It is very brave of Gerald Kaufman to dismiss so airily family-friendly hours in parliament in his interview published on ProgressOnline. As one of the oldest sitting MPs he can at least compare what it is like today to previous times.
But it’s difficult to defend his position, and I have no nostalgia for a time when MPs sat through the night talking bills out.
It would have been impossible for many of the women ministers from the last Labour government to have babies if that regime had still existed.
But there is a more serious point that Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, makes. Parliament is not sitting on enough days for there to be proper debate. Committees like the one she chairs can only sit when parliament sits and so do not have the time to scrutinise legislation properly.
So much has been pushed through fast by the government and guillotined so ruthlessly that debate about legislation has often happened almost after the fact, or in the House of Lords.
The eleventh-hour row about section 75 health regulations where an assurance was given by Earl Howe that NHS tendering would not necessarily have to be put out to competition, when it appears now there is a presumption in favour of competition, is just one example of how debate over important bits of legislation should have happened a lot earlier in the process, and preferably in the House of Commons.
Family-friendly hours have been exploited by those in power, who have seized on them as a convenient excuse to cut the time that parliament spends debating things. It is not surprising in politics that a reform should be used for a purpose for which it was not intended, but Labour needs to commit itself to being family friendly while giving ample time to debate legislation, not only because this is good for democracy but also because this is how good laws are made.
The wider point is that family-friendly hours have not yet led to a massive increase in women in parliament. Only 22 per cent of MPs and only 33 per cent of MPs in the Labour party are women. Women are consistently kept out of power, and the Labour party has only achieved the 33 per cent mark through all-women shortlists.
Parliament, particularly the House of Commons, still feels like a very male place. It doesn’t feel as if women have stormed its bastions, it still feels as if they are there on tolerance and are constrained by all sorts of rules to fit into a certain way of being that is acceptable to the men who hold sway there. And that has become more true with the Tory-Lib Dem government whose record on women is appalling.
If you talk to women MPs they will staunchly tell you that it is fine and is light years better than it was 10 or 20 years ago. That may well be true but it is still a brutal male place and until we have more women, 50 or even 60 per cent of women, as my younger more ambitious friends rightly say, it will still be out of touch with the normal world.
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Sally Gimson is a Labour councillor in the London borough of Camden and tweets @SallyGimson
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