Uphill All The Way

The 1997 General Election was not only a landslide victory for Labour, it also resulted in a significant increase in women's representation in the House of Commons. Since 1918, only 168 women had been elected to the House of Commons compared with 3,994 men. Women have been, and still are, woefully under-represented in both the British and European parliaments. Only 62 of the 650 Westminster seats were held by women from 1992-97. Labour was better represented but even so, of its 274 members of parliament just 39 were women.

Across the country as a whole there were wide disparities in the number of women elected. In Scotland in 1945 only three Labour women were elected. And in the 1992 General Election precisely three Labour women were elected to Scottish constituencies. Their number increased by one in the by-election for John Smith's Monklands seat. Wales had 27 Labour MP's. Only one was a woman.

The 1997 General Election saw a large increase in the number of women in the House of Commons with 101 Labour women MP's, 13 Conservative women, 3 Liberal-Democrats, and two Scottish Nationalist Party women a total of 119 plus Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House. However, there were still only four Labour women MP's in Wales, and nine rather than four Labour women in Scotland.

These increases were the result of many years work by women from a broad spectrum of the Labour Party and although short-lived, the Party's policy of quotas with women-only short lists in some of the key seats made a significant contribution to the result. Now that the legislation has been put in place once more - Representation of the Peoples Act (Election Candidates) Act 2002 - we should again see an increased number of women selected in key seats.

During the Parliamentary Selections in 2000 LWN supported potential women candidates and organised training events. Sadly the number of women in Labour held seats decreased in the 2001 General Election and where women retired or died (eg. retirement of Betty Boothroyd MP, Tess Kingham MP, and death of Audrey Wise MP) they were replaced by male candidates. This was seen by many women as a direct result of not having an effective mechanism to ensure positive action in favour of female candidates.

By the time of the General Election in 2005 the All Women Shortlist mechanism for selections had played a huge part in ensuring more women were returned to the House of Commons. Twenty two of the new Labour MPs were women. However, some of the seats Labour expected to win were lost and the total of Labour women MPs did not reach the peak of the 1997 result, but was nevertheless an increase on the 2001 result. Sadly in early 2006 this was depleted again by the death of Rachel Squires, MP for Dunfermline & West Fife. (click here for complete list of the current Labour women MPs).

In association with the Labour Party.