome the Government accepting amending the Bill. I listened very carefully to the very wise words of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, today and the comprehensive tutorial on development from the noble Lord, Lord Winston.

This Bill concerns maternity allowances for Ministers. For a group to be protected by the law, they must be properly identified in the law, and all I would like to say is that I feel that this amendment is a start.

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, I too warmly welcome the Government’s decision to accept my noble friend Lord Lucas’s amendments. I join everyone in this House who in the last debate offered the Attorney-General their best wishes. Having a child is one of the most magical moments in a woman’s life and it is right that a Minister should be allowed to take maternity leave.

I particularly thank the Minister for his understanding and his realisation that many women felt offended. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, who, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, would say, had the testosterone to start this most important debate.

It would have been ironic if, having spent years as a commodity broker, asserting myself and my rights as a woman in a male-dominated environment, I had found that 30 years later women had become a neutral object, neither man nor woman but a person. This is the ideology of the madhouse—or, to put it another way, we might as well have declared that biology was to be struck from the school curriculum. It is a plain fact of human existence that only women can become pregnant and that therefore this piece of legislation could not have been gender neutral. It would have amounted to acquiescing to the obsessive “woke” culture infesting so many aspects of our lives.

There is another issue. As my noble friend Lord Cormack and others pointed out, it is also a matter of language. English is not my mother tongue—or maybe I should say my “person’s tongue”. In fact, it is my third language. Maybe it is for that reason that I appreciate its beauty, its richness and, compared to other European languages I know, its greater flexibility. English is a language that adapts itself to law, to business and to humour better than most others. That is why so many want to learn English. Our schools and universities are a huge source of income and soft power.

Things have moved on a lot since the gender-neutral protocol in 2013 but not all for the better. We are on a slippery slope towards the complete debasement of our language. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, said in his passionate speeches, words and phrases such as “chestfeeders”, “birthing bodies” and “menstruators”—my autocorrect does not even recognise that last one—are truly unacceptable. I am not sure whether many foreigners will want to continue sending their children to learn English in the UK if we allow this kind of gender derangement to run riot through our language. It is bad enough to see grammatical mistakes, even commonly on the BBC, but corrupting the English language to this extent and demeaning women with reference to a gender-neutral person was just a step too far. I am delighted that the word “person” has been changed and will be “mother” in the Bill. Let us not continue down this dangerous path.