Role of Women in Public Life

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Bolton, for her very kind remarks about our election contest. When I expressed the hope that we would meet in the Chamber in due course, I had assumed that it would be at the other end. Never once, when we met in discussion over the political position of the nation, did I conceive that either she or I would be present in this Chamber.

I too want to concentrate my remarks mainly on one woman. When I first entered the Commons in 1974, there were three women in the Cabinet: Barbara Castle, Judith Hart—the Minister for Overseas Development—and Shirley Williams. Although it might be going a little far to say that they were household names, certainly for anyone with the remotest interest in politics those women made a big impact. Many of my male colleagues rejoice in that but we recognise that we have an awfully long way to go to produce anything like fairness towards women. Undoubtedly the big step forward was having all-women shortlists in the 1997 election. I have met enough men who have objected to those shortlists; nevertheless, their efficacy is undoubted. If we are to make significant progress towards anything like equality of representation of the sexes in the House of Commons, other parties also have to think along those progressive lines.

This debate commemorates the achievement of the vote for women in 1918 and we all salute the contributors to that cause. Some names are very well known. Those of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia drop off the tongues of anyone remotely interested in such history, but I want to concentrate on someone who I think deserves similar recognition but gets infinitely less. Her name is Annie Kenney. She was brought up in Oldham, the town which I had the privilege to represent in the Commons some time ago. She started off as a mill girl in one of over 400 mills which Oldham—the cotton king of England—boasted of at that time. Annie always bore the scars of that work. Just as miners often have the tips of fingers chopped off through the dangers of their work, women mill workers lost fingers through controlling the bobbins on looms in the factories, and Annie suffered from that handicap. It is about the only handicap that she ever recognised because, my goodness, she was a woman of considerable spirit.

There is presently a proposal to erect a statue of Annie in Parliament Square in Oldham. It is a very fine square. On one side of it is Oldham’s war memorial, quite a wonderful piece of sculpture and deservedly so, because Oldham lost its sons at the Battle of Loos in 1916. In those terrible times, the young men of a whole ward could be wiped out by the carnage on the Western Front. On the other side of the square is a magnificent example of 19th-century civic architecture: the town hall, complete with the requisite Doric columns. It also has a blue plaque, which states that Winston Churchill addressed the people of Oldham there on his election—his first election—as a Member of Parliament. It is a prestigious location, and I will now give the reasons why I think Annie Kenney should be commemorated there.

Annie listened to Sylvia Pankhurst at a meeting of the Oldham Clarion in 1905, and immediately struck up a political relationship with Sylvia. There was no doubt at all that Annie was born of very strong stuff indeed. She was certainly a militant suffragette; the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, paid tribute to them, while disavowing their effectiveness in the long run. She was alongside Sylvia when the first political meeting was disrupted by the suffragettes. Sir Edward Grey was one of the speakers, and Winston Churchill another, so it was a fairly star cast to upset, but the suffragettes had no inhibitions about that. As a result, Annie spent three days in jail. Subsequent to that, following further disruptions carried out by the militants, she suffered force-feeding in prison after being arrested and was a victim of that outrageous cat and mouse Act, whereby women were released until they were fit enough to be returned to prison, where they were treated just as cruelly as they had been in the past.

The militant suffragette campaign was suspended in 1914, and of course Annie was a patriot: not for her any question of reservation about participating in the war. It was the job of men to go to war and it was the job of women to fill the places that the men had vacated and play their full part in sustaining the war effort, which Annie did as ably as she could. At the end of the war, Asquith was long gone, and Lloyd George had been convinced, partly through the militancy of the suffragette movement before the war, that the vote had to be granted to women. So although I accept that of course wartime changed a great deal in British politics, and although I accept that the militant aspect of the suffragette movement will always arouse some degree of controversy, there is no doubt that it played its part. By far the most important part was the war effort and the fact that women were able to demonstrate that they were the equal of men in sustaining production at home. But it was inevitably the element of challenge laid down by women—a determination that they would be satisfied—that helped to convince the political establishment of the time, all of whom were male, of course.

I hope and expect that a statue will be constructed over this next year. I hope that Annie Kenney will be recognised for the outstanding Oldhamer, subject and woman that she was. Tremendous courage was needed to sustain these activities over many years, and we should do nothing else but give due praise to the women who did so.