STELLA CREASY
As long as mothers are unwelcome in Westminster, how can we expect to see gender parity in Britain? The Labour MP for Walthamstow talks to Frances Hedges about her campaign for maternal rights
When Stella Creasy brought her three-month-old son into the House of Commons last November, she had no idea of the furore she was about to unleash. ‘I was there to lead a debate about “buy now, pay later” credit schemes,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t the first time I’d brought in a baby, and causing a fuss couldn’t have been further from my mind.’ Yet that day, Creasy received a reprimand from the Private Secretary to the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, pointing out that her child’s presence contravened the MP handbook rules on ‘behaviour and courtesies’ in the Commons.
‘There was a practical reason why I brought my son, which is that I didn’t have proper maternity cover,’ the Labour MP explains when we meet at the Hoxton hotel, her son Isaac (known as Pip, after Creasy’s father) once again in tow. Despite having won a hard-fought battle to appoint a locum to handle her constituency work for six months following the birth of her first child, Hettie, in 2019, she was denied that opportunity this time around, after the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority refused to fund cover equivalent to her full salary. Even with a locum, there are limitations: if an MP on maternity leave wishes to represent her constituents by speaking in person at Westminster, she must relinquish her proxy vote. ‘For me, it’s not an option to tell my constituents that for six months they have no voice, no issues I can take forward,’ says Creasy. ‘I was on the phone to ministers less than 24 hours after giving birth to Pip because we had hundreds of Walthamstow residents affected by the Afghanistan crisis. I’m not going to say to someone cowering in fear from the Taliban, sorry, I’ve had a baby so your family doesn’t matter. It’s an impossible situation.’
Creasy has been fighting for her right to a political voice since she was an undergraduate at Cambridge, where, according to recent revelations she made in an interview on GB News, she was threatened with gang-rape as part of a sustained campaign of sexual harassment that lasted throughout her involvement in student politics. Since becoming an MP, she has frequently been a victim of trolling – including further rape threats and being branded a ‘witch’ – and has found herself the subject of hostility from women as well as men. Carrying her child in a sling in Parliament prompted accusations that she was pressurising new mothers to work during their leave, while her campaigns for MPs’ maternity rights have been decried as relevant only to a political elite. ‘This has never been just about us,’ she counters, ‘but it shows how endemic the problem is when even the place that makes our laws isn’t open to mums.’ Combining motherhood with work should not, she argues, be a juggling act. ‘There’s no other environment where we just accept that something should be difficult – why not try to make things easier, because who knows what talent we might unearth?’
Nurturing talent is the reason why Creasy is currently championing a non-partisan campaign called This Mum Votes that encourages mothers to run for political office. Spearheaded by the charity Pregnant Then Screwed, the movement has already helped open a public conversation around barriers to participation such as prohibitively expensive childcare, failures in the universalcredit system and a lack of flexible-working options. ‘When I start talking to women about these issues in private, they’re full of rage, but publicly they feel they can’t say anything,’ observes Creasy. To break this taboo and tackle what she calls the ‘motherhood penalty’, she has recently launched an initiative within the Labour party, MotheRED, that offers grants of up to £2,000 to help female candidates with children stand for election. ‘We’re putting money where our mouths are,’ she says, ‘and we’re also sending a vote of confidence to show that being a mother in politics isn’t a disadvantage, it’s an advantage – because right now, these voices are missing from public debate.’
Westminster could certainly benefit from having more voices like Creasy’s, but perhaps what it needs even more urgently is her sense of drive. ‘Sitting on the sidelines is for Waldorf and Statler,’ her Twitter bio proclaims, and in the 12 years she has held her Walthamstow seat, Creasy has proved time and again that she is a woman of action, whether that means working with youth groups in her community or leading the fight against payday-loan companies – with or without a baby strapped to her chest. ‘I refuse to believe my ideas only have power when Labour is in government,’ she says. ‘You can always make progress, and I will work with anybody and everybody to do that.’ Stella Creasy is featured in ‘A Woman’s World, 1850–1960’ by Marina Amaral and Dan Jones (£30, Head of Zeus), out on 4 August.
‘Right now, mothers’ voices are missing from public debate’