Sir Keir Starmer should make tackling misogyny the sixth key mission of his government, Harriet Harman has said.
The former Labour cabinet minister told our political editor Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast that the work so far to tackle it is “just not good enough”, and women’s voices need to be respected in government.
Her comments come after the most difficult week of Sir Keir’s premiership that saw him fighting for his political future.
Two of his closest advisers, as well as the nation’s most senior civil servant, have left Downing Street in less than a week as he has sought to regain control.
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The fallout from Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, as well as the revelation that the prime minister knew his former communications chief, Matthew Doyle, had an association with a convicted paedophile before nominating him to the House of Lords, saw Sir Keir accused of prioritising a “boys club” culture over the views and experiences of women.
For the first time since taking office in July 2024, he addressed a meeting of the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Party in which he promised that culture change in his government is coming.
Speaking on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Baroness Harman said he needed to go much further in making tackling misogyny a priority of his government, suggesting that he make it the sixth headline aim of his administration, alongside economic growth, expanding clean energy, fixing the NHS, making the streets safe, and breaking down opportunity barriers.
She told Beth Rigby: “I suggested that – you know, Keir Starmer has got these five missions – that we make a sixth mission of actually sorting out misogyny and culture change.
“And I think that there is a recognition now that it’s not just good enough to – sometimes people have said, ‘Keir has said something on one day, and then he is moved on to something else on the following days’ – and certainly there’s a lot going on, but this has got to be seen through.”
Women ‘not part of the decision-making’
The senior Labour peer also argued that Lord Mandelson would not have been made the UK’s ambassador to the US if a woman had been in the room, given his known links to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
“It wouldn’t have been set aside as something that could be brushed past and then just crack on with the appointment,” she said.
“The problem about misogyny is not just the discrimination that’s meted out to women around and about, but it’s also you make bad decisions because you’ve only got one view in the room – men’s views – and they don’t cognise issues in the way.”
Baroness Harman also said the phrase “in the room” is “quite bad” because more senior men will make a decision, and then point to the more junior women to be able to say, “see, there’s a woman in the room”.
“Well, she is in the room, but she’s not part of the decision-making,” she continued.
“Actually it’s about partnership in decision-making. And that’s what they’ve got to aim for – not just to get women in positions, not just to get women in the room, but to have real equality of decision-making and respect for what women need to contribute for the government to actually get itself on track.”
Inquiry needed into ‘UK’s Epstein’
Former Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson also noted that the women abused by rich and powerful men have not seen justice done.
Baroness Harman echoed former prime minister Gordon Brown’s call for the police in the UK to investigate the trafficking of women, and called for a “proper public inquiry” into the more than 400 allegations of sexual misconduct against the now deceased former Harrods boss Mohamed al Fayed.
She said: “I met on Tuesday this week with some of the victims of al Fayed, and they were saying [that] to see on television minister after minister, everybody’s saying, ‘we’ve got in the forefront of our mind these women and girls, the ones that are in America’, and they were saying, but what about us? What about your own Epstein, which is al Fayed?”
There also needs to be “a total feminist reset of Number 10”, and a female first secretary of state (most senior cabinet minister below the prime minister) to “drive forward culture change across government”, Baroness Harman concluded.
