International Women’s Day

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, to her new role, and thank her for securing this debate. I compliment most strongly the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, on his excellent maiden speech, and urge all noble Lords to reflect on his words and his account. Today, at this moment, there are women—mothers—on the Turkey-Greece border and throughout the world—who are refugees in a similar situation. We, the UK, need to welcome a significant number of them here and see the contributions that they, like the noble Lord, can make.

I considered talking about so many topics today. Violence against women is one of the obvious ones to address. In the other place, the honourable Member, Jess Phillips, read out the names of more than 100 women killed by men in the UK in the last year. Will the Minister consider pressing the Government to ensure that misogyny is declared a hate crime, something that there is a very large campaign for? On a global scale, more than 50,000 women a year are killed by a family member or intimate partner. Can we ensure that a significant portion of our aid money is directed to addressing and supporting women and men tackling that issue?

I considered talking about the world of work, about unpaid caring and domestic work that is so much a part of many women’s lives. I echo the call from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, for the Minister to consider increasing the carer’s allowance, as it would improve the lives of so many women. Again, if we look on a global scale, young women today will, by the end of their lives, have done four years’ more work than their male compatriots, a lot of it unpaid care work. When we think about our economic and development policies, let us think about the fact that gross domestic product does not take into account or value any of that.

Those were a couple of issues that I thought of talking about, but as a Green Peer, I guess there is something that I have to mention, which is women and the climate emergency—a topic on which I am asked to speak quite often, noble Lords will not be surprised to hear. There are some obvious points to be made. Women, as heavily overrepresented among the poor around the world, are hugely vulnerable to the climate emergency while having done almost nothing to contribute towards it. They have less access to resources and information, and in disasters related to the climate emergency, they are in more danger. They become climate refugees but sometimes they do not become climate refugees when actually they need to be. The inability to move, which disproportionately affects women, is a danger and threat to life that we need to acknowledge.

More positively, I also talk about the fact that women have knowledge and solutions to the climate emergency. Too often, that knowledge is neither respected nor acknowledged and I very much hope that our aid programmes and our approach on the international stage, particularly at COP 26, will value and support that knowledge being taken into the international efforts—knowledge about food production, household management, land management and social cohesion.

A few years ago when I was speaking at a Women’s Environmental Network event, the parallels and similarities between the situation of people campaigning on the climate emergency and campaigning for women’s rights really struck me. I reflected on the words of the wonderful feminist historian, Sheila Rowbotham, back in the 1970s that we thought when we won something, that was secure and we would move on to the next thing, but then we found that we had to keep fighting the same battles again and again. I draw real parallels with the efforts against the climate emergency. The Climate Change Act 2008 was a wonderful success and a great victory, but its results were not assured. The most recent report to Parliament of the Committee on Climate Change in July 2019 showed that the Government had delivered just one of 25 policies required to get UK emissions on track to meet the targets in the Climate Change Act.

The problem is that when we fight on individual issues, once that issue is apparently won, the momentum and energy head off in new directions and the system reverts to status quo settings. It is increasingly clear that the problems identified by feminism and the problems seen by environmentalists are joined up. They are part of a system—a model—that is broken. It is an economic system that is trashing the planet while trampling all over the rights of women. Important as they are, picking off individual issues, such as misogyny as a hate crime or the recognition and valuing of unpaid caring work, is worth while, but at the same time we must make it clear that the system that created the inequalities has to be tackled—the causes as well as the symptoms of the great sicknesses of our society. That is the way in which we can join up feminism and environmentalism. As the saying goes:

“System change, not climate change”.


System change, not patriarchy.