Stella Creasy won't give up her fight for maternity rights. Photo / Getty Images
The Labour MP was labelled an attention-seeker for bringing her baby into the Commons chamber. She explains why she won't give up her fight for maternity rights.
Stella Creasy is reeling off the insults that have been thrown at her during her battle for better maternity cover for MPs. "Privileged. Elitist. Out of touch. London," the Labour MP says. "I've had, 'Here she goes, talking about herself again,' and … people saying it's a stunt. Someone even suggested what I really wanted was to go into the parliamentary chamber and expose my breasts. I really don't. At no point has that been my dream."
She pauses. "It's that trope that if a woman speaks out she is attention-seeking, but if a man does it he's bringing his experience to the table. That's how we treat women — you can push but not too far." She particularly objects to being called a "difficult woman": "I'm not difficult, I'm different."
Creasy, 44, has never been afraid to make noise when she spots a perceived injustice. Currently that means trying to break one of the ultimate taboos: that for a lot of mothers the juggle of child rearing and work is almost impossible. This garnered huge attention in November when she led a debate about buy-now-pay-later schemes in Westminster Hall, a subsidiary chamber in the House of Commons, with her baby son strapped to her chest, asleep in a sling.
Named Isaac, but known by his middle name Pip after Creasy's father and grandfather, her son is now almost five months old. Dressed in a Chewbacca suit, he accompanies Creasy when we meet in a café in her constituency of Walthamstow, east London. Creasy's partner of 14 years, Dan Fox, a former director of Labour Friends of Israel who now works in civil contingencies, takes Pip to the next table while we get on with the interview. The couple also have a two-year-old daughter, Hettie, short for Hester, which means evening star. "I chose it because she came along late in my life," she says. "We'd waited a long time for her, so she was an evening star."
Creasy's path to motherhood was traumatic, with infertility struggles and two miscarriages before Hettie's birth. During one pregnancy she felt something "wasn't quite right" and had an extra scan, which she went to alone, imagining she was fretting unnecessarily. The sonographer told her that the baby had died. "I was completely floored by it," she says. "I was in such a daze that I left the clinic and walked straight out into the road and got beeped at by traffic. From then on I made Dan come to every appointment."
When partners were prohibited from attending scans during the pandemic, Creasy campaigned against the policy. Eventually NHS England issued guidance to hospitals instructing them to allow partners to attend. "I hate the word, but it's 'triggering' to be scanned once you've been through that," she says. "I couldn't cope with the stress of coming in on my own."
Struggling to have children left her feeling that her own body was against her. "Infertility and miscarriages are a lonely experience," she says. "They change the conversation from 'Do I want children?' to 'Can I have children?', which is more existential."
With Pip she suffered from gestational diabetes, high blood sugar that develops during pregnancy and can pose a risk to mother and baby if not managed. "It's your worst fear coming true, because your body is fighting the baby and you feel as though it is your fault," she says. "That feeling is visceral. I kept keeling over and turning up in hospital. I also went to the hospital a couple of times, terrified that I couldn't feel him moving."
In the end she was advised to have Pip early, at 37 weeks. This put pressure on her discussions with the parliamentary authorities about her maternity leave and cover. "I had to negotiate twice while heavily pregnant," she recalls. "The second time I was in and out of hospital, desperately wanting quick answers."
Currently backbench MPs are allowed to take "informal" maternity leave and are entitled to six months' leave on full pay, but not all of their duties — such as speaking in debates — can be covered by staff during their absence. Creasy says this leaves backbench MPs who give birth facing a choice: they either pretty much "disappear" — leaving their seat and constituents neglected — or they keep working with a newborn.
Creasy wanted a third way — and when she had Hettie she won a hard-fought battle to have the first "locum" MP, Kizzy Gardiner, cover her constituency work. "I shamed them [the parliamentary authorities], because there was nothing. They wrote to me saying, 'MPs don't take maternity leave.' "
Her locum arrangement worked well for constituency matters, but Gardiner, a former charity worker who also lives in Walthamstow, could not vote or speak in parliament for Creasy because she was not an elected member.
After Creasy became pregnant with Pip, she attempted to arrange more effective representation but, she tells me, the parliamentary authorities declined to give her potential stand-in the full title of locum MP, or to match what an MP is paid for their salary. "What they offered me would have been illegal if I'd been an employee as it wasn't adequate cover," she claims (MPs are classed as office holders and do not qualify for statutory employment rights). "Ultimately the only reason I have taken my baby with me is that there isn't cover." She is angry that some of her critics called Pip's presence in the Commons a stunt: "It would be a stunt if I took my toddler in. She'd be an Exocet missile — [targeting anything] expensive, breakable and irreplaceable."
Following Pip's parliamentary appearance in November, Creasy received an email from the private secretary to Dame Eleanor Laing, the chairman of the ways and means committee, which pointed out that it was a contravention of the new rules of "behaviour and courtesies" in the Commons to be accompanied by a child. Creasy was not the first MP to do this and had taken Hettie in too, but on this occasion she was heavily criticised, even by some feminists, who felt that it put pressure on other new mothers to work during their maternity leave. Creasy rejects this charge: "I don't particularly want to do it — it's an imperfect solution to a system that doesn't work. But I'm not prepared to turn around to the people of Walthamstow and say, 'You have no MP for six months.' "
Others accused her of picking the wrong battle, as parliamentarians have a better deal than most women financially — as well as the six months' full pay, there is also a (fee-charging) House of Commons nursery. Creasy responds that parliament should be setting an example by providing cover. "In a country where thousands of women face problems with maternity rights, we don't want a race to the bottom," she says. "We [parliament] should be leading on this. We need to look at how not to lose mums from the workplace. It's quite hard to advocate for that [in parliament] if you're not upholding that."
She argues that all women — including the self-employed (who currently receive a maternity allowance of between £27/$54 and £152/$305 a week) — should receive six months' full maternity pay too.
She also hits out at the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who said he had been lobbied by other female MPs to keep the rules barring babies from the Commons chamber. "I was incredibly disappointed to hear the Speaker repeating this narrative — interrogating a woman's choices about how she looks after her child — rather than going, 'We need to make this work for everyone.' " Hoyle has since said it should be up to whomever is chairing a debate to determine whether a child can be brought in; Creasy calls this "unworkable" because MPs on maternity leave have to decide whether to use their proxy votes (a system where someone votes on behalf of the absent MP) 24 hours in advance, and so risk turning up at a debate with the baby only to be unable to participate.
At this point in the conversation Pip has started to grizzle and Fox brings him over to be fed. I raise a query that Creasy's resigned expression and sigh show she has been asked too many times before: could he not help? "Dan's a very talented person but he can't actually breastfeed," she replies. "And anyone who has tried to breastfeed a young baby knows that it is impractical to leave the baby at nursery and go back and forth. The reason I have the baby with me is because I don't have cover. The reason I couldn't leave him elsewhere was that he needs feeding and no one else can do that. I mean, you can ask me why I don't have a wet nurse, but the answer to that is because I'm not a character in Blackadder." Asked if she couldn't express milk on the days she needs to go into the chamber, she says, "That's really grim! For what it's worth, I have expressed but the fundamental point here is that I need maternity cover rather than someone to micromanage my breast output."
She worries that parliament's stance will discourage other young women from going into politics. This is why she has launched her new This Mum Votes campaign, to encourage mothers with young children to stand for office. She also believes that society shouldn't simply accept that women have to "disappear for a few years" while their children are young, arguing for universally funded childcare from the age of six months on the grounds "it pays for itself" — as it allows more mothers to work longer hours — and should be viewed as a form of infrastructure.
"When you talk about childcare what you get is that it's nice for women to be able to get out of the house," she says, rolling her eyes. "People say motherhood has to be a struggle and a juggle — when did we agree that? When did we go, 'Yeah, this basic thing that humanity has to do to keep existing, we're going to make it really hard — just for 50 per cent of people [mothers]. The other 50 per cent [fathers] we're going to give them a gold medal if they appear with their baby because they're caring and modern."
Creasy's own father is an opera singer, while her mother was the head teacher of a residential special needs school. She spent her early childhood in Manchester, before the family moved to Colchester, where she attended Colchester County High School for Girls, a grammar. She had failed the 11-plus and got a second chance due to the move south, going on to read social and political sciences at Cambridge before doing a PhD at the London School of Economics. Her thesis, appropriately enough, was on social exclusion.
Theirs was not a family of "hardcore activists", Creasy says, but her parents were active in the community. "They imbued in my older brother [Matthew, an academic] and me an ethos of public service." It was her mother's work in the special needs school that shaped her early political views. "I was acutely aware of how lucky I was in comparison with the kids she taught," Creasy recalls. "We lived with them [the family had a flat in the school building] and they were my friends — I saw how tough their lives were and how much damage was done to them by poverty, inequality and their chaotic family lives. You couldn't really live in that environment and not think, 'This isn't right.'"
Her family is still "very close", but "close in the sense that they absolutely rip the shit out of me". A running joke is that Creasy's mother is the mastermind behind the torrent of online abuse that comes her daughter's way (Creasy was one of the first UK public figures to be subjected to horrific abuse on Twitter in 2013 after supporting a campaign to get a famous woman on a banknote). Does her mother mind these jokes at her expense? "She hates them, but she's an absolute legend. The biggest fortune I've had in life is to have parents who have been extraordinary in their determination not to let me stay down." Her greatest wish as a parent is to convey that same devotion but never to put her children on a pedestal. "I already have a series of photographs of my daughter that are coming out when she's a stroppy 15-year-old."
Pip, who has just been burped, isn't spared either. He has a wide grin and Creasy likens his expression to that of Frank Butcher from EastEnders. "He looks like he's saying," — she puts on a Cockney accent — "'All right, darling! Just going down the pub.'"
Has being a mother changed her? "One of my colleagues said to me — which I thought was quite insulting — 'Are you less mad now you're a mum?' " She pulls a face of horror. Mad as in angry? "Just generally. That's what we do to women — 'Oh, you're excitable, you're emotional.' But the truth about becoming a mum is that you have to be more focused on the time you do have."
Creasy has never really been one to waste time, though. During the Blair era she was elected as a councillor in Waltham Forest in 2002 and went on to serve as the borough's deputy mayor and then mayor. She also worked at the think tank Involve and as a researcher and speechwriter for ministers including Douglas Alexander and Charles Clarke. She first won her Walthamstow seat in 2010 and came to prominence rapidly, with highly effective campaigns on issues ranging from payday loans to sex education. She was promoted to the shadow cabinet by Ed Miliband, covering crime prevention and then as shadow minister for business, innovation and skills, while being heralded as one of the brightest stars of the new Labour generation.
That star seemed to dim in the Corbyn era. Creasy ran to be deputy leader in 2015, coming second to Tom Watson, but Corbyn's victory left her more moderate wing out of favour. That same year there was a large protest in her constituency after she voted in favour of Britain's involvement in air strikes in Syria. At a Progress rally at the annual Labour Party conference in 2018, Creasy called the left-wing Momentum group "toxic" and implored more centrist Labour members to stay in the party. She was high on the deselection hit list but clung on and kept campaigning. Her recent battles include trying to make misogyny a hate crime — to ensure the police record when crimes are motivated by anti-female prejudice — and making it illegal to take photographs of breastfeeding women without their consent, which she won earlier this month. "This shows why This Mum Votes matters," she says of the victory. "It wouldn't have happened without mums raising it."
What seems odd is that she hasn't made a return to the front bench in the Starmer era. A fellow Labour MP tells me that Creasy is "still on the periphery. Her card is marked — unfairly — as a difficult woman" and that "the leadership — not Keir but the people around him — don't want this conversation around MPs' maternity rights because they're worried that it will go down badly in red wall seats, that it will seem like the concern of the privileged middle classes".
Creasy, who shows me polling that indicates there is support for MPs having cover while on parental leave even in red wall seats, is more diplomatic. "I'm not going to be on the front bench any time soon," she says. "The way I do things is not comfortable for other people, and I respect that. Every Labour leadership has found me a challenge. I have disagreed with every leadership on something [but] I have fought for Labour governments nevertheless. Our politics has to be sophisticated enough to not think that you have to be of one mind all the time."
A frustration for her is that dissent often now morphs into invective: "It's 'You're either with us or against us.'" Why is the left so susceptible to that? "It's always easier to feel smug that you have better values than face the fact that you might not get change straight away." She is no fan of cancel culture, arguing that "we should be capable of giving each other space to mess up, apologise and learn from a situation".
On MPs' safety in the wake of David Amess's death, she says that members don't want to hide away. Her surgeries have moved online during the pandemic but she is routinely stopped in the supermarket and on the Underground by constituents. She has faced frightening moments of her own: during a campaign to ensure women in Northern Ireland had access to abortion, she said she felt "physically sick" after being targeted by anti-abortionist activists in her constituency.
Twitter-can you get me the CEO of @CCUK_Direct advertising? how much did you get for this crap? @metpoliceuk still think this is just 'free speech' and not harassment of women in walthamstow? Am sorry for the graphic images and @patel4witham am reaching out to you for help now. pic.twitter.com/rOG7Gc3App
— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) September 30, 2019
"My own experience of police security hasn't been brilliant," she says. "When I was targeted by these activists — who were telling everyone that I was a Nazi and that I killed babies — the CPS declined to prosecute, which was frustrating because this was a harbinger of what was to come. If we let third-party organisations start whipping up hate mobs against MPs, that's very dangerous."
What kept her sane in those tough moments is her life outside Westminster; she is a serious music fan — she once listed knowledge of Nineties indie music as a beneficial skill when she was advertising for an assistant — and she has a close group of non-political friends who "take the mick". "I've got a life outside politics," she says. "I don't think it's very fashionable to say that. For all the current fractiousness within the PLP [parliamentary Labour Party], I'm all right because it's not my be-all and end-all."
When it comes to Labour winning back former red wall seats at the next general election, Creasy believes that a false dichotomy has been created between those areas and "privileged" London. Her constituency has one of the capital's higher hipster counts but it also has areas of social deprivation and child poverty. "There are trans kids in Hartlepool and white working-class boys in Walthamstow," she says. "Setting Walthamstow against Hartlepool means that you get the worst out of each of them."
The thread that runs through all her political work — and what she believes Labour should stand for — is the "freedom to live your best life". She says that her maternity battle is an example of that. "For me — and that's one of the reasons I'm frustrated with the Labour movement — this is about emancipation. Women have shit to do, but we put hurdles in their way so we don't get their contribution. If you take those things away, maybe finally we'll get a cure for cancer and address climate change."
The question, she believes, is how to liberate people: "For many Brexit was seen as a moment of liberation and now it's becoming a moment of frustration that yet again they've been let down. The biggest problem we have in our politics right now is a lack of belief that things could be different. It can be different."
She is a pragmatist, though, arguing that Labour shouldn't wait to be in government to fight for change. "There are plenty of things we can stand for," she adds. "I've been told that we shouldn't be working with food banks because people should be able to see the damage this government is doing. No — you feed people and fight to abolish food banks through tackling poverty."
She finds it frustrating that so much of politics is about going to meetings (which she hates) and appearing in photos "as though that changes anything — being a prop". She adds: "I don't do that. I always say to people I'm your worst nightmare as your local MP because I'm going to get you involved. That's how change happens."
As she's speaking, Pip — back in his father's arms — is being fussed over by two elderly women. She turns to look at him: "I hope my kids grow up knowing that I fought for them, and that I fought to be with them too — and that the two shouldn't be mutually exclusive".
Written by: Rosamund Urwin
© The Times of London
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