News Archive

Women’s Parliamentary Radio celebrates 90 years of women and the vote

by Boni Sones
Executive Producer, Women’s Parliamentary Radio

Women’s Parliamentary Radio is a web based broadcaster that allows listeners to download or stream audio reports of our interviews and programmes with women MPs and MEPs here, in Europe, and with women politicians in other parts of the world too. Our production values are high. We aim to be the BBC world service for women politicians globally. The new media age allows us to have this huge vision for our programming and networking. All you have to do to tune in to our “as live “reports is have an internet connection. It can be listened to anywhere in the World without a licence or an FM frequency.

All the production values that go into BBC programmes are in ours. Broadcast journalists carry out our interviews and our Chair is Jackie Ashley of the Guardian. We “dumb up” while other sections of the broadcast media are clearly “dumbing down”. Our product is respected and seen to be what others aspire to. It should be we have re-invented the Reithian values of the BBC to “inform, educate and entertain”.

We allow women politicians to tell their story with rigorous interviews but ones which are also respectful and curious. It’s old fashioned women’s page journalism at its best. We are indeed the “Women’s Hour of Westminster”. We do interview men too, where they are pursuing issues to further the interests and welfare of women and families. John Bercow’s work on Genocide for instance.

The British Library archives all of the interviews we do, thereby allowing women to tell their own stories to historians of the future. This is very different to what women politicians have come to expect from a national media that often ridicules, belittles, or dismisses the significant contributions they are making to real and sustained changes to British Society at the moment.

A huge and interesting network of women are now involved, associated with, have been interviewed by, or have knowledge of our reports. We have been nominated for awards. We were short listed for the Channel 4 Political Awards, Hansard Democracy Section last year, and for a new project, I am told we nearly pulled it off. I was also nominated for the Dods Scottish Widows political journalist of the year. Phew, too much for one person and an excellent team of web managers and sound engineers on a budget that is largely built on enthusiasm.

This year is 90 years since women first got the vote. Women’s Parliamentary Radio decided to celebrate it by asking all women MPs in Westminster in all parties – 125 in all – to have their photographs taken party by party so that an enduring image of women’s participation in the political process could be displayed. In all we managed to get 104. Three women MPs had died since 2005.

This was a remarkable achievement for the photographer, Kieran Doherty, who earned his reputation at Reuters. It took three photo shoots and much courage to do all this in what was a matter of minutes for each of the four group photo portraits. Kieran was the photographer who took the now famous Blair’s Babes photograph with the Labour women MPs on the steps of Church House, waving and looking up with the then Prime Minster, Tony Blair in the middle of the group shortly after Labour won the 1997 General Election. Inviting him back was deliberate, we wanted to create a set of photographs across party that were much more positive.

The House of Commons Works of Art Committee has acquired a set of the four and they will be put on display at Portcullis House early next year. We unveiled the portraits at the National Portrait Gallery who are deciding how and when to display them in an appropriate way. The Rt Hon Theresa May MP, who has supported the project throughout, has also suggested that they should tour the Country in some way. Museums and Galleries can purchase a set from us. It is now up to the individual curators to take the agenda forward and improve their collections so that they can indeed deliver on Theresa’s idea and display permanent, positive images of women’s participation in the political process in Parliament. 90 years since women first got the vote, it’s about time they did.

My thanks to all who co-operated with the project. Liz St Clair, Women’s Officer for the Conservative Party has been an enormous support. We photographed 83 out of a possible 95 MPs for Labour, 11 of the 17 Conservative women, 9 of the Liberal Democrat women and one Independent, Clare Short.

The brochure on the project is on the www.wpradio.co.uk photographs section. A huge thanks to the Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Co-Chairman of women2win, for her work on all.