Webchat with Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party and London Mayor candidate, Tuesday 19 April at noon

[BojanaMumsnet]

Hello

We’re pleased to welcome Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, ahead of the London Mayoral elections, on Tuesday 19 April at 12 noon.

The Women’s Equality Party was set up in 2015 “to unite people of all genders, diverse ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, beliefs and experiences in the shared determination to see women enjoy the same rights and opportunities as men so that all can flourish.”

Sophie was elected leader of the Women's Equality Party in July 2015, and in January 2016 was voted to represent the party in the London Mayoral election. She says she is campaigning for “work that works, affordable housing, equal caregiving, equal enterprise, transport that works, affordable housing and an end to violence against women and girls.”

She worked as an international news agency journalist for nearly twenty years and is an ambassador for the National Autistic Society, campaigning for better support and understanding of autism, particularly in women and girls.

Please do join us on Tuesday at 12 noon if you can, or post a question for Sophie here in advance. And, as ever, please do remember our webchat guidelines and do be polite.

The London mayoral election will be held on 5 May and you’ll need to register to vote by 18 April, today. (Keep your eyes peeled for more mayoral candidate webchats in the next few weeks.)

Thanks
MNHQ

Sophie, Assuming that either you or people from your office will post-mortem this later:

I want to like you as a party, I truly do. But you are making it very hard.

Mumsnet are not some loopy fringe group. We are mainstream. We are the women who populate this country. We are women who have education, power, money and influence. We are not fools, and we cannot be bought with cheap tricks and convoluted language. We can see through those things.

We want honesty and genuine debate. We want to be listened to and taken seriously. We will not be spoken down to like truculent children. We want our voices to be heard as Women and if you refuse to acknowledge, in any kind of meaningful way, what a woman actually is, if you refuse to acknowledge our biological reality and the oppression that it means, then we will turn away.

We live in complicated times. We live in confusing times and it is right and understandable that everyone wants to be both popular, and on the side of the light. However, it is entirely possible to support, protect and stand shoulder to shoulder with oppressed groups and fight for their cause alongside them, without diminishing yourself or your biological reality in the process.

51% of the population are oppressed by biology. Women in Cameroon ironing their daughters breasts with heated spades, because of biology. Women in Saudi Arabia banned from driving because of biology. Girls in Pakistan being denied an education becuase of biology. Women being buried up to their necks in Iran and stoned to death for being raped, because of biology. Girls across the African continent having their clitorises gouged out and their labia sliced off because of biology. Women in China being forcibly marched at gunpoint to abortion clinics because of biology. 80,000 women and girls a year raped in the UK because of biology.

This stuff matters

If you want to be successful, to reach people, to win our support and our votes, you would do well to listen. And hear what we are saying. And give the issues some genuine, critical thought.

Great post MrsTodd

One of the things I find absolutely fascinating here is the level of political ineptitude on display.

The webchat was supposed to start at 12 noon. It looks like Sophie didn't even finish reading through the thread until ten past, and we didn't get her first answer until almost twenty past. One of the most basic Politics 101's is "prepare", whether it's you who do it or your staff. With this, I'd have expected someone to read it through (since many of us submitted questions in advance), brief Sophie on what issues were likely to come up, maybe draft a few things beforehand so she could get off to a running start. At the very least, I'd have expected her to scroll through the thread on her phone on the bus/tube/taxi here, so the first ten minutes weren't wasted.

Another Politics 101 is "don't gratuitously insult your audience". Or, "if you are going to insult your audience, at least be specific". If she'd said "Archery is vicious", I'd be offended but the rest of you might not have been, depending. By saying some of us we were vicious but not specifying who, we all get to be offended and hurt and angry!

I could go on.

The reason for all this, will, of course, be that Sophie is "busy", just like last time. Of course she's busy! She's running for London Mayor, ffs. But getting political interviews right should be one of the things she's being busy at. I would expect a more substantive performance from someone angling for a post on a local committee, not someone running for a post which controls a £17 billion budget and affects the lives of nearly 9 million people. If I wanted pointless political flummery with no plan of action, I have a range of existing parties that can serve my needs in this quite adequately already. I am being offered nothing new at all.

Well, I hope that the WEP will campaign for more reading and comprehension tests. Because Sophie Walker seems to have been badly let down as she failed to answer Buffy's very clear and straightforward question.

Sophie, Assuming that either you or people from your office will post-mortem this later:

MrsToddsShortcut I'd have previuosly assumed that, too, but I don't think they will. I think this, sadly, is just like last time, where we are a passive audience to be Told Things, but they aren't really interested in our responses. The thing is, they are missing a trick: political parties spend a lot of time, effort and money on focus groups of people telling them how they respond to political ideas. And here we are, responding for free! And we may be cranky, but we're smart, and we're willing to engage (just as they asked us to), and we're willing to put the hours in, and yet they really don't give a shit. It's a huge waste of opportunity.

Well said Archery.

Out of interest, is there any other forum or way of speaking to such a wide range of politically interested women as Mumsnet? I'd say this place was cream of the crop for a political party aimed at women.

I can see this thread of 155 posts being discussed on MANY feminist groups online. It's not in your favour WEP.

Quite agree Annie. I particularly didn't like "move on to all the other important issues I'd like to discuss with you." [my bold] Just the wrong tone entirely. The trans issue should have been prepared in advance and the statement issued at the time the web chat started if that's how you plan to address it. I'm not sure it's the best idea ever.

What really annoyed me was asking for our question then ignoring the pertinent points in them to link back to the pre-drafted policies. The polices drafted without the input of the members because the lines of communication do not work.

Awful :(

Hear hear MrsTodds.

Excellent work by all of you except Sophie.

I am livid at being called vicious. How dare the WEP dismiss my legitimate concerns as 'vicious'. I am the very person who should (and normally would) be supporting you. I am used to being dismissed by men as hysterical etc when I raise my concerns, I am deeply disturbed by the WEP doing so too. You are supposed to be on my side.

It just seems unbelievable, not to mention supremely arrogant, to ignore the views of so many women. Why on earth would a fledgling political party be so utterly dismissive of the views and questions of so many of their potential voting pool? I actually find it very scary,

Mumsnet Posters: "Here are some of our very valid concerns"
WEP: "Fuck off vicious plebs!"

(WEP scuttle off in search of more malleable 'women')

A blog post may have been better than a webchat for the purposes of telling women stuff. Although that didn't go so well for Nicky Morgan...

What a PR disaster!

This isn't specifically a go at the WEP, but I'm sure politicians on these Q and A sessions could answer more questions. Sophie was here for an hour (approximately) and managed to answer (using the word loosely) 13 questions. I'm sure the pace could be increased!
I agree with Archery wrt to the political ineptitude on display. You'd think there would be some form of preparation for a webchat like this. I can't see much of a future for the party if they carry on ignoring their target demographic, don't reply to e-mails etc - they should be preaching to the converted here!
Does anyone know how they are funded? Is it purely from membership fees?

It didn't go so well for www.mumsnet.com/Talk/guest_posts/2502963-Guest-post-Sandi-Toksvig-The-time-is-right-for-the-Womens-Equality-Party Sandi Toksvig either, Moving...

To be fair, the "trans statement" was fairly obviously prepared...

Well the chances of Sophie Walker being elected London Mayor have just plummeted.

'Vicious' is such an unpleasant and dismissive thing to say. I'm actually quite shocked.

'Vicious' is such an unpleasant and dismissive thing to say. I'm actually quite shocked

At least she didn't say "hysterical"

I was hoping to be called "shrill", myself...

Yes very inept - to be fair though, many web chat visitors to mumsnet aren't nimble enough to manage the questions properly. It is a tricky format because in theory the person is responding in real time, but in practice writing to order like that isn't something many people are used to. (Loathe the man, but the only person who really made a decent fist of it, technically, was Alistair Campbell)

At the same time as being a tricky format, the questions are often more penetrating than the person was obviously expecting. I do think that is a silly mistake from the WEP of all entities, though.

I am not satisfied or inspired by the WEP, but nor am I surprised. There is such a shonky ill-thought out air to this whole thing, it seems to have been set up by a lot of posh, confident "reasonable" "common sense" sort of people who haven't realised how poorly they are intellectually or politically equipped for such a thorny task.

I think the failure of the WEP to grasp what it's saying it's setting out to do is about something that is at the heart of what challenges feminism: on the one hand "oh yes jolly good who doesn't want equality for women, what what" - the sort of unthinking liberalism that sits on the middle class surface of things; and at the same time, underneath, unacknowledged, and poorly understood by many, the absolutely vicious (yes, I mean it) and atrocious undercurrent of hatred of, and violence against, women, that underpins mainstream society.

I mean it. The vice, and the atrocities, that are inflicted upon women every day in normal everyday reality make it impossible to stand up and protect them without going against a lot of grains, and inhibiting a lot of established privilege, and doing hard analytic thinking.

Look at this headgirly, patronising, rambling, shower. Look at them. Are they the people to do this? really?

I was a bit baffled by how very little of the 'trans statement' was actually about the concerns people really have.

I really think that all the WEP would need to say is 'yes, we can see that self-identificaition could be abused to create routes for predatory men to claim 'trans' status and thus gain opportunities to harm women. We fully support the right of both trans women and biological women to be free from abuse and will consult on how these needs can be addressed.'

But they seem unable to do even that. I think it's the sense of not being heard that's the most frustrating.

I was mostly baffled by the utterly bizarre "misunderstanding" of Buffy's question to requiring clarification that "oh no, we don't force men to be on post natal wards. Single women won't have to pull a man off the street in order to be allowed to give birth. Fathers will be allowed free ranging access including even to leave, if necessary." what the hell was that all about?

Again, I find myself astounded at the inability to look at something from all angles and foresee the inevitable consequences.

She came on to a webchat at a forum she's been on before, so should know what she'd be asked. She should have had answers prepared. Instead, she came on with patronising flim-flam and avoided dealing with the matters in hand. And the inevitable consequences of that is that she has lost votes that she could have won.

So not only do I find this party's policies unacceptable to me, I also now regard them as inadequate politicians. I have in the past actually been won over by a thoughtful argument made by a politician of a party I don't support. This is not such an occasion.

Still, silver linings. This webchat will stand, and will serve as a reminder of why not to give this party your vote.

OTheHugeManatee Tue 19-Apr-16 14:26:29

"I really think that all the WEP would need to say is 'yes, we can see that self-identificaition could be abused to create routes for predatory men to claim 'trans' status and thus gain opportunities to harm women. We fully support the right of both trans women and biological women to be free from abuse and will consult on how these needs can be addressed.'"

"But they seem unable to do even that. I think it's the sense of not being heard that's the most frustrating."

Extremely well put. I agree 100%. I am totally baffled by their inability to see it in this way.