This recent article in The Times illustrates some of the issues female MPs have within the Labour Party prior to Margaret Hodge's battle for reselection.In recent weeks five Labour MPs have been threatened with deselection by their local parties, and four of them happen to be women. Though the party has called allegations of sexism “baseless”, the shadow minister Tracy Brabin believes “an element of misogyny” is at play. One of those facing the chop, the South Shields MP Emma Lewell-Buck, is threatening to take legal action against the party over the misogynistic bullying she has allegedly endured. Another Labour MP, Helen Jones, has said that given the “culture of contempt” for women, the targeting of Lewell-Buck and others comes as no surprise. “The truth my party ignores is that women Labour MPs, however well respected they are, often face bullying and harassment in their constituency parties,” she wrote last week. Since the earliest days of the Corbyn era, comrades on the hard left have been spewing misogynistic bile online, taking down any uppity women who threaten the coming revolution. During the 2015 leadership contest Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper were Twitter-spammed with “witch” and “c***”. Moderate female Labour MPs have become accustomed to a daily bombardment of rape and death threats from their socialist brothers.To be fair to Corbyn, this issue long predates his leadership. The left has always had a woman problem, the sexism taking different forms according to the part of the movement it lurks in. There was the old-fashioned sexism of the old left: the swaggering, bullying trade union dinosaurs who felt that decisions should be made by men in smoke-filled rooms while women served the beer and made the sandwiches. Though things have come a long way since the days when Barbara Castle had to overcome the unions’ resistance to equal pay, it is still remarkable that the two biggest unions — Unite and Unison — have never been led by a woman.On the hard left you find the out-and-out misogyny displayed by those keyboard Corbynistas: resentful, hateful, violent. It was displayed, too, in the fantasising about Margaret Thatcher’s death. The vitriol in all that “burn the witch” stuff could only be partly explained by the Lady’s legacy. It was her sex which really made their hackles rise. The hard left lionises men such as Julian Assange, who spent seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in the face of sex assault allegations in Sweden; Ken Livingstone, who as London mayor welcomed Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim cleric who was accused of supporting wife-beating and the stoning of gays; Red Ken’s old mate Gerry Healy, leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party, who was accused by 26 women of “gross sexual abuse” (allegations dismissed by Livingstone as an MI5 conspiracy). How could so-called progressives have such blind spots? Because set against the great class struggle, sexism and misogyny are dismissed as bourgeois concerns. If all that matters is the revolution, then the (invariably male) heroes of that revolution must be allowed their handmaidens, their “peccadillos” and God-awful attitudes.Full article is behind a paywall, sorry. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-is-the-party-with-a-woman-problem-6dpkvfxm7
Lucille Grant ● 2566d