THERE has been a lot of media coverage in the past week about the proposal I put forward for a women’s “emergency cabinet” to prevent the disaster of a No Deal Brexit, and I want to put the record straight.
What drove my proposal was a recognition that we are in a time of emergency yet parliament is paralysed, while the prospect of a no-deal Brexit which would cause immense harm to the people of this country is growing more and more likely.
I wanted to explore whether a different dynamic could be created by bringing together a cross party group of women MPs, on a short-term basis, simply and only to try to broker a process to avoid a dangerous crash out Brexit, and to enable the British people to decide the way forward via a People’s Vote.
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The term “emergency cabinet” was always intended to be figurative and in my open letter to MPs was clearly in inverted commas. It was never intended to be a permanent Cabinet, despite media coverage implying otherwise.
In my experience – and I appreciate it’s a generalisation, with plenty of exceptions - women have often been able to approach conflict resolution and problem solving in a way that is different to our adversarial Parliamentary model, and it was that experience that I was seeking to harness in order to broker a process.
It is critical that we are inclusive moving forward and the original idea was that the group of women politicians would seek a way forward that would bring in the best talents and minds to stop a no-deal. This of course extends to men.
Although the list of politicians I wrote to was never meant to be an exhaustive one, failing to include women of colour was wrong and I have apologised for this. I should have thought more deeply about who, and what kind of politics, I sought to include.
I also know that my proposal to work with politicians who hold such divergent views to my own has been controversial. But I passionately believe that unless we are willing to work cross-party on the issue of Brexit, we will never be able to stop the disaster of No Deal. There are times when the national interest has to come first, and this is surely one of them.
Brighton, Pavilion
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