Labour Women's Network
In 1987 Barbara co-founded the Labour Women’s Network (LWN), and has sat on its Management Committee ever since. LWN was founded by four Labour women, Barbara Follett, Barbara Roche, Hilary De Lyon and Jean Black. They were disappointed and frustrated by the low number of women elected to the House of Commons in the 1987 General Election – just 21 Labour women MPs.
Since then, LWN has gone from strength to strength. They bring together women in the Labour Party who want to see more women in Parliament and at every level of the Party.
LWN is a voluntary group funded entirely by its members and supporters. It exists to encourage, assist and support all women in the Labour Party who wish to stand for public office, and to break down the barriers (in the Party, and in wider politics) that exist to women realising their potential in the Labour Party.
When LWN was founded, women were just 9% of Labour’s MPs – LWN have come a long way, but we have much further to go before we have equal representation.
The 1997 General Election saw a large increase in the number of women in the House of Commons, with 101 Labour women MPs elected, out of a total of 120 women – a huge jump from the 37 Labour women MPs elected in 1992.
The 2015 General Election saw 191 women elected, of that 99 were Labour women, a decrease from the achievement in 1997 but, due to the overall number of Labour MPs has fallen, and the percentage of Labour Women has risen to 42.8%.
A Woman's Place?
Original article published in Progress magazine 6th March 2017
The idea that British women might be interested in politics is relatively recent. Their participation in this cruelly challenging occupation is even more so. This is scarcely surprising when you consider that it is only one hundred years since a limited number of us over 30 were allowed to vote.
When I joined the Labour Party in 1979 the effects of this late entry were plain. Only 11 of our MPs were women. The Conservatives had eight and the Liberals had none. So, 51% of the British population held 3% of the seats in the House of Commons. Not a very representative figure.
Thankfully, thirty-eight years on, things have changed. Despite Labour’s defeat in the 2015 General Election, the Party managed to get 99 women into Parliament. That is an 800% rise since 1979. Better still, women now account for 44% of Labour’s representation in the House of Commons.
This change did not come about by itself. Between 1929 and 1983 women's representation in the British House of Commons never rose above 5%. In 1987 it increased to 6% and the number of Labour women in Parliament went from 10 to 21. We celebrated until Barbara Castle reminded us that exactly the same number of Labour women had been elected in 1945. Then we started organising.
The biggest barrier to women’s participation in British politics is its culture. This still is - despite all the changes- overwhelmingly male. Architecturally; organisationally and socially. Like the Houses of Parliament, it was designed for and by men. In 1997 when I and 119 other women – 101 of them Labour - took our seats in the House of Commons, the building, the staff and its older members seemed to reel in shock. So did we. The setting was beautiful but the atmosphere was so unnecessarily combative; rule-driven and inflexible. A public school over-provided with public bars.
The only way to change a culture is to infiltrate it. But, to do this successfully, you need help. That is why, in 1988, we founded Labour Women’s Network to give women the skills and the confidence to deal with the yah-boo side of British politics. Two other barriers to women’s political participation - caring and cash – quickly became apparent. So we set up local support networks for women candidates and formed Emily's List UK to help them meet the cost of getting selected.
But it was a culture change within the Labour Party itself - the introduction of All Women Shortlists in 1993 - that made the real difference. Without this we could not have raised the percentage of Labour women in Parliament by 173% in a single election as we did in 1997. Nor could we have managed to get 99 Labour women elected in 2015.
Many of those 99 women were graduates of Labour Women’s Network which, thirty years after it was founded, continues to play a vital role in the election of Labour women to Parliament. One of the 99, Jo Cox, chaired Labour Women’s Network for four years. We will never forget her.
Women’s participation in British politics has come a long way in the past forty years but we still have much to do. There has never been a Labour woman Prime Minister or Deputy Prime Minister. There has never been a female Chancellor of the Exchequer of any political persuasion. Women are still under-represented in the Cabinet; the Shadow Cabinet and the higher echelons of the Civil Service. We are still the exception, not the rule. We have to change this. Not to make things look better but to make things work better. For ourselves and for our world.