Women’s Equality Party: Honor Barber's speech calling for 50 per cent of MPs to be women in 10 years’ time left a real impression on me

It is not difficult to imagine Barber as an MP in the 2025 parliament, whether it is 50/50 or not

Sandi Toksvig, first left, welcomes delegates to the Women’s Equality Party’s manifesto launch (Getty)

Seventeen-year-old Honor Barber was supposed to have an English lesson at her London school last Tuesday morning but instead took to the lectern of the Conway Hall in Bloomsbury to help launch the Women’s Equality Party’s first manifesto.

I watched many fine speeches from women that morning, including the WE’s leader, Sophie Walker, but Barber’s left the greatest impression on me – first, because it was such a strong performance from someone who is not yet old enough to vote and, second, because she spoke so passionately about the party’s policy for 50 per cent of MPs to be women in 10 years’ time.

Joking about how her involvement in the WE is “distracting me from my studies”, including speaking at events past 9pm on a school night, she said the existence of the new party “changes the world for women of my generation: The idea that, in 10 years, we can have a country where gender equality exists is worth the inconvenience. Today we have come a step closer to ensuring our children will never have to skip school for gender inequality.”

This young woman wished “for the young girls who come after us … to never have a shortage of strong successful women to look up to”. It is not difficult to imagine Barber as an MP in the 2025 parliament, whether it is 50/50 or not.

And this is the point. I am in favour of a 50/50 parliament (although I would prefer to get there through selective all-women shortlists rather than outright quotas). Yet Barber’s generation should feel heartened by what already exists. She said women were not being represented properly in Westminster because VAT remains on sanitary products and David Cameron told a woman MP to “calm down, dear”. But I hope she and others would consider the two best speeches in the House of Commons this year, and the guts of those who made them.

The first was by Mhairi Black, in July: her speech has now been viewed millions of times and made her a star. The 20-year-old SNP MP tore into not only the government benches but also Labour’s weakened opposition. It took bravery to do this because, in the two months after the election, no MP had stood up in the chamber to expose how far the official opposition had fallen.

But braver still was Heidi Allen, who got to her feet a few hours after Barber had been on hers in the Conway Hall. Allen took apart her own government on tax credit cuts and its “betrayal” of working people in such devastating style that you had to keep remembering this was a maiden speech rather than an address by an outgoing minister. She has surely sacrificed her own progress up the ministerial greasy pole in favour of speaking up for the working poor by saying “a constituency does not function – a country and its economy does not function – if the people who run the engine cannot afford to operate it”.

Westminster has few independent-minded MPs who dare to speak out against their party leadership, particularly in government, which was why it was so rare to hear such a speech. Is it a coincidence that the two best Commons speeches of 2015 were by women? Maybe. But it shows that the state of women in politics is pretty good. What they lack in numbers they make up in strength and power.

Revolutionary words

“As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does W H Smith’s promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?” So said David Cameron, in one of his first speeches as Conservative leader, in January 2006. His words were designed to shame retailers into guiding their customers away from their addiction to sugar.

But a fat lot of good it did. A decade on, some firms are still tempting shoppers at the till and Britain’s obesity crisis is worsening. The PM’s refusal to consider a sugar tax, as recommended by Public Health England in its hard-hitting report last week, is a tragically wasted opportunity to improve the health of the younger generation – particularly children from poorer families, who are more likely to be obese when they leave primary school.

I am normally wary of “nanny state” interventions but our addiction to sugar is a national emergency. Critics say a sugar tax would only punish poorer families, but this is rubbish – salt consumption has decreased by 15 per cent in a decade because of greater awareness about its presence in food. Cameron needs to summon up the revolutionary zeal of his early leadership.

Frying tonight?

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s request to have a traditional fish’n’chip supper and a pint was answered on Thursday by the PM taking him to The Plough, a pub in the village of Cadsden, near Chequers, but I am concerned that the state visitor has been short-changed. Cameron’s choice of ale was fine – Greene King IPA is very smooth, although I would have ordered the president a pint of Sam Smith’s. But you can’t call a couple of cod goujons with some fries in a cup a proper fish’n’chip supper. Surely Cameron should have waited until Friday, when he took the Chinese president to Manchester City’s Etihad training ground? The international pair could have popped into a local chippy for cod’n’chips twice, with scraps, gravy and mushy peas.

Then the President would have understood the true meaning of Northern Powerhouse.

The greening of London

Our capital city has long searched for a project that could emulate the New York High Line, the disused railway turned into a green highway for pedestrians and cyclists to navigate NYC’s skyscrapers.

London’s Garden Bridge plan, to span the Thames with a new green walkway, is hugely ambitious, expensive and controversial, but there is a smaller-scale project under way in one of the city’s densest urban areas. The Peckham Coal Line is a plan to turn a disused coal sidings into a high-rise garden which would link cycle routes and provide a haven away from the busy south London traffic.

It has the backing of Mayor Boris Johnson but is also relying on crowd-funding to get the project off the ground. It needs to raise £64,000 by next Saturday, and is still around £10,000 short. You can find out more atspacehive.com/peckhamcoalline

Twitter: @janemerrick23