Does the Labour party have a problem with women? It’s not just Conservatives – who enjoy comparing their own three female prime ministers with Labour’s failure to get any woman into the top job – who seem to think so. It turns out many on the left think their side of the aisle is riddled with sexism.
Women on the left need to wake up to the fact that not all criticism directed their way is ‘sexism’
As Labour members head to Liverpool for this weekend’s party conference, all eyes are on the battle between Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson and former Leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, for the position of Deputy Leader. Phillipson, initially seen as the frontrunner and assumed to be the Prime Minister’s choice, has been losing support. Asked in a BBC Radio 5 interview if she felt she had been on the ‘receiving end of sexist briefings’ from No. 10, Phillipson replied: ‘Yeah, completely.’
Meanwhile, Powell, backed by Andy Burnham, has also complained about sexism. She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: ‘You’ve got two strong women in an open and transparent contest. And instead of talking about the two strong women, everybody’s talking about this being a sort of proxy for war between two men, which, quite honestly, I find kind of sexist.’
She has a point. Party members, political commentators and voters alike are a great deal more interested in the latent Starmer vs Burnham showdown than they are in the one between two barely distinguishable women battling it out for a position that does not even come with a guaranteed seat at the cabinet table.
But the idea that this is all down to old school, boys’ club sexism beggars belief. Let’s remember, it was Labour grandee Harriet Harman who declared that her party’s next deputy leader ‘definitely needs to be a woman’. Achievements, qualifications, experience, vision, be damned. From the moment the search for Angela Rayner’s replacement was declared, it was decided that the next-in-post had to meet just one criterion: being a woman.
Tellingly, no one was at all surprised by this injunction. It comes after decades in which Labour, cheered on by Harman, tried everything from pink buses to quotas and all-women shortlists, to attract more women. Rarely, if ever, did anyone suggest that women should be judged on their ideas, intellect and political nous – just like men.
Bizarrely, in more recent years, being male did not exclude candidates from all-women shortlists. As Labour higher-ups struggled to define ‘woman’ – the very people their quotas were meant to help – the qualifying factors shifted from having female anatomy to looking good in a smart frock and brunette bob.
Women now sit proudly on Labour’s front bench. But rather than demanding to be taken seriously for their accomplishments, they still fixate upon representation and insist they have a right to leadership positions for no other reason than their identity. If this is really what Labour’s women want, fair enough.
However, as Phillipson and Powell are now realising, if a contest is presented as a battle between two people whose only qualification is that they are women, they can hardly complain when everyone else sees them as proxies for the men who, presumably, represent competing views and ideas. If there is sexism here, it comes from Labour’s commitment to identity politics, not simply a boys’ club in No. 10.
It’s not just Labour’s deputy leadership contest that has caused the spectre of left-wing sexism to raise its ugly head. Erstwhile Labour MP Zarah Sultana has levelled the exact same ‘boys’ club’ accusation against the leadership of Your Party, the vehicle she is attempting to coerce Jeremy Corbyn into creating, seemingly against his will. She has, she complains, been frozen out of internal discussions.
Sultana is another woman who does not know what a woman is. ‘Trans women are women’, she repeats ad infinitum, while criticising those who raise inconvenient biological facts or suggest that, just occasionally, women may need access to single sex spaces. Quite how you discern what is and is not a ‘boys’ club’ when your grasp on human anatomy is so tenuous is anyone’s guess.
There are very obvious reasons why Corbyn’s team might look to squeeze out Sultana. Her premature announcements of the party’s existence and calls for membership payments risked jeopardising the entire Your Party project before it even began. Perhaps Sultana is simply not as good at politics as she thinks she is.
Likewise, there are clearly criticisms to be made of both Phillipson and Powell. Phillipson’s plans to reform academy schools have been roundly lambasted, including by Labour MPs. And Powell, tone deaf on grooming gangs, was dismissed in Starmer’s last cabinet reshuffle. It is far more tempting to cry ‘sexism’ and ‘boys’ club’ rather than own up to errors or personal failings.
Women on the left need to wake up to the fact that not all criticism directed their way is ‘sexism’. Some of it is justified. And some of it is the same kind of treatment men might expect to receive when they mess up. Welcome, ladies, to sexual equality!
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