International Women’s Day: Progress on Global Gender Equality

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Pendry. As this past week we have been remembering the wonders of Sir Roger Bannister, who ran the first sub-four-minute mile, I can reveal that I have recently taken up running and I may set the record for the slowest mile. As the noble Lord said, however, even this girl can.

We are having this debate at a significant time, the run-up to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which is very important to some of us. That is because 40 out of 53 Commonwealth states criminalise homosexuality. They account for more than half of the world’s nations where same-sex relations are illegal. Seven Commonwealth nations impose life imprisonment. Some have the death penalty for relationships between men. Hate crimes against LGBT people are most widespread in most Commonwealth countries. The vast majority of LGBT people who live there have no legal protection or rights whatsoever.

This Commonwealth Heads of Government summit, happening as it is in London, is an opportunity for those of us living in this country who, over the past 50 years—a milestone we marked last year—have experienced enormous economic, social and political change and advances, to share with others around the world the secrets of how we have advanced as a nation. Will the Minister consider the work of the All-Party Group on Global LGBT Rights, which is working with an organisation called Open for Business, a collection of top global businesses that have come together and are putting together the economic case against discrimination? We are building a lot of data from well-established resources, such as the World Bank, from which we can show that countries where there is a good attitude towards LGBTI inclusion have better economic performance, are more competitive, have greater levels of entrepreneurship and foreign direct investment, and fare better in global markets. They are also the sorts of countries with less of a brain-drain. That applies to both men and women.

Lesbians are often deemed to be at less risk in these countries because they are often less visible, but in fact they are probably more vulnerable in many ways because they usually have a less economically stable existence. I commend to the noble Baroness the work of a very small charity, Micro Rainbow International, which gives business support and start-up funding to LGBT people so that they can set up businesses. The charity provides a good example of how they are able to help, concerning two women who were harassed and badly treated in their community because they were seen as outsiders. They were given money to start a small bakery and are now respected employers in their community. That is but one example of an approach that could be further adopted. I hope that Ministers attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit will make not only the moral case but also the financial and business case to other leaders in the Commonwealth, because their countries need economic development just as much as ours.

My second point is that I really liked the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, who opened this debate so eloquently and fully. She is very different from the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, who answers my Written Questions. I am very sorry that she is not in her place to hear me say so. She will know that over the past year and a half I have submitted endless questions to her department, principally about the detention of LGBTI asylum seekers. I have still not received a satisfactory answer on why we are busy locking people up in detention at a cost of £36,000 per year when they are no flight risk whatever.

I will, however, give the Minister due credit for the fact that her department, after 18 months, finally got round to releasing some statistics just before Christmas. These show, quite horrifyingly, that two-thirds of people who apply for asylum on the basis of being LGB—not T: we have excluded trans people—fail. Consequently we are sending people back to countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and Sri Lanka where they will face very serious peril: in some cases they will inevitably be sent to prison for an extended period. I asked the noble Baroness a few months ago what efforts were being made by those supervising such deportations to ensure that people would not be imperilled when they go back. Even by the standards of the Home Office, I got a pretty ropey Answer. It seems that we are busy saying that this matter is the responsibility of the country to which people are returned. I do not think that is good enough when people are put in jeopardy as a result.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, Justine Greening and Mrs May all deserve a lot of congratulations on having the courage to say that they will go ahead with the consultation on the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. That Act is currently not fit for purpose. People who need to rely on it are forced to go through truly humiliating and demeaning experiences to have legal recognition of their identity. Since the Government made that announcement, there has been an absolutely relentless campaign against it, waged primarily by transphobic feminists such as Sarah Ditum and Julie Bindel and Murdoch journalists such as Janice Turner and Andrew Gilligan—along with, I might add, some absolutely woeful journalism on the part of the BBC.

I say to the Government that I would not blame them for being somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of that campaign, but I sincerely hope that they will stand firm—and do so in the knowledge that if they go ahead, as I really believe they should, they will have widespread support from these Benches. I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, might agree that there would be support from the Official Opposition’s Benches, too. We know that, at heart, this work is very necessary to bring about equality for a bunch of people who have a really tough time in our country, and to whom we owe it to bring about legal equality.

In the one minute left to me, I want to very much welcome the publication of the report by the group of the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, which I was part of. Autonomy over your body is the absolute bedrock of your existence as a human being but for us women, of all different types and backgrounds, now more than ever—in the face of some of the terrible stuff coming out of the United States—we must stand together. We must understand each other’s differences and bind together on those basic things that are of immense importance to us all and to the girls of the future.