International Women’s Day

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I attend this debate regularly but do not always—or even often—put my name down to speak. I feel that what I need to do in attending the debates is to listen hard to what is being said and to gather some kind of range or spectrum of ideas and issues—things to be happy about and things to concern us—as the debate unfolds. I have put my name down this time and, before moving on to another part of my speech, I just say that I hope that the House has heard the stabbing, persistent and passionate questions of the noble Lord, Lord Bates. Our Parliament should be ashamed of itself of how it—all parties—has handled the question of overseas aid over recent time. It is scandalous. Having worked overseas and knowing that it is women who are at the heart of most of the aid that goes from this country, I believe that we simply cannot allow ourselves to indulge in the normal range of concerns, congratulations and the rest of it.

In August, I am going to be standing in a graveyard in Burry Port, where I come from, by the grave of my mother. It will be the 50th anniversary of her death. If I have been shaped by anybody, it has been by her. When she married young, the marriage did not work out and there was a bitter and acrimonious divorce. My father could afford a lawyer, while my mother could not, and so she was named as the guilty person, evicted from the family home and she went with two boys into homelessness and misery.

I remember my mother’s screams, but I remember even more pertinently her sobbing at the violence she received from my father as he departed from the marriage. It was an extraordinary series of events, culminating after the enactment of the law that gave us national assistance by an application on my mother’s behalf for some benefit from it. She had had a bad injury in the factory where she worked, carrying heavy sheets of steel from one part of the process to another, and she could not work. I will never forget the man with a briefcase who came—petty officials get up my nostrils. She was accused of being a malingerer and was told that she had no right to take money from the state, and the rest of it. I was 10; my brother was nine. We lived in one room in a brickyard. We looked each other in the eye, turned on him, beat him up, kicked him and threw him out. We feared that that would mean that we would have no entitlement to the benefit. Mercifully, the powers that be saw that the man who treated us in that way was himself to be reprimanded.

My mother, who suffered abuse, eviction, homelessness, poverty, misery, pain and injury at work, rose above all of that. She had a translucent personality. She was generous, she never complained, she never pointed the finger at anybody and she was not judgmental. She did not go to church, because she thought that that was judgmental. She smoked. She backed a horse sixpence each way—but only in the big races, she used to tell us. She did her bingo and she loved it. I used to go and post the football coupons for her—to Vernons, it was. And, of course, she was divorced, which was a stigma in those days. None of that dragged her down. She said, by the way, “I’m not going to go to the chapel and give those preachers too much to preach about”. Quite right she was, because I heard a number of those kinds of sermons in my time.

I would like the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, to add Olwen Thomas to the list of great Welsh women that she gave us earlier. I remind myself, as I ask for that, of the wonderful verse by Thomas Gray, his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.

“Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,


And waste its sweetness on the desert air”.

My mother was gigantic. I have learnt generosity, not to have a chip on my shoulder and to enjoy life, largely because she shaped me, gave me my platform and all the rest of it.

Let me say one last word. Others have been indulged; I claim the same indulgence. I passed my 11-plus without knowing that I had sat it. When I went to the grammar school, still wearing no underwear, having no pyjamas or anything like that—we were desperately poor—I walked through its door as a poor boy from the lowest level of British society. As I said to some headteachers just two days ago, they must not only think about their concerns, strategies, philosophies and the rest of it. They need to recognise that the schoolchildren coming through the door to their classrooms may have come from the sort of background that I came from. The people who debate the grand themes of this kind in this Chamber should always remember the lowest of the low, who are the ones in most need of benefit. If women mean anything, they would focus on that.