International Women�s Day
Alex Brewer Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)
Ahead of International Women�s Day this Saturday, I want to celebrate women�s achievements. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) on securing this important debate today, on being a trailblazer for this Parliament�s diversity, and on speaking so passionately.
We have made the most amazing progress since the inaugural International Women�s Day following workers� rights protests in the early 20th century. Women in this country can now vote, start a business or undergo surgery on their own body without consulting a man. The absence of those rights might feel faintly ridiculous now, but they were hard won in our relatively recent past, and we must remember that they do not apply universally across the world. We must also recognise that, while so much progress has been made, given the current global political environment, this progress has never felt so precarious.
This year marks 250 years since Jane Austen�s birth, in our beautiful Hampshire countryside. Austen�s novels, despite high praise and popularity, were published anonymously, and it was her brother who often dealt with her publishing negotiations. One of her first books was simply written under the authorship: �By a Lady�. As we celebrate World Book Day today as well, it is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the enduring impact of authors such as Austen, who not only shaped our literary world but challenged the societal norms in their time.
Thankfully, women�s literature in the UK is no longer published anonymously, but we still live in a world where 122 million girls are out of school, 496 million adult women worldwide cannot read or write and women make up two thirds of the global illiterate population. Issues of education and illiteracy will be worsened by the recently announced cuts to international aid. That policy, as highlighted by the hon. Member for East Thanet (Ms Billington), will disproportionately harm women.
We need foreign policy with gender equality at its heart not just because it is the right thing to do, but because countries that educate girls do better economically for everyone. We must also increase international development funding initiatives that aim to eradicate sexual violence and abuse in areas of conflict. The UN confirmed a 50% rise in conflict-related sexual violence between 2022 and 2023. Women and girls made up 95% of the victims. It is not just sexual violence: 61% of preventable maternal mortality�that amounts to about 500 deaths a day�occurred in 35 crisis-affected countries, and the average incidence of child marriage was 14.4% higher in conflict-affected countries than in non-conflict settings.
Women continue to be abused across the world. Murder is still the leading cause of premature death in women, and as we have heard, every 10 minutes a woman or girl is murdered by her intimate partner or a family member. We heard powerful testimony from the hon. Member for Bolsover (Natalie Fleet) on rape and sexual assault. We must develop our support mechanisms by embedding domestic abuse specialists in every police force, increasing protections for refugees and expanding our rape crisis centres to tackle these crises.
I am proud to be the first female Member of Parliament for North East Hampshire�the 658th female MP on the list�and a Member of the Women and Equalities Committee. I support the powerful personal and professional testimony of our Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), who spoke on health inequalities, as did the hon. Members for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy), for Monmouthshire (Catherine Fookes) and for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Dr Tidball).
Strides are being made in the House to improve the lives of women and achieve equality. The Voyeurism (Offences) Act 2019, which was originally introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), criminalised upskirting.
It has been heartening to hear such powerful speeches across the House on a wide range of topics, but women must also be protected financially. Right now in the UK, women continue to be economically disadvantaged in the workplace. Median hourly pay for women is 7.7% less than for men, and in Hampshire that gap almost doubles. The gender pay gap also worsens with age: among full-time employees aged 40 and over, the gap widens considerably due to the motherhood penalty. That is not a fact that we should accept. Women deserve better from their workplaces and from the societal structures that enable that to continue. Policies such as increased paternity leave will help women to have a fair share of wages. Improving policy for women also improves it for men. As the hon. Member for Kettering (Rosie Wrighting) said, equality benefits everyone.
Today, I speak proudly as a progressive, internationalist, cosmopolitan woman inspired by the strength of women leaders. Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand impressed the world with her management of crises from terrorism to the pandemic while being the second-ever elected world leader to give birth in office. Kamala Harris was the first female, the first black and the first Asian-American Vice President of the USA. Sanna Marin, who became the world�s youngest Prime Minister in 2019, guided Finland to become the 31st member of NATO. In the face of sexism in political life, who can forget Julia Gillard�s 2012 speech on misogyny in which she powerfully addressed the sexism to which she had been subjected? It is that persistence, resilience and fortitude that women and girls must continue to have in political, public, professional and private spaces across the globe so that we continue moving in the right direction towards equality for all women. We are not there yet, but our progress must be celebrated.
Rural Crime
Alex Brewer Excerpts(1 month, 4 weeks ago)
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Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Ms McVey. Last week, one of my local farmers told me that in the last two years there have been fewer thefts on his farm. I was thrilled and asked him what had led to that—and he told me that everything worth taking had already been stolen.
My constituency of North East Hampshire is a beautiful part of the country. Rolling countryside is peppered with picturesque villages, farm shops and even a vineyard. Despite being officially classed as semi-rural, it has all the hallmarks of idyllic country life. But beneath that is a troubling picture. Day in, day out, farmers face theft, fly-tipping and hare coursing on their land, and this is often accompanied by threats, violence and intimidation. These are not small, isolated incidents in rural pockets; every farmer I speak to has plenty of experiences to share.
As we have heard, these crimes are linked to and a major source of funding for organised crime such as drug trafficking and gambling. This in turn affects our towns and returns to our communities in the form of shoplifting, car theft and county lines drug dealing. Last year, an estimated 6,600 active county lines were in operation, generating an annual criminal profit of £800,000—a figure likely to be a significant underestimate. The profitability of rural criminal activity and competing county turf wars in turn increases violence and rural knife crime. There are 22 active organised crime gangs across the country that are specifically involved in rural crime. The organisation of these groups enables them to take stolen goods across international borders, and farming equipment is frequently traced to eastern Europe and Africa.
The more valuable the crime is to the criminal, the more aggressively they will protect it, and farmers are experiencing the impact. Isolated farms are exposed, and farmers tell me that they receive direct threats of retribution for reporting crimes. We know that these rural crimes are often under-reported and difficult to prosecute, especially given the ways in which police weaknesses are exploited across county boundaries. Despite the precautions of CCTV, extra locking on gates and digging ditches, the police are usually just too far away to be able to reach the farms quickly enough. The impact of Conservative cuts to policing is still being felt despite recent recruitment of new officers. We are not back to former police officer numbers and many are not experienced enough to manage the complex and violent nature of rural crime.
Hare coursing is particularly lucrative, with betting proceeds running into tens of thousands of pounds on each race. The money goes to criminal gangs and the farmers are left with damaged fields and dead hares. Criminals know the land so well that they can simply duck for cover when they see the blue lights of a police vehicle. If they do end up in a police chase, they drive so dangerously that the police are often forced to give up pursuit. The knowledge that they can avoid police action and prosecution has made criminals in rural areas, including mine in North East Hampshire, increasingly brazen. They will drive over fields of crops three or four times a season, damaging fields that support our food security, pushing farmers’ insurance bills through the roof and making farmers feel so threatened that some physically cover their heads when they move around their own land at night because they expect to be attacked.
This is a complex problem that requires a co-ordinated, deliberate and targeted solution. Hampshire was promised a rural crime taskforce, but where is it? There has been a lot of talk and very little action. All the while, farmers continue to experience an escalation of crime that is costing Hampshire at least £1.4 million a year. We know what needs to be done, so I call on the Minister and the Government to work with local communities to build up dedicated rural crime units, increase specialist training for new police officers and forge collaboration across county boundaries. Many of the solutions lie in planning policy partnerships, partnerships with industry, and prevention, as much as with policing. We have the knowledge; now we need the strategy, the leadership and the action.
Farmers have had a hard deal recently and our food security is at risk. It is time for the Government to step up to ensure the safety and dignity of our farmers and to put an end to the distress that rural communities are facing. Our farmers are the backbone of this country—it is time we gave them the fair deal they deserve.