As the current parliament is dissolved, some of Labour’s highest-achieving female MPs and former ministers will stand down. What is their legacy?

When the 2010 parliament comes to an end on 30 March, 10 of the Labour party’s most high-achieving female MPs and former ministers will be standing down. Some of them began their parliamentary careers in 1987, and together they have clocked up 200 years in parliament. The list includes two former secretaries of state – Tessa Jowell and Hazel Blears – and five former ministers or junior ministers – Anne McGuire, Meg Munn, Dawn Primarolo, Glenda Jackson and Joan Ruddock, as well as former parliamentary private secretary Siân James and committee chair Joan Walley. Their colleague Linda Riordan, another committee stalwart, is also now standing down.

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Together they have put major new government laws on the statute book, on everything from equality to education, the environment and civil partnerships. Without these women, there would have been no Sure Start centres and early education for the under-fives, no reduction of VAT on sanitary protection and contraception. There would have been no gender-neutral drafting of legislation and no 2010 Equality Act, which drew together legislation on equal pay, sex discrimination, race, disability and religion. Even the 2012 Olympics might not have come to London, had Jowell not spent more than 10 years pushing for it.

They have ensured that positive measures were introduced to allow more female MPs to join them, with the controversial adoption of all-women shortlists. They also helped to reform the male-centric culture of Westminster – Ruddock led the campaign to end late-night sittings, and Walley campaigned for a family room – that famously once resembled a gentleman’s club, and some feel now does again.

Blears says the Labour women have made progress, but that things are once again moving backwards. “I think women, individually, have made a difference – people like Tessa – but it is individuals. I don’t think we have systematically changed the way it is. Politics at the top is very male dominated. The characteristics that seem to allow people to rise are still male.”

She says some of what they fought for in her first days in the Commons has been lost. “The smoking room had a very male atmosphere, full of chesterfield settees where Nye Bevan used to plot in the 50s. When we came in, the smoking room was dominated by male Tory MPs who drank a lot of brandy, smoked cigars and would sit in there in the evening and talk affairs of state. We determined as women that we would take the smoking room. On Tuesdays, we would gather in force and drink pink fizzy wine and we would occasionally giggle and we would talk fashion, or we would talk politics and affairs of state. We would occupy literally the centre of the smoking room and gradually the men disappeared to the fringes, and then disappeared. When we came back this time in opposition in 2010, it was very interesting to see that that room is now colonised again by male Tory MPs.”

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McGuire, too, remembers finding Westminster inhospitable. “In terms of the general environment, the one thing that surprised me, and this is really trivial, is that all the furniture was built for men. If you are my height, you can’t sit all the way back in a chair in the members’ room, and we all used to laugh about it. My feet don’t touch the ground and it was an uncomfortable seat. There was no ladies toilet in the lobby, there were no machines for women’s sanitary products.”

She thinks Labour women and younger male MPs did help to change Westminster after 1997: “I do think the introduction of so many women at one time helped, partly because they weren’t from the same kind of networks that the guys were part of. There were a lot of younger men MPs as well who had families still in their constituencies, who didn’t do what a lot of men did, which was to move their families down to London.”

Walley remembers similar obstacles in her early days in Westminster: “Even the toilets, they had on them ‘Members Only’, but they were for men MPs, not women MPs. The chairs that you sat on had splinters on them and wrecked your tights … Our boys were down here too and there was nowhere for them to go, and that was what led me to set up the campaign to get the family room.”

Like her colleagues, she feels women’s progress is in reverse gear again, and social progress too: “I think it is the populism and a lack of understanding about politics which reduces it to the lowest possible denominator. There is a sense of people not looking in depth at what the issues really are.”

James, a miner’s wife who handed out food parcels during the 1984 strike, and whose life is portrayed in the 2014 film Pride, agrees: “I didn’t think I would have come a 360-degree circle, where I would be handing out food parcels now to my constituents.”

Primarolo, too, regrets not achieving more: “My sadness is that I think my constituents are in a worse place now and it doesn’t look good going forward … We should have done more. We look at what we didn’t do, but now I realise we did our best, and the main thing is that I have learned that I have to encourage others to fight the same battles again. That is what democracy is – you never reach your destination, you are always trying to reach it, it is imperfect, you make mistakes, and that is all you can do.”

Their proudest achievements, in their own words





Dawn Primarolo, MP for Bristol South

“One thing that makes me smile and I know that, because of the work I did there, it may seem like a small thing, but it was the reduction of VAT on sanitary protection, followed by contraception. It was important to women and it was also symbolic.”

Joan Ruddock, MP for Lewisham Deptford

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joan Ruddock Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

“I led both of the campaigns to change the hours, first of all with Ann Coffey and then with a slightly wider group of women from all parties for the second time round. We were utterly determined because it wasn’t only that women were suffering; the men were suffering as well. Their families were suffering terribly, but of course they wouldn’t talk about it.”

Joan Walley, MP for Stoke-on-Trent North

“I did a lot of work [in the early 90s] as a shadow transport and environment minister, preparing policies for an incoming labour government. This included setting up the Environmental Audit Select Committee, which I now chair.”

Tessa Jowell, MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, 1992:

“There are two things I am most proud of: Sure Start, which I designed and got the money for and set up as an early nurture programme that then became a child care programme across the country; and the 2012 Olympic Games, which I lived with for 10 years.”

Hazel Blears, MP for Salford and Eccles

“I was promoted to public health minister, and we did ‘five a day’, so people who get fed up with eating five a day, it is my fault. And we banned tobacco advertising too.”

Anne McGuire, MP for Stirling

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anne McGuire Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

“I was one of the two ministers to take forward the Civil Partnership Bill in 2004, and was in New York to sign the UN convention protecting the rights of people with disabilities on behalf of the UK government.”

Megg Munn, MP for Sheffield Heeley

“One thing I did on my own was to persuade Jack Straw, leader of the house, that legislation should be gender-neutral. It actually took a couple of years to persuade people. Most people don’t notice but now there but that is my mark on history.”

Siân James, MP for Swansea East

“My proudest achievements are the campaigns in the constituency when people have come in and told us about issues and we have changed things. getting pension rights reinstated, and fighting for better train services and electrification to Swansea.”

• Interviews by Jackie Ashley, Linda Fairbrother, Deborah McGurran, and Boni Sones