Vote 100 and International Women’s Day

Debate between Rushanara Ali and Justine Greening

Thursday 8th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) and to hear so many inspirational speeches across the House today. In particular, I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) for her moving tribute to the victims of violence in our country.

It is fitting that we should mark International Women’s Day alongside the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. My constituency has a proud history of women being pioneers and fighting for women’s rights and workers’ rights, going back to the matchwomen’s strike of 1888 and to the establishment of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, led by Sylvia Pankhurst, which was based in Bow and had branches all over the east end. The suffragettes grounded their campaign in the everyday reality of working women’s lives and fought for a living wage, decent housing, equal pay, food price controls, adequate pensions and much else. They saw the vote as just one aspect of the struggle for equality, and while it was an important step towards equality, it represented a partial victory rather than a complete one. We owe a huge amount to them for giving us the opportunity to stand here today and speak in this debate, and to make a contribution to public life in our country and internationally. Much progress has been made since then, but we have so much more to do in relation to women’s status, safety, rights, pay and representation.

I am incredibly proud of the fact that I am one of the three Muslim women elected to Parliament in 2010, along with my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood). I am also proud of the fact that many other Muslim women and women from other faith backgrounds and from black and minority ethnic backgrounds have entered Parliament, but there is much more to be done to increase the number of women and those from other backgrounds in our Parliament. I want to pay tribute to the women in Parliament who enabled us to get here. They were the pioneers who first arrived here, and I want to single out two in particular.

The first is my Labour predecessor, Oona King, who is now a member of the House of Lords. She was only the second black woman to be elected to this House. The other is the former deputy leader of our party, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who has done so much for us and for our country, and who commands the support of women across the House. I certainly would not be here were it not for the encouragement and support from her and from many other women in public life.

I hope that we can continue to build on that by ensuring that women have the confidence, the encouragement, the support, the networks and the back-up to enable them to charge ahead and to stand for positions in public life. That is why I took the step of setting up the UpRising leadership charity, which has cross-party support. It supports women and men—particularly women—from white working class and ethnic minority backgrounds to enter public life in the professions and, particularly, in politics. We work in different constituencies so that the next generation can have the support it needs and does not have to struggle in the way that previous generations have done.

I have heard many stories of people deciding to stand for Parliament and being told, “You can’t do that because people won’t support a woman.” Having the audacity to stand is still a challenge for many women. Too often, they are told that they cannot make it because they will not have the support of the people in their communities or that they will not have the support of the men. It is when women push forward and stand, as I and many others have done, that those preconceptions and prejudices are shown to be wrong. That is why we must continue to encourage young women to stand for public life and for positions in politics locally and nationally, despite all the online abuse and all the stories of abuse and injustice that we have heard in the past year. I hope that we can all continue to work together on that effort.

We have achieved a great deal, as we have heard today, but the focus on progress must continue. Progress comes with pressure. Over the past year, we have seen the #MeToo campaign and other campaigns relating to the plight of women emerging in countries where we do not expect women to suffer in this way, and that tells us that we still have much to do. Around the world, women continue to bear the brunt of poverty, of war, of sexual violence and of climate change. There are 130 million girls not in education, and 15 million girls of primary school age who will never get the chance to learn to read or write in primary school. Globally, more than a third of women are subject to violence, and 750 million women and girls are married before the age of 18. Far too often, women still bear the brunt of the conflicts around the world. They are exposed to brutal attacks, often as deliberate tools of political and ethnic violence. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, women are far more likely than soldiers to be victims of violence. In Sudan, rape has been used as a weapon of war by Government and opposition forces. A report published by the International Rescue Committee last year stated that the scale of violence against women and girls in South Sudan was double the global average.

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady is making an important point. A longer-term consequence of children in those communities growing up with violence around them is that domestic violence rates, even after peace is secured, are way higher than in other countries. It is vital that she makes that point, and she is quite right to do so.

[Rushanara Ali]

I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention and for her work when she was International Development Secretary. As a former shadow International Development Minister, I cannot stop being affected by the experience of women in conflict zones and other parts of the world. The ongoing crisis in Syria has forced the displacement of women, who have fled to other countries in the hope of finding safety. However, as the right hon. Lady points out, women continue to experience violence long after they have fled the instability in their own countries. The women living in temporary refugee settlements in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere have limited access to support and live in constant fear of further violence and forced marriage.

Education and Local Services

Debate between Rushanara Ali and Justine Greening

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I have made it clear that we are going to introduce proposals on fair funding. There is record funding in our schools, and we have set out a commitment to increase that further in our manifesto. We will introduce those proposals shortly.

To conclude on higher education, the £2 billion higher education black hole would mean an emergency cap on student numbers. Young people would miss out on university. They would almost certainly be from disadvantaged backgrounds: young people hoping to be the first in their family to get the chance to do a degree, as I was. It is literally a cap on aspiration. Labour are not being honest and up front with young people about the implications of their proposals for higher education funding. It is simply snake oil populism.

It is vital to ensure that higher education remains accessible, is affordable and provides value for money. We need to listen to the voices of young people at the last election and we are committed to doing so, but our approach must reduce inequality and the lack of access for disadvantaged young people, not increase it as Labour’s policy would.

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

I remind the Secretary of State that the last Labour Government expanded higher education and had a cap on fees. She talks about 1 million young people being unemployed. In the first Parliament under the Tory Government, youth unemployment was at 1 million and the Work programme was a disaster, wasting billions of pounds. I ask her to reverse the £3 billion of education cuts being proposed by her Government, which will devastate aspiration in schools around the country. It is time to act, Secretary of State, not attack the Opposition. You are in power—deal with the cap on aspiration now.