International Women’s Day

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very happy to follow the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, whose courageous and determined work in support of widows worldwide is known to many of us in this House. I am delighted to hear him speak up again here today. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Smith on her appointment as Equalities Minister and on her excellent speech opening this debate. At the same time, I hope it will be appropriate for me to pay tribute to Anneliese Dodds MP for her dignified and principled conduct last week. I hope that she will remain a very active member of the other place and join us in campaigning in the months ahead.

I congratulate all those who have made their maiden speeches, including my fellow ex-First Minister, my noble friend Lord Jones, whose introduction to the House is very welcome. I am so pleased to welcome in particular two Scots: my noble friend Lady Alexander, who—let me get this right—is the second former Labour Minister in the devolved Government in Scotland who was not a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons to have entered your Lordships’ House. I have long argued that those who served only in Holyrood—or in the Senedd, for that matter—should be welcome in this House, and I am delighted that she has now joined me here. She will make a fantastic contribution.

I was delighted to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady Hunter. We have been friends for a very long time, and her contribution to the modernisation of this country in the election and the running of the first four years of the 1997 new Labour Government is not widely enough celebrated and recognised. She was a pivotal individual at that time. I remember many illuminating moments, not least, perhaps, on the day when the then leader of the Opposition was about to try to persuade me to persuade the Scottish Labour Party to support a referendum on devolution before the new Government legislated, when the then Anji Hunter presented me with a glass of wine, at 10.30 am, to prepare me for the meeting and try to make sure that I was calm enough to hear the news that I was about to hear. She is a very welcome addition to your Lordships’ House, and today’s speech showed that her contributions will be outstanding.

As a former maths teacher, I have enjoyed the theme of today’s debate. I have been very lucky to be inspired and mentored by many women throughout my life, including, perhaps in a similar way to the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, by Mrs Craig, who was my first primary school teacher. She came to seek me out on the day I left primary school to tell me that if I could learn when to keep my mouth shut and be a little more disciplined, I could do absolutely anything I wanted to. To this day, I credit her with much of the incredible moments I have been able to enjoy in my life and career.

Almost all of my entries on the register have a link to today’s topic, including the McConnell International Foundation, which currently sponsors 200 girls in rural Malawi to go to secondary school. These girls live in rural villages, where no one from their family has finished secondary school before. Last year, one of the girls went to university—the first from her village ever to do so. Of the 200, in a country where very high numbers of girls become pregnant in their teenage years or are forced into early child marriage, only one girl became pregnant last year, and she hopes to go back to school after the baby is born. The potential for education to transform those lives is shown in all my interactions with them. Girls’ education transforms not just the lives of the individual girls but communities and families, going far beyond the individuals who personally benefit.

Many Members of your Lordships’ House have today commented on the international aspect of International Women’s Day. In Afghanistan, incredibly in 2025, girls and women are being held back from going to school and into higher education and from many other basic liberties. There is also the persecution in Iran—as we heard in the Statement earlier from the noble Lord, Lord Hanson—the cynical, planned rape of women and girls in Sudan and elsewhere as part of violent conflict around our world, and the casual acceptance and encouragement of violence throughout our supposedly progressive, developed world since the Covid pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of girls are not returning to school to complete the educational opportunities that would give them a fairer chance in life. Throughout the world today, women’s and girls’ rights are going in reverse. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, we should be angry about that and certainly not complacent or complicit in it.

While I absolutely endorse the Government’s decision to increase defence spending, I believe, as I said last week, that it is short-sighted and counterproductive to reduce overseas development assistance to its lowest level since Harold Wilson was Prime Minister to fund it. There will be fewer girls finishing school, fewer health programmes giving young girls choices in their early adult years, fewer women entrepreneurs and more conflict, violence and famine as a result.

Will there be an impact study on women and girls before these cuts are implemented? Will programmes on sexual health, girls’ education and conflict prevention, particularly the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, be protected?