.ltShreela Flather - the first Asian woman in the House of Lords

The Times,
6 April 1990

Yesterday Shreela Flather added another triumph to an already impressive list. The large dent in the solid oak table in Shreela Flather's kitchen is a constant reminder of the risks attached to being an Asian in public life. The permanent blemish, caused by an iron pipe being hurled through the window in a racist attack nine years ago, is not, however, something upon which the new Conservative baroness dwells. "I feel very deeply that if you allow these things to affect you, you're letting them win," Mrs Flather says. "My family insisted that I was a bit more careful - because one is vulnerable - but it did not have an emotional effect on me. It just made me more determined."
  
The reaction is typical of the 56-year-old Indian who was yesterday named as Britain's first Asian woman peer. Mrs Flather has already trailblazed her way through a daunting list of boards and committees in the voluntary sector, as well as becoming Britain's first ethnic minority woman councillor and first Asian woman mayor (in the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead), and the first non-white woman magistrate.
  
She came to Britain in the 1950s to read law at University College, London. "My father wanted me to be a lawyer and I decided to come to university at the same time," she explains. Her family was one of the most eminent in India prior to Independence. Her grandfather, the philanthropist and engineer Sir Ganga Ran, gave away millions of pounds he made developing irrigation schemes in the Punjab. Her father, who also qualified as a lawyer, was a successful businessman and diplomat. When he was posted to South America in 1950, Mrs Flather, then 16, accompanied him, and played hostess in the absence of her mother, who remained at home in the manner of orthodox Indian wives. "It widened my horizons at an early age," Mrs Flather says. "I learnt that the world was a big place, but that people were very similar, and that one should enjoy oneself."
  
She met her husband in the Inner Temple when they were both reading for the Bar. Despite listing "coping with multiple sclerosis" among his recreations in Who's Who, Mr Flather works full-time as a Recorder as well as sitting on several tribunals. The illness, diagnosed six years ago, has brought him and his wife closer. "Marriage is always improved by difficulties," he says.
  
Mrs Flather has suffered her share of discrimination over the years - "I think we all do. But if you're Asian and a woman you have to decide whether you're being discriminated against on the basis of being a woman or on the basis of being an Asian, or on the basis of both. Certainly, people patronize you quite regularly, and each time you're in a new situation you have to make a base there. But for every person who causes problems and is not particularly nice, there are another 10 who are quite the opposite."
  
The attack on her home was made when she was a member of the Commission for Racial Equality. The iron bar, which narrowly missed her husband and one of her two sons, was thrown by a National Front group called the White Defence Force, who also daubed racist slogans on the garden wall. Ignoring police advice, the family decided to inform the Press.
  
"We felt that if we didn't, people wouldn't realize the kind of things that are happening to ordinary people who perhaps don't have access to the Press in the same way as we do," Mrs Flather says.
  
She regards the incident as a positive experience. Apart from the "wonderful public response - a tremendously warming experience", the police went to such lengths to trace the villains that "they completely disappeared. So more good came of it than anything else."
  
She does not accept that the antiracist bodies are responsible for the apparent increase in racism. "Of course, the organizations raise consciousness about it, but I think that if you want to blame somebody you might choose Enoch Powell, who made it respectable to display racism for the first time. Before that, people in this country felt it was not polite to display racism. And once you allow it to be socially acceptable, you have to do something to counteract it.
  
"I think any politician in a position of influence has a responsibility not to make other people's lives more uncomfortable. When he made his 'rivers of blood' speech I was running a local Asian ladies' club, and the women were being abused and spat at when they went shopping, which had never happened before. And for that, he can't be forgiven by me."
  
Although she was called to the Bar in 1962, Mrs Flather has never practised as a lawyer. Instead, she became an infant teacher, and then a teacher of English as a second language at a comprehensive school near her home in Maidenhead, "so that I could share the school holidays with Paul and Marcus".
  
Today Paul is a journalist, currently reading for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford, and Marcus is a doctor. She is philosophical about the fact that Paul is a committed socialist. "Everyone is entitled to their own political views, and I don't think they should spoil relationships," she says. "We discuss politics a lot, but we both have carefully thought-out views, and we don't try to convert one another."
  
She is encouraged by the increased awareness of racial issues and problems, and the search for possible solutions. "In the early days, it wasn't quite the thing to talk about it because it might go away on its own, but now people talk about it in places and areas where it wasn't discussed before."
  
She intends to be a working peer - "I shall take my lead from the people in the House" - and to raise the subject of racism "when it's necessary. I think my government would expect it of me."

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