On Monday (2 March) Emma spoke to the GMB union’s National Equality Conference in Leeds, telling delegates about her experiences as a person with dyspraxia in Parliament and the importance of making Parliament more diverse.
Emma is the first MP to be public about her dyspraxia, and has spoken out about her experiences in the past.
Emma took questions from delegates about the challenges under-represented groups face in politics as part of a question time style panel. Joining Emma on the panel were the GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny, the union’s National Equalities Forum Chair Brian Shaw, and local councillor Alice Smart.
You can read Emma’s full speech below.
Emma’s speech to the GMB National Equality Conference
Thank you, friends, for inviting me here today; it is always great to speak to my union. I am going to talk to you about my experiences as an MP with dyspraxia and why equality and diversity matters to me and the Labour Party.
I was elected the MP for South Shields in May 2013, and became the first woman to represent my town. I’m happy to have that small place in history, but in fact one of the nice things about the campaign was that people weren’t all that interested in the fact that I was a woman – for the voters, my gender wasn’t even a factor when they went to the polling booth. There wasn’t even a question about whether I could be an effective representative for them.
Just a few decades ago that wouldn’t have been the case. Women could be elected, yes, but to be a woman in Parliament was ‘unusual’. I’m glad that today having women in politics is an everyday fact of life, and that most voters don’t bat an eyelid when they see a woman’s name on the ballot paper. The Labour movement needs to take a lot of credit for that – over the last few decades we have promoted women’s participation, and now one in three Labour MPs are women. After the next election, that proportion should be even higher.
That’s not to say that everything is OK now of course. Other parties have a long way to go to match Labour’s progress, and we need to be clear that there is more to equality than just getting women in the room – we need women in positions of leadership too. And not just in politics, but in business and in civil society. Across our country we need to open up opportunities for women – in science and technology, sport and the arts.
But we also need to make sure that we don’t treat ‘women’ as one category either. If all the women, and men for that matter entering Parliament are white and middle class, that doesn’t make our Parliament very representative. We need people from all backgrounds, from ethnic minority communities, disabled people and people from the LGBT community, because our country’s Parliament needs to look and sound like the people it is representing, it needs to have voices rooted in real experiences that people can resonate with. At the moment it just doesn’t.
I am proud to be one of a relatively small number of women from a working class background in Parliament. And, as you may have seen, I am also the first MP to talk publicly about having dyspraxia.
Dyspraxia is a form of developmental coordination disorder. It affects things like spatial awareness, learning, memory and language skills.
Although my dyspraxia is not severe, it is still something that affects me every day. As you might have guessed, learning, memory and language skills are quite an important part of being an MP!
Many dyspraxics spend their lifetime always feeling like they have to compensate for the things they don’t excel in or the things they struggle with. As a result many of us tend to go all out just to prove how capable we are, we will learn everything possible about a topic, we will practice practice practice at things, knowing the bare minimum or doing something once is just not enough for us to get it right. And whilst that can be tiring, it tends to mean we end up knowing more than others or being more proficient in the things we practice at.
I think the dyspraxics of this world are the talented, the creative, the big thinkers, the problem solvers, because we often don’t see things as others do. I would never be round a table thinking the same as everyone else or agreeing with the majority because we see the world and have experienced the world differently.
That said the Chamber can at times be very difficult for me. It is sensory overload: it is noisy, people are moving around and talking all of the time, when you are speaking you have to be ready to stop and take questions, all the time making sure you are looking at the clock that counts down your slot.
There are plenty of MPs who find speaking in the chamber easy, and who can stand up and improvise for ten minutes without even having read the Bill in front of them. They might make their party whips happy, but I am not sure they are doing the best job for their constituents. If I am going to speak on an issue I want to know it inside out, because I want to do my constituents justice.
Dyspraxia is often described as a learning difficulty, which I think can be misleading, because people with dyspraxia are no less intelligent than anyone else. Some of them have brought unimaginable change to the world – people like Bill Gates and Albert Einstein. Dyspraxia isn’t a lesser way of thinking, it’s a different way of thinking. Politics is a great place for dyspraxics because we need a wider set of views in the political arena. Approaching our countries problems from a different perspective can produce solutions not previously considered. Einstein used to struggle with spelling and tying his shoes, but he changed the way we understand our whole universe. I think Parliament would be better off with a few more people who can think like that.
With dyspraxia early diagnosis is the key. When I was younger I suffered from chronic low self-esteem and zero confidence. I always remember being terrified of getting something wrong, so in order to not get things wrong I would isolate myself and not speak up in class or in break times.
I then remember the sheer hell of senior school – for girls it’s sadly all about how you look and what you are wearing. As any dyspraxic will tell you make-up application, hairstyling and general presentation are not our strong points. I got by by becoming the joker and trouble maker, at least then people wouldn’t focus on my dyspraxic traits. But that unease and lack of confidence never went away. I would often sit in class knowing the answers but never shouting out – because how could I be possibly right?
I knew I was better than just being the class clown, so after a few rough years what my mam refers to as my ‘reign of terror’ I began to work hard. I knew that I was just as capable and intelligent as everyone else, it just sometimes took me a little longer to get there.
As the years have gone by I’ve realised there is nothing I can do about my dyspraxia. This is who I am. I’ve embraced it, tailored it to suit me and the bits I couldn’t tailor I just accepted, bits that since meeting the Dyspraxia Foundation I am now celebrating. After all life is never dull with dyspraxics – we are funny, kind, innovative people. We are the people whom others seek out in a room to speak to.
I know I am very lucky, I have a job where I can celebrate my dyspraxia without it impacting. In fact, I have a job where I can make a real difference for dyspraxics. I want to see dyspraxia have the same resonance with people as dyslexia,- everyone knows what dyslexia is, everyone knows what a struggle life can be for dyslexics but no one knows really what it is like for dyspraxics.
My message is that being dyspraxic, being different, can be a good thing, the people who make a difference in the world are those who stand out and are not the same as everyone else.
There is a lot of fantastic support out there from organisations like the Dyspraxia Foundation, but a lot of children never get to access it. A lot of them get frustrated by lessons that aren’t suited to their style of learning, and by teachers who just think of them as being lazy or slow. A lot of parents I have spoken to get equally frustrated by the slow path to diagnosis – our health and education systems are just not set up for dyspraxics.
But another barrier, and one that applies not just to dyspraxic people but to all disadvantaged groups, is the psychological barrier that tells people certain fields are ‘not for them’. Sadly politics is one of those fields. I remember when I used to watch Parliament and think there is no one there who is representative of me our my community. This is the same for many people with disabilities, or from ethnic minority backgrounds. Politics seems like something that happens to them, not something they can be involved in or where their opinion is valued. It looks like a field that doesn’t welcome you unless you are white and well-off, so it’s understandable when people who don’t fit that description think “why should I bother?”
But they really should, because every time a talented person is kept from pursuing their dreams, it doesn’t just hurt them – it hurts our society. Think about how different our world would be if Bill Gates, after failing a few spelling tests, got discouraged and stopped working hard at school. Or if Einstein had listened to the teachers who called him a ‘dunce’ who would ‘never amount to anything’.
It’s for this reason that equality needs to be at the very centre of everything we do as a movement. Equality is sometimes talked about as if it is a luxury – a nice idea, but not something that can be allowed to get in the way of prosperity. That is absolutely wrong. Equality is a vital part of prosperity – a world where opportunities are blocked and potential is left unfulfilled is a world where we are all worse off. People who speak about a trade-off between freedom and equality are not seeing the bigger picture. How many great inventors or leaders has humanity lost because they were born into poverty, or because they were denied a job on the basis of their race, or because they were failed by a culture which said “women don’t do this, that’s men’s work”?
If we want to build a more successful Britain, equality needs to be built into everything we do. Labour is the only party that understands that. David Cameron has tried to clean up his party’s nasty image, but you only have to look at the facts to see that equality is not a Tory priority. Unemployment among women is on the rise, and those who are in work are more likely than ever to be on exploitative zero-hours contracts. People from ethnic minority backgrounds, too, are more likely to be unemployed. The number of disabled people in poverty is rising year on year, and as the Coalition cuts go deeper more and more people are having their support withdrawn.
David Cameron wants us to believe that these cuts are regrettable, but inevitable – that we had no choice but to cut support for the poor in order to deal with the economic challenges we face.
But that is not true – cuts on the scale we have seen were not inevitable, they were a choice made by the Government. They could have maintained the 50p top rate of tax, or taxed bankers’ bonuses – instead they gave tax cuts to the rich and let the burden fall on public services.
I know that our country is going through hard times, but that does not mean we should abandon the principle that everyone should have a fair opportunity to make a better life for themselves, or our goal of eliminating poverty.
Tough times are when we need to fight hardest for our principles and stand by them. It is easy to preach equality when times are good, but if you drop that principle as soon as it becomes a challenge to defend, then it isn’t really a principle at all.
That is why I believe that now, when the idea that we can have a country that takes care of its most vulnerable citizens and welcomes people from a broad range of backgrounds is under threat, now is the moment when we need to fight hardest to defend those values. We must work hard to convince people that it is not inevitable that disadvantaged people have to suffer the most in an economic downturn.
What we have seen from David Cameron and the Tories is that when push came to shove, equality just wasn’t high on their list of priorities, you just need to look at his Cabinet to see that.
It isn’t just economically where the Tories have been quick to abandon the principle of equality, David Cameron used to try and distance himself from Tory xenophobia, but then he went out of his way to pander to the right-wing press and UKIP, with shameful incidents like the ‘Go Home’ immigration vans, and his claim that ‘multiculturalism has failed’. And while he managed to do the right thing and back legislation to legalise gay marriage, he only did so with Labour support – the majority of his own party voted against.
But for Labour, and for me, equality is not a slogan or a brand that we can wear to win over voters, only to discard it at the next convenient moment. Equality is central to who we are and our mission as a party, and we will always embody that principle in good times and in bad.
When Labour wins this year we would do no different. I know that we still face a difficult economic situation, and the next Labour Government will have to make some difficult decisions, but we will not lose sight of our goal of a fair society where a person’s talent, and not their background, is the key to success. We will hold true to that principle at every level – not just in our policies, but by making sure that our own MPs and our own cabinet draw on the experiences of people from across British society.
I am proud to be a member of a party which has always been a champion for equality throughout its history. I am proud to be a working class woman MP, I am proud that I am able to use my position to raise awareness of dyspraxia, but I am most proud to have been asked to come and speak to you, my union about these issues today.