TRAILBLAZER: Baroness Hayman on women in Parliament and fun with Obama
3 min read
From fun with Barack Obama, to today’s fight for a greener, cleaner planet, there’s more to Baroness Hayman than a decades-old controversy about breastfeeding.
Baroness Hayman has a track record of breaking boundaries in Westminster. The former Labour MP, who as Helene Hayman represented Welwyn and Hatfield from 1974 to 1979, was elected Britain’s first Lord Speaker in 2006.
Two decades earlier, Hayman became the first parliamentarian ever to breastfeed in the Palace of Westminster, and today the crossbench peer, who served in three ministerial posts under Tony Blair, has her heart set on combating climate change through her work with Peers for the Planet.
As soon as she begins speaking, Hayman makes it clear she does not want her career to be defined by a single act of feeding a newborn.
“It was the first time that [a parliamentarian] had obviously been pregnant, obviously had a baby, and I was faced with a very particular circumstance,” she says.
The circumstance was that in 1976, just two days after giving birth, Hayman was refused the option of pairing for a series of crucial votes in the Commons. With no majority in the House and Jim Callaghan’s government reduced to winning votes by two or three people, the baroness could either abandon breastfeeding or “pick up the baby and bring him in with me”.
“The extraordinary thing was that it was considered really extraordinary,” Hayman says.
“It really isn’t extraordinary that someone who had got married two years ago should want to have a baby,” she adds.
Having been made a life peer in 1996, Hayman’s historic election as Lord Speaker, a position she held until 2011, is the “tremendous” achievement of which she is most proud.
“Representing the House function was a fabulous thing to do,” she says.
“You learnt a lot and did a lot. I love the House of Lords and I think it does a great job.”
Hayman’s fondest memory of her time as Speaker is “definitely” spending 20 minutes giving former US president and fellow trailblazer, Barack Obama, a tour of the Lords. It was a “fabulous event” and was some of “the most fun” the baroness has had in Parliament.
Today, the peer is firmly committed to ensuring her grandchildren will have a healthy and prosperous planet on which to live. Together with Baroness Worthington, Hayman formed the cross-party parliamentary group Peers for the Planet. The collective strives to form and influence policies that will facilitate a greener, cleaner United Kingdom.
“The main legacy that matters at the moment is the climate crisis and what we leave for our children and grandchildren to clean up after us,” Hayman says.
“Diminishing the toxicity of the legacy on climate and biodiversity that my generation has helped to create is not building a brave new world legacy, but it is doing something.”
On the subject of women in Westminster, does she think there are fewer barriers for women hoping to enter Parliament these days?
“I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we have made enormous strides,” she says.
The baroness has been “encouraged” by seeing ministers, both male and female, taking paid leave to look after their newborns, and by Parliament’s new rules and provisions around childcare.
Having a child in Parliament “is not newsworthy any more,” she says. That, for Baroness Hayman, is a boundary she is happy to see broken.
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