International Women’s Day 2016

Peter Bottomley Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

When Eleanor Rathbone was elected to this House, one of her first speeches in the 1920s was about female genital mutilation.

She then went on to talk about the need for family endowment, saying that it was ludicrous to think that the earnings, generally of a man, at paid work can support a family of varying size. That is why she argued for family allowances, which were opposed by all parties, for their own reasons, until the wash-up session before the 1945 elections, when that measure went through this House and the House of Lords with nobody opposing it. That shows the endurance needed to push good ideas to their eventual adoption. After that, we moved on to child benefit.

When I was first elected, a Chancellor of the Exchequer —a Labour one, but that is not terribly important—argued that there was no need to bring in family allowance for the first child because the married couple’s allowance made up for that, not realising that half the married men had no dependent children and half the married men had a working wife. It was therefore one of the least directed ways of trying to support the needs of children while they are necessarily dependent—they are not allowed to work, so they cannot work and cannot earn.

I wish to make two brief additional points. The first is that we need to equalise work, by taking paid and unpaid work together. We ought to have an indicator that comes out every two or three years showing how much of the unpaid work in a household is done by the men and how much is done by the women. Until we start getting that more consciously becoming more equal, the opportunities for equality in paid work will remain distant.

The second point I wish to make is about expectations, hopes and opportunities. Anybody who went to see the exhibition in the Attlee Room in Portcullis House yesterday, where scientists, mathematicians and technologists were showing what they were doing, would not have been able to tell by the posters, except by looking at the name, whether the work and research had been done by a woman or by a man. One that particularly struck me was about the woman who had found a marker for prostate cancer. It was very important, low cost and effective, and it had no false positives. This was the kind of work that one would have expected to get a Nobel prize for if it had been done 30 years ago and if it had been shown to be working.

When we can get every child in primary school to feel at ease with maths and when everyone with talent can move on, we will find that all our children can reach forward. Whether they end up as mathematicians, engineers or scientists does not really matter, but they need to be as familiar with those subjects as they are with the arts, literature, drama, sport and the like. Let us therefore have the same expectations, opportunities and hopes here.

Tied to that, may I suggest that we also try to get more attention paid to an article in today’s ConservativeHome about the Marmot curve and how we can try to get it into a flat line? No matter what the deprivation of the household we are born into, no matter whether we are Asian or black, in a lone parent family or not, we have the opportunity that education gives us, and that the hopes and expectations of our parents can give us, and we do not have our life chances determined by who are parents were, but more by what our parents do and what we can do ourselves.