To the Women and Equalities Committee, to which Labour’s Sarah Owen has been elected chair. The Labour MP for Luton North achieved a majority of 7,500 in the July election and now has a select committee chairmanship under her belt too. But not everyone is especially thrilled by the announcement – not least because Owen seems to have more than a little difficulty defining, er, a woman…
The day after Owen was elected committee chair, the Luton North MP appeared on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour with Anita Rani. But when Rani got to the all-important question of what a women is, the chair of the Women and Equalities Committee struggled to answer. Instead of replying directly, Owen remarked that: ‘Somebody that is going to be paid less than their male counterparts, somebody that is going to be less safe walking down the streets and somebody that faces more barriers in the workplace, education and health sector.’ Continuing on in her roundabout way, she added: ‘It’s really sad to be honest that we’re still at this stage of the debate. We have boiled down people’s fears or concerns on both sides of the argument to people’s body parts.’ Er, right. Still not quite managing to address the point…
Mr S would have thought that a rather basic prerequisite of being a committee chair would be to understand exactly what the committee stands for. It hardly bodes well for the government when their own party’s Member of Parliament can’t even meet that condition…
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