A British politician has made history by bringing her baby son to a parliament debate.
Jo Swinson, a liberal democrat, attended a Commons debate yesterday with her son, Gabriel, because she didn’t want to wake him up before going back to work.
Swinson, the first woman to bring a baby into parliament in the UK, said that she wanted to “modernise” h0w politicians work in Britain.
Speaking on BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, she said:
“The convention is that you come back at the end of the debate to listen to the final speeches. By that time I’d had to leave the chamber, I’d had to go and feed my baby and he had then fallen asleep on me in the baby carrier.
“The options were: wake him up and hand him to somebody else for 20 minutes, or go in and sit down, do no harm, and he stayed asleep for most of it.”
Another piece of progress today in @UKParliament – thank you to @alisonthewliss @HarrietHarman for the encouragement! pic.twitter.com/NBINZqVtEV
— Jo Swinson (@joswinson) September 13, 2018
Swinson, who welcomed her baby boy at the beginning of July, said that it should be easier for working parents to actually to their jobs when they have young children.
She went on:
“It really needs to be possible for parents to be able to combine their responsibilities for their children with their working lives, and all too often that is made too difficult.
“That won’t always mean taking your child to work, but in the case of very small babies, for people who are working at that stage then that can be just one of the ways in which workplaces can modernise and there could be flexibility in order to make it possible.”
