MARINA WHEELER is a distinguished barrister who has come into prominence recently because of her willingness to help the Labour party put together the forthcoming Green Paper on how women could deal more effectively with workplace harassment. “Women in the workplace too often suffer sexual harassment and assault and they pay a heavy price for speaking out,” she declared. “Knowing this, and to keep their jobs, they suffer in silence,” she added. “Having spent over two decades litigating employment disputes, I am delighted to be working with (La bour’s shadow attorney general) Emily Thorn berry to help formulate solutions – including law reform where necessary – to encourage women to come forward.”
She has spoken to many ethnic minority women during the process of gathering evidence for her report. She has no fixed political allegiances but when the call came from La bour, she worked on the “cab rank” principle traditionally adopted by lawyers and agreed to contribute to what she considered a vital issue. Marina, who is a KC and an acknowledged expert in employment law, is the daughter of the legendary BBC foreign correspondent, Sir Charles Wheeler, and a Sikh mother, Kuldip (known to everyone as “Dip”) Singh. In fact, the couple met and married in Delhi where Charles was stationed as the BBC’s South Asia correspondent and Dip was the glamorous social secretary to the Canadian high com missioner.
It could be Marina has acquired her sense of fair play from her parents, who have now both passed away. Marina has written a moving book about how her mother grew up in Sarghoda in west Punjab but had to flee to India because the place was allocated to the newly created state of Pakistan at Partition in 1947. Marina has told the story of her search for her mother’s house – she found it disappeared long ago – in The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab. The book was published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, and by Hachette in India.
“I have always, unambiguously, loved my Indian family,” Marina has written. Researching the book has given her a new understanding of herself: “Absolutely, I think I am changed. My life is certainly enriched by both the greater understanding of India and Pakistan and that history, but also a greater understanding of my mother and her personal journey – the determination she had to build something else. And also, the way she brought so much to their shared life together with my father. I also feel enriched by being able with my mother to go over some of her life in India for the last two years of her life.” On one of her trips to Paki stan, Marina carried a card on which her mother, who had learnt Urdu as a schoolgirl in Sarghoda, had scribbled a few lines from the poet, Muhammad Iqbal. “I took it but I did not pay it a lot of attention,” admitted Marina. “But then it’s part of her whole experience. Being in Pakistan, I looked at it and then I started to know who Iqbal was and I saw his tomb and it just all came together. That was a very poignant thing this little bit of card that she had scribbled this Urdu on – she couldn’t have written Urdu for decades.” A loose translation was: “Develop the self so that before every decree God will ascertain from you: ‘What is your wish?’ ” Her mother later explained: “I understood it to mean that you shape your own fate. It isn’t just mapped out for you.” Her book is “doing well, it’s still selling, and I get nice messages from people that have read it. I get invitations, some of which I am able to do and some not, to speak about it at different events.
I’m so glad I did it. Lots of people have reached out to me as a result.” Meanwhile, Marina’s elder sister, Shirin, who has been a journalist, has written a book about their father, Charles Wheeler: Witness to the Twentieth Century (Manilla Press). Jon Snow has called him “the greatest broad cast journalist Britain has ever produced”. After India and Germany (where Marina was born in 1964), Charles reported from the US, where he was deeply affected by the civil rights movement and later brought his sensibilities to bear in covering relations between the police and the black community in Britain. Shirin has commented that “Charles was about to marry into a family of Sikhs: monotheistic, and distinct from Hindus and Muslims in their commitment to the equality of men and women and the rejection of the caste system”. She has said her parents “were wonderful people, so we were glad to capture something for posterity”. All this might explain how their daughters inherited their sense of justice almost by a process of osmosis. After reading law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and then doing a Master’s in EU law in Brussels, Marina began practicing as a barrister and took silk in 2016.
Marina has been carefully examining how women can combat workplace harassment, especially in the health and financial services sectors. Labour says it would seek to give those who live with their partners the same rights, including over property, as married women, should their relationship end. In numerous surveys that have been done, Marina found women were eager to speak anonymously about their distressing ordeals. But they were unwilling to bring these to the attention of their employers for fear of being “marginalised or worse”, or because they were not confident any meaningful action would be taken. In her opinion, solutions might include trying to change the culture of the workplace, training employees to understand better the adverse impact of their behavior on others, and toughening legislation as a last resort. She has taken note of the Equality Act, which is often not applied and can also be expensive. Marina’s strength is that she has personally dealt with many harassment cases in the public sector.
The most serious have often been settled at an early stage. She has also been in volved in mediation, a subject she has taught. The problem of harassment is a simple one. Women are afraid to speak out because of fears the aggressors will somehow find a way of taking revenge. Marina has said she considers it a “privilege” to put together a set of proposals that might work in practice. It is worth recalling that in 2012, the Indian Journalists’ Association gave a posthumous lifetime achievement award to Sir Charles Wheel er, which was collected by Shirin and Marina.