Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman ruffled a few pinstripes last night when using her speech at the Speaker’s Lecture to make digs at the PM and Gordon Brown about parliament’s gender imbalance.
Attacking sexism in Westminster in general, Harman homed in on the decision made by Brown not to put her in the position of deputy prime minister in 2007, and claimed this wouldn’t have happened if she had been male:
Imagine my surprise when having won a hard-fought election to succeed John Prescott as deputy leader of the Labour Party, I discovered that I was not to succeed him as deputy prime minister… If one of the men had won the deputy leadership would that have happened? Would they have put up with it? I doubt it.
In a sparky and revealing speech – also calling for more working-class MPs, ethnic diversity and representation of people with disabilities in parliament – she referred to her own personal experiences of sexism in Westminster:
When I came back after having my first baby I was reported to the Sergeant at Arms for breaking the rules by taking my baby through the division lobby under my jacket. Of course I’d done no such thing – I was still fat from being pregnant. What made it worse was that it was obviously my own side… because it was our lobby. I told the whips I’d have to miss a vote because I was ill – with mastitis. And they put it in the papers.
Hitting out at David Cameron, she said:
It’s really a deliberate misrepresentation to have the few Tory women MPs clustered around the Prime Minister so that they can be picked up by the TV cameras while the rest of the government benches are nearly exclusively men.
However, her remarks about the previous prime minister, who was once her boss, have caused the most comment. Brown’s former aide, the infamous Damian McBride, who had to resign his post after using his No 10 e-mail account to discuss smearing opponents, has written a blog-post in response to Harman’s comments entitled: “Have you no sense of decency, Harriet?”
He accuses her of a cynical motive, writing she doesn’t want to, “look too obvious or too partisan, so she’s trying to make it look like a wider attack on the political culture in general, and there’s no easier dog to kick in her own garden than Gordon Brown.”
McBride also took to Twitter to dispute Harman’s speech: “It’s utter bilge from Harriet, done to make her attack on Dave look non-partisan. And shameful timing given the work GB is doing in Nigeria.”
Harman responded by asserting on LBC radio yesterday that McBride was, “sacked from being in the employment of the government for denigrating women and he’s doing it again now.”
Although calling out and condemning individuals is never a pretty process among politicos, particularly those purportedly on the same side, the reaction to Harman’s words is nevertheless a rather depressing one.
The stories we have become accustomed to hearing about the lack of female representation in parliament, and how Labour’s all-women shortlists transformed the culture of Westminster from 1997, often only discuss the subject in broad sweeps.
Sarcastic tweets from journalists about the party leaders bunching their top women behind them in the chamber for the cameras, statistics about the stubbornly low number of women working in parliament, and raised eyebrows during reshuffles as we count and recount the number of women around the cabinet or shadow cabinet table are all important, but it’s less often that we hear those personal anecdotes, the experience of individual female MPs when they take office.
I’ve found when interviewing women in parliament, who are in however senior a position, that they are more than prepared to discuss the problem of parliament’s gender imbalance, but tend to be far more cautious when I ask them for individual examples of sexism that they have faced in their time.
That a senior female Westminster figure has opened up in detail, at risk of making her vulnerable to criticism from her own side, is a very arresting, immediate way of bringing problems in parliament’s culture and make-up to the forefront of political discussion. The fact that this approach has been met with such a defensive reaction is telling of how much needs to change before women can really operate in parliament without having to, in Harman’s words, “be as like the men as possible”.
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