International Women’s Day

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I am happy to contribute to this impressive debate and I thank the noble Baroness for introducing it. On occasions like this, I often think of the generations of women whose self-sacrifice and commitment produced the rights that many of us in this country now take for granted. The past century saw truly amazing advances in rights for women. At the beginning, women were second or third-class citizens, without the right to vote or to have improved education. Job prospects were limited. Marriage meant immediate job loss. Equal pay was a remote dream. There were no rights, even over one’s own body: access to birth control knowledge was limited and abortion illegal.

We still have much to complain about—this will become apparent during the debate—but the rights we now take for granted came about only because of the committed campaigning of previous generations of women, who collectively combined in feminist organisations and unions to force improvements on an often unwilling political establishment. The first Equal Pay Act came about following a strike of women engineering workers. Maternity leave arose as a result of union campaigns. Without equality law, we would certainly not be celebrating today women’s contribution to our economy.

Unfortunately, there are many parts of the world where women are still very much repressed—largely where the more extremist forms of religion are in control. That has become clear to us from the repression imposed here in some of our immigrant communities. Although it is perfectly right, in my view, to insist on religious and cultural freedom, that should certainly not include the right within such communities and families to deny women members the rights that should be theirs under our law. Forced marriage and domestic violence are not acceptable in this country, and neither is the extreme form of domestic violence known as female genital mutilation. That is against UK law, and anyone assisting in its application can be jailed for 14 years. The police know that it goes on, but have difficulty in tracking it down because of the family secrecy surrounding it. That is an extreme form of female repression and must be eradicated.

In the past year, we have seen apparently populist risings against dictatorships, mostly in Arab countries. Many of us have welcomed what seemed to be genuinely democratic movements against authoritarian rulers, but it is not yet clear what kind of regimes will take the place of those that are disappearing. We should make it clear that regimes in which women continue to be repressed cannot be regarded as democratic. International Women’s Day gives us the opportunity to make that completely unambiguous statement.

To return to our situation in the UK, we are facing extreme problems as a result of the economic situation. Unfortunately, that seems also to apply across Europe—what we know as the western world. Unemployment now stands at 8.4 per cent, the highest level for 16 years. The latest figures indicate that women are more affected than men. Many women work in the public sector; 700,000 workers are expected to be made redundant there over the next five years; 80 per cent of them will be women. Moreover, because of the high costs of childcare, many women have given up work and are now dependent on benefits. We have recently been discussing the Welfare Reform Bill. We sought to achieve some amendments. We did not quite achieve what we wanted to, but we tried to improve the provisions for women and poorer people in general. We must not allow what previous generations achieved to be undermined by government policies designed to deal with the economic crisis.

Other legislative changes are also likely to impact disproportionately on women. The legal aid Bill is designed to limit the amount spent on legal aid, which will make it more difficult to take cases in the family courts, and in personal injury and employment cases, the impact is likely to be heavily against women. Then, of course, there is the NHS with the Health and Social Care Bill and, later, more employment legislation making it more difficult to claim unfair dismissal. All that legislation is likely to have an impact on women’s rights, because women are more dependent on public provision, and the Government aim to make drastic cuts in that area.

On this, International Women's Day, a great deal more needs to be done and in the same way as has been successful in the past: through collective organisation and political campaigning. Many of us in this House will be willing to do whatever we can to assist.