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Women, Justice and Gender Equality

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that excellent point. The Committee stage of the Companies Bill lasted seven weeks last summer—it was arguably the longest and most boring Bill in history. A Labour Member discovered when her child care arrangements broke down that there are no crèche facilities at the House of Commons for Members. Her little daughter learned to walk on the corridor outside the Committee Room, which was one of the few pleasurable and enlightening moments that I experienced during the passage of the Bill. I do not tell that story to belittle what the hon. Lady says, which is hugely important. I have asked the Minister about crèche facilities and she has been generous and kind enough to say that she will look into that. The entire atmosphere of this place is very women-unfriendly. Let us consider what happens if a Member stands up at Prime Minister’s Question Time to ask a question of the Prime Minister. A wall of noise suddenly comes towards them if Labour Members get the feeling that it will be a hostile question, which can be very intimidating for men and women Members. The behaviour often resembles what I imagine public schoolboys’ bad behaviour to be, with pointing, shouting, catcalling and repeating remarks. It is not edifying. The hon. Lady made a good intervention. At least the Labour party has been brave enough to take radical action to redress the situation. To its credit, women make up 27 per cent. of Labour Members. The Liberal Democrats trail with 14 per cent., and the Conservatives, as I mentioned, have only 9 per cent. Five years ago the Liberal Democrats had a passionate debate on positive discrimination. Major figures in the party exhorted the members to vote for positive discrimination, including the revered Baroness Williams and my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), but all to no avail. The vote was lost because a number of equally passionate young women spoke up to say that they did not want to be token women. When those women have been through the mill of competing for jobs with the men—who give their undivided attention to their careers, while the women are bringing up a family, arranging child care, deciding what is for tea, and ensuring that there is something to cook—and then having to take jobs below their ability, or taking time off and coming back to find that they have lost out on the career stakes, that they will get less pension, that they will have a disproportionate share of the burden of caring for older and infirm members of the family, and that they have been failed by the system because we do not have a critical mass of women in Parliament to focus on family-friendly policies, let them come back and tell me that they do not want to be token women. I am sorry about that, Madam Deputy Speaker. I had to get that off my chest.