International Women’s Day: Language in Politics

Debate between Katherine Fletcher and Ruth Jones

Thursday 29th February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Jones]

I thank my hon. Friend for that positive and opportune intervention. I did not want to embarrass you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I thank you for your calm nature last week when you took on the issues that arose. The calm and peaceful way in which you dealt with it all was an inspiration to us all.

Online abuse affects when women in public office speak and what they speak about. Online abuse, particularly abuse that is misogynistic and racist, has a detrimental impact on the mental health and wellbeing of women in public life, particularly ethnic women MPs, reflecting on the emotional toll that it takes on them, their families and their staff. It is deeply unfortunate that online abuse spills out into reality, causing real concerns about physical safety, with such abuse often including threats of violence. Even though women make up over half of the United Kingdom’s population, as the right hon. Member for Basingstoke said, we make up only 35% of the House of Commons. There is so much more to do.

[Katherine Fletcher (South Ribble) (Con)]

We are talking about the importance of language in debate, but does she agree that we also need to start thinking about images, especially with changing technology? Several Members present were with me last night at a debate about deepfakes and artificial intelligence, hosted on the Committee corridor by Glamour and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. It strikes me that a lot of the themes of today’s debate around the use of language, and how off-putting it can be, can also be applied to stuff that is generated very realistically and very quickly. Does the hon. Lady agree that we should not forget that while we debate language, and women in politics?

[Ruth Jones]

I absolutely agree. Being a luddite, I may not be as familiar as lots of other people in the Chamber with AI and other online issues, but deepfakes are deeply troubling. I thank the hon. Lady for highlighting that really important issue.

I acknowledge that the Conservative party has had three women leaders. Although the last two did not last very long, the Conservatives have done more than we have, and in due course I hope that Labour will elect its first woman leader. In August 2022, just 36% of the 19,212 elected councillors across the UK were women. Fewer than 5% of councils have achieved gender parity, so the need to empower and support women is clear to all of us. The issue will not be solved overnight, but we need to start making progress. It will not be addressed by one party, but by all of us working together, and it will not work unless every man in this place, and in our country, recognises the role that they have to play too.

Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Katherine Fletcher and Ruth Jones

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Katherine Fletcher]

And she—let us make it a she—almost environmentally released it into a field.

Professor Dunwell: Yes. That is the context, and I think it is important just generally that people—well, that is me producing a sermon. That is the context in which we are now working.

[Ruth Jones]

Q I am interested in the environmental release side. Your advice to DEFRA was that “different parameters” should be applied to the environmental release of gene editing micro-organisms because of the increased risk of gene flow. Can you explain that point about gene flow? Does that mean that micro-organisms are outside the remit of the Bill?

Professor Dunwell: That is a whole other area. Science in this area has not been applied in the same way to a micro-organism. Obviously, it has been applied to animals. You talked before about asking the question about gene edited animals. One of the things I should add before I get to the other question is that the best example of that on the market at the moment is gene edited fish in Japan. There are two varieties of fish whose growth rate has been modified through gene editing, which have been on the market—I do not know whether successfully commercially, but they are one of the prime examples of that.

On micro-organisms, we hope at the next ACRE meeting—we have not had an in-person meeting since covid started—to start to explore the applications in the microbiology area. We have invited people along from outside, as we do quite regularly, for consciousness raising at a scientific level, to get the best experts to say where they see this type of technology going. Microbiology at the moment is not specifically described in here. It will develop over time because there is an increasing interest in applying different microbes—often ones that have been selected, because the soil is full of tens of thousands of microbes, and some of them are good and some are bad. Many companies now have huge collections of hundreds of thousands of microbes that they go through to try to pick ones that may have an antagonistic effect on other microbes, so they can be applied as inoculants into the soil to improve soil health.

All that is really admirable and exciting stuff. It depends, again, on our ability to identify, extract and sequence genetic information. I went to a meeting probably 20 years ago in Paris, when somebody for the first time said that their PhD student, having spent three years, had got the sequence of one bacterium. He was so proud of that student. Now, you can probably do hundreds in a day. The rate of change is orders of magnitude just in 20 years. It is in what grows out of that and how we develop the regulatory boundaries that the challenges lie.