Horn of Africa

Baroness Harman Excerpts

Tuesday 29th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harman (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the illuminating and powerful speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Polak and Lord Bruce. I thank them for their welcome. I am more than pleased to find myself joining this House. We have an important job to do. Our task is to scrutinise legislation, hold the Government to account, consider and report on public policy and seek to introduce legislation or propose amendments to Bills. I pledge that I will do all that to the best of my ability, working with Peers on all sides of the House.

Everyone is so nice here. It feels quite different from the Commons. I confess that it will take me a while to get used to former members of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet greeting me warmly, and my former ministerial colleagues here are being much nicer to me now than I ever remember them being when we were in government together. I put it down to this being a place of post-ambition politics, and I can highly recommend it.

There are so many here whom I have worked with closely and respected over decades, not least my noble friend Lord Kinnock, who in an overwhelmingly male-dominated Parliamentary Labour Party always backed me, and my noble friend Lady Smith, whom I have admired since she won Basildon in 1997. I thank them for introducing me and for their advice.

I am grateful to Black Rod for her guidance—I ask her to pass on my thanks to all her team, who have been so helpful—as well as to the digital service, the Library, the doorkeepers and many others. It meant a great deal to me that Black Rod and her team enabled my family to be here when I was introduced last month. When I was introduced in the Commons in 1982, I was pregnant and it was my husband beaming down at me from the Gallery. This time, it was my children and grandchildren up in the Public Gallery—even one year-old baby Reuben was allowed in.

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this important debate. While the dreadful suffering in the Middle East and the appalling invasion of Ukraine by Putin have seized the world’s attention, there has none the less also been a steady focus in this House on the suffering in the Horn of Africa. I fully support the Minister in making that the case. I pay tribute to his speech last month and the many other excellent speeches in that debate, most particularly that of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury.

During the 40 years I was an MP, Camberwell and Peckham became home to many from the Horn of Africa. I learned from them about the tragic waste of lives and the suffering which propelled them to leave their home and seek a better life here for themselves and their families, and I valued the contribution they made to this country. I visited the Horn of Africa out of respect for them and to get to know their homeland, and grew to understand not only the critical role of our development aid, which the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, spoke about, but the crucial importance of the money they send back from the often low pay that they earn here. Those who send remittances for the welfare of those in conflict-blighted homelands are truly the hidden heroes of international development and I hope the new Government will recognise that and facilitate their contributions.

As we debate the many problems in the region, we must have at the forefront of our minds the absolute need to tackle the monstrous abuse that is female genital mutilation. Across the Horn of Africa, millions of women are living with the consequences of the brutality of FGM. Somalia and Somaliland have an almost universal rate of FGM; it is inflicted on all women. It is rife in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Sudan, too. FGM is cutting, scraping and cauterising procedures to remove the external female genitalia, and it is carried out on girls from as young as infancy up until the age of 15. The pain inflicted by it does not stop after the initial procedure but continues with bleeding, infections, shock, and difficulty in passing urine, having sex and childbirth.

I pay tribute to those in the region who challenge the taboo subject of FGM and those here too from the diaspora community who fearlessly speak out against it. Our new Development Minister, Anneliese Dodds, is also Minister for Women, and I know that she will make this a priority. We should recognise that the eradication of FGM and the empowerment of women with a new generation of women leaders will bring new prospects to the region.

There are now many women in this House who are proud feminists and I look forward to continuing to work with them, but, in conclusion and ever-hopeful, I want to say I am on the lookout here for male allies of feminism, not so that you can decide our agenda, heaven forbid, not so you can lead us—we are more than capable of doing that ourselves—but so you can actively back us in our work as we go forward to greater equality for women.