International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Baroness Flather Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Flather (CB)]

My Lords, I was here for the Finance (No.2) Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, was saying how few people had taken part in the Second Reading, so one noble Lord who was still there said, “Well, it’s because the next debate is so important. But if this debate is so important, why are so few men taking part? Nothing will change in the world unless the men commit themselves also to improving women’s lot. It cannot be done by women alone and I am sure that all the women here know that perfectly well. Until half the people speaking in this debate are men, I will feel quite disappointed. I had been hoping for this all along. I have been in your Lordships’ House since 1990 and it has not happened yet. It is amazing to think that we can do this alone.

Men have really been in the lead since time immemorial: men have been this, men have been that, while women have not. We used to think the cavemen were ahead of the women, but now they have found that cavewomen were very strong indeed. Maybe that will give us an important point to work towards. As has already been said, this whole concept of women today is global and not just British. I thank the Minister as well that it is global. There are so many different and unbelievable things happening in our world that sitting in this Chamber, we cannot really get our heads around it, but we ought to try if we can.

First, I want to remind ourselves of what is happening to some of the women in this country. We already know that a sharia marriage is not recognised by British law. What does that mean for a woman who has a sharia marriage? She has no rights whatever. Is that the right thing? She cannot ask for anything from her husband. He can put her out on the street and that is it. He can sometimes even put the children out on the street. When people say to him, “Why don’t you look after your family?”, he will say, “The Government will look after them”. There are two negative points to this: first, the woman has no rights and, secondly, the Government have to pay to look after that woman and have no claims against the husband. The sooner this is looked at and changed, the better. It is quite wrong for people to come to live in this country and to follow rules which are completely the opposite of what we believe in. It is not right and will never become right. We have to look at these things and say they are not acceptable.

It is nothing to do with religion: sharia is not a religious law, but a law which has been created by the priests—the maulvis. It changes from country to country, and sometimes it changes from one group of three presiding priests to the next three presiding priests.

So please make an effort to get this put right. It is appalling. The statistics tell us that more than 60% of women under 40 could be in unregistered sharia marriages. The families do not like registration. Why should they? Is it not much better for them if they do not have to do anything for their wives? This bothers and upsets me. A sharia review said clearly that these marriages should be registered. What has been done as a result of the Casey report? We know these things are not right, but we just go on doing them. We should know much better.

In many countries there are laws to protect women—in India, for example, there are a lot. If you were to ask a lawyer, they would tell you, “Oh, we have this, we have that”. Ask them how much is enforced. Nothing is enforced, or what is enforced is a minute fraction. It is no use having a law that is not enforced. It is far better to have fewer laws that are enforced. There are a lot of lawyers here today, so I am sure they will agree with me.

In Africa and India put together there are 1 billion women, and they do more work than the men in these areas—it is said that women do more than three-quarters of the work. When I was in Jamaica I saw the women doing far more work than the men. I begged them to have a one-day strike and to do nothing except look after the very sick and the children.

Women have worked very hard in every age and at every stage. They did not have, for example, the support of religion. You might say that religion could have supported women. Some people, such as the Sikhs, say, “Oh, but we believe in equality”. Yes, their religion believes in equality, but it does not exist in fact. So we have also had the burden of religion saying to women, “your place is here”—Kirche, Küche, Kinder—“not in public life”.

I felt quite close to the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, when she said that she did not like being called “the first and the only one”. All my life I have been called “the first and the only one” because that is how my life started. When I came to this House in 1990, I was “the only one”. There were very few women here then as well. I was “the first” to be the Mayor of Windsor. Things have been happening but I think we need to be in these positions because it encourages others to realise that if this woman can do it, they can do it as well. Always be proud of what you have done and what you are able to show other people that you can do.

I would like to talk about women’s attitudes towards other women. It is improving, but it has been quite bad. Women have not been willing to support other women. We have to learn to support each other all the time in everything. I hope this will happen in due course because younger women are much more aware of it.

Lastly, how do we change the attitude of mothers towards their sons and daughters? We have done a lot of work in this country and attitudes have changed, but there is a whole, vast world still where the son is the prince—not the daughter.