The British Parliament from an intersectional perspective. The representation, experiences and action of working-class women from racially minoritized groups

This paper intends to analyze the way British institutions and the Westminster Parliament in particular have marginalized women and more specifically women from working-class backgrounds and from racially minoritized groups. It delves into the questions of political power and representation from an intersectional perspective by examining the representation, the experiences and the perspectives of female parliamentarians coming both from disadvantaged social and economic backgrounds and from ethnic minority backgrounds. It pays particular attention to the role of these female political actors - who were not born into the elite and who succeeded in getting elected as members of the British Parliament - in advancing the descriptive and substantive representation of this marginalized group of the British population. Adopting both a quantitative and a qualitative approach, the study is based on an extensive corpus of political, parliamentary and electoral sources and archives (maiden speeches, oral and written interventions in Parliament, Prime Minister’s Question Time, electoral addresses, electoral leaflets, websites). The analysis covers the past four decades, from 1987 to the present. One of the four MPs from ethnic minority groups who entered the House of Commons for the first time in 1987 was Diane Abbott, who was born from Jamaican parents who had left school at 14. In 2010, the first women of Asian origins were elected and in 2019 and 2022 respectively, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, both MPs, joined the Cabinet as Home Secretary. Since the most recent General Election of 2019, 37 female MPs from ethnic minority backgrounds have sat in the House of Commons, representing 5.7% of all MPs ; among them Nadia Whittome, who declared in her maiden speech delivered in January 2020 : “As a working-class woman of colour, I am made to feel like I do not belong here unless I throw my community under a bus, but that is not what I am here to do. This is why I will campaign for the rights of working-class people to defend themselves”.