'Tragic Brexit is degrees of disaster. We face a perilous moment'

"It's just degrees of disaster, Brexit. We face such a perilous moment," says British Labour MP Harriet Harman, about her country's impending departure from the European Union.

"We're turning away from our biggest economic market just at the time when Donald Trump is pulling up the drawbridge against imports into America," she told Kathy Sheridan, presenter of The Women's Podcast.

How Britain arrived at Brexit is "tragic", she said. Former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron only stuck the in/out referendum into his party's election manifesto to quieten noisy, anti-European backbenchers and to stave off potential competition for Tory seats from UKIP, according to Harman, but his gamble backfired. His party had an unexpected landslide victory at the polls, so there was no need for a coalition with the Liberal Democrats who would have blocked the referendum and Cameron was forced to make good on his promise.

The Brexit future is unpredictable, she said, “but none of it seems to be very good predictions”.

Elected as a Labour MP for Peckham in 1982, Harriet Harman had canvassed throughout her campaign while heavily pregnant. At the time, the House of Commons was 97 per cent male and she would go on to gain many firsts for her party,most notably she was the first Labour woman to answer Prime Minister’s Questions.

Her memoir, A Woman's Work, details her life as a politician and her work championing women's rights. It tells how while serving as an MP she had three babies and due to her "phobia of letting the children down" she worked doubly hard to strike a balance between her two lives.

She earned the unfair reputation as an ice-queen because she could not be “one of the lads”. She wasn’t “clubbable” and didn’t socialise often, because she was always rushing home to see her children.

Thatcher’s gaze

The Houses of Parliament were not a welcoming place for women and she recalls ducking out of a corridor while cradling her baby to prevent an approaching Margaret Thatcher from laying eyes on her child, lest her gaze corrupt him in her arms.

She also faced blatant discrimination, not only from across the Commons, but from her own benches. Harman described on the podcast how some of her Labour colleagues were caught by newly installed Commons’ cameras, nodding in agreement when a member of the opposition called her a “stupid cow” after she had delivered a speech.

Despite it all, Harman has never stopped fighting for the improvement of women’s lives. We face a difficult time with “misogyny coming back like a virus from Trump”, she said, but she is confident in the next generation’s ability to “fight against the clock being turned back”.

To listen to the full conversation between Harriet Harman and Kathy Sheridan, go to iTunes, irishtimes.com/podcast, or your preferred podcast app.

A Woman’s Work, by Harriet Harman, is out now.