Dame Margaret Hodge Interview with Sofia Collignon 00:29: Sofia Collignon (SC): Hello everybody. My name is Dr Sofia Collignon. I am very honoured to be here today with the Right Honourable Dame Margaret Hodge MP. Margaret has been in politics for a very long time. She was elected to Islington Council in 1973 and in parliament was elected through by-elections following the death of another Labour feminist Jo Richardson in 1994. She has been the Labour MP for Barking ever since. Today to mark the launch of Royal Holloway’s Gender Institute, Margaret will tell us about her life as a woman in electoral politics, her motivations to stand for office, her experiences in Council and as an MP, and the challenges she has faced in local and national politics. Thank you very much for being with us, Margaret, today. Before, maybe we will have to start with some of your motivations to stand for public office. So, what inspired you to push your career in politics? 01:31: Right Honourable Dame Margaret Hodge (MH): In a sense it was all an accident. So, I am now getting on a bit in years, but my work when I was working, was in international research, so that involved a lot of travelling and I started having children in 1971. In those days, this was before any legislation, really, protecting maternity rights at all, had been enforced. It was a very different era. Women were expected to stay primarily at home until the children, at least, reached school age. I had always been an activist. I had been an activist for causes, really. So, I was a member of the campaign against nuclear disarmament, I was active in the anti-Vietnam War, I was an anti- Apartheid activist. Those were the sorts of issues I got involved in. But I was also a member of the Labour party and active in that capacity and I had my first child, and found, simply, that being a full-time mother at home just didn’t do it for me enough. Although I love my children dearly, I’ve got four children and now twelve grandchildren, so I’m very blessed but it just wasn’t enough. I had a close friend, who was at that time, on the local authority as a councillor on the local authority in Islington where I lived, and she had to move because of her husband’s job. Just think about it, in those days. He got a job at Birmingham University, so she was expected to move with him. So, she said to me, ‘go on the council, Margaret. Try and get my seat and it will keep you sane while you’re changing nappies.’ So, it was an accident that saw me into politics. But it’s a sort of drug. I’d always wanted to change the world. I’m of that generation that really believed that we could change the world. We were a very, sort of, positive, determined generation, the generation of the Sixties. I just stayed there, every now and again I tried to give up but on the whole I’ve had a career in politics, a very rewarding, very stimulating, very varied career in politics since that accident of history. Changing nappies became a politician. 04:02: SC: That’s really interesting. Thank you. But after twenty years as a councillor, then you decide to start for a seat in parliament. Why did you decide that? 04:12: MH: Actually, again, that’s not quite accurate. So, I never wanted to become a Member of Parliament, partly because I had four children and I thought it was incredibly difficult to juggle your life between the childcare responsibilities and being a full-time MP. I still think it’s a very, very challenging existence because you are 24/7 as an MP. And also, I was never really attracted to the Palace of Westminster. I thought it was rather pompous, I thought the debates were rather irrelevant, I felt it was living in a sort of, a little bubble away from the reality of life. I really enjoyed my work at local authority level. But I did that for twenty years, Labour lost four General Elections in a row starting from 1979, 1983, 1987 and then 1992. And I tried to give up politics. I decided that I’d done it all in local government, I’d been lead of the local authority for ten years and I’d really enjoyed that, but I decided that there was nothing new, really. I think ten years in a job for anybody is enough and you should move on. I went and took a job actually with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, simply to prove my capability credentials because we were very attacked in the London Labour councils in the 80s when I had been leader. And then, I’d always said to myself, ‘if I really can’t bear it, I will try and go back.’ I’d always had my eye on Barking because it’s close to where I live and I knew the leader of the council a little so I thought it would be, you know, it would work well. And I always thought that Jo Richardson, who was my predecessor, who was a brilliant feminist fighting for women’s rights at the head, in a senior position, of the Labour party. I thought she might retire, so I’d have four or five years outside of politics, see if I liked it and then take a decision. Actually, tragically, she died during the middle of a parliament and I so remember coming home that night, and we live on a house which has got staircases up and down, an early Victorian, late Georgian house and the handrail going up the stairs was absolutely, full of post-it notes which were saying, ‘Margaret, you’ve got to stand, you’ve got to stand, you’ve got to stand’, because Jo had just died. And I remember actually my heart sinking and thinking ‘oh my God, I don’t think I’m ready for this.’ My youngest daughter was 13 at the time. But, you know, in the days that followed, I just thought, ‘I’ll kick myself if I don’t do this’, and I stood and I was so fortunate and lucky, but I’ll tell you about the challenges I faced in getting selected, but I was fortunate and lucky, got selected, and the rest is history. 07:26 So, I’ve always been a feminist. I went to the very early consciousness-raising groups in the 1960s because, really, I got into feminism because I was discriminated against in a place of work. So, I was not the best of students, but I managed to get a job as a graduate trainee in Unilever, in their economics department and arrived there, well-paid job, but I found that women were never allowed to write the reports. The men wrote the reports, and the women gathered the information. I was furious and went to see HR who basically said to me, ‘that’s how it is, if you don’t like it get out’. So, I have to admit, I got out. But I also started going to women’s consciousness-raising groups in Hackney with Sheila Rowbotham and characters like that. So, it’s always been with me. Equality has always been a driving force and gender equality is a part of that. Racial equality, as well has been another aspect of that driving force, and of course, income and class have been really important to me. But when I got onto the council, we started trying, particularly when I became leader in 1982, we tried to take some steps to move the gender equality forward and it was just interesting what was difficult. Actually before 1982, in 1978 when I had – in those days, they had, not a cabinet, but they had chairs of every committee responsible for delivering certain services. I chaired the housing committee, and I was pregnant. So, I went and asked for maternity leave and I remember the leader being absolutely shocked that I had the gall to ask for that. But, you know, couldn’t refuse, really. But the way in which they punished me for taking my six months off, which I did, to have my third child, was when I came back, they had an election again, we had annual elections to confirm whether or not you remained in your position, and they kicked me out of my job. That’s an interesting story about discrimination, then. When I then became leader in 1982, I was the woman leader, there were not many of us in local government in those days. And we also had a woman, feminist chair of our Labour group. But we had to battle for three years to change the timing of meetings in the evening because the meetings used to start at 7 and everyone with young children would know that that is a crucial time when you’re trying to settle the babies in bed. So, we wanted to move it to half past 7. But of course, that gave the men half an hour less in the pub and it literally took us three years to persuade our colleagues that no meeting could start before 7:30 in the evening unless all members of the committee agreed to do that. A very small step forward, but just one of those things we did.