Obscure parliamentary procedures are currently all the rage, from John Bercow’s controversial deviation from precedence in selecting amendments to business motions and the arcane voting procedure requiring MPs to physically go through division lobbies, or be “nodded through” (for which they still have to be on parliament grounds), for their vote to be counted.
The decision by the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq to delay the caesarean birth of her second child to vote in the crucial Brexit debate on Tuesday night and the confidence vote on Wednesday night has reignited the debate over proxy voting – and reminded the country that the Conservatives have a fundamental problem with women. Despite parliament agreeing in principle last February to implement proxy voting, party whips have yet to facilitate a system for those MPs who most need it, mainly pregnant people and parents.
This is not just a fetishised obsession with parliamentary tradition but a cold calculation on the part of the Tory party. It has a lower proportion of women MPs compared to other parties (just 67 out of 317) – and is therefore less likely to have insufficient numbers to carry a vote in the absence of a pregnant or new parent MP. It has put its own interests above a person’s fundamental right to safely carry and deliver their children and to have adequate time off to parent those children.
Indeed, it was the breakdown of the pairing system over the summer – when the Conservative party chairman, Brandon Lewis MP, apparently forgot to abstain in a crucial Brexit vote to offset the absence of Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson, who was on maternity leave – that led Siddiq to make her decision. She could not trust that system to function properly.
Images of a heavily pregnant Siddiq on the floor of parliament in a wheelchair brought expectedly mixed reactions. Fellow Labour politicians and feminist activists (rightly) pointed out the absurdity of forcing a heavily pregnant woman to be physically present in parliament to cast possibly crucial votes instead of implementing a modern proxy vote.
Others were predictably derisive in their dismissal of Siddiq’s decision as a publicity stunt at best – an act made, in the words of Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch, “simply to prove a point”. Siddiq’s decision also brought out the Twitter trolls, who opined that she was already a “bad mother” for having to make an impossible choice between country and family.
It is a choice she should never have had to make. But are such attitudes surprising, with a party such as the Tories? The party that took away child benefit for families with more than two children, unless the mother could prove she was raped? The party that cut funding to women’s shelters and appointed an anti-choice campaigner to party vice-chair for women? The government that hopped into bed with the DUP, a similarly backwards-looking party whose oppression of Northern Irish women through the denial of their reproductive rights would have made any other party appropriately squeamish?
While society as a whole is arguably not much better at protecting the rights of women or those who are pregnant – whether at work, in the home or simply out on the street – we rightly expect parliament to do better, and to lead us to a place where the rights of the marginalised and disadvantaged are robustly protected and not treated as bargaining chips.
But parliament was built by and for men – the evidence is everywhere – and nowhere will one find stauncher defenders of this ignominious status quo than in the Conservative party. Certainly, a party that restores the whip to two MPs suspended while under investigation for harassment and other sexual offences in order to win a vote, is not one that can be trusted to bring the interests of women and pregnant people to the fore. The refusal to implement a proxy vote system is another symptom of the Conservative problem with women, and their willingness to put parliamentary maths above human rights and dignity.
• Elizabeth Nelson is an activist with the Belfast Feminist Network
