International Women’s Day

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords and Sisters, there have been some absolutely brilliant speeches today. After the first four speeches—the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, and her optimism, the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, with cold, hard facts, the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, with her calm, concise clarity, and the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, with her passion and sincerity—I ran back to my office to rewrite my own speech. I thought, “I can’t compete with any of those speeches”. When I got to my office and I started casting round to find some things I wanted to say, I suddenly thought, “I don’t have to compete; all I have to do is support what I heard, collaborate, and be part of a debate that is incredibly important in today’s world”.

It is about a century since women got the vote—in 1919 for women with property and 1928 for all women—but society is still unequal, and women are still being left behind. The statistics speak for themselves. Women still do not have equal pay. Women do not have equal representation, whether in Westminster or in boardrooms. One in four women is subjected to domestic violence during her lifetime. The number of rape cases and domestic assault cases that come to court is abysmally low, which we as a society should be utterly ashamed of. Of course, many cases are never reported—why bother if it will take years for them to come to court? The levels of violence against women and girls are at epidemic proportions, and there is strong evidence that the media’s sexist portrayal of women is part of the problem.

The Government could do a lot about that. They possibly have done some things, but there is a lot left to do. My noble friend Lord Sikka today tweeted about something quite useful: the government “policies against women”. He mentioned:

“Gender pay/pension gap. Lower state pension. Unpaid carers. Real wage/benefit cuts—majority public sector workers & benefit recipients are female”.


We have heard about those issues in today’s speeches, and it is a sad reflection on 14 years of Tory government that they have not tried to equalise society in the way that only Governments can.

On the issue of our climate crisis, it is more often women who suffer. They are more likely to die in a climate disaster, be displaced by climate change or die from pollution. They are not inherently more vulnerable, but intersections between sex, power dynamics, socio-economic structures and societal norms and expectations result in climate impacts being experienced very differently by women. In many countries, women more often grow food for their families on small plots and are vulnerable to small changes in rainfall or soil quality. Sex inequality also intersects with discrimination based on other aspects of identity—class, age, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, ethnicity and religion—all of which multiply the impacts of climate change.

When I was casting around for what to say, I looked at my noble friend Lady Bennett’s speech last year. I thought that it was really good and that I would take some of it. I thought I would not bother telling anyone, but then I thought she might notice. She said:

“When we think about food systems and the health and economic well-being of women and girls, we also need to think about the way in which the financial sector plays against it. When the overwhelmingly male-dominated financial markets expand under current arrangements, the rest of the world suffers … This is a threat to women and girls around the planet, to their chances of having a healthy diet and a liveable world. The financial sector is a parasite and we need strong medicine to stop it sucking the lifeblood out of this planet, particularly the well-being of women and girls. The financial sector funds big agriculture—the handful of companies in seeds, agrochemicals and industrial, giant-scale agriculture—which all too often robs the women and girls of this planet of their land, fresh water supplies and current food systems, and of their chance of a sustainable, secure life”.—[Official Report, 10/3/23; col. 1032.]


If we care about women, it is not enough to talk; we actually have to act.

Noble Lords here today probably act in their own lives to make things more equal for women. I first got into politics because of a fluke in our electoral system. After my first year as a London Assembly member, the Evening Standard did a review on how good everybody on the assembly was, and I came bottom of the poll. Two years later, I was the Deputy Mayor of London and, two years after that, I helped the Mayor of London bring in all sorts of multi-million-pound measures. We can do the most amazing things, but we have to change the world. We are all capable of it, but co-operation among ourselves is a big part of it.