International Women’s Day

Tulip Siddiq Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab) [V]]

Recently my four-year-old daughter proudly declared that she wants to be a politician when she is older, because she wants to work to make life easier for other people. Her words came back to haunt me when I saw my six-year-old constituent Gabriella Ratcliffe, whose life has been anything but easy.

The story of Gabriella’s childhood is well rehearsed. She was separated from her mother, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, when she was still being breastfed at 18 months. At the age of two, she had to wear a sack over her head when visiting her mother in prison, and she celebrated her third birthday in the waiting room at Evin prison. By the age of four, she had forgotten how to speak English, and so lost the ability to communicate with her father, Richard. At the age of five, she travelled across two continents, from Iran to the UK, saying goodbye to her mother indefinitely and promising to be brave.

I often see Gabriella on my Zoom calls with Richard, and she once asked me if mummy would be coming home in time for Mother’s Day—a plea from a young woman about her imprisoned mother to her female MP felt particularly poignant on International Women’s Day.

Yesterday it was reported that the Prime Minister and President Rouhani had a conversation about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, and it was heavily implied that the £400 million debt that the UK owes to Iran was linked to my constituent’s case. I imagined being a fly on the wall, listening to two men at the top of their respective Governments discussing the fate of a poor woman who had been caught as a political pawn between the two countries, taken hostage and imprisoned for crimes she did not commit, mentally tortured for years, all to serve a diplomatic negotiation with an oppressive regime over issues including a debt dating back to the 1970s and the international arms trade.

For a lot of women we will hear about today, their tragedies have been caused by personal or local circumstances. Gabriella’s personal tragedy has been caused by global injustice, which has overwhelmingly been orchestrated by men. At this moment, Nazanin’s fate is held in the hands of men: President Rouhani, the judges in Iran and, of course, our Prime Minister.

I hope that Nazanin returns to the UK soon, and that she returns to a country that is on a path to true equality between men and women, where her daughter and my son can walk the same streets as equals.