On 25^th January, I was honoured to be invited to give the inaugural Alice Bacon Memorial Lecture at the University of Leeds.

Alice Bacon was Yorkshire’s first woman MP elected in 1945, one of the 15 new Labour women MPs elected in 1945 and the 43^rd women MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. Alice represented the constituencies of Leeds North East and Leeds South East between 1945 and 1970 and was a powerful voice for Leeds in Parliament, respected on all sides for her wit. Alice was just one of 3 women elected in 1945 to make it ministerial rank, with Barbara Castle and Margaret Herbison.

“Unless we write about ourselves, unless we write about what other women have done, history will tell us what men did, but it will not tell us what women did. We certainly can’t rely on the men to include us in their memoirs. And that’s why I wrote my book.”

You can watch the full lecture here.

King’s College Hospital is enormously important. It is a centre of international excellence and of local necessity. It sits at the heart of GP services, social care services and mental health services. It is a pivotal part of the local community and we are proud of the 15,000 dedicated staff who are on the frontline 24/7 including treating victims from the Westminster and London Bridge terror attacks and Grenfell Tower fire. On 16th January 2018 I spoke in Parliament to demand the government give King's the resources it needs to protect patient care and to make it clear to everyone at King’s that we are on their side and want to help them, not make an example of them.

My speech in full:

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for introducing this debate. She has proved herself a real champion for her constituents. She fully recognises and champions King’s College Hospital, which many of her constituents need to use and where many others work. She is my constituency neighbour, and my constituents find themselves in the same situation. King’s is enormously important. It is an organisation of international excellence but also of local necessity. It sits at the heart of GP, primary care and social care services, and of mental health care services, both at the Maudsley Hospital and in the community. It is a pivotal part of the local community.

I will confine my remarks to two key points. The first is about the tenor of the debate. I hope Members do not treat King’s like a recalcitrant teenager who has overspent their allowance, or argue that its managers, chair or board are somehow profiting or salting away public money into offshore tax havens. King’s is doing its very best, in good faith, and all its people want to provide the very best service they can. That must always be at the heart of our debates. A tone of blaming King’s sometimes creeps in, but we should be grateful to it and thank it. On the deficit, it may be inconvenient for the Government to see figures with “King’s” written next to them going in a particular direction, but they should understand what is going on there, not tell King’s off as if it is at fault. It is doing one thing, and one thing only: trying to provide the very best care to people who use its national specialties, to regional referrals and to local people who need it. Let us always start on the footing that it is doing its best and that we are grateful to it for that.

My second point is that we need always to concentrate—I do not mean this in a cheesy way—on actual people. I baulked when I heard the Prime Minister talk about cancelled operations being “part of the plan”. Please, let there never be a plan with cancelled operations as part of it. Let us think of the situation for people. For anyone who has an operation booked, there are all sorts of things around that operation. Quite apart from the fact that it screws up their confidence and courage, they have to get time off work and, if they have a young family, their mother-in-law might have to book time off work, too, so that she can come and stay when they go in to have their operation.

An operation looks like one little entry in the Department of Health computer, but for the individual concerned, quite apart from the psychological effect of gearing themselves up for an operation and then finding it cancelled, everything is organised around it. We must not mess people’s lives around by assuming that cancelling an operation, of all things, is normal and can be used as a management tool. I hope that the Minister says that that is not at all what the Prime Minister meant, and that we will not manage our hospitals by booking operations and then cancelling them.

We must remember the human impact of longer waiting lists and cancelled operations. Someone’s hip replacement operation being postponed might be the ​thing that ultimately causes their job to be given to someone else. They might take sick leave and then take more, and their manager might finally say, “We’ve tried our best, but we just can’t carry on like this. We’re going to have to get somebody else in.” People lose their jobs while they are waiting for hospital treatment. Prompt treatment allows people to get on with their lives. An elderly person who is waiting for a cataract operation, for example, will not go out much, because they cannot see. They will not have the confidence to go out and meet their friends. If the operation is heavily delayed, by the time they have it they may have lost their social circle, lost what they do and become de facto housebound. For every single person who has to wait or whose operation is cancelled, there is a human cost. It is important to focus on that.

There is also the question of accident and emergency. I have watched the TV programmes and have visited King’s A&E on numerous occasions. The odd person is there just because they want to spend four hours sitting somewhere, but most people are there because they have had an accident or they have an emergency. They might have tried to find somewhere else to be seen, but they are there, and they are worried. They are often in pain, and they often have worried relatives with them. We must not drift back to the situation we had before 1997 under a Tory Government. I remember that well. People routinely spent all night on trolleys in King’s accident and emergency. I know what that situation was like, and we must not drift back to it. That would be really unfair on people. In this day and age, when much of the hospital has been rebuilt, we should not go back to that situation.

I hope the Government recognise people’s concerns. I hope that they are generous not just with their money but with their commitment to King’s; that they help it to go forward; and that they do not talk euphemistically about savings. Everyone knows what cuts are—cuts are when more people are coming through the door and there is less money per person. I thank Bob Kerslake for his work as chair, and I am disappointed that, because of the circumstances, he felt he could not stay on. I will meet the new interim chair shortly, but I hope that everyone at King’s—the staff, the management and the chair—feels that the Government are on their side and want to help them sort out the situation rather than blame them, make an example of them and talk about King’s as if it is anything other than the wonderful hospital we believe it is.

My letter to the Equality and Human Rights Commission today regarding pay transparency. The justified anger must now spur the change for equal pay. As the equalities watchdog the EHRC must lead and the Government must give them the funding they need to do this:

Harman, left, and Baird said the government used “completely flawed” research

Two senior legal figures are challenging the attorney-general and the new lord chancellor over claims that the law is protecting rape complainants from being questioned at trial about their previous sexual history.

Two former solicitors-general, Harriet Harman, QC, an MP who served as deputy leader of the Labour Party, and Dame Vera Baird, QC, now a police and crime commissioner, accuse Jeremy Wright, QC, and the then lord chancellor David Lidington of using “completely flawed” research to claim that the law is working as it should.

In a letter issued today, Harman and Baird say they are seeking a meeting with the Wright and Gauke for an explanation of how the research was relied on and to suggest how the law could be improved.

In 2016 Wright and Lidington commissioned research into the workings of section 41 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, which prevents the use of sexual history by the defence to discredit the complainant unless the judge agrees.

The case of the footballer Ched Evans, who was acquitted of raping a 19-year-old woman, led to concerns that the rule was being breached.

The study looked at 309 rape cases and found that in 92 per cent, no evidence of the complainant’s sexual history was permitted to be introduced by the defence, and applications to do so were made in only 13 per cent of cases.

However, in their letter, Harman and Baird say they are “disappointed and baffled” by the research report and accompanying statement.

They say that it fails to challenge the findings of other evidence about the use of section 41 and that it cannot be accurate because the Crown Prosecution Service does not require its prosecutors or caseworkers to note if a section 41 application is made. Any application at the start of or during a trial is unlikely to be recorded because in most trials there is no CPS caseworker present and no requirement for the prosecuting barrister to report.

“The numbers in your report are therefore not based on anything which could be regarded as reliable. Yet on this basis you conclude the law is being correctly applied and does not need amending,” they write, adding: ”We seriously challenge this.” 

The cite a proposed Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill as an opportunity to amend the legislation. They also question why the research report included trials involving “guilty pleas” because there would be no point in a section 41 application by the defence in such cases.

In a statement to the Commons in December, Wright said: ”These findings strongly indicate that the law is working as it should, and strikes a careful balance between the need to protect complainants and ensuring that defendants receive a fair trial, consistent with the common law and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.”

However, he added: “Whilst this is reassuring, we want to do more to provide vulnerable victims, and the public at large, with complete confidence in our criminal justice system.”

This afternoon I spoke in Parliament to praise Carrie Gracie, former China Editor at the BBC, for the principled stand she has taken in denouncing unequal pay on behalf of women not just in the BBC and broadcasting but in workplaces up and down the country, I demanded the government to reverse the cuts of almost 70% to the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ensure they have the funds to tackle the pay discrimination which is now laid bare.

From April 2018 all organisations with more than 250 employees will be required to publish their gender pay gap every year. The exposure of the persistence and extent of the pay gap will anger women employees. But it is important that this information is the spur for change, empowering women to demand change, rather than just increasing the justifiable resentment which women feel.

-It is crucial that a woman at work is able to see clearly how the pay gap in the organisation for which they work compares with other similar organisations.

-It is crucial for women to be able to track the progress their organisation is making in narrowing the pay gap year on year.

-It is crucial for the government and local government to see the regional pattern of the pay gap.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has the responsibility to monitor this, to ensure companies publish their pay gaps and to set targets for companies to close the gap. But in order to ensure that the EHRC are able to carry out this important task and right this wrong, it is vital that the government gives them the money they need.

You can read my full statement below or watch the debate here.

Harriet Harman:

I think what we should be doing today is to be thanking Carrie Gracie for the principled stand she has taken. She has done this on behalf of women, not just in the BBC, not just in broadcasting, but women throughout the country who suffer pay discrimination. As a broadcaster and as a journalist she is exceptional, but as a woman facing entrenched pay discrimination, I’m afraid she is the norm.

He rightly says that when it comes to the transparency, the requirement to publish the pay gap, which is in the 2010 Equality Act, it’s for the regulator, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to police that, to monitor it, to make sure companies publish and to set targets that they close the gap. But, will he commit that this Government, in order to ensure that they are able to carry out the important task, to remedy this discrimination, that they redress the cuts of up to 70% that have fallen upon the Equality and Human Rights Commission?

This is a pivotal moment. We need the Equality and Human Rights Commission to be able to do their job. They need the funds to be able to ensure we right this wrong.

Matthew Hancock, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport:

Well, I pay tribute to the leadership that the Right Honourable lady, in Government and since, on this issue, because making sure that equality of opportunity pervades our country is important, and that means gender equality too. She’s rightly been an outspoken voice in favour of gender pay equality and equality across the board.

What I would say about the EHRC, is that it is their actions, and they have a duty to act and now they are indeed acting, and that is a question of judgement as much as it is a question of judgement.

Following reports of death threats to MPs after last week’s Brexit vote, I asked the Home Secretary what actions the Government is taking to combat the toxic culture surrounding the Brexit debate.

Harriet Harman

“I fully endorse the words of my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary. I thank the Home Secretary for her statement, but I want to press her on the question of death threats to MPs because of how they voted in last week’s debate. Does she agree that we have here a toxic triangle, which is made up of the divisiveness of the Brexit issue, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail identifying certain Members as targets and framing the attack on them and—facilitated by social media—the mob following? When MPs in other countries are threatened with violence because of how they vote, we call that tyranny, and we call that fascism, but that is what is happening here.

As well as rightly commending the bravery of her Conservative colleagues, will the Home Secretary be brave herself and call in the editors of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph? We have more contentious votes ahead of us, and there are people out there who are vulnerable to being incited to violence. Barely 18 months ago, our colleague Jo Cox was killed. The safety of MPs is at stake here, and so, too, is our democracy.”

Amber Rudd

“The right hon. and learned Lady makes a passionate case about the difficulties, challenges and very real threats that all MPs find themselves facing. Let us be clear that the real criminals are the instigators of these threats and attacks. Everybody should be clear that anything that is illegal offline is illegal online, so anybody who is in receipt of such a threat should go to the police, so that action can be taken.

From the Government’s point of view, we have made sure that the police have the resources to address the problem. We have invested, through the police transformation fund, in new digital advice to ensure that the police know how to record for evidence the types of accusation and attack that Members may receive online, so that there is a proper trail of evidence for prosecution. I believe that the attackers are the clear enemy, and we should focus our policy on them.”

You can watch the statement or read a transcript here.

It was great to welcome the lively and enthusiastic Ivydale Primary School Council to Parliament today. A big thank you to the teachers and parents for bringing them!

The run-up to Christmas is the busiest period of the year for the police. This afternoon I visited police stations in Camberwell and Peckham to take part in their annual #WalktheMet event. I later also joined local officers talking to residents in The Lane.

Thanks to all at Southwark Police for the work they do.