Politics

Labour MP Gloria De Piero urges women to change parliament


Gloria De Piero, who is stepping down after nine years as a Labour MP, is urging women to “come into parliament and change it,” despite the proliferation of threats and abuse faced by many female MPs.

One of 58 MPs who have announced that they will not be standing in the 12 December general election, De Piero, who represents Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, said she hoped women would not be deterred from entering frontline politics.

“I would still say to anybody who wants to change the country – it does have strains and stresses, but I wouldn’t have not done this for the bloody world.”

She added: “It’s not great at the moment: but come into parliament and change it. All that progress that we’ve made in getting women there: we can’t go back on that.”

Several of the women who are stepping down from parliament, including the former Conservative Heidi Allen, have cited the toxic political debate in explaining their reasons for quitting Westminster.

And the independent MP Anna Soubry has detailed a string of threats, most recently including a card posted through the door of her partner.

Anna Soubry MP
(@Anna_Soubry)

This was sent to my partners home (threatening letter also sent to my mother’s home last year). No warning on envelope Grant, they had to read them. BTW @nottspolice & @syptweet have been outstanding in taking these threats seriously. You should try it @grantshapps pic.twitter.com/71dXNatgQI


October 31, 2019

De Piero said that she had taken security precautions, on the advice of the police and parliamentary authorities.

“My mailbox is bombproof: there was a letterbox in my door, and it’s probably sensible that I don’t have that any more. I have an external mailbox, that’s bombproof. And I have good locks on my door, fitted by the parliamentary authorities.

“I’ve got a panic button as well, in my house – but I’m OK,” she adds. She also doesn’t publicise in advance where she is going to be, in accordance with police advice – and admits she does feel nervous before going out door-knocking.

“Before every one of my canvass sessions, because I’ve seen it on social media I think, ‘Oh God, am I going to be OK?’. Because I canvass a lot. But touch wood, it’s always been OK on the doorstep.”

“I haven’t spoken to all these women, I’m sure there will be different reasons why they’re standing down,” she says. “It’s worth exploring that to find out. But at this stage, I still want to say to women out there – do this, you will never regret it.”

And she points to the “great solidarity” among women MPs. “My female friends, Vicky Foxcroft, Stephanie Peacock, Louise Haigh – you will make friends in there that will support you through the tough times. Your women colleagues, you put your arms round each other, and you’re there for each other.”

De Piero cites harrying the government into implementing equal pay audits as Ed Miliband’s shadow women’s minister – under legislation passed by Labour but set aside by the coalition – as an example of the difference even opposition MPs can make.

“You can change the law,” she adds, pointing to the case of a woman constituent who had been a victim of domestic violence.

“A woman came to see me about a year ago. She had some scars, she said ‘my husband is serving time for attempting to kill me, he is in prison, he is now entitled, as part of the divorce, to half the house’”.

“I didn’t know that – and I went to see the minister, and nobody seemed to know it. So I’ve been working on amendments to the domestic violence bill to remove the automatic presumption of joint assets.”

“I just hope my colleagues will continue that work when they come back. But it’s things like that: you can’t learn that from any book.”

As a former broadcast journalist who grew up in a working-class family, De Piero says encounters like this have changed her political perspective dramatically.

“You leave Bradford, you go to university, and you’re not conscious of this along the way, but you’re getting a bit more liberal. Then you go into the London media: and before you know it, you are pushing some very, very predictable lines. Which you think are original, but actually everybody in your bubble thinks those things.

Gloria De Piero



De Piero speaking to constituents in the shopping streets at Sutton in Ashfield in 2018. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“And I just felt, when I came to do this job and I started knocking on doors in 2010 I was like, ‘shit, this conversation is totally different’. I thought the world had changed, on my little journey from Bradford to London, and it hadn’t: I had changed.”

She warns there are still too few MPs from backgrounds like hers who make it to Westminster – or even consider it. “Speaking from the working class is as important as speaking for the working class. That’s why I have talked about my background: not because it is a badge of honour, obviously it is miserable to grow up in child poverty. I just think the more people know that there are people in there who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth, the better.”

She was one of the 19 Labour MPs who took the controversial decision to vote for Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal at its first parliamentary stage last month – hoping, she said at the time, to amend it: a process that was brought to a halt when the general election was called.

That decision came from the feeling that voters in constituencies like hers should have their voices heard, she says – but she has been taken aback by the toxic tone of the debate, in Westminster, on social media, and in her inbox.

“We get emails – saying that you’re a traitor. Because of course the weird thing is – and this is what illustrates the gulf over Brexit more than anything – is that up here they think I’m trying to stop Brexit. Down there, I go down and they think that I’m bloody Nigel Farage, some of my colleagues, to put it bluntly.”

De Piero had always intended to step down after 10 years, she says – or as it has turned out, nine, all of them on the backbenches, and the last three dominated by Brexit.

As she prepares to leave the House of Commons for the last time, she now wonders whether she did the right thing in not backing Theresa May’s deal.

“What do I ever regret? Not voting for Theresa May’s deal? I think about it a lot.” May’s deal, unlike Johnson’s, would have underpinned EU standards on workers’ rights in law – and while it didn’t include a customs union, it needn’t have precluded a future government from negotiating one. “I’ll never know whether I did the right thing there, but I know I ask myself a lot,” she says.





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