To the Fawcett AGM this afternoon – business briskly conducted, we turned to an interesting debate, with the broadranging topic of “what might a female future look like?” Speakers were Mary MacLeod MP (Conservative), Jean Lambert MEP (Green Party), Baroness Kate Parminter (Liberal Democrat) and Rushanara Ali MP (Labour).
I haven’t heard Kate speak before (she said she only uses baroness when she has to) and she was very impressive, as was Jean Lambert, who took the generally appointed Green role of doing the blue sky thinking. Her discusion of how we need to change our whole view of and attitude towards work went down very well, and what a workinglife means, as did her line: “Why does everything that looks interesting have to wait until you retire?”
Kate has an interesting background – RSPCA with the hunting ban, Campaign for Rural England, and she only went to the Lords in July, but is clearly enjoying the experience. She spoke a lot about women “self-selecting out” from running for parliament, as she’d done herself, and was very keen on the idea of job-share MPs as a way of getting around the problem of the role’s pressures. She called on Fawcett to move the agenda forward on the issue, and added: “I know for a fact the No 10 policy unit is thinking about it.”
House of Lords reform was an important opportunity, she said: “let’s set the test for the reform to be that it must end up with a 50/50 gender balance.”
She also referred to the importance of the portrayal of women in media and sport, particularly for girls. “I want girls to feel they can say yes to all life has to offer them.” She called for the 2013 revision of sports broadcasting to ensure that at least one all-female sport is regularly shown. And she noted that in looking at secondary schools for her daughter, she found that one she had otherwise liked offered cheerleading as an after-school club. “I want that to stop.”
Referring to the impact of cuts, clearly the primary concern of the meeting, Jean came up with a powerful line that sums up much of the stupidity of where we find ourselves: “A strong social security system is an essential foundation for a strong economy.” Fawcett has powerfully taken legal action over the government’s apparent failure to fulfil its requirement to do gender audits of its decisions, but Jean added, a useful thought, that campaigners should also think about the obligation there is for this on local government, where many of the final detailed decisions about cuts will be made.
Kate also made an important democratic point (against her own side) about the making of announcements about many important policy decisions at party conferences, where they “can’t be considered in the round”, as in parliament.
Rushanara went on a specific attack – no doubt justified – about the government’s recent dropping of “go orders”, under which domestic violence perpetrators can be forced to leave the home for two weeks while the victim decides what to do, in part on grounds of cost. Jean added that this should be considered on human rights grounds – the right to safety – but that even if you chose to look at it only on financial grounds it made no sense, since the cost of dealing with the damage done to victimns and their children could be far greater than that of earlier intervention.
There was a very interesting intervention from the floor from one of the half a dozen males in the packed Toynbee Hall – he came up with the memorable line that what we’re now “living in a man’s museum”. (I think lots of people wrote that down.)
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