International Women’s Day

Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab)]

My Peers—following my noble friend Lady Gale’s innovation for a new way of addressing ourselves—I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ranger, on a truly remarkable maiden speech, especially on his veneration of his parents, particularly his mother. I am sure that he will make a great contribution to this House.

I had my speech ready on Saturday—that is well prepared for me. It drew on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020. Then, on Sunday, I travelled down to the small town of Spennymoor in County Durham to the unveiling of a very special new banner created by the Women’s Banner Group to honour influential women and the campaigns that they were involved in. Everyone featured was nominated by women from the Durham coalfield area. I was there because one of the women shown on the banner, Pat McIntyre, was a friend of mine for many decades. After an afternoon listening to stories of the women depicted and the campaigns that they worked on, I thought that the banner had more to say about women’s solidarity than any report or list of statistics.

Probably the most well-known person included on the banner was Ruth First. Her link to County Durham came when she was in exile from South Africa. While teaching at Durham University, she supported the anti-apartheid campaign and was active in the women’s liberation struggles of the 1970s. I am sure that many noble Lords will have read her book, 117 Days, describing her very cruel imprisonment in solitary confinement even though she had never been convicted of a crime. While working in Mozambique on secondment from Durham, she was brutally murdered by the South African Police using a letter bomb. The British Government of that time failed to notice who the real terrorists were in South Africa.

My friend Pat McIntyre knew Ruth and was inspired by her. Pat was already involved in fighting for women’s rights and was active in international solidarity movements. In 1986 she went to Chile as part of the support for the women struggling there. She joined the International Women’s Day march which was made up of women and children. Mounted police charged the demonstration and the women were tear-gassed. Pat was helped by Joan Jara, whose husband Victor had been brutally beaten and murdered by the Pinochet regime. Victor Jara was the country’s most popular singer and poet. It seemed as if Pinochet had a particular dislike of poets. Chile was another example of when the British Government failed to acknowledge who the real terrorists were.

One of the campaigns depicted on the banner is Women Against Pit Closures. Betty Cook and Anne Scargill were there on Sunday. Betty spoke of the links their campaign had made with women around the world, including American women miners. During the strike, women from the campaign were often picked up by the police. When this happened to Betty and Anne the police tried to intimidate them by asking them to take their clothes off. Those officers obviously had little experience of women from Barnsley. After the strike, the pit villages were often left to rot while women tried to hold their communities together. The Government of the day thought that they were part of the enemy within.

Other campaigns are shown on the banner: women from County Durham had been at Greenham Common, were supporters of CND, and are now involved in the WASPI women’s fight. This beautiful silk banner will join the Big Meeting to be held in Durham in July. It will have pride of place on the march through Durham and many hundreds of women will walk behind it. Memorials to women, many of whom are largely unrecognised, help us to remember and learn from our history. That is why I join others today in supporting the campaign for a memorial to the match-girls’ strike.

I turn back to the Global Gender Gap Report, because I do not want to waste the hours I spent looking at it. It benchmarks countries on gender parity and reveals that since last year, the UK has dropped six places to 21 and has been overtaken by Albania, among others. The report places Nicaragua in fifth place after only Iceland and the Scandinavian countries. It also shows that our long-term trading partner Saudi Arabia is down at 146th out of 153 states. While the Saudi ruling elite has allowed some relaxation in the laws about women driving cars, the women who campaigned for that change are still in prison and being held in solitary confinement.

Rather than posing this debate as a congratulation to the UK on its role in advancing equalities for women everywhere, we should be congratulating the work done by women across the world in fighting for their own rights as well as those of their daughters and granddaughters. “Each for equal” must mean that, until we all have equality, none of us is truly equal. Above all else, it is about solidarity. Sometimes our sisters will be depicted as terrorists and enemies when all they are doing is fighting for human rights. The UK under both party leaderships has sometimes been on the wrong side of history. I hope that the Government will recognise this and ensure that they always stand in solidarity with oppressed people rather than siding with the oppressors.