International Women’s Day

Lord Razzall Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Razzall (LD)]

My Lords, I feel both proud and disappointed—proud to be participating in this extremely important debate and disappointed that more of my sex have not seen fit to participate. As the Minister said at the beginning, if we are to talk or do things about equality for women, men have just as much a role to play as women.

There is no doubt that since I was born there has been progress in the role of women in the three significant activities of my life—first, in legal education and the practice of law. I did not go to Cambridge University, but many people may be surprised to realise that only in 1947, when I was four years old, were women admitted as full members of the university for the first time. I went to Oxford. When I went in the 1960s, with few exceptions—I think there were four all-female colleges—the colleges were all male. I read law there. Of the 200 students who read law at the same time as me across the university, only five were women—including the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, who unfortunately is not in her place today. Now, of course, all colleges at Oxford are mixed and there will be equal numbers of men and women reading law. I then joined a law firm that had been founded in the mid-18th century and had had no women partners at all. It had never had a woman partner from 1750 when the firm was founded to 1966 when I joined it. By the time I left, 25 years later, there were a significant number of women partners.

In the second area of my life, politics, there has clearly been a sea change in women MPs, as everybody has said. When I was born in 1943, there were only 13 women MPs; there are 220 today. Until the 1958 legislation to create life peerages, there were in your Lordships’ House only a handful of Scottish women Peers. Of course, the 1958 legislation was violently opposed at the time by numbers of your Lordships’ House. Indeed, the father of a colleague of mine, who had better remain nameless, said:

“This is a House of men, a House of Lords. We do not wish it to become a House of Lords and Ladies.”—[Official Report, 31/10/1957; col. 690.]


Fortunately, Harold Macmillan took no notice of that at the time and the legislation was passed. The success of that, as far as women is concerned, reminds one—looking around this Chamber—of Christopher Wren’s plaque in St Paul’s Cathedral: “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”

The third area of my life has been cricket, where there have been very significant changes. After a lengthy campaign, there are now women members of the MCC. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, grinning at that. The rise in the popularity of international women’s cricket would have delighted Lady Rachael Heyhoe Flint, who sadly is no longer with us. The success of women’s cricket is shown by the fact that you are much more likely to hear an international woman cricketer interviewed on the “Today” programme than you are to hear a government Minister.

But this is no time for complacency. As one of the noble Baronesses said, we are only 39th in our proportion of women Members of Parliament. It is quite surprising, as someone indicated, that Rwanda is first and the next four are Cuba, Bolivia, the UAE and Mexico. If we look at the role of women throughout the world, the statistics are shocking. An estimated 303,000 women worldwide die in childbirth or during pregnancy every year; the UN says that on average women earn 24% less than men; one woman in three is a victim of sexual or physical violence; only 48 women have been awarded Nobel prizes, and 822 men; and it is calculated that one woman in four alive today was a child bride.

The outlook, however, is not all bleak. I do not always agree with Boris Johnson, but I was impressed that when asked to choose the five women he most admired, one of them was Malala Yousafzai—the girl who was shot when campaigning for education and is now studying PPE at Oxford. Along with many noble Lords, I welcome the appointment of the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, to be at the forefront of promoting girls’ education throughout the world—more power to her elbow.