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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Biteback Publishing is delighted to announce a major new project, a two volume series of biographies of every female MP ever to be elected to the House of Commons. When Constance Markievicz stood for election as MP for Dublin St Patrick's in 1918, few people believed she could win the seat – yet she did. A breakthrough in the bitter struggle for female enfranchisement had come earlier that year, followed by a second landmark piece of legislation allowing women to be elected to Parliament – and Markievicz duly became the first woman MP. A member of Sinn Féin, she refused to take her seat. She did, however, pave the way for future generations, and only eleven months later, Nancy Astor entered the Commons. A century on from that historic event, 491 women have now passed through the hallowed doors of Parliament. Each one of these pioneers has fought tenaciously to introduce enduring reform, and in doing so has helped revolutionise Britain's political landscape, ensuring that women's contributions are not consigned to the history books. Containing profiles of all 287 woman MPs from 1997 to 2019, and with female contributors from Mary Beard to Caroline Lucas, Ruth Davidson to Yvette Cooper and Margaret Beckett to Ann Widdecombe, The Honourable Ladies: Volume II is an indispensable and illuminating testament to the stories and achievements of these remarkable women.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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CONTENTS
PREFACE
IAIN DALE
In the century since women were first allowed to stand for Parliament, only 494 have been elected. Of these, 326 have been first elected since 1997, and 211 women sit in the current House of Commons at the time of publishing – that’s 32 per cent of the total.
Jacqui Smith and I had the idea for this two-volume set of books in 2016. Volume I, published in September 2018, contained 168 essays on the women elected to the House of Commons between 1918 and 1996. This second and final volume contains biographies of the 326 women elected since 1997.
The 1918 general election was the first in which women were permitted to stand for Parliament. Out of 1,631 parliamentary candidates, seventeen were women – one Conservative, four Labour, four Liberals and eight others. And it wasn’t until 1983 that women as a proportion of all candidates would rise above 10 per cent – even up until the late 1980s the proportion of women actually elected had always been below 5 per cent. The 1997 general election saw female representation increase to 18 per cent, following the election of 120 women MPs. Before the 1997 general election, women MPs had never made up more than 10 per cent of the total number of MPs. The 2017 general election brought the highest-ever proportion (32 per cent) of women to the Commons. Since 1918, 493 women have been elected as Members of the House of Commons. Four were elected as Sinn Féin MPs and did not take their seats: Countess Constance Markievicz (1918), Michelle Gildernew (2001), Elisha McCallion (2017) and Órfhlaith Begley (2018). Of the 493 women, 284 (58 per cent) were first elected as Labour MPs and 140 (29 per cent) as Conservatives. Forty-six of these 494 women MPs have gone on to serve as Cabinet ministers.
* * *
There were many triumphs for women in the 2017 general election; Preet Gill became the first female Sikh MP to join the Commons after her election in Birmingham Edgbaston, while Marsha de Cordova, a disability rights campaigner who is registered as blind, took the safe Conservative seat of Battersea for Labour. Lib Dem Layla Moran’s election in Oxford & West Abingdon made her the first female Lib Dem MP to come from a minority background and the first UK MP of Palestinian descent. A total of 973 women candidates across all parties stood in the 2017 general election – 29 per cent of the total number of 3,304 candidates. Although this marked a numeric fall in the number of female parliamentary candidates from the 1,033 that had stood at the 2015 election, there was still a percentage increase in the proportion of women standing.
This was a landmark election for Labour, who fielded the highest number of women candidates of any party at any general election. The proportion of Labour female parliamentary candidates rose from 34 per cent in 2015 to 41 per cent in 2017. There were 184 female Conservative candidates – 29 per cent of the party’s total – marking the highest number in the party’s history and a 9 per cent increase on 2015. There were also 184 women candidates (29 per cent) representing the Liberal Democrats. Thirty-four per cent of the Scottish National Party’s candidates were women, 35 per cent of the Green Party’s, 28 per cent of Plaid Cymru’s and 13 per cent of UKIP’s. A higher proportion of women candidates contested Labour’s safer seats (those with a 20 to 30 per cent majority), at 51 per cent, compared with 26 per cent for the Conservatives.
However, 43 per cent of Conservative candidates in the most winnable seats (those with a 0 to 10 per cent majority held by another party) were women, compared with 33 per cent of Labour candidates. This indicated a rise for the Conservatives and a fall for Labour; in 2015, the opposite held true. Labour also fielded a higher proportion of women candidates in marginal seats. In seats with a 0 to 10 per cent marginality, 47 per cent of Labour candidates were women, as opposed to 20 per cent of Conservative candidates. Fifty-six per cent of female Lib Dem candidates stood in marginal seats. At the 2017 election 119 women Labour MPs were elected (45 per cent of all Labour MPs), more than every other party combined. The Conservatives have sixty-seven women MPs, three fewer than before the 2017 election, and the SNP twelve. The Lib Dems, who had no female MPs in 2015, now have four, while a further seven women represent smaller parties and independents. These women make up 32 per cent of all the MPs in Parliament.
In the Scottish Parliament, 36 per cent of the members are women, compared to 42 per cent of the members of the National Assembly for Wales and 30 per cent of the members of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Following the 2014 European Parliament elections, 41 per cent of UK MEPs are women. However, despite significant progress, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s global league table, the UK ranks only thirty-eighth in the world in terms of female representation in Parliament – falling behind several European nations. Rwanda tops the list, followed by Bolivia, Cuba and Iceland. Five countries in the rankings have no women in their lower or single house, while thirty have fewer than 10 per cent. There are currently female Presidents or Prime Ministers in only sixteen countries – 9 per cent of the 193 countries who are currently members of the UN. It should be noted that of the eight Labour MPs who defected to the Independent Group in February 2019, four were women – Luciana Berger, Ann Coffey, Angela Smith and Joan Ryan.
We decided only to commission women to write the biographies. I am the token male in the production of the book! Its editors and publicist at Biteback are also all women.
Jacqui and I would like to thank the 189 women who have contributed the essays to this book. Most have written a single entry, but I’d especially like to thank Dame Anne McGuire and Linda McDougall for their efforts in writing more than a few entries each.
We would also like to thank Olivia Beattie and Stephanie Carey at Biteback for their herculean task in putting the book together and editing it so well. Having said that I am the token male in editing this book, I do have a fellow traveller. Namkwan Cho has done a fantastic job in designing the cover and typesetting the text.
Naturally every contributor has a different writing style, and we make no apology for that, and we hope you enjoy the variety. Some of our authors know or knew their subjects and were encouraged to include personal reminiscences and judgements. We didn’t want this to be an academic exercise; we wanted to bring some of these remarkable characters to life.
Given the length of the book and the subject matter, it is inevitable that there will be a few errors. We take full responsibility for mistakes and hope you will point them out to us so they can be corrected in any reprint. If you spot anything, please email [email protected].
We very much hope you enjoy the book.
Iain DaleTunbridge Wells, August 2019
PREFACE
JACQUI SMITH
There is a famous photograph of all the Labour women elected to Parliament in the Labour landslide of 1997. I’m in the front row next to my good friend, Caroline Flint MP for Don Valley. The photo was taken on the first day that MPs gathered after the 1997 election and I felt a combination of elation and exhaustion, but was also proud to be part of such a group of women.
The 1997 election marked a step change in women’s representation in the House of Commons. The first volume of The Honourable Ladies contains essays about women elected to Parliament starting in 1918 with the election of Constance Markievicz, who became the Sinn Féin candidate for Dublin St Patrick’s constituency. At the time of the election, Markievicz was in Holloway Prison and, like other Sinn Féin representatives, refused to take up her seat in the House of Commons. This was a mere three weeks after the passing of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act 1918 on 21 November 1918. Seventeen women stood in this election, including Christabel Pankhurst, who stood in Smethwick and polled over 8,000 votes (and only narrowly lost out to Labour). The first woman to actually take up her seat was Nancy Astor in December 1919.
Finishing in 1996, Volume I contains the stories of the women who forged their way in a male-dominated Parliament and achieved notable firsts: Margaret Bondfield as the first woman Cabinet minister in 1929; Betty Boothroyd as the first Speaker of the House of Commons in 1992; and Margaret Thatcher as the first female Prime Minister in 1979. In that 78-year period, 168 women were elected to Parliament, but the proportion of women never went above 10 per cent. As Tessa Jowell noted, before 1997 there had been ‘more Members of Parliament called “John” than there are Honourable Ladies in the House’.
It was not until after the mid-1990s that any real breakthrough in representation happened. For Labour, this came in 1997 when the party implemented a quota policy of all-women shortlists for 50 per cent of their winnable seats. More than 100 Labour women were elected to Parliament and the proportion of women MPs increased to 18 per cent. Other parties rejected this type of approach, but the Conservatives made considerable progress in 2010 when their numbers of women elected went from seventeen to forty-nine. A programme of support and leadership shown by David Cameron and Theresa May seems to be at the heart of the increased representation. There are now 67 Tory women, 120 Labour women and 22 representing other parties.
At the time of my first successful election in 1997, 120 women were elected to Parliament. This was a cause for celebration, and many called it a breakthrough. The reality was that this still constituted just 18 per cent of all MPs. What it did demonstrate, however, was that progress in women’s representation was finally speeding up. While there were 167 women in our first volume of The Honourable Ladies, this volume contains the stories of 327 women elected in just twenty-two years.
Another important milestone came on 8 December 2016. Nearly one hundred years after the first woman was elected to Parliament, the election of Dr Caroline Johnson in the Sleaford & North Hykeham by-election meant that she became the 455th woman elected to the House. On that same day, there were 455 men sitting in the Commons. It had taken ninety-eight years for the number of women ever elected to equal the number of men sitting in the House of Commons on that day.
The real significance of the women who have been elected to Parliament is not just their presence, but also their action and the change they achieve. That’s not to underestimate the impact of the growing number of women in Parliament on how people – especially other women – felt about their national politics. Many people commented to me, and still do, about the impact on them of that picture of the new Labour women MPs in 1997. Lobby journalists talked about how Parliament didn’t just appear, but felt different, as they looked down on the coloured jackets dotted between the traditional grey suits. It’s hard to be what you can’t see, and all of a sudden young women could see that there were MPs that looked like them, and they could begin to picture themselves with a political career. Many of them are among the MPs elected in more recent years.
Even with a female Prime Minister in Margaret Thatcher, the senior echelons of government had remained very male. After 1997, Tony Blair appointed five women to the Cabinet – the first time that there had been more than two. Between 2006 and 2007 we had the largest proportion of women Cabinet ministers, with 36 per cent of the Cabinet being female. There was also a new tranche of firsts. Ann Taylor was the first female Leader of the House and then the first Chief Whip. Margaret Beckett was the first Foreign Secretary and I was the first Home Secretary. Baroness Scotland was the first Attorney-General and Liz Truss the first Lord Chancellor. In May 2019 Penny Mordaunt became the first female Defence Secretary. We’ve had another woman Prime Minister with Theresa May, but the roles of Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the Labour Party remain stubbornly male.
Parliament and government didn’t only look different – women politicians started pursuing new priorities, too. Issues previously seen as insignificant became centre stage, and completely new areas of public policy developed. Women’s work and caring responsibilities became driving forces for welfare reform. Violence against women moved to the mainstream of criminal justice changes. Laws were introduced to institutionalise equality. Sure Start; the national childcare strategy; improvements in maternity and paternity pay and leave; and the right to request flexible working recognised caring responsibilities largely undertaken by women. The National Minimum Wage was the biggest increase in women’s pay since the Equal Pay Act 1975, and tax credits and pension reform both aimed to boost the incomes of poorer women. New rights and services for the female victims of violence became a criminal justice priority. Increasing international aid recognised the particular needs of women and their children.
Women’s rights have been a less obvious feature of the coalition and Conservative governments of recent years. However, the greater number of women members across the House has made an impact on many issues, such as resisting anonymity for rape suspects and pushing for abortion rights for women in Northern Ireland. Improved parental leave was a feature of the coalition government. Theresa May led efforts on tackling modern slavery. Maria Miller is the first chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, which has brought real parliamentary focus to issues of equality.
However, these ad hoc efforts have failed to prevent austerity hitting women hardest, and the position of women and the policies that support them will always depend on the politics of the government in power, not just the numbers of women serving as ministers or MPs.
In the first volume of The Honourable Ladies, we heard about women making enormous, but largely individual, efforts to promote issues of significance for women’s economic and social wellbeing. In this volume, we see women at the heart of government: able to drive significant public service and economic reforms for the benefit of women. The centrality of women’s rights will always depend on the political priorities of the governing parties, but what is clear is that progress for women will continue to be driven by the enormously energetic and talented female MPs you can read about in this book – and by the others who will have been inspired to follow them.
Jacqui Smith Malvern, June 2019
FACTS AND FIGURES
This table shows the number of women MPs elected across all parties in general elections since 1918.
This table shows the number of women who have stood for election to Parliament in every general election since 1918, the year that women were first permitted to stand.
PARLIAMENTARY FIRSTS FOR WOMEN
This timeline charts a number of ‘firsts’ and significant events over the past century for women in Parliament and political life.
CANDY ATHERTON
LINDA GILROY
Candy Atherton was a larger-than-life character who wore flowing clothes and big jewellery and carried a capacious handbag. Her career in politics stretched long before her election to Parliament: she was a passionate feminist and a lifelong campaigner, setting up a women’s refuge, co-founding Everywoman magazine and serving as an Islington councillor and mayor.
Candy was greatly affected by illness and disabilities caused by an autoimmune disease, but never let it affect her appetite for life, food, drink and having fun. She was a qualified glider pilot and accomplished ‘boat woman’ who lived on a narrowboat on a London canal when attending Parliament. She played keyboards, attempted the accordion and was a keen, knowledgeable birdwatcher.
In 1995 she was selected to fight the three-way marginal seat of Falmouth & Camborne, the first constituency to use Labour’s new all-women shortlist procedure. The selection was as controversial locally as the policy was nationally. Two Labour councillors resigned (one of whom stood against her for the seat), but in 1997 she took Labour from third place to first and much enjoyed saying that she was ‘the overweight woman who beat Seb Coe’ – the Olympic athlete turned Conservative politician who held the seat from 1992.
She nearly doubled her majority in 2001, having successfully campaigned for the Prime Minister to take the necessary steps to achieve Objective 1 European funding status for Cornwall (bringing infrastructure and development funding worth over £2 billion), for the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, and for a university in Cornwall. Candy was also a vocal campaigner for the ban on fox hunting, spearheaded the campaign to open a minor injuries unit in Camborne and exposed the longstanding concerns about the nerve gas station at Nancekuke (RRH Portreath) in her constituency. She also introduced a Private Member’s Bill in 2001 to outlaw age discrimination. In 2002 Candy married Cornishman Broderick Ross in Falmouth’s Pendennis Castle, befitting her well-deserved reputation for throwing a good party.
In private life Candy was very sensitive about perceived political insults, but in public she could come across as high handed, which perhaps contributed to her defeat at the 2005 general election by Liberal Democrat Julia Goldsworthy by 1,886 votes.
After her parliamentary career, she served on the Housing Corporation, chairing the rural housing committee, before entering local politics in Falmouth in 2013 with her customary energy and zeal, playing a major role in steering the council through a period of change as it took on devolved services from the unitary authority.
On 30 October 2017, Candy had a major stroke, dying suddenly in the midst of her representative duties at the Association of Larger Local Councils’ conference. She would have been delighted at the local paper’s description of her as a ‘Cornish campaigner’.
Six months before this she and I had sneaked a ‘quiet’ night out on 1 May 2017 in the middle of her campaign to become re-elected to the Cornwall County Council seat she had held since 2013. At one of her favourite Falmouth fish restaurants we (well, mostly she) demolished a crab stack and two bottles of red wine. Reflecting with her on the twenty years since 1 May 1997, I saw in sharp relief how practical this left-wing feminist was in her politics, achieving change for the better for so many people, making sure they too could live their lives to the full.
CHARLOTTE ATKINS
KATHRYN STANCZYSZYN
The daughter of stalwart Labour MP Ron Atkins, Charlotte Atkins grew up with politics in the family. After a successful career in trade unions and as a local councillor, she became MP for Staffordshire Moorlands in the Labour landslide of 1997.
Born in 1950 in Essex, Charlotte Atkins went to Colchester County High School. After gaining a degree in economics at LSE, and an MA in area studies at the University of London, she worked with Luton Community Research Council from 1974 for a few years before becoming heavily involved with the trade union movement. She was first a researcher and then head of research at UCATT in the late 1970s, before moving on to TASS and then heading to COHSE, and finally UNISON, where she worked as a press officer and then parliamentary officer between 1983 and 1997. In 1981 she wrote a book with another future Labour MP, Chris Mullin, called How to Select or Reselect Your MP.
She had become a member of the Labour Party aged just fifteen, and in 1982 had her first taste of elected politics as a councillor in Wandsworth, becoming deputy leader of the Labour group a year later. She first stood for Parliament in 1990 in the Eastbourne by-election brought about by the assassination of Conservative MP Ian Gow in a car bomb attack by the Provisional IRA. She came third, in a surprise win for the Liberal Democrats over the Conservative candidate. But she had proved herself, and went on to stand in 1997 for Staffordshire Moorlands, winning the seat from the Conservatives, who had held it for twenty-seven years, with a 10,000 majority and a significant swing. That election marked the point the seat became a bellwether for the nation.
Throughout her thirteen-year parliamentary career, agriculture, education and the environment were among her specialist interests. Charlotte Atkins became Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Transport in 2004 for a year, and was an assistant whip from 2002 to 2005. She was also part of the Health Select Committee that changed the course of a crucial piece of legislation. In 2007, the committee recommended banning smoking in all enclosed public spaces, going against the proposed law for a ban to apply only to food premises. The committee members tabled an all-party amendment to the Bill to remove the exemptions for non-food pubs and private members’ clubs, and it was this cross-party support that helped convince both the opposition and the government to allow a free vote on the issue. The rest is history.
However, it is Charlotte Atkins’s fierce advocacy of Britain’s waterways that she became best known for, and led to her receiving the Inland Waterways Association’s inaugural award for ‘Parliamentarian of the Year’ in 2008. She was heavily involved in campaigning for more funds for England’s waterways, particularly the Caldon Canal in her own constituency, and spoke many times during her time as an MP in support of the need for ongoing regeneration. She later became chair of the Canal & River Trust’s Central Shires Waterway Partnership board.
Charlotte Atkins lost her seat to Conservative Karen Bradley in 2010. She then once again became a Labour councillor, this time in her new home, for Staffordshire County Council.
JACKIE BALLARD
CAROLYN QUINN
Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was Jackie Ballard, Liberal Democrat MP for Taunton, taking to the skies in a helicopter to launch her bid to take over from Paddy Ashdown as leader in 1999. Never a shrinking violet, she was the first and only woman to seek the top job. Pitched against four of her male colleagues, her slogan, ‘Jackie B – Who cares, wins’, failed to stop Charles Kennedy, and she came fourth out of five. But during the race she gained some unexpected backers. Michael Gove, then a columnist for The Times, wrote a glowing piece about her. Then, in 2018, while reflecting on the lessons he had learned, he concluded: ‘That prediction is a mug’s game. I’m a man who wrote Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right, and the man who said Jackie Ballard would be leader of the Liberal Democrats!’
Jackie Ballard had entered Parliament in 1997. After a career in social work and education, she already had a reputation as a fierce opponent of hunting when she won the Taunton seat on her second attempt. During her time as MP there, she received death threats from hunting supporters for her vocal and prominent campaign against blood sports. A dead sheep was placed on a golf course with her name around its neck. But she stood her ground. She says one of the things that made her most proud as an MP was cross-party collaboration to co-sponsor the first Bill which attempted to ban fox hunting. The Hunting Bill failed ultimately during her time in Parliament but – to the chagrin of many of her critics – succeeded during her subsequent career as director general of the RSPCA.
She lost her Taunton seat to the Conservatives at the 2001 general election by 235 votes. Catapulted out of Parliament, she turned her back on politics and took off to Iran. She had fallen in love with an Iranian man at university (while returning to her studies after losing her seat) and now wanted to immerse herself in the culture and the language. She’d paid several visits during her time as an MP; now, with her £25,000 redundancy and with the blessing of her grown-up daughter, she planned a longer stay. Known for her feminist credentials, she surprised friends at home with her willingness to submit to the mandatory hijab in Iran. She admits now to being a bit blinkered in interviews about her life there. ‘I loved the people, the culture and the country, but I am not an apologist for the regime,’ she insists.
Back in the UK in 2002, when her appointment as the first female director general of the RSPCA was announced, a storm broke out. She was publicly criticised by members. Trustees resigned in protest. One newspaper branded her a ‘feminist and failed MP who … can’t even read a balance sheet’. But within five years she had dug the charity out of a deep financial hole and oversaw the implementation of a new Animal Welfare Act. She moved on to head the Action on Hearing Loss charity – formerly RNID – though her attempts to learn sign language, were, she says, impeded by the fact that she has been blind in one eye since birth, which limits her spatial awareness.
Since then, her charity career has spanned causes such as women’s rights and issues surrounding alcohol.
Her ties with Parliament weren’t completely severed in 2001, however. She was chosen to join the new panel set up to oversee the new MPs’ expenses system after the scandal of 2009, but her appointment was vigorously opposed by Tory MPs, who said she hadn’t been an MP long enough and didn’t sufficiently know the ways of Parliament.
Reflecting on the criticism she received, Jackie Ballard dismisses her critics as ‘dinosaurs’ who kicked up because she wasn’t ‘one of them’:
Most former MPs preferred at the time not to put their head above the parapet – it was clear the appointments and the new process was going to be controversial. I found myself under flak from all sides – from the media, from MPs. We had very little time to set up a new system for the world’s most difficult customers.
Jackie Ballard joined fellow board members in declining the chance to seek re-appointment when it came to the end of their three-year terms in 2012, accusing MPs of ‘gratuitous hostility’ and the Speaker of ‘interference’, though today she suggests that he was ‘under pressure to put the screws on, whatever he thought personally of the new system and its board’.
Ask Jackie Ballard if she ever hankers after a return to party politics after 2001 and she will look horrified and dismiss the thought out of hand. ‘When I go on holiday, or meet someone new, I never tell anyone I was an MP,’ she says. ‘As soon as you say, “I was an MP”, it’s like [it’s] the only thing you have done in your life, whereas I feel I have done bigger and better things since.’
ANNE BEGG
ANNE McGUIRE
Anne Begg was born with a disability, but for the first eight years of her life, her family had to fight to see a specialist to get a definitive diagnosis of Gaucher’s Disease. By the time she was eleven her enlarged spleen had been removed and she had spent many months in hospital for painful exploratory procedures. However, as she herself puts it: ‘We were a Scottish working-class family, so we just got on with life,’ and get on with life she did, but it was never easy. She sat her Scottish Higher exams in hospital. After her education at Brechin High School, she found that her way into primary teaching in 1973 was barred because she ‘couldn’t fit the health standards’. So she studied for a university degree and took a secondary teaching course, qualifying in 1978. She did get a teaching post, having gone to the interview using only one of her two sticks. Using two sticks would have disbarred her. Even then, it was only a qualified acceptance as she had to prove her fitness by having a two-year period without any absences, a stricture that would never have been imposed on a non-disabled person. As Anne often said, it was never about her ability.
Previously an unsuccessful council candidate in Angus, Anne was selected as the Labour candidate for Aberdeen South in the autumn of 1996 and came to the job on the basis of a record of activism in both the party and her union, the Educational Institute of Scotland. She was seen as a good choice, ‘if a bit of a leftie’. What was never in doubt was her commitment and energy, however, and in 1997 she was returned as one of eight Scottish Labour women MPs, at that point the highest in the Scottish party’s history.
If Anne had any fears about the Commons being accessible to a wheelchair-using member, then her fears were quickly allayed. Thanks initially to the efforts of the Deputy Speaker, Michael Martin, the Commons was ready for her, certainly in terms of facilities. Her room was on the same level as the Chamber and only a few minutes away, and provision was made for additional staff support. Twenty years on, it is taken for granted that support for disabled MPs is built in. The Commons might have been reasonably accessible, but other places were not. In those first months she refused to go to receptions and meetings that were held in upstairs rooms, even in government buildings. A new lift was installed in the Scottish Office’s Dover House, which Donald Dewar, the Secretary of State, dubbed ‘Anne’s Lift’.
However, while the facilities were in place, it was obvious that in debate, other members were not quite sure how to deal with her. Astonishingly, she was the first member to be allowed to speak from a wheelchair. Previously, any physically disabled member would be carried to their seat in the Chamber. Knowing that Anne had taught debating to her pupils, and she herself knew how to pack a verbal punch, it was often amusing to watch as opposition members treated her initially with kid gloves and sometimes a little condescension. She had not just to establish herself as one of the new women in a Parliament unused to us in such numbers, but also as the first permanent wheelchair-using member. Anyway, everyone soon learned she was neither a shrinking violet nor a pushover in verbal combat.
I always thought it surprising that Anne never gained ministerial office. She had such a range of interests, from the oil and gas industry to fishing, health and equalities, that there was no shortage of experience. However, she became a formidable force in the Commons Select Committee structure, serving for fourteen years on the Work and Pensions Committee, the last five years as chair. Her time as chair was dominated by the radical and controversial reform of the UK welfare system and she had to steer her cross-party committee with diplomatic skill and critical impartiality.
Anne Begg only broke the whip on aspects of foreign policy. A life-long supporter of CND, she was against the renewal of Trident. On Iraq, she was among over 100 Labour MPs who voted against action, and in 2014 she was one of another group of Labour colleagues who voted against air strikes on ISIS. In a statement to her local newspaper at the time of the 2014 vote, she said, ‘I’m pretty nervous about any military action, whether it was the 2003 invasion or replacing Trident.’
As a wheelchair-using MP, Anne was acutely aware that she could be easily pigeon-holed by the media as ‘the disabled MP’. She was always going to be interested in disability issues, but her range of interests and experience went much wider, as she proved during her eighteen years in the Commons. However, I think she would also recognise that some of her most powerful speeches were when she used her own experience as a disabled person to highlight an issue, none more so when during the debates on stem-cell research which cut across party lines.
In my case, degeneration, particularly in my bone marrow and bones, is so advanced that any cure, should there be one, because of the shape of my body, will not help me anyway. But perhaps there will be something in stem-cell research that could help not only people like me – my disease is a rare one – but many people with other diseases.
Anne was defeated at the 2015 general election along with all but one of her Scottish Labour colleagues. She had won so many battles in her life, but not this one. She took her defeat with grace and humility. Not so long afterwards, she was back in public life as a member of the local NHS trust and as a member of the Scottish Care Commission. ‘I’m too young to retire,’ she told anyone who asked why she wasn’t taking life a bit easier.
LIZ BLACKMAN
FREYA PRATTY
Liz Blackman is often remembered for beating TV personality Robert Kilroy-Silk in the 2005 general election, thereby, according to The Guardian’s political correspondent at the time, ‘doing the whole nation a favour’. This win allowed Blackman to continue in her role as Labour MP for the Nottinghamshire constituency of Erewash, a seat she’d first secured in 1997, when she comfortably ousted her Conservative predecessor with a 12 per cent swing to Labour. As a first-time candidate from an all-women shortlist, for many, she perfectly symbolised the New Labour of May 1997.
Blackman brought her close knowledge of the community she served to her work as MP. She had been both a history teacher at a local comprehensive school and a local councillor prior to her election to Parliament. The improvements she lobbied for in her constituency spanned numerous areas, but education proved to be a central focus. Her successful campaigns in Erewash secured funding for local schools, money to upgrade parts of the constituency’s towns and funding for the local Ilkeston Hospital.
At a parliamentary level, the causes Blackman championed were equally numerous and varied. She helped to secure flu jabs for over-65s and compensation for victims of pension mis-selling, tighten laws on the use of airguns, and speed up settlements for ex-miners with lung disease. Blackman also worked on the mainstreaming of Sure Start, an initiative providing childcare, early education and family services, which she described as ‘an important measure to support families and to lift children out of poverty’.
Blackman was known for her work promoting a greater understanding of autism within government. She helped to secure the 2009 Autism Act, which aimed to offer more provision for adults with autism. For this, she was commended by her fellow MPs for bringing her ‘usual honesty and passionate feelings’ to the cause. Conservative MP Angela Browning said she’d felt like a ‘lone voice’ in government on the need for autism provision until Blackman had joined Parliament and shown herself to be a ‘great advocate’.
Blackman replaced Diane Abbott on the Treasury Select Committee in 1997, a role she continued to fill until 2000. Her loyalty to the Labour Party’s leadership is often noted: loyalism that was rewarded when, in 2000, she was appointed parliamentary private secretary to Geoff Hoon, the then Secretary of State for Defence. In 2006 she left this position to begin a post in the government Whips’ Office, which she continued for two years.
Blackman served her Erewash constituency for twelve years before her retirement from politics in 2010, upon which she was described by Gordon Brown as a ‘tireless campaigner’.
HAZEL BLEARS
JANE MERRICK
In an interview with The Times in December 2008, Hazel Blears spoke movingly about her working-class childhood in Salford and how she had been driven, by aspiration, to aim high. ‘I have never known my place,’ she said – a simple yet powerful remark which will resonate with others from similar backgrounds who have reached Westminster. Six months later, Blears proved she was indeed not one to be pushed around when she resigned in spectacular fashion from Gordon Brown’s Cabinet on the eve of the 2009 local elections. On the day of her resignation, she wore a brooch which – much like herself – was small yet pin-sharp; it carried the words ‘Rocking the Boat’. As she stood down as Communities Secretary, Blears claimed she wanted to ‘help the Labour Party to reconnect with the British people’. However, this does not tell the full story: her sudden departure was part of a wider attempted coup by Cabinet Blairites against the then Prime Minister, who resigned within hours of each other in early June 2009, and followed some caustic comments exchanged between Blears and Brown. That year, dissatisfaction with Brown had been growing among ministers, who feared – rightly – that Labour was on course to lose power in the 2010 general election. In May 2009, Blears wrote an article for The Observer about what the party should do to re-engage with its traditional voters. The piece would have been noted, yet largely ignored, were it not for her devastating phrase, in reference to the Prime Minister’s recent, toe-curling attempt to try his hand – and awkward smile – at social media: ‘YouTube if you want to. But it’s no substitute for knocking on doors or setting up a stall in the town centre.’
Another storm had been blowing through Westminster that year: the parliamentary expenses scandal. Days after her Observer article attack on the PM, Blears’s expenses were exposed by the Daily Telegraph: she had told the Commons authorities that her main residence was in her Salford constituency and claimed second-home expenses for a flat in Kennington, near Westminster. But when she sold the flat, she had ‘flipped’ it, designating it as her main residence and therefore avoiding capital gains tax. Brown described Blears’s actions as ‘totally unacceptable’. She apologised and repaid more than £13,000, insisting she had not broken any rules. However, seen through the prism of the long-running TB–GBs, as Labour’s civil war between Blair, Brown and their respective allies was known, it seemed as though the Prime Minister was hanging Blears out to dry.
Ironically, until that moment Blears had been seen as one of the most loyal Cabinet ministers of the Labour government. She had risen through the ministerial ranks under Blair, and yet it was Brown, on becoming Prime Minister in June 2007, who promoted her to a fully fledged position – Secretary of State – with responsibilities for Communities and Local Government. Her loyalty went hand in hand with her sunny optimism: some commentators and politicians saw this as political vacuity, and yet she had inner steel. This combination of an almost Thatcher-like gritty determination and her diminutive stature at 4 ft 10 in. led to her being described as the ‘Iron Chipmunk’.
It is easy to see where her optimism and steel came from. She has spoken many times about her working-class upbringing, and her vision of aspiration that arose from it, as the child of a soap factory secretary and machine-fitter in a terraced home with no indoor toilet in post-war Salford. Her background is not unique for New Labour politicians of her generation, but it was certainly different to the private school and Oxford education of Blair and others. At the age of five, Blears appeared as a street urchin in the 1961 film A Taste of Honey about a poverty-stricken mother and daughter in Salford – the filming took place in her neighbourhood. In 2005, Blears told The Guardian: ‘I have a burning desire to make the world a better place. At fourteen I got angry that people did not get the chances they should have if they came from a poor community.’
