Is the upcoming change in the law that makes all-women shortlists legal a positive step for women in the Labour Party?
Jo Tanner: I think it’s a positive and a negative. It’s good that they’re addressing the problem as there clearly is a problem, but it’s also going to come in for criticism because it’s a quota system and that has obvious negative connotations. The fact that it’s going to take in all the political parties means it will be interesting to see what the Tories come up with because they haven’t exactly got the best track record.
Emily Thornberry: I am in favour of it. I think when we had all-women shortlists the first time it was to click things into place, redress the balance and get things sorted out and get people to start thinking that women could be MPs, too, and getting women to think they could be MPs. But if the system that we have at the moment doesn’t work, and it obviously doesn’t, then the issue is too important. I think we’ve tried everything else and it hasn’t worked so now we have to do something about it.
Rachel Cashman: I think that unless people, from the very bottom up and from the very top down, of the Labour Party actually accept that this is positive and promote it, then it will do nothing but encourage that kind of backlash amongst those people we’ve all encountered locally, regionally, nationally, in all different facets of the party, who say that all-women shortlists are sexism.
Laura Shepherd-Robinson: For years and years people have said women need more training, women need more confidence boosting. The implication of that being that the women who are coming forward who want to be MPs are not as good as the men. Quite frankly, that isn’t true and time and time and time again we are seeing these half measures fail to work.
Stella Creasy: I think that you can look at this in an historical perspective as well. If you look back to the 19th century, when people first talked about extending the franchise to the working classes, similar sorts of arguments were put up – that somehow these people were not as capable of voting. It’s the same parallel: you use the law to make changes which, if you stick to them and you promote them in the long term, can generate cultural change. I would hope to see a situation where my grandchildren think it’s illogical not to have vast numbers of women in parliament and vast numbers of people from ethnic minorities as well.
ET: Actually, women candidates are very popular with the electorate. People remember them and they want to vote for them. When I was candidate recently I got an extraordinarily good response from the pushchair vote because I’ve got kids myself and spent most of my time in the high street crouched down talking to kids and their mums. It’s a completely different approach to politics.
Female MPs have been widely caricatured during the first term as ‘Blair babes’. Why do you think that was? And is there any truth in it?
JT: What you have to remember is that the majority of the lobby correspondents are male and a lot of them are old school, boys club. If you try to break into that as a woman, it’s more than an uphill struggle. The Paul Routledges of this world will say: ‘You’re alright, love, to make the tea.’ The women MPs that were elected in 1997 have proved their worth and it didn’t take very long before the women who were elected weren’t known as women MPs, they were simply MPs.
SC: We have got to be very careful not to underestimate the power of images like ‘Blair babes’. I think the most dangerous thing about this is that it provides a way for the general public to think about their MPs and to think about having a woman MP. The public think in a very complicated way but if you only provide the public with the ideas about ‘Blair babes’ you are not providing a rhetoric that says they are doing all these other things.
ET: It is quite clear this government has the most feminist agenda of any government. That is something that women MPs have achieved. I think the measures that have helped working families are thanks to work that has been done quietly behind the scenes by women MPs. It’s not a coincidence that these measures have been introduced by a government that has the highest number of women MPs ever.
RC: A lot of women were turned off by politics and turned off voting in the election. If there were more women candidates, then more women members of the public would relate to candidates and may vote. I think that a lot of constituents may think: ‘I can’t relate to my MP, my MEP, my councillor because I’m surrounded by men.’
Do you think women that have risen to the top of the Labour Party have done enough to promote other women within the party?
LS-R: I think that in terms of support for women, the Labour Party is streets ahead of any other political party in this country. I think that it’s important that we give them credit for actually taking on this agenda. In general, women do provide a lot of support, but I also think that is terribly under-resourced and what you have is a few incredibly hard-working people that are killing themselves for very little reward.
JT: I think that some of the people who have been elected don’t lead by example. They don’t offer the support, they pay lip service to it. They say ‘give me a call anytime’, but when you do there is none there. I’m not saying all of them are like this, but through personal experience, and through speaking to other people who were candidates last time round, some of them certainly are.
SC: I have also had lots of support from male members of the party, both old and young and from left and right. I’ve had a lot of support in my local area from a range of people, both male and female, because they recognise the need to present a council that represents local people. What is really interesting is that ten or 20 years ago that kind of recognition probably wouldn’t have been there. Now even those people who perhaps I would expect to get some kind of antagonism from are actually very supportive.
Are trade unions better at promoting women?
RC: I’d like to go up to TUC congress and say: ‘Look at the thousands of women delegates and isn’t this fantastic’, but something tells me I’ll be going: ‘There’s a few and they’re really good but there should be a whole lot more of them.’
L S-R: I think we have got to give the trade unions credit where credit is due because there are a lot of prominent senior women trade union activists that have been absolutely crucial in getting the women’s representation bill onto the table and it has been the women on the NEC who have pushed and pushed. The trade unions have been really, really good at providing a lot of training and a lot of support for women members of their unions who wish to be MPs. However, when it actually comes to the selection process the seats where the unions do work for a particular candidate, the candidates that they are doing that work for, are men and there doesn’t seem to be that same drive to actually pull out all the stops for women and make sure their members turn up to the meetings and vote for the candidate. They just don’t seem to have that same determination when it comes to their women and I think that’s a real shame because there are such talented women trade unionists out there.
ET: I think that trade unions have changed and I think that some of the excellent women in senior positions in the trade union movement have made a big difference – and there is a difference in terms of the attitudes of trade unions. I had lots of support from the T&G, especially in terms of money, which made a great deal of difference in terms of the morale of my constituency. We have to be careful not to fall into caricatures of the trade union movement 30 years ago, which is very different to the trade union movement now.
SC: It does matter what is said and it does matter what is seen. We are all talking about women MPs behind the scenes and women trade unions behind the scenes. It’s very much about providing the public with the language and the metaphors about women to make them think about it that if you have women in public life they suddenly don’t become this strange phenomenon. We simply need a glut of women and we don’t have that. They’re all great, they’re doing all these effective things behind the scenes, but nobody’s talking about them and thinking about them and it makes it look like they’re not there.
RC: I don’t believe that it gets away from the fact that there is still more that can be done and you can also fall into another trap which is the attitude that we have got quite a few prominent women now who are doing good work so the balance is being redressed, so do we really need to keep having that impetus and keep having that push?
L S-R: I think it comes back to that ‘Blair babes’ thing as well. I think what that does is totally debunk the myth that we have a level playing field for men and women. Even once they’re elected, there’s this idea about these women being ‘Blair babes’ who haven’t achieved much. It was not a criticism of the new MPs generally. They singled out the women for particular criticism. There was actually no reason for them to do that and I think what that’s done is prove that if you are a woman and you have got over the immense hurdles involved in getting selected and winning your election and you’re there in parliament, you don’t only have to be as good as the male MPs, you have to be five times better to get the same degree of recognition.
Has the Labour Party itself done enough to encourage women to join the party?
JT: I think the onus is on us as women and as members of the Labour Party to encourage more women to join. I mean you know from when you go knocking on doors and you get talking to women that they are involved, they are engaged, they understand about the Working Families’ Tax Credit, nursery places, changes in the education system – why their kids are now in classes of thirty or lower – because they all have a bearing on them directly as parents and as mothers. Probably these are things that directly affect women and we need to engage them enough to take them from the doorstep into a meeting.
ET: People don’t see those issues as being politics. But politics is getting hold of power and ensuring that you can increase maternity leave, for instance. These are bread and butter politics and people don’t realise, women don’t realise or don’t appreciate, that it is women who have been pushing this agenda.
Do you find all the talk about ‘women’s issues’ patronising?
SC: Yes, its incredibly patronising because women are affected by everything from our defence policy to our childcare policy to our environmental policy. The trick is that it tends to be women who, even in this day and age, are still at the forefront of dealing with the work/life balance and so tend to be more aware of the need to push it. I think we have to be very careful not to let men off the hook on this sort of thing. It must be as much them who push it as us and equally it must be women who get involved in endogenous growth policy and whether or not we should be involved in bombing various areas of the world.
L S-R: I think that’s true. Out of any age group and any gender group, women under 25 are the most likely to vote Labour and yet they are also the least likely to vote. If the Labour Party is serious about holding on to power and re-engaging people in politics then that age group is absolutely key. SC: It’s not just about the party, it is also the media. I want to see Labour women reaching out to women journalists and to others as well and saying: ‘Look, you can’t ignore us, you can’t keep characterising what we say as fluffy, you must take us seriously.’