International Women’s Day

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I congratulate all our maiden speakers today, and I hope they continue along the lines we have heard from them.

I want to start in Geneva, where I recently spent a week visiting various United Nations organisations. I saw how much they have been hollowed out, degraded and cut back by funding withdrawal, particularly from the United States, but also from the UK cuts to official development assistance. This is an issue particularly for women. I heard and saw first-hand how the World Health Organization has been slashed. Its African regional office is majorly affected, losing 638 of 2,500 posts. In Geneva, we heard how maternity services, care for victims of sexual violence and nutritional provision for malnourished children—a disproportionate number of them likely to be girls—will be cut back.

I thought of that yesterday as I was at Porton Down at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antimicrobial Resistance talking about AMR. I was thinking too about an inquiry we conducted jointly with the WASH APPG—that is water, sanitation and hygiene—about how many maternity facilities, particularly in Africa, lack the most basic facility of running water. That means risk of infection and the need to use antibiotics prophylactically, which risks speeding AMR.

As we talk today, we might think about the women at this moment in labour in those maternity clinics—their lives and their babies’ lives at risk because of inadequate resources, because some people in this world are taking far more resources than they should have the right to while those women suffer. The cutbacks will mean only that that situation continues, which makes not only those women and babies less safe but all of us less safe.

I turn now to how the closing down of international public spaces and actors has opened up a space for forces with interests other than global well-being and human and natural flourishing—corporate interests, and dubious interests. I am not, on this occasion, talking about President Trump and his so-called board of peace.

We have, I am afraid, seen today in our debate a practical demonstration of this. The slogan for International Women’s Day is “Rights. Justice. Action”, as has been noted by, among others, the noble Baronesses, Lady D’Souza, Lady Goudie and Lady Smith of Llanfaes. You can find that on the dedicated page on the UN Women website, where it notes correctly that this year’s event

“comes at a time when justice systems are under strain. Conflict, repression, and political tensions are weakening the rule of law”.

We have today, however, heard another slogan, “Give to gain”. It is a very different slogan, a very neoliberal slogan, one focused on the individual—focused on making a sop to our current system, rather than acknowledging the need for radical change. It is a slogan that originates with an opaquely owned website that appears to be a corporate shill. It is suggestive of the philosophy infamously promulgated by the cryptocurrency billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now of course in jail: so-called effective altruism. That has helped to build a political culture that practically invites the most egregious forms of capture of our public global spaces by the rich. The haves give; the have-nots receive. The have-nots have to avoid challenging the status quo if they are going to get a few crumbs from the table.

If you want to find out more about the origins of the “Give to gain” slogan, the Women’s Agenda website has a detailed account of the origins of the URL internationalwomensday.com—that .com should be a giveaway. It makes no declaration of its ownership or origins. It is, of course, a name that can simply be bought by anyone. Women’s Agenda says—as far as I can establish, rightly—that this is the creation of a “London-based marketing firm”. The “about us” part of the website says nothing. There is no mailing address. The digital regulations require that it says that it is owned by Aurora Ventures (Europe), which is apparently based in London. That is what we know. What we are seeing is the impact of search engines, tech companies and maybe artificial so-called intelligence tools enabling corporate capture.

I turn briefly to what I wanted to talk mainly about today, the situation of many women in war zones. We have had considerable accounts of the women in Afghanistan, and I commend those who have talked about that. I think about the women in Sudan—the women of El Fasher, many of whom now head households because their male partners have been killed—and the women in Iran who have been fighting against the regime and are now in jails under the most hideous conditions, with the assaults that are being made on Iran. There are the women in Palestine, Myanmar and the central African states—and, of course, women in the US. System change—that is what those women need. As UN Women says, they need rights, justice and action.