International Women’s Day

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is an absolute pleasure to follow that terrific speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover. On behalf of all of us, I am sure, I welcome granddaughter Northover into the world on this extremely auspicious day. I am also thrilled that the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, is making her maiden speech, and I look forward to it. I know I have not very many minutes, but I will try to cover as many things as I can.

What becomes clear, listening to this, and I am sure will become clearer during the day, is that women are still doing the caring and childcare and are not paid for it. I go back 50 years to Spare Rib—I know I have done this before, but I will do it again. One very fundamental thing happened then. When we wrote the original editorial, we said that the gender divide was just as tough for men as for women, that women have to support 2.2 children for the rest of their lives with their two weeks holiday, et cetera. We dropped that within about a fortnight because it became clear that it was women’s stuff, and women’s equality was so huge.

In those 50 years, we have expanded the role of women. I stand here. We all stand here. Effectively, we can be barristers, lawyers, doctors, solicitors, mothers and everything. We never did anything about the role of men. It was very interesting. We said, “We want all the sexy stuff in your life, and we want you to take out the trash”. This was a very bad equation. It seems that what has happened is that men are very frozen in their roles. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, I have a lot of connections with Denmark: my sister lives there. Economically, men get paid to care. The moment you are in a capitalist system, what you get paid for matters, and what you do not get paid for is kicked into the long grass. This is what happens now. In effect, we have not changed at all in this respect.

I was thinking about things that have gone well and things that have gone badly. As all noble Lords know, I work in food politics. I want to announce that, from Sunday, there will be a Mothers Manifesto hunger strike taking place across the road. This is on behalf of lots of groups of mothers, because guess who is skipping meals in this cost of living crisis? It is not the blokes—I am sorry, but it is not. One in four mothers in this country is currently skipping a meal. But 50 years ago, nobody skipped a meal. I am not saying it was all fun and roses, but we certainly did not skip meals. If someone had said to me, “In 50 years’ time, you’re going to stand up in Westminster and talk about food poverty”, I would have said that they were bonkers. But I met the mothers about the hunger strike just yesterday—all my examples are from the last few days. Last week, I was with a head teacher who said, “I noticed this curious pattern about a girl in the sixth form: she came into school only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This went on for a while, and I asked her teacher, who said, ‘Yes, it’s very, very weird’.” They found out that she and her mother had only one pair of shoes. It was not the boy with his father; it was the mother.

Going on to the international stage, I would very much like to contest the words of the Minister earlier, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, said. I do not in any way impugn her willingness to say that we are spending a lot on development, but, according to Care International, which was here in the House doing a very large event widely attended by Peers, we are now spending less than 1% of UK bilateral finance on targeting gender equality, and less than 0.2% reached the needs of women’s rights organisations. No one is under any illusion: unless we empower women, it is about not just our economy but our stability, the wars in countries, the safety of children and how we will go forward.

It seems that we still live in a kind of conspiracy where men dominate. If we look back to the inquiry into Partygate, the decisions about the Covid lockdown were made by a group of young men in their 30s who had no children, had been to Eton and had no idea what it meant to care for an elderly relative or to think, “How am I going to do my zero-hours contract job when I’ve got to look after the kids?” or, “How will I get to the food bank?” None of these things was considered.

So there is a question of legislation about representation, and, ultimately, legislation and support that says, “We have to bring up the next generation well”. I am completely shocked. I am sitting on a new committee about ultra-processed food. One in five kids are going to school, at five years old, obese. Do not just think about them; think about our economy. These children are going to be what we call the “inactive blob”, which we are all worried about. We are spending money on coaching them to get back to work. They will not get back to work. They are sick. We are in the most extraordinary state with this. I find it really depressing. Although I am thrilled, personally, that I can stand here and think that I have had an amazing life, it worries me very much, despite all the work that people have put in and the efforts we make.

There are some fundamental things that government needs to grasp. The first is that we are a society that loves and protects our children, rears them properly and healthily, and supports the people who do that. We are a society that looks after the people who care for people in their old age. We as a country understand that, if the problems of climate change, which are massive, are going to be helped, we up our development budgets to help women in developing countries through women’s projects and women’s representation—and, by the way, we need a lot more than 37% women representing us at COP.