International Women’s Day

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it was a pleasure to listen to the noble Baroness, Lady Casey. She has spent a lifetime trying to understand the needs of minorities and those who are overlooked and to bring their needs to the attention of people in power. As somebody who, equally, never expected to be in this place, I can tell her that this is a place of unique privilege and that one of the great privileges we have is to speak up for such people. She will no doubt continue to do that as marvellously as she has today.

International Women’s Day is a timely reminder that progress for women and for all minorities is neither inevitable nor linear. I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Lampard, who talked about the ending of the married women’s work bar. My late mother-in-law proposed the motion to the NALGO conference that suggested that, and she did so against quite significant opposition from men—allies for progress are often not who we might think.

It is important that we acknowledge that this debate happens today against the backdrop of a campaign orchestrated and funded by Christian nationalists in the USA and Russia that is ultimately about trying to wreck human rights legislation and the organisations that protect it. This campaign has a number of tactical aims, one of which is to be anti-gender and anti-LGBT, and it has different emphases in different parts of the world. In Poland and Hungary, it is very definitely anti-reproductive rights. In the USA, it is all that but with a good deal of anti-trans discrimination. It is a very poisonous campaign founded not on evidence but on prejudice and fear, and on a very narrow, stereotypical idea of what women should be. Well, women are diverse and different, and their diversity and difference are a key to economic prosperity; we should not lose sight of that.

I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, will forgive me: I thought it was very moving of her to read out that list, but she will perhaps understand that while I sat here thinking that all those women deserve dignity and respect, as do their families, the name ringing in my head was Brianna Ghey, because this campaign of prejudice being promulgated every day in our newspapers and across the world is not without its consequences. Across Africa, politicians of all stripes have been fed millions of dollars to perpetrate myths and fear about the LGBT community. We can see the direct violence and murder that has been wreaked upon my community. Only last week in Uganda, it became illegal to identify—not to do anything but just to identify—as being lesbian or gay. If you are gay in Uganda, not doing anything or even having a relationship with anybody else, you can end up in jail, not being an upstanding, economically productive member of society. I ask our Government what they are doing to explain to Governments across Africa the harm that they are doing to their people by pursuing and being fooled by this really regressive and repressive campaign, which ultimately has nothing to offer the world except destruction and, ultimately, destitution.

There is some good news. Since the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Republicans have been struggling all across the United States because people are not stupid. Ordinary people understand that the more you restrict women’s access to contraception and abortion and their ability to take a full part in the labour market, the more you will harm not only them but their children and families. It is a lesson that was obvious in 1967, when my colleague and one of my heroes, David Steel, produced that landmark piece of legislation that has done so much to improve the participation of women in the labour market across the world.

Today, voters here in the United Kingdom can see what has happened in various parts of the world. It is good to see that, in places such as Poland, light is beginning to dawn. We can see through this destructive campaign for what it is. I hope that we can use our principal means of affecting the lives of women and girls across the world through our FCDO programmes. I say to the Minister that it is good to see that we will put women and girls at the forefront of our unilateral programmes but ask the Government not to reduce the funding to our multilateral obligations through the Global Fund, Unitaid and all the programmes that—for women principally, as well as men—give access to full and comprehensive healthcare. That is fundamental to economic well-being, which is fundamental not just to women’s rights but to human rights throughout the world.