International Women’s Day

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise as an unconfident man hoping to make some kind of contribution of a positive nature to this terrifically important debate. A week ago today, my wife and I headed for the Old Vic, where we saw “Sylvia”. I did not see and hear it; I experienced and lived it. Funk, soul and hip-hop—I never thought that my degree in theology would allow me to say all those things in the same sentence—have released the story from the tight embrace of social historians, and even parliamentary debate, to come alive for our age. While mentioning that, I have to say that my wife is descended from the Pankhursts. I remember her old grandmother, who was a cousin of Sylvia Pankhurst. Despite downsizing when we retired, my wife insisted on the yard of books relating to the Pankhursts coming with us, whatever the cost. The shelves, suitably bent, tell their own story.

It was a wonderful, alarmingly brilliant production, reminding us to remember. We remembered the Holocaust just a month ago. Zachar is the great Hebrew word for “to remember” and remembering is what we must do with these key moments in the drift towards equity, which is at the heart of the debate today. There was more to do after Sylvia did her job, but what courage, resilience, determination and strength she and her supporters showed. “Like a mighty army” is an idea that has come of age, whose time is right. If only we could centre some of the disparate thinking that we have on this and other similar issues in a focused way. A younger audience, which was ethnically very diverse, with a significant proportion of women compared to men, was there for “Sylvia” last week. It was clear to me that what the suffragettes, as mentioned in debate earlier, achieved was to energise society to give it the courage to embrace new ideas. How can we do that again? That was the question I came away with last week.

Last Friday was the churches’ international day of prayer. The material that churches around the world and in this country were motivated by this year was formulated by women from Taiwan. It so happens that the day before, a young Taiwanese couple—two of my friends—came to have dinner here because their parents had come from Taiwan for the first time since Covid. The women there, as well as the material in the notes provided for the worship last Friday, reminded me of the fears of Taiwanese women and girls, knowing what is happening in Ukraine at the hands of the Russians, that something not dissimilar might happen to them at the hands of the Chinese. They are already in a defensive mode.

It does not help that only 13 countries out of 193 members of the United Nations have recognised Taiwan, no doubt out of fear of, and of offending, China. But for all that, it makes them feel very vulnerable indeed. The Taiwanese people I met last week, and whose plight I became aware of, reminded me that in a country like this we must do our darndest to stand in solidarity with women in countries like Taiwan—countries not in the headlines, with women and girls who have genuine fears for their future that are never noticed by anyone. Those were my experiences last Friday.

When I first entertained the idea of speaking in this debate, I thought I would want to talk about the rights of migrant women who have suffered domestic abuse and whose plight is still not addressed by our embracing the Istanbul convention. I am a member of the migration committee of the Council of Europe. I will be in Paris next week talking about precisely this and leading a seminar on it in Parliament on Monday. But I did not dare allow myself to talk about this issue relating to migration in a week when a wretched Bill has been put before us. I fear that a theologically correct, properly brought-up nonconformist boy like me would have had to use vocabulary I keep secret for the most part, as I denigrated the Bill. That is the speech I did not make; I hope you will hang on to one or two of the ideas in the speech that I did.