Melanie Ward MP: speeches

Speeches

• 19 Mar 2026 · Online Harms · Hansard source

  More

  I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I would add that I was recently at a primary school in my constituency, and I asked the young people how many of them were on social media—a class of 10 and 11-year-olds—and almost all of them were. However, when I talked to them about how social media work, I found that everybody had different rules for what they are allowed to do and when they are allowed to go on social media. It was clear that their parents are trying really hard to regulate their children’s access to social media. Among the reasons why I want us to act by banning social media for under-16s are not only the impact on young people, which I have tried to lay out, but the job parents are struggling to do because social media companies cannot behave properly. I saw a survey showing that one third of parents had cried because of the stress of trying to manage their children’s access to social media and online content. To me, this is about backing parents as well as about keeping our young people safe online and in the real world. We banned the sale of alcohol to under-18s in 1923, and when we banned the sale of tobacco to those under 16 in 1908. I very much hope that future generations will look on our Parliament as the Parliament that finally took action to prevent the public health risk and the real-life harm that is addictive social media and extremist content in the hands of children, as well as in the hands of so many vulnerable young people. We must act now. The safety and wellbeing of our children is at risk.

• 12 Mar 2026 · International Women’s Day · Hansard source

  More

  I congratulate the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) on her first speech, and welcome her to this place. I do not know whether she has noticed, but the Palace of Westminster is in need of some maintenance, so it is entirely possible that both her plastering and plumbing skills will come in useful in the very near future. I rise to speak in my first International Women’s Day debate. I have followed these debates since before I was elected, so it is a true privilege to take part today. I have to say, if the composition of the Chamber were like this more often—by which I mean the number of men and women relative to each other—we might have different kinds of debates. Today, we celebrate women in our communities, across the country and throughout our world. We celebrate extraordinary women who achieve incredible things for the good of humanity. In that context, it is a great but sad honour to sit opposite the coat of arms of my late dear friend Jo Cox, with whom I served on the board of the Labour Women’s Network. I think of her every time I come to this place and see her coat of arms. We miss her and her contributions dearly. I have previously mentioned Jennie Lee, a proud Fifer who grew up in Cowdenbeath in my constituency and served two spells as a Labour MP. As well as having been the first ever UK Minister for the Arts, and the creator of the Open University, it is less known that Jennie served in the Ministry of Aircraft Production during world war two, keeping aircraft factories running during the blitz. She was called on to do so because of her no-nonsense attitude and ability to get things done. I take inspiration from that. I am proud to follow Jennie as the 595th woman—among many thousands of men—elected to this Parliament, together with an unprecedented number of women MPs. Our Labour Government have important plans to advance women’s equality, from halving violence against women and girls to transforming women’s experiences of maternity care—a subject I discussed with the right hon. Baroness Amos just this week. Beyond the women who are recognised for extraordinary achievements, we must be clear that the unseen work that women across the world do every day does not receive the recognition it deserves. According to the UN, women and girls do 16,000,000,000 hours of unpaid care work every single day. Their work is the very glue of families, communities and economies—countries could not function without it—yet it remains largely invisible, undervalued and unequally distributed. Today, I want to sound a warning. We know that violent struggles are being fought for global power, but around the world, and increasingly at home, the struggle for power is being expressed as a struggle for control over women and our bodies. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) and I have written about that together this week. There are many shocking examples of the battle to control women’s bodies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) mentioned, the oppressive regime in Iran has been desperate to prevent women from dressing in the way they want to, despite the incredibly brave protestations of amazing women there in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death. As the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) said so eloquently, in Afghanistan, the Taliban have tested the limits of whether the world will stop them enforcing gender apartheid, by forcing women out of schools and workplaces and into the home. They looked for, and found, the answer they wanted: that the world does not care enough to stop them. In Sudan, which is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, rape and sexual violence is routinely used as a weapon of war. At the recent Munich security conference, which I attended, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary spoke powerfully about her visit to Sudanese refugee camps and the horrific accounts that she heard there, including of the systematic rape of girls as young as eight. I am proud to be a former chair of The Circle, the global feminist organisation founded by Annie Lennox. Only this morning it shared with me data showing that sexual violence in conflicts worldwide has increased by 25% in the last year. In conversations about a shift in the global order, there is an increasing subtext of the need to control women’s bodies. We see that in some of the attacks on the legitimacy and funding of the United Nations. I worked with the UN in my previous work. Let us make no mistake: the UN would benefit from many reforms, but starving its institutions of funding to do work that no one else will do, for people no one else will help, is a grave error. That work includes providing contraception to women in war zones and refugee camps, so that they have some basic control over their bodies in situations where they have control over almost nothing else. In the context of domestic cuts to our own aid budget—a source of concern to many of us—we must do everything possible to preserve support for women and girls. I know that the Foreign Secretary is doing important work on that. We must not content ourselves by believing that such misogyny only exists abroad. Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, said that women who do not have children should be taxed more, and that young women need an education in fertility—as if “The Handmaid’s Tale” was something we should aspire to. He seems to believe that women who choose not to have children, or who cannot, are somehow failing in their duties. Reform has said that, were they in government, the Equality Act—the basis for much of the progress we have made on women’s rights in the UK—would be repealed. Shame on them. Online, British women are stripped of the agency we have over our own bodies, exemplified by Grok weaponising women’s bodies through nudification. Our Labour Government are right to crack down on such apps. My hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) had the truly awful experience of someone using that technology to make a fake video of her being chloroformed and “prepared for rape”. That makes the comments by the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), in the previous statement all the more unacceptable. The intended humiliation of women online is not simply cruel or misogynistic, although it is certainly both. It is intended to instil fear, to signal that some violent men believe that they are entitled to dominate women and to normalise such abhorrent behaviour. Last week, ahead of International Women’s Day, I met members of the Fife violence against women partnership. We discussed the more than 5,000 incidents of domestic abuse and the more than 1,100 crimes of indecency reported to the Fife police last year. We know that many more will have gone unreported. They also shared with me their concerns about social media and the misogyny spread online by so-called male influencers. I heard shocking reports about some of the things that local schoolboys have said to female teachers—comments that they have learned online. They included female teachers being told by boys that they teach, “You’re so ugly, I wouldn’t even rape you.” Male influencers online also seek to spread the idea that the role of the tradwife is what girls and young women should aspire to in life. This is the idea that women belong only in the home, and that we should all take our fulfilment simply from cooking meals for our husbands and rearing children. This online misogyny is spread by the likes of Andrew Tate, the late Charlie Kirk and far too many others, and it is aided by harmful algorithms. Perhaps it should not surprise us that a new global survey has found that younger men increasingly believe that a wife should obey her husband, and that men are expected to do too much to support equality. That is not an accident; transnational organisation is making that happen. The European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights has found that $1.18 billion was pumped into European movements dedicated to rolling back women’s rights between 2019 and 2023. That funding came from 275 different actors, including church-run non-governmental organisations and far-right populist parties. Russia was the biggest source of donations, and the United States the second biggest—especially from American Christian nationalists. That American funding is now accompanied by financial help from the US Government, who have set aside $200 million to support MAGA-friendly think-tanks in Europe. Let us be clear: this is designed to spread their ideology, including here in the UK. When we, the decent majority, both in this House and outside it, confront the grassroots arm of the far-right—local groups acting in our communities—we must be clear that they are not just isolated local groupings of people; they are the grassroots arm of a well-organised international effort to reverse women’s rights. Our Government are doing a huge amount to drive forward women’s equality on closing the pay gap on childcare, on tackling violence against women and girls, and so much more. I am proud of that work. But we face a dark threat to the fabric of our society from the organised misogyny that I have described. We must defeat it, and we have much to do.

• 5 Jan 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

  More

  We continue to await a Home Office decision on the future of the Gaza student scholarship scheme. While thinking about that, will the Government commit to honouring the visas of the small number of students and their families who already have funded places to come here but have not yet been permitted to leave Gaza?

• 17 Dec 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

  More

  I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s condemnation of the horrific attacks in Australia. We must be clear that antisemitic terrorism is always an outrage. At Christmas time, many across our country will be thinking of Bethlehem, where the situation remains extremely difficult. The Government’s important scheme for students from Gaza with scholarships to study in the UK expires on 31 December, but a number of scholarship holders and their children have not yet been permitted to leave Gaza. If the scheme closes, these brilliant Palestinians will lose their university places and we will lose their talent. Will the Prime Minister extend the UK’s existing scheme into next year to prevent that from happening?

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

  More

  My hon. Friend makes an important point about something we see too frequently across Scotland: our people being forced to opt in to private healthcare because they cannot get treatment under the SNP’s NHS. That is completely unacceptable. I know that similar waits exist for assessments for autism and for mental health support. There is a crisis across Fife and the Scottish Government are refusing to give NHS Fife the support needed to try to make a difference. The problems do not just exist in our health system; sadly, they also exist in our education system. Our educational outcomes in Scotland worsened this year, with the gap in attainment between the richest and poorest students growing, including in Fife; that happened after Nicola Sturgeon said that eradicating that attainment gap was the priority on which she wanted her record as First Minister to be judged. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow West (Patricia Ferguson) said earlier, Scottish Government failure on the targets they set for themselves is a hallmark of their time in office. The same Nicola Sturgeon proclaims her love of literature at book festivals, yet she was part of successive Governments who have presided over the closure of almost 100 libraries in Scotland. On skills, we saw the UK Government having to step in recently to save a welding skills centre because the SNP Government refused to do so. The SNP Government’s indifference and often opposition to the highly skilled, highly paid jobs that the defence industry provides across Scotland and in constituencies such as mine has meant young workers missing out on the opportunity of a secure, highly paid job. It is also deeply irresponsible at such a dangerous time in the world, with Russian aggression in Europe right on our doorstep. All those cuts stack up, while the bill to the taxpayer for SNP waste becomes ever more eye-watering: nearly £1 billion spent on Barlinnie prison, almost double the original cost; more than £400 million or four times the original estimate spent on two ferries, with one ferry still not in service eight years later; and let us not forget the costly shambles that was the deposit return scheme, flunked by the SNP and the Greens and described by the SNP’s leader in Westminster, the right hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), as a “self-inflicted wound”. The purpose of devolution is supposed to be to take action in Scotland on Scotland’s problems, and to help to make our nation the best it can be. Yet too often that is not the reality under this Scottish Government, as a couple of examples from my own constituency show. At the peak of summer this year, when many businesses in Kinghorn and Burntisland were looking forward to making the most of tourism season, because we are blessed by beautiful beaches, the beaches were closed because sewage spills made the water unsafe to swim. Some of my constituents became physically sick because they had swum among sewage, yet the chief executive of publicly owned Scottish Water said over the summer that the concerns of my constituents “should not be overblown”. This issue has a real social and economic impact on people in my constituency, not to mention a health impact. It is the direct result of the SNP’s failure to invest in our sewerage network and in regular water-quality monitoring. I wrote to the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Climate Action and Energy in August and received a response that began with a comparison between Scottish and English bathing waters. We are familiar with that: if we raise a problem in Scotland, we hear, “Well, it is worse in England.” Even if that were true, that is exactly why this Labour Government are taking tough measures to crack down on polluting water companies. Yet water quality is another devolved issue, creating significant problems that the SNP Scottish Government seem completely disinterested in solving.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Devolution in Scotland · Hansard source

  More

  My hon. Friend rightly mentions the crucial role that further education plays, both in our communities and in our economy. Does he recognise that the reality is that, in my area, Fife colleges are receiving real-terms cuts from the SNP Scottish Government, whereas colleges in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen are receiving increases? Those areas are having their funding increased, whereas Fife is having its funding cut.

• 16 Jul 2025 · Further Education Institutions · Hansard source

  More

  I thank my hon. Friend for being so generous with her time. Fife college in my area does hugely important work, but it has had its budget slashed by 20% over the last three years by the SNP Scottish Government, who are actively moving funding out of my area and into Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Does she agree that such a cut is unacceptable, and that people in my area deserve the same opportunities to learn new skills as those in every other part of Scotland?