Equal Franchise Act 1928

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for securing the debate. She is a woman I am proud of, as I know many Members are.

It is vital in such a debate not only to celebrate the achievement of the 1928 Act, but to remember the stories of the women and fighters who campaigned for it and who won the battle for electoral reform, suffrage and equality. It is 100 years since some women got the right to vote—not all of them, but some. It was a good step forward. People often get confused between the different Representation of the People Acts. Were it not for the fantastic Voice & Vote exhibition in Westminster Hall, it would be easy for Members of Parliament, too, to be confused about when each piece of legislation was passed, and what it meant.

In 1918 the vote was given to some women—only those at the top of society. The 1928 Act gave the vote to all women over 21, rather than those over 30 who were landowners. That was a huge step forward, and it meant that 52.5% of the electorate in the 1929 general election were women. That was transformative. The fact that it took 10 years—two whole Parliaments—fully to extend the franchise shows just how scared the establishment was of giving proper representation to women and the working class across the UK.

I pay tribute to the incredible campaigners who continued to make the case for the legislation. Many gave up their freedom, faced imprisonment or went on hunger strikes. Many, such as Emily Davison, gave their lives for the cause, but the campaigners never gave up. They are an inspiration to all of us in this House and we pledge ourselves to further their cause. The story is often overlooked.

In Plymouth we are proud to be part of the suffragette story, and of the fact that the suffragette movement there was not just one of rich women campaigning for the vote. The women took things into their own hands. Members may be familiar with the beautiful Smeaton’s Tower on Plymouth Hoe. That lighthouse still stands proudly, but the suffragettes put a bomb in it and tried to blow it up. They wanted to attract attention to their cause. I am glad that the lighthouse still stands, but the story of how local women in Plymouth resorted to those means to try to gain attention and credibility for their cause should continue to be talked about.

I want to talk now about Nancy Astor. As my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury said, the story of how we reached the point where only a third of our Parliament are women started with Nancy Astor taking her seat in 1919. She represented Plymouth Sutton and was introduced to the House of Commons flanked by Balfour and Lloyd George. It will be the 100th anniversary of her election—and of Plymouth’s voting for a woman—in November 2019. She and I would disagree fundamentally on nearly everything. She stood for many things that I could not stomach, countenance or go along with, and I am sure that that would be the case for nearly every Member. We would not share her views on slavery, anti-Semitism, fascism and LGBT equality, but her story, the fact that she was the first woman to take her seat in this place, and the fact that Plymouth was the first place to elect a woman who took her seat means we are intimately entwined in the story, which we must keep telling.

There are far too many girls and young women in schools in Plymouth and across the country who do not know about Nancy Astor. I do not want her political views to be advocated; I want the story of brave women, many of them standing alone, doing brave things and pushing the boundaries for women in general. She was initially known as the Member of Parliament for women, and we should talk about her role. There should be debate about the good and bad sides of all politicians. The first step that she took is important. It may seem odd for me as a Labour MP to speak here about a Conservative MP—especially one I fundamentally disagree with—but we need to tell the story. It frustrates me that the story of women in our politics is not told. We hear about men, and occasionally about the women standing behind them. We need to break that, and we can do so only when we—men in particular—start to tell the story. We cannot leave it to women to tell the story of women in politics. It is for all Members of Parliament, male and female, to talk up the role of women in Parliament.

[Mr Dhesi]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. As to women pushing boundaries, does he agree that women, and especially those from ethnic minorities, are often not given much credit for their accomplishments? The first black lady mayor in the country, Lydia Simmons, was elected in Slough. She was an inspiration for many, yet often such individuals do not get the credit they deserve.

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend has proved my point precisely that we need male MPs speaking up as well as female MPs, and I thank him for taking the advice so quickly.

I recently visited the superb Voice & Vote exhibition in Westminster Hall. I pay tribute to the House authorities for putting it on. It really is a superb exhibition, and hon. Members who have not visited need to take the time to do so. They will notice that one exhibit is Nancy Astor’s dress, on loan from Plymouth museum. She picked the dress because it looked like a man’s suit; it looks like a double-breasted suit. Beside it is a little plaque explaining that she chose it because she wanted people to judge her by what she said and not for what she wore. It is therefore somewhat ironic that 99 years later I stand here, as one of her successors, talking about her dress and disagreeing with all her words, but perhaps those are the joys of democracy.

Parliament was a very different place when Nancy Astor became a Member. Voice & Vote tells us the story of a system that did not welcome women to Parliament. It did not afford them the equality and credibility that they deserved by virtue of their election. We can see that in the fact that in 1929 there was only one coat hook in the Lady Members’ Room for eight female MPs. That was simply unacceptable. However, there is still far too much that the women at that time, Nancy Astor included, were fighting for that we are still fighting for today.

Nancy Astor was not afraid to stand up for herself as a woman, even in the face of power. She had an incredibly canny sense of humour, and people who have spent time in Plymouth will know many stories about her. I will touch on just a few. In particular, I want to touch on her relationship with Winston Churchill. Many hon. Members will know one story about it, but there were so many glorious clashes between them. Apparently, Churchill once told Nancy Astor that having a woman in Parliament was like having one intrude on him in the bathroom, to which she retorted, “You’re not handsome enough to have such fears.” She is also said to have responded to a question from Churchill about what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball by saying, “Why don’t you come sober, Prime Minister?” But perhaps the most famous exchange, which I am sure all hon. Members will know of, is the one in which Nancy Astor said, “Mr. Churchill, if you were my husband, I would poison your tea,” to which Churchill replied, “Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.”

So many stories are told about Nancy Astor, but so few are told about many of the other fantastic female MPs for Plymouth. I want to single out Lucy Middleton, who was the MP from 1945 to 1951 and a real tower of strength in the trade union movement. She is not remembered enough by my party in Plymouth, or by all of us here. Sadly, she lost her seat, to a male member of the Astor dynasty, Jakie Astor, in 1951, but it is good to see her name on the wall of female MPs in the Voice & Vote exhibition, because there is so much more that needs to be said in that respect.

One thing that frustrates me every time I come to Parliament—and that helps keep alive in me the fire so that I do not become accustomed to or cushioned by this place—is looking around the rooms in which we have our meetings and seeing all the old white men in wigs staring down at me. This place has a problem, because nearly every room—except, perhaps, this one—has too many pictures of men, too many pictures of old men, and too many pictures of old, white, rich men on the walls. Where are the women? Every single one of these rooms should have 50:50 representation. If there are not the paintings of women from our political history, commission them or borrow them and put them up. Take down those images of old white men, so that when young children from Plymouth come to visit Parliament they see pictures of people who look like them. Let us also ensure that there is not just male and female representation. Let us ensure that we have on our walls LGBT heroes, black, Asian and minority ethnic heroes, and disabled heroes. This place looks far too much like the old stale white male club that it sometimes was in the past.

We can change that. We need to do it by speaking up about equality. We need to continue to be restless about it to ensure that we keep fighting the misogyny that we see in our politics, in our parties and in our society. We need to give a voice to the single parents, to the WASPI women and to those people who are standing up for equality and want a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. That is what we all need to do. We can all do our bit to ensure that we get there by telling the story of women in politics, and the 1928 Act is a really important part of that. I look forward to my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury still being in this place in 10 years’ time to lead the debate on the 100th anniversary of that Act.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I thank the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) for bringing this debate to the House and giving me the opportunity to speak on the subject today.

We have spent a lot of time this year marking the anniversaries of universal suffrage. Every time I think about this, what I find remarkable is not how long ago it was, but how recent. The beginning of the 20th century was an age of modernity—there were motorcars, aeroplanes, radios and televisions; there were new advances in thinking in science and technology; there was an avant-garde movement in the arts, architecture and music. Yet while all that was happening, half—in fact, more than half—of our population were denied the basic political rights given to the other half. On reflection, that is a monstrous injustice, and the fact that it could have existed for so long while our modern constitution was being shaped is a source of great shame, and a black mark on our collective history.

Universal suffrage had been a long time coming when it happened. I have spent some time recently looking at the political agitation of the late 18th century, from Thomas Muir in Scotland to Thomas Paine here and Wolfe Tone in Ireland. They were agitating for universal suffrage—basic political suffrage—in an age when there was none. The role of women was alive and present in those debates. Since we have time, I want to read for the record the opening lines of a poem by Robert Burns, written in 1792:

“While Europe's eye is fix’d on mighty things,

The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.”

That shows that in 1792 there was a live discussion about the political rights distributed among men and women.

The exhibition just outside this Chamber in Westminster Hall shows that throughout the 19th century there was agitation, in the Reform Acts of the 1830s and driving on throughout that century. People were asking for reforms for a very long time. It is hard to imagine now the political organisation of men in this country and the degree to which that patriarchy practised misogyny and exclusion. It is quite phenomenal that it took so long—decades and generations—for these most basic of reforms to be achieved.

Having the right to vote is an end in itself, but increasing the franchise and bringing women into the electorate and then into Parliament achieved many other great ends. In particular, it overcame much exclusion, inequality and discrimination that pervaded every aspect of social policy. Even in the period 1918 to 1939, there were many advances in social and economic legislation, to the betterment of women and our society, and the task continues today. It is sad that we have to admit this, but it is a fact that there is a correlation between the involvement of women in the rules that govern our society and the effect those rules have on sexual inequality.

I hope we are nearing the end of this process. I hope we are getting to a situation where we have genuine equality and where our public policy is genuinely equal, but as colleagues have said, we are still at it. Government policy today still has a worse effect on women in our society than on men. The welfare cuts fall mainly on women. The rape clause means that women now have to prove that they have been raped to get child benefit for their third child. The WASPI inequality—I think that all of us would agree that men and women should have equal pension rights—was brought in in a ham-fisted way. The denial and breaking of an obligation and guarantee given to so many born in the 1950s is a monstrous act of Government policy. Those things are still with us today.

[Luke Pollard]

The mistakes made with the WASPI women—not informing people about changes—are still happening today with the change in universal credit. If women transitioning with their families on to universal credit have more than two children, they are not being told that they will lose the benefit after the two-child cut-off. The opportunity of WASPI is to learn the lessons and to help women with three children especially to understand that cuts are coming for them. That is not being done by Government at the moment.

[Tommy Sheppard]

Indeed. It would probably be unfair to expect the Cabinet Office Minister to respond to that point on behalf of the Government, but perhaps she will commit to take it back to discuss with colleagues.

It would be remiss of me to speak on behalf of the Scottish National party without saying something about the many great women who have contributed much to the politics not just of Scotland but of the United Kingdom as a whole. I shall mention only three: in 1967 Winnie Ewing tore the establishment apart by winning the Hamilton by-election, surprising everyone in British politics and beginning 51 years of unbroken representation by my party in this place; in the following decade Margo MacDonald did the same in not one but two by-elections, upturning the political firmament and in many ways creating the conditions that have led to the modern political dynamic in Scotland now; and of course Nicola Sturgeon, our First Minister in Scotland, who has been a beacon, an inspiration and a role model for young women in Scotland and throughout Europe and the modern world.

Nicola Sturgeon presides over one of the few Cabinets among Governments that is gender-balanced, made up half of women and half of men. It has been praised as a role model by the United Nations. The Scottish Government are also moving forward in many other respects to improve the representation of women in public life, setting targets and quotas for representation in our public board rooms, hoping to encourage the private sector to follow suit.

There has been a big debate about quotas—whether they are a right and proper thing and whether they genuinely advance women or are in some ways unnecessary or patronising to women. My experience is clear: quotas are a way of breaking the inertia and stasis that surround the existing system. It is a way of asking and answering a question about whether women are capable of doing the job. When given the chance, they are not just capable but in my view more capable than their male counterparts. That is the experience of the Scottish Government in action, which the rest of the United Kingdom might choose to learn from.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Buck. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) on securing this important debate. It has been great to listen to all these names, which are now in Hansard in perpetuity, and know that we have done our bit to recognise working-class women who have been, and are still, often ignored.

In history, working-class women, the poorer suffragettes, were referred to as “women quite unknown”. My hon. Friend mentioned how few opportunities there were for working-class women. She talked about inequality and the gender pay gap, and the way that they are still poorer female citizens. She also mentioned 50:50 Parliament, which we campaign on with Frances Scott, who is here today. We need to ensure that upskirting and revenge porn become sexual offences so that women who suffer do not have to make themselves publicly known.

How can we achieve all that in this day and age? We can all play our part. We can use inclusion riders, like actors who say, “I will not star in a film if it does not involve diversity in its pipeline and creation.” We have also talked about various sections of the Equality Act 2010. I hope that when the Minister responds, she might be tempted to announce that the Government will enact section 1 of the Act, which would force public bodies to take into account socioeconomic disadvantage when making policy decisions. If we had more consideration of that when policies were being developed, we would see fewer policies like the third-child policy, and fewer policies like those under which 86% of cuts fall on the shoulders of women and black, Asian and minority ethnic women suffer more than any other group.

My hon. Friend also mentioned my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), who is recovering. The proxy vote debate, which was supposed to be today, has been postponed. I had hoped that all the women MPs who were ready and poised to speak would come to this debate to at least listen or even make their speeches, because then they would not have been wasted.

There were many great contributions to the debate, and I will touch on a few. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) flew the flag for working-class women, the different types of women and the strength of east London women, which I can obviously attest to. She gave a voice to the match women and talked about the leaders of those times, who were buried in paupers’ graves after all their struggles.

My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) talked about Nancy Astor and how we have to talk about the journeys of women, even those we disagree with. Of course, I often talk about women I disagree with and the policies they make. Their story deserves to be told, just like everybody else’s. It is important that we stand up for other people’s rights. Let us imagine how quickly we would move towards equality if all men spoke about the rights of women, all white people spoke about the equality of black people, and all straight people spoke about LGBT+ people. We must all play our part in speaking up for equality, because we all play a part in each other’s journey. As Martin Luther King said:

“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) spoke about Margaret Bondfield, the first female Minister under Labour, which made me think about all the firsts that Labour has achieved. I would like to read them out, but there are so many that it would take at least an hour, and I do not have that much time. Some of them are to be celebrated: we have had the first black female MP, the first lesbian Minister and the first black female Minister—that is me. There are also some sad firsts, such as Maureen Colquhoun, a Labour MP who was born in 1928, who was gay and outed by the Daily Mail, which still happens today. Newspapers still think that that is okay, which shows how far we have to go.

We also heard some great interventions about 1950s women. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), who is no longer in his place, for wearing the colours of the suffragettes in his turban. He talked about Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and the hidden histories that have been ignored or forgotten, which this debate has shined a light on.

Poorer women were treated worse than middle-class women. They were treated more brutally by the police, prison wardens and magistrates. As I said, I am pleased that we are recognising them. To remember them and their struggle is to remember our own struggle and to adopt their struggle as our own.

As has been said, alongside the growing women’s suffrage movement was the women’s labour movement, which included groups such as the Women’s Protective and Provident League, the Co-operative Women’s Guild, the Women’s Trade Union Association and women in the young Independent Labour party, which would probably be known as Momentum today. Those women were referred to as “radical suffragists”. I cannot see what was radical about them, apart from wanting equality. However, those “radical suffragists” included people such as Sarah Reddish, Ada Nield Chew, Helen Silcock and Selina Cooper. Those women mobilised other women in the trade union movement—in fact, they mobilised almost 30,000 people to sign a suffrage petition, and that was without the internet, Twitter, Facebook, mobile phones and WhatsApp.

Ada Nield Chew said that if the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ request had been granted in 1884,

“the entire class of wealthy women would be enfranchised” ,

but, as she added,

“the great body of working women, married or single, would be voteless still”.

That message rings true with me. The radical suffragists, as they were known, began to move away from the NUWSS, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham spoke about. That reminded me of something that I did recently. I was a member of a women’s WhatsApp group, but I became so frustrated with trying to get members of that group to understand and consider the intersectionality of women that in the end I left the group, and I was not the only one to do so. It did not feel radical to leave that group; it obviously just entailed the click of a button. However, it reminded me of those powerful working-class women and it made me realise that the fight for recognition of, and equality for, all women is a constant struggle. We have to talk about it and fight for it constantly, otherwise we will be dragged backwards. That is really a stark realisation, because I would have hoped that we would have progressed.

I cannot confirm or deny whether I joined a new radical women’s WhatsApp group, but those working-class women broke away and formed “Womanhood Suffrage”, or the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU’s strapline and objective was:

“A vote for every adult woman, regardless of whether she owned property.”

When working-class women fight, they fight for everybody; they do not just fight for a select group. That is a lesson that truly still needs to be learned in some feminist circles. What those women were fighting for sounds really simple now; it does not sound radical to me at all. As my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury asked, if all women had received the vote earlier, how far towards equality would we be now? We might not even be having this debate.

As we have heard, the first march was from east London, and it included trade unionists such as Minnie Baldock, Sylvia Pankhurst and Dora Montefiore, who were working-class women using their non-working day to march. They worked six days a week and on the one day that they were not working they marched to Westminster and back. In a way, it can be said that working-class women committed more, in that they sacrificed more. They had the daily struggles of life. They had no home help; when they left to march on that one day off, they had to go back home afterwards and do everything else that they needed to. They had less time, less money and less formal education than many others, yet still they fought, and fought for everybody. They fought for food, they fought for their rights, they fought for dignity and respect, and they fought for every woman’s rights. And they were known as radical—I really do not get it.

Later, the WSPU was taken over by wealthy women, and it moved away from its roots in the labour movement and the trade union movement. It became ineffective and it was too far removed from its roots; some people would say that has been repeated in some circles. However, Sylvia Pankhurst reclaimed the movement, and I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury that we should perhaps see a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst. Not all women were up for the fight. Some women described the working-class women’s movement in this way:

“A working women’s movement was of no value—working women were the weakest portion of the sex...their lives were too hard, their education too meagre to equip them for the contest.”

That was an insult, but let us hope that we are moving forward.

The fact is that the Representation of the People Act 1918 enabled the representation of less than half the adult women in the UK. However, the Equal Franchise Act 1928 was literally equal. Women fought not only for the right to vote but for economic and social rights, through the labour movement and the trade union movement. We are still fighting for those rights today, as we have heard from many hon. Members.

To forget the place of working-class women, disabled women and black women in history is to be complicit in the misogynistic class war, and to forget the interconnectivity of the Labour party and the labour movement in that is to do a disservice to the truth. In this day and age of fake news, the truth has never been so important, so it is vital that we correct the record and put on the record the names of these working-class women at each and every opportunity that we get.

This year saw the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square, and I am thankful to the Mayor of London for making that happen. There are about 58 or so names of women, mainly those of working-class women, around the plinth. However, I would like to see a statue of Sarah Parker Remond, the only black woman known to have signed the Representation of the People Act 1918. I am pleased to say that the Mayor of London and his team are meeting me to discuss that proposal. While I am there, I might even put in a plug for a little statue of Sylvia Pankhurst, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens) suggested.

Our job here in Parliament is to give a voice to the voiceless.

[Luke Pollard]

When I first got into Parliament, I tabled a question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, asking what the official figures were for the number of men and the number of women represented in statues and other public art. However, the UK Government do not keep those statistics. I think we should. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should encourage Ministers to start recording equality in our public art, so that we understand the scale of the challenge ahead of us?

[Dawn Butler]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention and I absolutely agree, because only then will we be able to measure how far we have come and what still needs to be done.