‘Working women made Wales’, sexist Reform candidate is told

Martin Shipton

Four Welsh Labour women candidates have issued an eloquent denunciation of the Reform UK candidate who suggested that women should stay at home and look after their children.

Mark Lawrence made the comment during a Senedd election hustings meeting in Pontypridd.

In a joint statement, Rebecca Fogarty, Rebecca Francis-Davies, Patience Bentu and Kemba Hadaway, who are all standing for Welsh Labour in the Gŵyr Abertawe constituency, said: “A Reform candidate at a hustings in Pontypridd Rugby Club on Monday evening was asked about the cost of childcare and told the room that women should stay at home and look after their children.

“When pressed, he clarified, as Reform candidates so often have on this campaign, that it was his opinion.

“To walk into a hustings in 2026, in a country whose economy, health service and public life are held together in very large part by women in every profession, every boardroom, every classroom, every ward and every business in the land, and to propose as a solution to the childcare question that those women should simply go home, requires either a sincere belief that the last 40 years did not happen or a working assumption that nobody in the room is paying attention.

“The women of Wales will recognise the tone. It is the tone of a Reform candidate explaining your own life to you, confidently and at length, without any apparent awareness that you might know more about it than he does.

“Mark Lawrence has never weighed the price of wraparound care against a part-time salary. He has never stood in a pharmacy at half past six with a sick child and a work call he could not miss. He has never calculated, in the way every mother in Wales has calculated, the exact margin between carrying on and collapsing.

“His answer to a structural economic problem is to reverse half a century of women’s participation in it. His definition of working people does not include most of us.

“Their rhetoric is draining and irksome. Reform offers anger, but no real answers, and their candidates are dropping like flies under a moment’s scrutiny.

“Welsh Labour has spent years building the childcare system Mr Lawrence appears unaware of, because Welsh Labour women in government understood what Reform has not yet grasped, which is that care is work, that care has economic value, and that a country which does not invest in it cannot grow.

“We will be at work on Monday morning, as we were on Monday evening while Mr Lawrence was sharing his opinion.

“The women of Wales built this country. We hold it up. We run it. We staff its hospitals and its courts, its schools and its businesses, its boardrooms and its back offices.

“On May 7, the women of Wales will reply to Mr Lawrence in the only language his party appears to understand, which is the language of the ballot box. The answer will be one they will not forget.”