Three Women MPs Elected New Deputy Speakers
2 min read
Caroline Nokes, Judith Cummins and Nus Ghani were elected as deputy speakers of the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon.
The three candidates, who will support House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, were elected by MPs from a field of eight candidates.
Cummins and Sharon Hodgson put themselves forward as candidates for Labour, while for the Tories Ghani, Nokes, Karen Bradley, Sir Roger Gale, Helen Grant and Wendy Morton joined the race.
Nokes, the Tory MP for Romsey and Southampton North, has been chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee for four years, on the Speaker’s panel of chairs since 2019 and in the Commons for the past 14 years.
Improving the culture of Westminster was her priority during the campaign. “With 41 per cent of Parliament being women this time, that gives us an opportunity to address some of the thorny cultural issues,” she told PoliticsHome.
Nokes wanted MPs’ bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct training to be mandatory and have the team of speakers work with party whips to create an “absolutely explicit behavioural code and a method of dealing with infringement”.
Ghani, a former minister, is the first ethnic minority MP to sit in the Speakers chair.
She said she was inspired by the late Betty Boothroyd, the first female Commons Speaker, to run for the role. But being sanctioned by China and Russia – for condemning both states’ human rights abuses – demonstrated to her that every MP should be able to go about their business “without fear or favour”. Ensuring this, she says, would be her top priority if elected.
Ghani has been the subject of repeated hacking attempts by foreign states. Just before the election, she was hacked again by Russia.
While Ghani does not want to “jump the gun” on specific plans for the role, she says if she is elected, her time as deputy speaker will be solely about the chair, not the person occupying it.
Cummins on the otherhand has pledged to apply the rules in Parliament fairly and to foster a tolerant atmosphere in the Chamber and across the Commons.
The general election has been “very tough on new Members”
She pledged for a regular review of systems to ensure Parliament “does work for everybody”, saying: “I recognise that this place has had its problems, will always have its problems like any other workplace in a way. But I think we need to be held to a higher standard than any other workplace,” she told PoliticsHome.
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