Women in Westminster: In Conversation With Harriet Harman
(Photo Credit: UK Parliament_Jessica Taylor)
Before stepping down at the last election, Harriet Harman was the longest-serving woman MP, with over 40 years of service in the House. As part of our Women in Westminster series, PoliticsHome sat down with Harman to explore the changes she has witnessed and to talk about her hopes for the future
When she was elected at a by-election in 1982, Harriet Harman became one of only 10 women Labour MPs in a House of Commons that was 97 per cent male. Over the next 42 years, she continued to represent her constituents as social and technological changes have transformed both politics and the nation.
It is hard to comprehend the scale of the changes that Harman has witnessed during more than four decades of service. She explained to PoliticsHome just how it felt to be a woman MP entering such a heavily male-dominated environment.
“A lot of the men felt that it was not appropriate for a woman to be in Parliament because leadership was a male characteristic,” she tells us. “Representation was what men did rather than women and a woman’s role was within the family. So, there was quite a lot of disapproval.”
That disapproval was partly the establishment’s response to Harman’s passionate belief that the way that politics operated was unfair and unrepresentative – with the consequence that political decision-making often ignored the issues that mattered most to women.
“It was a very hostile environment,” she recalls. “The message that I came in with, was ‘This place needs to change.’ If you go into an institution and you've got a fundamental critique of it, because it doesn't represent half the population, then the people who are already there feel criticised and are on the defensive. So, you get a backlash.”
Harman tells us that hers was the first generation of women who rejected the binary choice between having a career and having a family. With so few women in parliament there was no existing template for women working in UK politics. Instead, Harman and her handful of female colleagues supported one another whilst also drawing strength and inspiration from the wider women’s movement.
“We wanted to remake the path, not follow in somebody else's footsteps,” she says. “I think that my generation looked to each other. We didn't look upwards to those ahead of us because we were forging a new path.”
That philosophy continues to drive Harman forward. And, as someone who is herself frequently hailed as a woman who forged a path for others, she is clear that those at the outset of their political careers should aim far higher than simply following in her footsteps.
“If you just follow the previous generation that is the antithesis of progress,” she explains. “It puts a ceiling on ambition. This new generation of women need to do much more than we've been able to do in my generation.”
Whilst acknowledging the progress that she and others have achieved, Harman also recognises that much more remains to be done. She is optimistic that the increase in the number of women MPs following the last election will signal a step change in both the culture of how Parliament operates and the issues that it chooses to prioritise.
She identifies a similar shift following the 1997 general election which, in her view, marked a watershed moment. In that election, 101 of the new Labour MPs were women.
Harman still recalls the impact that made, not just within politics but to women up and down the country.
“I remember the first time I went through the Division Lobby with the new Parliamentary Labour Party, which had over 100 women MPs,” she says. “Here were women in the Division Lobby who had the same agenda as women in the country about maternity leave, childcare, domestic violence, and pay. It was a real moment of constitutional and political change.”
With a record number of women MPs now in the Commons, Harman detects an opportunity to build on that shift and ensure that the issues that matter to women are properly reflected in policy decisions.
As chair of the Fawcett Society, Harman is active in ongoing moves to establish a powerful “women’s caucus” that will create a new critical mass of female MPs. She points out that similar approaches already exist in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Senedd, and the Scottish Parliament.
“When that happens, I think that will turbocharge progress,” she explains. “That will be another huge moment.”
Harman remains clear that such action is needed to address persistent issues such as the gender pay gap as well as to tackle new challenges like the rise of a particularly dangerous brand of online misogyny.
On the former, she remains proud of the impact of the Equalities Act that she helped bring into law in 2010. However, she believes that it is now time that it was strengthened, giving the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) the power to fine companies that fail to make progress on closing the gender pay gap.
“At the moment the EHRC exposes the pay gap, but they can't actually do anything about it,” she observes. “The first step was to expose it and the next step is supposed to be to give them the powers to close it. The EHRC is the only regulator that doesn't have those sorts of powers.”
Despite describing her own journey in politics as being “a tough, tough road,” it is obvious that Harman has lost none of her passion to drive positive change and address the issues that impact on women across the UK.
“If you think everything's fine and it should stay as it is, then progressive politics is not the place for you,” she concludes. “But if you think that there are things that are wrong, then to be able to be part of that movement for change is an incredible thing.”
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