‘Labour just couldn’t envisage a woman doing the job of an MP’
In his latest Martin Shipton Meets podcast, our chief reporter talks with Baroness Anita Gale of Blaenrhondda, who as general secretary of Welsh Labour helped introduce measures to ensure her party fielded more women candidates
ONE of the pioneers of allwomen shortlists and other mechanisms aimed at achieving 50/50 representation for women and men in parliaments has told of her personal disappointment at not becoming an MP.
Baroness Anita Gale was general secretary of Welsh Labour when the party agreed on “twinning” arrangements that ensured half its candidates in the first National Assembly election were women.
But 16 years before, she had failed in her bid to become Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Rhondda, where she had lived all her life.
She said: “The MP died in 1983 and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be the MP for the Rhondda?’. I was working for the Labour Party at the time, so I decided to have a go.
“Looking back, I realise how naive I was, because we’d only ever had three women MPs in Wales and the last one had retired in 1970.
“Anyway, I thought people would judge me on my record. I’d done a lot in the party, I’d been active in the trade union, when I’d worked in a clothing factory I’d been a shop steward – I thought all that would count in my favour.
“But the reality was it didn’t count in my favour. I did get on the shortlist – I think there were seven or eight. All men except me. Later one woman told me that her women’s section was determined there was going to be a woman on the shortlist and that was going to be me. So in that sense I was a token woman.
“Anyway I got one nomination. I went to the selection meeting – it was the general committee that selected the candidate back then, not the whole membership – and I literally didn’t get a look-in. When I was speaking at the meeting I thought, ‘These people are not going to vote for a woman’. At the end a leading woman came up to me and said, ‘You were so good. You must try somewhere else. Don’t give up’.
“I didn’t bother after that. Maybe if they’d had all-women shortlists at the time I’d have had a better chance. I was going for one of the safest seats in the country and they weren’t going to give that to a woman.
“After that, I did everything I could to get women selected.”
Having left school at 15 and worked in a clothing factory and a grocer’s shop, Baroness Gale got married at 18 and had two children.
“I always had this chip on my shoulder that I hadn’t had a decent education. When my youngest was four, I went back to working in the clothing factory and then they had redundancies.
“At the same time I saw this advert in the Rhondda Leader for a course in Rhydyfelin College for married women. It was a secretarial course, but you could do your O-levels. I enrolled there, and for me it was marvellous.
“The teacher there really encouraged me, and I ended up doing my O-levels, my A-levels and I got a place in Cardiff University to study politics and economics.”
She joined the Labour Party when she was 25. The first event she attended was a women’s section meeting.
“A job became available in the party for a women’s officer for Wales, and I thought, ‘That’s a job I would really like to have’,” she said. “It was during my second year at university that the job became vacant but, as it turned out, they didn’t make an appointment for a long time.
“So they advertised again and I applied then,” she said. “I was appointed, so when I graduated I had a job waiting for me.
“When I started the job in 1976, there wasn’t one woman MP in Wales, not one. And there were no women MPs until Ann Clwyd got elected in a by-election in 1984. And she was the only one until 1997, when we applied all-women shortlists.
“I did lots of selection conferences. Nearly always it would be an all-male shortlist. Women couldn’t get nominations.
“Women weren’t seen as potential
MPs. This went on for years and years. In the selection conferences that I did, women often couldn’t get a look-in. The image of an MP at the time was a man, so they couldn’t envisage a woman doing this job. So there was lots of prejudice, and this applies to all the political parties, not just Labour.
“The women I’ve seen who did have a go and not get anywhere would go off and do other jobs, quite often working for charities, for example, or social causes. They made their contribution that way because they couldn’t make it on the political scene.
“So it was very hard – and thank goodness the party eventually realised there was something going on, and we’d have to do something about it. And that’s when all-women shortlists came in.
“Loads of things had been tried before then – we didn’t go straight into all-women shortlists. We started saying, if a woman gets a nomination, there has to be a woman on the shortlist. So that was no problem – women got on the shortlist. And then there had to be an equal number of men and women on the shortlist. That wasn’t a problem either. But still women didn’t get selected. That was when the party decided the only thing to do – by compulsion really – was to say to party members, ‘You have to choose a woman in this constituency’.
“And when I look at the good women now in Parliament – look at the women who were standing for the leadership of the Labour Party, for example – I can probably guarantee that every one of them would have come through from an all-women shortlist. And look at the calibre they are – we’ve got some fantastic women in Parliament.
“So it wasn’t that women weren’t good enough to stand; party members just wouldn’t choose women.”
Baroness Gale pointed to the fact it had taken the Conservative Party 101 years since some women had been able to vote before a Tory MP was elected from Wales. In fact, in last month’s general election, the party had three women MPs elected in Welsh seats.
Baroness Gale said: “It took so long because they [the Conservative Party] didn’t do anything, basically.”
She said that so far as Labour was concerned, the safer the seat, the more difficult it was to persuade local parties to agree to an all-women shortlist. Cardiff North – a Labour/ Tory marginal – had been the first to volunteer for one.