International Women’s Day

Jane Ellison Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)]

I do rather worry that today has been a missed opportunity to strike a more bipartisan note. I myself shall not be tribal, although some previous contributors have been.

I shall make three practical suggestions, loosely linked by the idea of asking awkward questions, which I like to think we are all quite good at. My first theme, which Members will not be surprised about, is female genital mutilation, and I thank many Members in the House today and others for their support over the past year, because a lot has happened since I spoke about FGM in last year’s international women’s day debate. I feel that we have a sense of momentum, and I thank Members for that.

I want to ask for something practical, because we have to keep the issue high on the agenda. The all-party group on genital mutilation has drafted a template letter, which Members can send to health and wellbeing boards or to other commissioning groups, and it asks lots of practical questions about the strategies that have been put in place on safeguarding, commissioning and dealing with women and girls who might be threatened with, or have suffered, FGM. May I urge hon. Members to send that template letter, or their variation on it, to their local groups and boards?

Even in London, I am amazed at the number of times that people look at me blankly when I raise the issue. Sometimes they do not even know what I am talking about, despite being senior health professionals and so on, so we have to keep pushing; we cannot assume that it is on everyone’s agenda.

My second practical point is a bit of leap, but one thing that I worry about when I look at the Arab spring, which other hon. Members have touched on, is how women’s rights are not on an upward trajectory but are potentially going in the other direction. There is evidence of that in Egypt, with many clerical groups pushing for the further institutionalisation of FGM there.

I therefore have a very practical suggestion, which I put into practice when I attended a briefing with one of our ambassadors recently—slightly I suspect to his surprise. We should tell all our ambassadors and high commissioners—wherever they are but particularly those in key countries—to ask why they are not seeing delegations of men and women. If they are seeing only delegations of men, they should politely and nicely—diplomats are very good at being polite and nice—ask why; and if they are not seeing women they should seek out the authentic voice of women. If they see only male delegations and talk only to male politicians, they will not hear the views of the people; they will hear the views of men in those countries. So it is important that the Foreign Office asks those questions of its diplomats.

My final point is about the way in which we do politics here in the UK, because we can take a lead. We should agree cross-party, and begin a discussion before the next general election, on how we do our politics and with whom we interact, because too often we see community leaders who say that they speak for their community but speak only for men. We female politicians, in particular, should demand to hear the authentic voice of male and female community leaders. There is no point demanding equality in the boardroom if we accept inequality in our community centres.