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WILL LABOUR SEE 50% WOMEN IN SHADOW CABINET?
Posted by Charlotte on September 28, 2010
As you must know by now Ed Milliband sneaked into the leadership roll for the Labour party this week turning the news coverage into more brotherly love/hate debates (his older brother David had looked like the shoe-in for the role). All very entertaining if you’ve got nothing else to do but we do. We have a lot to do.
During his campaign Milliband E first suggested a third of the Labour cabinet would be filled with women and then went on to back Harriet Harman’s call for 50% of the roles to be given to women. I find that kind of exciting and promising.
However, mentioning this on a friends facebook page I was reminded by someone else that Blair had run with the same sort of line in his campaign without getting the final results. Sigh.
Regardless, this isn’t enough to defeat my hope that Milliband will get the ball rolling on equality policy by giving 11 seats of the Shadow cabinet to the cadre of obviously qualified women in the party. And I have no doubt that the women of the party will play a large part in making sure this happens.
For one, the party has been lucky enough to have Harman as a standing leader while the campaign for a new leader ran, a woman who has pushed forward policies inline with her right on, Equalities Minister thinking bringing maternity leave, gender pay gaps and prostitution laws to the attention of the house. She has taken her flak from the mainstream press for that (nicknames anyone?) but she’s paved the way for other women to speak out and acts as a supportive figure for their opinions.
Sexism is not such a scary word anymore and Yvette Cooper does a fantastic job telling the voters exactly what the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition are doing to women with their austerity measures – namely, fucking up their lives and rights.
And more importantly, the women of Labour recently submitted a letter to Ed Milliband reminding him of his promises, and if they’re all as committed and hard working as they appear to be in this video at the Guardian I can’t imagine this will be the last time they’ll mention it.
Call me naive, but I call myself a feminist. Women are more and more reaching for their rights and we will have to succeed.