Labour bars feminist groups from conference

[PearlClutch]

Filia and the Labour Women's Declaration have been refused permission to have stands at the Labour party conference.

Although the group had had their application approved in March, this was reviewed and subsequently rescinded. Labour claim on 'purely commercial' grounds.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jul/03/labour-accused-of-silencing-women-in-row-over-sex-based-rights-group

Assuming this is completely innocent and it was a purely commercial decision - which GC feminist entities have been granted a stand?

You have a good point but if so imagine if any minority group was barred due to fear of the same

It’s insane Labour won’t crack down on this to ensure the women’s groups are safe

@MarshaBradyo ITA - please don’t take anything I say as supporting this pathetic spineless and discriminatory decision! The penny just dropped that this is the likely reason. Stringent steps to protect, er, Keir’s news cycle.

Dear old Labour, they do seem to enjoy shooting themselves in the foot, don't they 🤣

Can a democracy survive when the political landscape is so hyper-polarised. Judging by the intentions in this thread, it seems that when people vote for a candidate, they'll be using that vote to not vote for the other candidate for whom they would traditionally have wished to vote?

Perhaps this is a plain, ordinary protest vote but it doesn't feel like that. A protest vote is supposed to be a one-off. However, this level of alienation because a party is actively opposed to who you are (here, a sex class) feels as if we've actually had a reverse on our suffrage.

What on earth is the matter with them? The next general election should be the easiest one for the main Opposition party to win in living memory.

If I lived in a marginal constituency I'd be absolutely torn how to vote. I've never voted Tory in my life and I never will. I used to vote Labour. I have on occasion voted Green and LibDem. I can't currently support any of them. Last GE I voted for the Green candidate, who was openly GC, but has since left the party. I have a good constituency MP who is not GC, not openly, anyway, and we live in a rock solid Labour constituency, so my vote in fact counts for nothing. That doesn't make me feel any better about the state of UK politics at the moment.

God, the Labour Party and its terrible relationship with women.

They abandoned all women shortlists for this selection round, on legal advice that they now weren’t allowed because the current PLP is more than 50% women. What has already started to happen is men being selected all over the place including in safe Labour seats where the outgoing incumbent is female. Kate Green, who herself benefitted from an AWS, endorsed a man for her seat, who was duly selected.

Funny how they know what a woman is when they want to vote against her.

God, the Labour Party and its terrible relationship with women.

Timeline reads. Scarcely and selectively tolerated depending on social class and exigencies: even then, the tolerated ones were not fully acknowledged. Coerced into tolerating through gritted teeth. Sigh of relief as it's now legitimate to move back to scarcely and selectively tolerating women depending on social class and exigencies.

I still haven't fully rethought through my confidence in Labour or my traditional allegiance since seeing the Giles Udy interview with Triggernometry. I need to read the book and other sources to be able to think it through. And I look round at my options and I feel stripped of my suffrage.

Labour And The Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left

"

I'd vote for a mumsnet candidate, lot of smart, articulate bods on here.

I hadn't thought of the safety issue. It's one thing for Labour standing by silently watching women be threatened and bullied out of public life - but to have to acknowledge that it's labour supporters doing so much of the harassment would be ... errr .... embarrassing? outing? truthful?

No chance of that.

If you ever looked at those put onto the future candidates programme (or those who tweeted about it - the LP has been very coy about providing a list) there was a significant cohort of TRA, plus a load of familiar names who have climbed the greasy pole and are close to the leadership office (eg one of the participants in the recent bookshop video). I think it’s a safe bet they are almost completely captured. So is the Jo Cox Women Identifying People in Leadership programme

Ironically a GC candidate who was on the future candidates programme stood in Green’s constituency (local councillor, defender of women’s SSS etc). She got a lot of abuse from party members, not to mention no support from Green. And didn’t get selected.

We really do need a new, equity-based, feminist-friendly party, don't we? I've just listened to that Triggernometry talk. Such a timely reminder of the links the modern left in the form of Corbyn and Milne and Momentum have to that fascist, Stalinist leftism. Yet again a demonstration about how important the HoL was, even 80 years ago, in raising things that the government of the day refused to touch for ideological reasons. I'm learning so much, so late. Thanks for posting the link.

Labour Party and its terrible relationship with women.

This continues to gnaw away at me. If I think of the timeline of women's rights and what it's taken to remove some aspects of structural oppression, at some level, it seemed as if some of the legal justification for structural oppression had been removed.

There was a quickening pace after the substantial timelapses in some of the earlier progress. And still, the Equal Pay Act was 1970 (implemented 1975) and the nuance of 'equal pay for equal work' was only resolved in 2021 and had to go to the European Court.

www.citywomen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/gender-equality-timeline.pdf

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4261093-European-Court-of-Justice-decision-on-Equal-Pay

It still feels as if women's rights were never meant to be interpreted as rights but concessions that would be fought and resisted.

I feel the same about token attempts to achieve a balance of female MPs. Labour just needed what felt like a decent cover story to abandon this, much to my chagrin.

And, now, courtesy of various political and social forces, even the social contract around women's rights to dignity, privacy, and basic safeguarding are being removed. My vote and suffrage are being nullified by what the various political parties are offering me.

As above. I haven't finished thinking this through.

You are not the only one. So embarrassed I was ever a member. They have more of a death wish electorally than the Tories with all the sleaze.
Labour Women's Declaration should cut their losses now and stop allowing themselves to be treated like 2nd Class citizens. A bit like what Julie Burchill said about they are not worth your time. Deny them your vote forever...as they will never see sense on this.

The only way to hurt all the left wing and centre-left parties (Labour, Libdem, SNP, Green) who refuse to acknowledge women's sex-based rights and children's safeguarding and seek to stymie freedom of thought and speech is to vote for the party most likely to beat them i.e. the Conservatives....free speech is so important I can't see me ever voting for any lefties ever again.

'For the Meny, Not the Few'

It's so akin to the dynamics of domestic abuse.

Shhhh. Don't tell anyone about it. The violence is your shame. And it's not violence, just much-needed corrective action. You provoked it anyway. Now look what you made us do. Showing your bruises in public will make us all look bad. You think you've got it rough now, that's nothing to what will happen to you if you carry on like this. Nobody else wants you, who would? [and continues]

And, Pluvia, yes! The discussion of the white timber and the bishops in the House of Lords—that chilling part in Hansard where George Graham concluded a debate for the government by saying, "The Soviets are conducting a very interesting economic experiment and deserve to be allowed to continue without outside interference…Indeed, we'll give them whatever support they need."

I'm really struggling with this. I've lost that comfortable secure sense of being able to firmly identify myself with any political party in the UK. For me it's always been Labour. The Triggernometry podcast linked to above makes me realise the sheer ideological short-sightedness and madness of people like Corbyn. After it had ended the next podcast to come up was this one, from the Telegraph, with Douglas Murray. I had the sound on but no image and I was doing life admin online and missed who it was speaking. As it went on, I found myself agreeing with a fair bit, particularly about the anarchy and the self-flagellation around BLM and Robyn di Angelo. Then I heard who it was talking and all the old 'right-wing bastard' responses rose up in me. Here's the Off Script video with Douglas Murray for anyone interested.

My parents were conservatives with a small C and I was a teenage Marxist as a result. Always followed Labour. Now I hear a bloke talking and think 'He's talking sense' and it turns out to be Douglas Murray. What's next? Peter Hitchens?

Welcome to the politically homeless, Pluvia.

It is very odd. Since all this spiralled out of control, I've had much of my previously comfortable & settled opinion shaken and questioned everything. For the first time in my life I'm not happy considering myself 'of the left'. I can't, anymore. I can't trust anything they do or say. I see people calling those of other parties 'scum' and dehumanising them and wonder if I used to find this as unsettling as I do now (I've never liked it, but I think I saw it as over-excitement before, rather than the precise left equivalent of Katie Hopkins calling refugees cockroaches).

I mean, I obviously don't trust the Tories, either.

Price of freedom is eternal vigilance, I suppose.

Agree with this.

I grew up in one of the most “loony left” councils of the 80s and in reaction was pretty right wing as a teenager. Over the years I moved to the left (combination of going to university, meeting my husband, who’s always been very left wing, and Kinnock/Smith/Blair gradually making Labour more electable and less like what I grew up with).

The effect on me of starting where I did was that I never had that comfortable feeling of being associated with a political party, because my earliest political
memories were of “Tory scum” and of my political affiliation being a shameful thing, nothing any sensible person would admit to. I never found the tribalism of the Labour Party attractive and it was one of the things that stopped me becoming a member (I’d just about got over that and was about to join when Corbyn was elected leader!).

When I finally did join after Starmer became leader I was amazed at how much benefit of the doubt it confers. I hadn’t changed, but suddenly I was assumed by all sorts of people in my wider circle to be a Good Person, a bien pensant liberal.

Ironic then that I am back to being scum, I suppose.

I think that makes a lot of sense. Being able to say I support Labour has, till now, been my personal reassurance that I'm on the right side of history. That's changed.

Labour seem to be hell bent on driving away any votes they can from women. Which means they loose the next election. Like they lost the last one. Because of this stupidity. Even if they do an about turn now on all the gender nonsense I won’t trust them. They are so bad that I find myself wondering if it’s deliberate sabotage. One minute I feel like Labour needs to be wrestled back out of the hands of people who don’t seem to have the first clue about the real life experiences of actual normal everyday working people in this country. The next minute I feel like actually I’ve just reached the life point where I see that all political parties right now, are just liars and charlatans who will say anything at any time they believe will win them the most votes. Where have all the real people gone in this?

On WH now.

Thank you!

Why is the LP persisting with these easily disprovable lies about why they did it? twitter.com/LabWomenDec/status/1544618197743292417?s=20&t=GW_kuiTyRgZiG-uxDz5EWA