Baroness Flather, Conservative local politician and first Asian woman to be a life peer – obituary
Baroness Flather, who has died a week short of her 90th birthday, was Britain’s first Asian woman JP, local councillor, mayor and life peer, and a tireless campaigner for the rights of women and girls, for the South Asian community and for assisted dying.
She was also the driving force behind the campaign to construct the Memorial Gates near Hyde Park Corner to commemorate the five million Commonwealth servicemen who fought for Britain in the two world wars; her father had been a volunteer stretcher-bearer in Mesopotamia.
Shreela Flather was appointed a magistrate in 1971, elected a Conservative councillor in Maidenhead in 1976, and mayor of Windsor & Maidenhead 10 years later. In 1990 she was created a life peer – turning heads as the first member to wear saris in the House of Lords. She briefly resigned the Conservative whip in 1999 over William Hague’s demotion of Lord Cranborne, leader of the House, during negotiations with Tony Blair’s government over Lords reform, and since 2008 had sat as a crossbencher.
She taught English as a second language, finding that many immigrant women were “trapped” in their homes; worked for four years at Broadmoor; helped to run numerous organisations involved in refugee, community, race relations and prison work; served on the Conservative Women’s National Committee; and as a peer set up Asian Link, bringing young Asians to the Lords to meet Cabinet ministers. In 1996 she was named Asian of the Year.
Describing herself a “Hindu atheist”, Baroness Flather was a vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist group and an associate of the National Secular Society. She was patron of Population Matters, and for 21 years chaired Marie Stopes International.
Married to the QC and judge Gary Flather who died in 2017, Shreela Flather was not afraid to speak her mind, particularly about Britain’s subcontinental Muslim communities. During a Lords debate in 2011, she said Bangladeshis and Pakistanis were having large families to claim welfare benefits, whereas families of Indian origin as “are like the Jews of old. They want their children to be educated.” Criticised from both sides of the House, she agreed she had “gone too far”.
The next year, she defended the Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby after he denigrated Muslims while working for the London Mayor Boris Johnson. “I don’t condone swearing,” she said, “but Lynton is right to say it is pointless for the Conservatives to chase Muslim votes. They are all on benefits and all vote Labour.”
In 2015 she was accused of bigotry for calling for a ban on Halal meats and implying that marriages between cousins – which could give rise to birth defects – were uniquely problematic in the Pakistani community.
She was born Shreela Rai in Lahore, British India, on February 13 1934, the daughter of prominent Hindus, Rai Bahadur Aftab Rai, a barrister, and his wife Krishna. Her great-grandfather Sir Ganga Ram – “the Father of Lahore” – had been an engineer and philanthropist; her niece, Kesha Ram, is a member of the Vermont State Senate.
Partition in 1947, when Lahore became part of Pakistan, forced the family to leave their house, factories and land. Shreela and her mother flew to the United States to stay with her student brother, then they regrouped in New Delhi. When her father was appointed independent India’s ambassador to Brazil in 1948, she went with him.
In 1952 she arrived in Britain to read Law at University College London, which would elect her a Fellow in 1992. She was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1962, but went to work for the Inner London Education Authority as an infant teacher. She next taught English as a second language at Altwood comprehensive in Maidenhead – and from 1974 to 1978 at Broadmoor, going on to chair the hospital’s ethics committee and be president of its League of Friends.
Shreela Flather’s firm stand against racism – she was one of the first to describe the police as “institutionally racist” and while mayor took a school to court over uniform rules that discriminated against Asian pupils – led the White Defence League to attack the family home in 1983, throwing a lead pipe through the window that missed her son Paul by inches.
In the 1970s she served on the Race Relations Board, and in the 1980s the Commission for Racial Equality, the Swann Committee on the education of ethnic minority children, the Police Complaints Board and – having got to know the Royal family as the local mayor – the Duke of Edinburgh’s Inquiry into British Housing.
After receiving her peerage in 1990 – finding the House of Lords “welcoming and friendly” despite there being only one other non-white member, Lord Pitt – she chaired the Disasters Emergency Committee and the Alcohol Education and Research Council. She also became vice-chairman of the Refugee Council and Government advisory committees on legal aid and social security, and served on the EC’s Economic & Social Committee and the Bar Council’s committee on equal opportunities.
At various times she was also president of the Family Planning Association, and vice president of the Townswomen’s Guilds, the Carers’ National Association and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy; chairman of the Consortium for Street Children Charities and Star FM; and a director of Thames Valley Enterprise, Hillingdon Hospital Trust, Meridian Broadcasting and Kiss FM. She was a trustee of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and a governor of the Commonwealth Institute.
She became chairman (and later life president) of the Memorial Gates Trust in 1998, and Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated the gates four years later. On Commonwealth Day 2022, she told a gathering of war veterans and diplomats at the gates shortly after Russia’s attack on Ukraine: “It is 20 years since we opened these Memorial Gates, and I am gratified that, over that time, the awareness and appreciation of the huge contributions to our war efforts made by some five million Commonwealth soldiers is so much more widely shared.
“The war raging again on the continent of Europe makes it all the more poignant to recall such sacrifices in the past. We owe this to the memory of all the Africans, West Indians and Indians who fought for us in the two great wars. They knew which was the right side. I hope all Commonwealth countries, all democracies, remember that – and come out on the right side today – and not hide below the parapets.”
Shreela Flather was the author of Stepping Stones (English for adults) in 1973, and Woman – Acceptable Exploitation for Profit (2010). She was appointed Deputy Lieutenant for Berkshire in 1994, and held several honorary doctorates.
She is survived by her two sons.
Shreela Flather, born February 13 1934, died February 6 2024
