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Mrs. Curtis-Thomas: May I express my sorrow to the hon. Lady that in this important debate she stands alone, with none of her colleagues present? That is a sad reflection of the commitment of her party to this issue.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Lady has made a number of interventions. We are fairly short of time in this debate and that was one of the least helpful.
Sandra Gidley: That was an appalling intervention, and untrue. I am discussing a very real problem facing women in post-conflict Iraq, yet the hon. Lady seeks to trivialise it in this way. She should be ashamed of herself.
Many Iraqi women genuinely believed that they would gain more rights after the war. It is a huge disappointment to many of us that the opposite appears
to be the case. Suspicions have arisen lately about the efforts of religious parties in the governing council to push through resolution 137, which would abolish a 1959 law that, according to the Justice Minister, Mr. al-Shibli, drew on the most generous protections for women and children from different schools of sharia. The resolution would stipulate that, for example, a Shi'ite woman should have her divorce adjudicated by Shi'ite law, while adjudication for a Sunni woman would be under Sunni law.In effect, one law would become many, according to religious adherence, but such a move would strip every woman of some of her current rights. For example, Shi'ite inheritance law is more generous to women than Sunni, but divorce protection is better under Sunni law. There are many similar examples. The Americans who run Iraq have frozen the legal system for now, but many supporters of the proposal have indicated that they want to reintroduce it when Iraq regains its sovereignty, as they believe that it respects religious diversity in Iraq. As women, we should pay particular attention to that situation.
In Iraq, the same problems of gender-based violence are emerging as are occurring in Afghanistan. Many women have lost their job, especially in the public sector. In September 2003, it was announced that subsidies to farmers in Iraq—many of whom are women—would be reduced, which could drive many of them out of business. An Iraqi madam, quoted in The Daily Telegraph on 26 October 2003, said:
- "Most of my girls are from the countryside. They are not well educated, so the money is good for them."
The Minister may not be able to respond to all the points that I have made, but I hope that she will discuss them with the Secretary of State for International Development. I hope that he is paying more attention to UN resolution 1325 than his predecessor, who could not even remember what it was about when asked during DFID questions. I have yet to see a focus on that resolution, which would include women in post-conflict resolution and peace-building. Much evidence shows that when women distribute resources, they ensure that those resources go to the most needy—women and children—but if resources are distributed by men, there is a greater likelihood of the chain being corrupted in some way. That is not new information; most non-governmental organisations working in the field acknowledge it, although women do not appear very much in that aspect of post-conflict work.
This subject is so wide-ranging that it is difficult to choose a focus. I look forward to the other contributions to the debate.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. May I suggest that a guide time of about 10 minutes might enable all those Members who seek to catch my eye to do so?
4.4 pm
Julie Morgan (Cardiff, North) (Lab): I am pleased that women have the opportunity to hold this annual debate, and it is a pleasure to be called to speak.
International women's day is a good time to assess where we are as women, especially as this year we are mid-way through the second term of the Labour Government. It is important to establish how women have fared under Labour and where we go from here—a point already addressed in some of the speeches made from the Front Benches.
I want to start by discussing women in Wales. In Wales, the first resounding success for women that springs to mind is the almost incredible achievement of a 50:50 gender balance in the Welsh Assembly. Who would have believed that that would happen in Wales, a country where iron and steel industries predominated, where mainly male-dominated unions held power and where politics was, as likely as not, sorted out between men in the pub? All that has changed.
In other political spheres—local authorities and this place—all parties have failed to ensure that women have a completely equal say. Labour has done better than the other parties in Westminster with our 94 women MPs. The Welsh Assembly is the only law-making body in the world where half the Members are women, and the credit for that must be given to the Labour party. Its determination to battle with the thorny issues of all-women shortlists and twinning for the Welsh Assembly constituencies has resulted in 18 Labour women Members in the Welsh Assembly, compared with 12 Labour men. All the other parties have women Members, including, for the first time since the last election, the Conservative party, but it is a fact that nearly two thirds of the women Assembly Members are Labour. I did not realise that the split was 50:50 until the Fawcett Society rang up on the day after polling day in May 2003 to point out that unique achievement.
Over the past couple of years, I have had the privilege of talking to women in many other countries, including the United States, Iran, Ethiopia and, more recently, India. They expressed astonishment at that achievement and asked how we managed to do it. I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equality discussed equality and human rights all over the world, because one of the great privileges of being a Member of Parliament is meeting women internationally.
Many hon. Members will remember the moving stories told in last year's women's day debate. When we meet women in other countries and discuss issues such as equality and human rights, we usually find that we are trying to tackle the same problems. Women's representation is raised as a major issue all over the world. One must implement a mechanism to ensure that women have a say, and the women to whom I have spoken in countries all over the world seem to draw that conclusion.
I recently visited India with a group of women Members, some of whom are in the House today, on the first all-women MPs visit to India. Everywhere we went, women at all levels discussed the 33 per cent. representation of women in Parliament that all political
parties in India seem to support, but which has never actually appeared on the statute book, and I want to put down a marker in the House that we support them in that aspiration. It will be interesting to see whether in the current elections any party commits itself in its manifesto to one third of representatives being women. The law applies at local authority level, and 33 per cent. of local authority councillors in India are women, which is a tremendous achievement—in Wales, only 21 per cent. of councillors are women.Wherever we went in India, we were struck by the strength and enthusiasm of women. We visited a project funded by the Department for International Development, where money had been invested to pave the streets and put in taps and toilets. Women in the community had formed the committees, made the decisions and worked hard to make sure that the project really answered people's needs. We were overwhelmed by the enthusiasm that those women showed.
There is no doubt that having so many women in visible, high profile positions in the Welsh Assembly Government has changed politics in Wales. As other hon. Members have said, women do politics differently. It was easier to do that in Wales because we were starting up a new institution, and the same was true in Scotland. It is much more difficult to change an established institution such as Westminster, but we can change things here as well following the enactment of the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002.
On this first international women's day since the Welsh Assembly elections, the Labour party and the Government should take enormous pride in what we have achieved in Wales and in this place, but things are far from perfect in Wales. We have no black or ethnic minority female—or male—members of the Assembly and statistics are bleak for other areas of life in Wales. For example, only 16 per cent. of secondary school head teachers are women; only 27 per cent. of senior civil servants are women; only 18 per cent. of local authority chief executives are women; and only 20 per cent of hospital consultants are women. We are not complacent: although we have achieved much in terms of elected representation, we have a long way to go in many other areas.
I shall now consider briefly—as many of the issues have already been mentioned today—what the Labour Government have achieved for women since 1997. Labour has improved conditions for women who work outside the home and the lives of women at home. More women are in employment than ever before, and the minimum wage has had a huge impact in Wales, bringing thousands of women out of poverty pay. Maternity pay has increased and the child care tax credit and child tax credit have been introduced. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has allocated millions of pounds to child care. Women have more rights in the workplace and are better able to balance work and life.
I heard only yesterday from the Public and Commercial Services Union about the Inland Revenue in Llanishen in my constituency, which no longer has a core time for working. That means that women and men can clock in and out of work three or four times a day and go home as needed to care for children or—more likely—for elderly people, or to have the washing machine mended. That is a huge change that the Inland Revenue is operating in Cardiff and probably
throughout the UK, and it especially important for women, who always have to juggle responsibilities at home and work.It is now politically acceptable to speak up for women in this Chamber in a way that it may not have been some years ago. Every month we can table questions to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equality, and she is one of five women in the Cabinet. We still have no day nursery at Westminster, and that is a disgrace, given the thousands of women employed here. I hope that we will be able to do something about that. At least the House of Commons now sits at more family friendly hours. For me, they are not family friendly because my family is in Wales, but at least the hours are more normal and the working day sets a better example. It may encourage other women to stand as Members of Parliament, because it is now more like a normal job. It is very important that we try to make this place more modern, so that it appeals to women and makes them want to come here and join us in trying to change things.
In the home, the scourge of domestic violence has finally been recognised and we have had some discussion of the issue today. This year, the Labour Government introduced the first legislation in 30 years on the issue. It is a worldwide problem. Last year I visited Ethiopia as part of the British Council's pairing scheme for African and Westminster women representatives. When I was there, I was asked to give a lecture on how we deal with domestic violence. I gave the horrific statistics, and at the end the first questioner could not believe that we still had to deal with the problem as such an affluent country. They could not believe that domestic violence was still an issue. However, we all know that domestic violence occurs in all societies, at all levels.
I shall not take much longer, as I know that other women wish to speak, but I wonder why—despite the undoubted major advances for women—things still seem precarious and hard for many women in this country. Those who have spoken, from both sides of the House, have indicated some of the difficulties. As Anna Coote said, in the second Val Feld memorial lecture in Swansea last year:
- "As a woman, you can feel politically, socially and economically marginal."
The pay gap has already been discussed, and the Fawcett Society has given us ammunition to campaign even more strongly for equal pay. Women pensioners often live in poverty—statistics showing that have been cited today.
Despite the progress that women have made and the fact that the Government have led the way on making things better for women in this country—the situation has been transformed since 1997—there is an enormous amount left to do. That is not a reason to get depressed, feel down or feel we have not got enough. It is time to do all the things that women are often accused of doing in
any case. We are accused of being awkward, of being interested in only one thing, of being a pain in the neck or of being hell raisers—such expressions are often used to describe women. I quote again Anna Coote from the lecture in honour of Val Feld, the wonderful feminist from Wales. She said that it is perhaps time not to take
- "'no' or 'maybe' or 'later' for an answer."
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