International Women’s Day and Protecting the Equality of Women in the UK and Internationally

Debate between Baroness Thornton and Baroness Kennedy of Shaws

Thursday 17th March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Hear, hear. First, I apologise to the Committee for my seated comments to my noble friend Lord Young. I want to say something to the noble Lords, Lord Farmer, Lord Young and Lord Clement-Jones, who all meant very well by what they said—and I think we could all agree about the need for careful and respectful debate, and not taking for granted or assuming what people might think or what they might be saying. The only thing that I would say to them is that I have been a feminist all my life. One thing that you learn as a feminist, and as someone who has been active in women’s politics, is that you need to be in control of the battles that you fight. I say to them that it is great that they feel as strongly as they do, and please support me and my feminist friends in any way you can, but actually the fight is ours.

I intend to make a speech that is about breaking the bias and about ending the prejudice and discrimination that women face on a daily basis in 2022. As other noble Lords have said, of course, who could not be absolutely choked up when we heard little Gabriella saying “Mummy” to her mummy? Goodness me, is it not wonderful that that family is reunited? I pay tribute to my honourable friend Tulip Siddiq, the MP for that family. I also wish everybody a happy St Patrick’s Day.

I thank the Minister for getting us this debate because, like other noble Lords, I am sure that she will agree that it deserves to be in the main Chamber; so I will just ask her to put it in the diaries of the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip for next year and mount a campaign—one that we will all join her in—to make sure that we get the debate that we want on the special day on which we want it. I did, however, visit Central England Co-op’s wonderful International Women’s Day debate at the National Memorial Arboretum last week, and spent a very lovely morning there. It was not New York, but it was actually a great event. My job there was to speak about bias in my life and lessons to be learned, so I thought I might mention a few biases that I have known and experienced.

The first example I want to mention involves my late mum, Jean Thornton, the eldest of 11 children in a working-class family in Batley and Spen. I cannot remember a time in my life when I was not aware that my mum was top of her class in her primary school. She was very ill and failed to be able to take her 11-plus exams, and despite the fact that her teachers were really very keen that she should take it, her family did not arrange for her to re-sit it, but they did send her brother to the grammar school the following year and could not afford two sets of uniforms. She felt that missed opportunity literally all her life, which is why I can remember it: I have always known this story about my mum missing that opportunity and suffering from that bias.

Even though she made a great success of her working life and her public life and had seven children of her own, it did make her very ambitious for us, her six daughters. I am the eldest of seven. When the head teacher suggested—and it has to be said that I was definitely a troublesome, campaigning sixth-former—that I might not be university material, and should settle for a teacher-training college, I was not actually sure that he would escape with his life. I did, indeed, head to the LSE.

When I was in my early 30s, in the 1980s, I decided to take a pop at getting selected as a parliamentary candidate in Bradford, when one of our Labour MPs had died. Those of you who have subjected yourself to the ordeal of trying to be selected to fight a parliamentary seat will know that you have to attend a lot of meetings to sell yourself to the members of the local party. However, two of the meetings for this parliamentary selection were held in local working men’s clubs in Bradford, and I, as a woman, could not enter. I had to be signed in and escorted through the club; so while I watched all the other candidates, who were all men, waltz into the selection meeting, I had to wait until the secretary came to sign me in and escort me to the meeting.

At the time, I probably did what most of the women here would have done: I just got on with it. I made the best speech that I could and, needless to say, I did not get selected. It did, however, harden me, and it gave me a campaigning zeal to change the Labour Party selection rules and to ensure that there would be a great pipeline of women ready to stand for election. So in 1997 we saw the 100-plus Labour women, and now more than half of our Parliamentary Labour Party are women.

We have all experienced bias, be it minor but annoying. For example, I am fairly sure that when I came to your Lordships’ House in 1998, Conservative women here in the House did not wear trousers. I do not know if there was a rule or what, but it simply was not done.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

It was the same in the courts.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

Yes, it was the same in the courts. In 1998, women Peers had two little toilets that were by the Chamber. The men still had the splendid Victorian ones, but we gained the one just around the corner within a few years.

Then, of course, the bias goes to the downright dangerous and discriminatory. I have an admiration for the organisation Pregnant Then Screwed. This is partly because, when I was pregnant with my first child, I was without doubt the most senior person in the whole co-operative movement to have ever taken maternity leave; I was not that senior, actually. The chair of the committee for which I worked simply thought that I was being awkward and unco-operative by not saying exactly when I would return to work after my baby was born. Today, I would have known to take out a complaint and have them in a tribunal as quick as you like, but I did not know and so just had not as happy a time during my pregnancy as I should have had.

In the medical and health world where I work, there is still a clinical bias whereby medicines and devices are designed for and tested on men. This is changing but, of course, it is potentially dangerous and certainly can be very uncomfortable. The bias, otherwise known as misogynism, in our police, which has been mentioned already, has appalling consequences for both individual women and their treatment. We know about Sarah Everard but, more recently, a young girl was strip-searched at her school, including the removal of her sanitary wear, by two police officers. She was traumatised by her treatment, which took place without her mother or an adult present.

We have the lowest rape convictions for an age, as noble Lords have mentioned. As Dame Vera Baird said, 1.5% of rape cases reach court, meaning that 98% do not. We have long argued for the inclusion of domestic abuse and sexual offences in the definition of “serious violence”. We argued for violence against women and girls to be a strategic policing issue, given the same prominence as terrorism and organised crime. We argued for safeguards to be set out on the extraction of data from victims’ phones. We argued for a lifting of the limit for prosecution of common assault or battery in domestic abuse cases. We argued for a review into spiking, so that we can get to the bottom of this appalling practice. None of these measures were included in the Government’s original Bill. They are all there as a result of the campaigning work of women’s organisations, the Labour Party and, I have to say, the Liberal Democrats and other Members of your Lordships’ House. We have changed the law for women for the better. The Government have been asked some pertinent questions by my noble friend Lady Kennedy about ensuring that misogyny is made a hate crime and publishing a perpetrator strategy at the end of the month, as the Domestic Abuse Act requires. The Government must adopt these measures.

Turning to health, the area in which I work, we need the women’s health strategy to be produced. I am pleased that the Secretary of State has now said that it will be. The UK has been found to have the largest female health gap in the G20 and the 12th-largest globally. Research has shown a gender health gap in the UK where many women receive poorer healthcare than men and are routinely misunderstood, mistreated and misdiagnosed. There is still a great deal of work to do.

I want briefly to turn to the international issues mentioned by several noble Lords. I just want to add my voice and say this: what a short-sighted, counter- productive decision it was to reduce funding for women and girls across the world at every single level. This was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, my noble friend Lady Armstrong—virtually everybody. We need to return the funding for women and girls to its pre-2020 level; this requires the return of the £1.9 billion in programming. We need it now. We cannot afford not to find it.

I want to mention two other issues. One is to do with bias and tone. Both the current Secretary of State for Health and his predecessor have called out my honourable colleague Rosena Allin-Khan at the Dispatch Box because they did not appreciate her tone. That makes me quite angry because when men do that and say to women, “You’re not using the right tone, my dear”, what they are actually saying is, “You shouldn’t be speaking at all. Please speak only with our permission”. I place that on the table but, do not worry, my honourable friend Rosena is absolutely aware what is happening: those men are saying that she should not be speaking.

Finally, the Labour Party is the party of equality. We are the party of the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equality Act. We understand that our society, our economy and our country are poorer if women cannot play their full part. Women hold the key to a stronger economy. My noble friend Lord Sikka was quite right and I have been asking, all the time I have been in the House, for gender impact assessments. We have been asking for them for many years, so I plead with the Minister to add that to her to-do list.

International Women’s Day is always a bittersweet moment. It celebrates how far we have come, which is a great distance—certainly a great distance in the time I have been in your Lordships’ House—but also notes, with regret, how far we still have to go. It is a chance to recommit ourselves to the struggle for women, the girls of today, and our daughters and granddaughters of tomorrow. Women across the country and the world deserve security, prosperity and respect. We think a Labour Government would give them that but, for as long as we are still on these Benches, we will push the Government to deliver it.