On Friday 25th May I was fortunate enough to co-chair an event featuring the Rt. Hon. John Bercow MP, Speaker of the House of Commons.
For those who aren’t sure the Speaker of the House of Commons is that fellow
who sits in the big chair in the House of Commons and tells MP’s off when they
over step the mark (like when David Cameron called Ed Balls a ‘muttering idiot'
on PM’s question time last week). His role is to stay impartial and maintain
order. As well as this he’s also doing some rather excellent work with the
Parliamentary Outreach service to help improve public engagement in politics
and improve equality and diversity in the House itself.
The event in question was a W.A.I.T.S (Women Acting in
Today’s Society) Policy Forum on the opportunities for and barriers facing
women wanting to get involved in politics (see my previous blog post http://henshouse1.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/whats-problem-women-in-politics.html for a brief overview of the situation). Aside from Mr Speaker being delayed
in traffic and arriving half an hour late the event was a great success, with
the Policy Forum speakers and Mr Speaker himself delivering engaging,
informative and occasionally amusing speeches and deftly answering challenging
questions.
Our first speaker was Sharon Thompson. Sharon is currently a
magistrate and has a vast amount of first-hand experience of the issues women,
and especially mothers, face with wanting to get involved in politics. The key
points that I took away from her presentation were:
1) There are two kinds of women local parties need to
consider: those that are already engaged in politics and those that would make
a fantastic contribution to the political scene but feel that they lack the knowledge
(‘I don’t watch the politics show!’), skills or ability to make it. To help
engage these women we need more successful female politicians to act as mentors
and ‘pass the baton on’ to the next aspiring generation and more family and
female friendly events. Things like low key, welcoming coffee mornings where women
can get together in a friendly environment and chat about what makes
them tick and how they can get more involved in party politics.
2) Parties need to raise awareness of political positions beyond
just councillors and MP’s. Sharon made the point that there are loads of local
party positions (such as women’s officer) that can represent fantastic ways for
women who are interested in politics to gain a bit more experience without
being shoved in at the deep end of the MP or Councillor candidate selection and campaigning
process. But hardly anyone knows about them.
Our next speaker was Ally
Sultana. Ally is the Coordinator for Saheli Women's
Group Empowerment Project which works to increase the understanding of politics
and political structures amongst women in South Birmingham. She spoke
passionately about the importance of politics and the difficult experiences of
the women she had delivered training to on how to become a local councillor.
1)
Ally began by talking about the experiences of the women she had worked with,
saying that it’s not just the women who have to change but the parties
themselves. After helping deliver training to South Birmingham women on how to
become a local councillor, in line with parliamentary guidelines on the matter,
many of the women were put off the political process by the in-fighting, pettiness
and bickering that they had witnessed. If parties are serious about improving equality
and diversity in their numbers, they need to be serious about changing their
ways too.
2) Next Ally made the point
that, if you’re going to run for candidacy you need to 1) know yourself and be
confident that whatever the barrier you can get through, 2) build a vast
support network around you. It’s a tough process and will involve a load of highs
and lows, so you really can’t do it alone. Despite these difficulties and
barriers, though, Ally concluded with an impassioned plea to the audience: get
involved. Things won’t change until we make it happen so whatever you come up
against, keep going and it’ll be worth it in the end.
Our final W.A.I.T.S Policy Forum
speaker was Nura Ally. Nura is
currently the Community Development Officer for the Hodge Hill constituency
and founder and director of the Allies Network; a community organisation set up
by women for disadvantaged women from ethnic minority backgrounds and
communities in the West Midlands. She had some interesting advice and
feedback based on her own experiences of competing for candidate selection:
1) The ‘tick box’ approach to equality is not always
helpful. Nura felt that during the selection process there was far too much
emphasis placed on the external qualities gender, race, sexuality, and not
enough on what an individual can truly offer. She believed that a stronger set
of guidelines to go alongside the process, weighting the importance of these
external qualities against the individual’s personality and experience would
help make the system fairer for all.
2) Like Ally, Nura called for
all of the assembled audience to get more involved. Her own experiences may not
have been difficulty free but that does not change that fact that she believes
that it is every woman’s (and man’s) civic duty to get involved in politics.
She asked that every audience member join a political party of their choice and
start participating as it’s only through participation that change is going to
occur.
Our final speaker of the morning
was Mr Speaker himself, the Rt. Hon. John Bercow MP. Mr Bercow attended the W.A.I.T.S Policy forum as part of a
series of events he was participating in in Birmingham that day as part of the
Parliamentary outreach programme, aiming to bring Parliament to the people and
helping make national politics national, not just London centric. The main
theme of his speech was what Parliament is already doing, and what still needs
to be done, to help make it more accessible to women.
1) He discussed changes he had
insisted on already such as the creation of a nursery within the Houses of
Parliament to help female employees and MP’s with young children. He also
referred to the creation of ParliAble (a Parliamentary Disability Equality
Network) and ParliOut (a support group for LGBT individuals) before talking about
the female ‘movers and shakers’ of Parliament.
2) He then referred to what he
felt were still key barriers facing women wanting to get involved in politics.
First the anti-social work hours (on Mondays and Thursdays, for instance,
Parliament opens at 2:30pm and ends at 10:30pm) which he felt should be swiftly
dealt with. Secondly the ‘ya-boo’ (heckling) atmosphere of the House of Commons
itself and the masculine ‘boys club’ attitude it can portray, which he hopes will
be changed by more women striving to become candidates and thus more women
making it into Parliament.
After this we moved onto a brief
question and answer session in which the assembled audience excelled, asking tough
and poignant questions and suggesting improvements to the system Mr Bercow
should take back with him to Parliament. There were too many to list here so
here’s just a few:
1) Job share MP’s? One lady had
an interesting suggestion: in order to make high profile political positions
more attractive to women Parliament could look a job share scheme. She argued
that many women, especially in the public sector, manage to juggle advancing
their careers with looking after young children by opting in to a job share
position, so how about applying the idea to MP’s, divvying up the role so that
one individual does the local constituency work and the other the Westminster
role/varying combinations of the two?
2) How can we guarantee that the
hard work Mr Speaker has put in to improving equality and Parliament outreach will
be continued by his successor? This highly apt question had a very simple
answer from Mr Bercow: we can’t. But on the plus side he plans on sticking
around for a good few more years.
3) The selection process for MP’s
is ridiculously expensive, requires a large amount of travelling and favours
candidates with public speaking training and experience (i.e. private school or
Ox-Bridge), what about a hardship fund and how about making the selection
process as much about the person’s other abilities as it is about public
speaking? Mr Bercow agreed with this statement but discussed the difficulties of
getting either Parliament (and the public) to agree to putting a portion of tax
payer’s money aside to help candidates of any party in dire financial need, or
individual parties to put a portion of their funds towards an in party scheme.
At this point Mr Bercow was
whisked off to his next appointment, already a little on the late side, and
myself and the assembled audience were left to reflect on what had been said
and what still needs to be done.
For me, I was personally
genuinely impressed with Mr Bercow’s down to earth, often amusing approach to
his role as speaker and his dedication to going out in to the community to
engage with harder to reach groups. However, despite the leaps being made
forward, I was left feeling that the fight for more women in Parliament is still
an uphill struggle. Mr Speaker himself stated that just getting a nursery
facility in place in Parliament came up against opposition and apathy, with
many colleagues complaining ‘there’s nowhere we could put one’ (a statement proved
glaringly untrue by the fact that there is now one in place). Likewise, the W.A.I.T.S
Policy Forum speakers all depicted an image of local party politics that really
needs to make more of an effort to become more approachable for women in ways
that really would not require too much effort on their half (coffee mornings,
mentoring, family friendly event times, fairer selection process). 93 years on
from when the first female MP took her seat the proportion of women in Parliament
remains stubbornly at just 22%. Only 37 out of Birmingham’s 120 local
councillors are female. I’m very glad that someone is standing up for common
sense policies to get more women involved in the political process but there’s
a heck of a lot more work still to be done.
Fortunately the W.A.I.T.S Policy
forum speakers seem more than willing to take on the challenge. Sharon, Ally
and Nura are all carrying on their fantastic work either by running for
political roles themselves or helping many other women discover their
potential and take on greater roles of responsibility. On top of this in the
post event networking several of the audience members declared their intention
to get more involved in local politics and even go for candidate selection before
the next local election too. We need more dedicated and inspiring women like
these to keep building up the momentum and pushing for positive change in the
UK. Luckily for us, if this event is anything to go by, we’ve got them in abundance.
H.B.
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