Seeking the vote

In the first of a series of extracts from her forthcoming book Women in the Law: Successful Career Management, Elizabeth Cruickshank profiles solicitor-general Harriet Harman

Harriet Harman is the first solicitor to become Solicitor-General, and also the first woman who has attained that position.

She does not know why she went to York University after St Paul's Girls School to read law; it is a question that does not really interest her.

'It's very easy to drift through university with no clear ambition, and going to the College of Law was just the next step.

There was nothing vocational about it, no feeling that I was going to love the law, just the knowledge that I needed to qualify in order to earn a living.

'Most people tell me that they loved university but hated the College of Law, learning all those long lists, but as soon as I was asked to consider the elements of an offence I bonded with the law.

And it was there that I learned to work, because up until then I had done very little work at all, either at school or at university.'

Her choice of articles was as practical as the decision to go to the College of Law, but this time there was no Damascene conversion.

What Ms Harman looked for was a good firm that would provide a good training and look well on her CV, and this was certainly provided by Knapp Fisher.

Ms Harman was never going to be in sympathy with the commercial purpose of a firm that was also involved in obtaining planning permission 'for huge ugly office blocks, and to keep me sane I went along to the Fulham Legal Advice Centre as a volunteer on Tuesday evenings'.

There she spent her time listening to and trying to help 'individual people with individual problems'; it was worthwhile and was a counterbalance to the commercial work that she did for the rest of the week, but Ms Harman felt that there was something lacking.

It was a political, larger scale aspect of working for the disadvantaged that she was unconsciously looking for when she went along to a talk given by the Brent Community Advice Centre.

Up to this point, the avowed role of legal advice centres was to help individuals, not to empower low income groups.

But Brent Community Advice Centre saw its purpose as strengthening the community by helping local people as groups to help themselves through proper access to legal services.

'It was exactly what I believed in and exactly what I wanted to do.' She volunteered to help them on an unpaid basis, and with her articles over, a paid job at the centre appeared; she applied and was accepted.

She felt that she was at the cutting edge of the law aimed at improving conditions for women that was enacted in the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975.

'I worked night and day.

It was my whole life, and' - she pauses because she knows that the next statement goes against much of what she has spent her legal and political career fighting for - 'I had no work/life balance at all.

We were a young and committed team and we didn't mind working hard, but I did meet my future husband there.'

She soon expanded her horizons to the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) where she joined a committed group of young women on the NCCL sub-committee on women's rights, Tess Gill, Anna Coote, Patricia Hewitt and Ann Sedley.

The post of NCCL legal officer became vacant and she was asked to apply.

'In my mind, it was one of the most important jobs that you could do, and I felt that I could never do such an important, bold national job.' Nevertheless she applied, was appointed to the post and began a long partnership with Patricia Hewitt, who was then the NCCL general secretary and is now Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and the Minister for Women.

'Having done a degree I was not interested in, and articles I was not interested in, here I was doing what I believed in.

I felt incredibly lucky.' And she was still only 25.

By now, Ms Harman had both established connections in the legal advice world, and also made somewhat of a name for herself in the aftermath of the sex discrimination legislation by highlighting the need to use that legislation to accelerate change and progress.

She felt strongly that Parliament had passed legislation to enable women to have equal access to the employment market, and yet the place where women were most under-represented was Parliament itself.

The result was that people began to ask her why she did not herself stand for Parliament.

The opportunity came in an odd way when Fulham Labour Party went through the process of selecting their next parliamentary candidate to succeed the retiring incumbent.

At that same time, a group of women in the Fulham Labour Party 'were trying to get a women's group going, and they asked me if I would stand as a potential candidate before the selection committee'.

Ms Harman agreed, 'really out of a sense of pure altruism, to help them out, because I did not think that I would get the nomination and I did not particularly want to become an MP for Fulham'.

However, the women's group was sufficiently well organised, she enjoyed the campaigning and the networking across the Fulham wards, and she came runner-up, only one vote away from becoming the official Fulham Labour Party candidate.

'I had been going through the process, helping them out, but at this point I thought to myself that I could and should be doing this for real.

I realised that because I had been thinking of other people, because the women's group did not think that I would have much of a chance either, and I had just been helping them to get started, and I was so relaxed about it that I had invested the event with none of my personal ambitions or any fear of failure.'

Armed with this new self-knowledge she was accepted as the candidate for Peckham.

In 2002, she celebrated her 20th anniversary as the MP for the constituency.

'If you are on the front bench in opposition you get experience of a lot of things.' In her case it was health, social services, campaigning for the concept of a minimum wage and a Low Pay Commission, which was finally constituted in 1998.

She clearly feels that much still has to be done to make Parliament a more comfortable and possible place for women.

'The hours were absolutely ridiculous.

Since January this year, there has been some improvement, because the House now starts at 11am instead of 2.30pm, but it is still not easy.

I was determined to campaign to change the working hours but it took me a bit longer than I thought it would.'

The compensating factor for her is that the recesses are long, and although MPs will still have work to do, they are more able to tailor the hours they work to their own particular circumstances.

Ms Harman has campaigned long and hard for family-friendly hours and working practices and extended maternity leave and pay.

More generous provisions have just come into force in April 2003, but the women who campaigned for them through Parliament laboured surprisingly under a lack of proper maternity provision for MPs.

'There were very few Labour MPs in London at that time, women MPs were an oddity and a woman MP with a baby was regarded as a freak.'

Despite the Labour Party in opposition being very much a minority party during the period of her children's infancy, and her personal vote being of no crucial importance in the grand scheme of things, the Labour whips 'gave me very little latitude' and were insistent that she turned up to vote at every possible opportunity.

For Ms Harman, a fairness and equality policy extends beyond the position of women in the state.

It covers the position of ethnic minority groups and those who are disadvantaged because of lack of educational and economic opportunities.

Her definition of providing opportunities is very wide, and in the Crown Prosecution Service, which is within her bailiwick, it encompasses staff at all levels.

In the CPS there are many people in the lower grades 'who have acquired expertise and who are studying for legal qualifications in their spare time and with their own money.' Ms Harman is proud that the CPS law scholarship programme can make it easier to increase the diversity of those able to proceed to the higher ranks in the service.

She has also noticed that because the CPS is a civil service department it has the benefit of many of the civil service family-friendly policies, which have resulted in many women and people from ethnic minorities being able to attain senior positions.

'The pool of available talent for the judiciary requires considerable broadening and the consideration of senior CPS staff for judicial office is one way to do this'.

This would result in both an actual broadening of the bench's understanding of the difficulties and concerns of ordinary people and also the general public having a greater faith in the judicial system.

She speaks interestingly about 'judicial confidence'.

This is two-pronged.

It means not only the confidence of the public in its judiciary, but also the confidence of the judiciary itself that it is dealing with individual cases with understanding and firmness.

She says that she is 'very impressed' by women CPS prosecutors who deal with rape victims who say that they do not wish to prosecute.

'Where often a man might accept this, because he perhaps does not understand or does not wish to be seen to harass the victim, female prosecutors often review the evidence and point out that they are going to go ahead with the prosecution anyway because that is the right course of action.'

She has a great belief that the bench should be 'gender neutral', and that if we had a mixed bench that state would be attained.

'The law is still totally unrepresentative of society as a whole.

It does matter that there are not enough women on the bench, because in a society where we are trying to encourage women to reach their full potential, and to regard themselves as equal to men, the judiciary looks old-fashioned and prejudiced'.

In that regard she feels that 'it is a great step forward that we have our first woman president of the Law Society, but look how long that has taken.

After all this time we are still celebrating new examples of the first woman who...

became something'.

All that criticism of various aspects of the law having been voiced, she is still of the opinion that it is a very suitable career for a woman.

'A legal training is never wasted, because it encourages rigorous thought processes, and teaches discipline.

I draw on my legal training all the time in my work as an MP in terms of dealing with court cases, because it is another way of thinking and it is logical.'

A longer version of this interview will appear in Women in the Law: Successful Career Management, edited by Elizabeth Cruickshank and scheduled to be published in October by Law Society Publishing.

The book combines advice for women seeking to develop a career in the law with interviews of women who have achieved success in various areas of practice.

It can be ordered from Marston Book Services, tel: 01235 465 656, at 29.95 plus 3.50 postage and packing