Everything You Really Need to Know About Politics: My Life as an MP by Phillips Jess

Author:Phillips, Jess [Phillips, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery UK
Published: 2021-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

7 The Room Where it Happens: The UN

Over the six years of my parliamentary career, I have attended several of the annual Commission for the Status of Women conferences at the United Nations in New York. It is a huge event where the nations of the world gather for two weeks to hash out treaties and documents outlining how they can work towards improving the global lot of women and girls. It may sound as though it should be an easy task – surely everyone would agree that the educational, economic and human rights of girls and women should be protected, you might say. You would be very wrong.

There is almost no global agreement on many of the issues raised. Even the notion that women should have autonomy over their own bodies is deeply controversial in many countries.I Marriage is another sensitive area: it is a deeply political institution in lots of parts of the world and the rights of a husband over his wife or a father over his daughter cannot be questioned. So the commission is anything but straightforward and diplomats from every country spend weeks going through a policy document line by line, trying to agree on language that they can all take forward together.

If you think things happen slowly in UK politics then I would invite you to go and sit in the negotiating room of the UN for a day – or a month, if you want to see anything get done. At my first commission, on the first day, I joined the British team of negotiators in the congress room where the policy document was being discussed. After four hours, we were still quibbling over the first sentence in a document that stretches to hundreds of pages. That morning, I had a series of epiphanies. First, that I would make a terrible diplomat – I tutted very loudly every time Saudi Arabia’s all-male team of representatives disagreed with anything. And second, I just don’t have the patience for this kind of work. To be honest, it is a wonder that anything has ever been agreed at the UN when so many people from such varied cultures and with very different expectations are asked for their opinion. Bravo to the amazing people who have both the temperament and also the stamina, but I know my skill set and that is not it. I’m more of an ‘act first, apologise later’ kinda gal, more wrecking ball than gentle nudge.

My job at this convention, thankfully, was not to negotiate the finer points of a thousand-page document but to join with the hundreds of representatives from other nations of the world and development charities, meeting and lobbying and cajoling countries to agree to the things I wanted out of the negotiations. I am much more suited to having a drink, a yarn and a debate with the Equalities ministers from Italy and New Zealand than I am to sitting for hours quibbling about where the comma goes or what is an acceptable phrase for enshrining the sanctity of a woman’s womb.

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