Women's Place UK: Filia event: the elephant ignored yet again

[pattihews]

I attended the WPUK event at Filia yesterday and came out feeling disturbed by what struck me as a very heavy-handed event designed to avoid talking about the elephant in the room. For what it's worth, I've voted Labour at every election since 1979. I imagine 90% of the audience had a similar track record.

Put briefly, we had 90 minutes of:
Feminism=socialism and if you're not a socialist you can't be a feminist and if you're not a feminist-socialist you're the enemy.
The right is sly and will lie and try to draw you in (illustrated with a video from the US about the right-wing origins of many apparently liberal groups, including the Heritage Foundation) and you must resist any temptation to get involved with them.
The way to do it is to join unions and change them from within, hold socialist women's salons to recruit and inform and get involved at grass roots level.

There were also regular warnings about racism, which seemed odd and extraneous because WPUK is all about gender ideology.

And then the penny dropped. Though her name was never mentioned, I suddenly realised that the whole tightly-managed event (no talking unless you're holding the microphone) was a warning not to fraternise with Posie Parker.

At lunchtime I encountered several other women, all of them furious about what they'd sat through. Furious in particular because of course the elephant in the room was the fact that the Labour Party, to which WPUK is loyal to death, is the biggest threat to women's rights in this country. And they'd used PP to deflect from that.

I'm not a Posie fan. Posie's clear she's not a feminist. She says things that make me cringe. I have doubts about her motivation and we wouldn't be friends in RL. But I went to one of her events when she came to my area and she can mobilise women the left will never reach and for that she's important and valuable. When I go canvassing for Labour I meet working-class as well as middle-class women who vote or have voted Conservative. They include aspirational minority ethnic women. They have their reasons, and some of them I can understand.

A woman I've never seen before and may not see again joined my table for lunch and explained why so many women were feeling really disturbed. These are TRA tactics.
The huge issue that concerns so many of us (should we vote Labour?) was avoided and we were instead lectured on how to be good socialists and feminists.

Was anyone else there? What did you make of it?

@TheClogLady

I haven't said at any point the women are allying with Extreme Right men. Have I? I have said we should be aware that they are sniffing around. That's literally all I've said. My focus has been on them.

I was enjoying the hilarity of you flip flopping from your gotcha post about how awful we are for not even wanting to talk about the far right scary zombie right wing apocalypse to "we can ignore them!"

You first Jean, you ignore them for more than one post. Not sure you can manage even that!

A man firebombed a migrant detention centre and then, it seems, killed himself.

Police are treating it as terrorism - could have been absolutely anybody - we have no info. Zero info! On who it was, their political leanings. And it has absolutely nothing to do with feminism, or Mumsnet, or anything.

Why do we go from zero to 'nazi' every bloody time? It doesn't advance anything to look for the most extreme possible interpretation of every event. We saw that happen when two people from some random group nobody had actually heard of before turned up and filmed a SfW event and this somehow got spun as KJK 'supporting' the far right, and anyone who refrained from condemning her also getting smeared by association.

It's ludicrous hyperbole at best.

Well, Tins that told you, eh? 🥴

Best leave the team selection to the Head Girls in future 🤐

What direct challenges have you or anyone affiliated/supporting WPUK made to the far right men you fear will dupe us dim women? Any open letters? Any tweets telling those men to fuck off? Anything at all?

All I've seen is pressure on women to capitulate to imagined support for those men & their dodgy orgs & apologise for it. And been absolutely trashed when they refuse to play the 'when did you stop beating your wife' game.

Either they're such a real threat to the women's movement that there's significant activity going on 'behind the scenes' to address this very serious threat. It it's just distracting bollocks.

Which is it?

@TinselAngel

Who died and made you head of Sports Day putting women into teams?

You wouldn't know her. She went to a different school.

@VestofAbsurdity

You're just being offensive "superior backsides". I'm here in good faith chatting to you all. I'm not up my own arse or I wouldn't be engaging would I? Also - stop making out that non-academic women are less intelligent. I'm not an academic. I'm also not stupid. This snob v pleb narrative is a load of rubbish. I don't recognise who you're talking about. If I'm the snob in the scenario how so? What have I don't that's snobby?

Didn't say I'm wrong though....

I would have added Ali Ceesay to my suspected outer circle list, due to the way she performs on social media, until she actually turned up on a panel.

Haha, reminds me of when that repeal the GRA site appeared from nowhere and the 'head girls' were horrified that something had been done without permission. It was very funny, and very telling.

@GrumpyMenopausalWombWielder

You mean like this sort of thing? Or the fact I addressed him all the time when he was on Twitter? jeanhatchet.blogspot.com/2017/05/dear-tommy-robinson-open-letter.html

Yes, that did set off an interesting reaction!

Haha, reminds me of when that repeal the GRA site appeared from nowhere and the 'head girls' were horrified that something had been done without permission. It was very funny, and very telling.
Yes I remember who led that as well, she was on the panel in Cardiff funnily enough.

No, that's from 2017.

This very real threat has emerged coincidentally when the SFW event happened. There's been a lot of time & effort expended on curating the significance of this very real threat. I'm looking for something, anything that addresses that very real & serious threat in the past few weeks.

@GrumpyMenopausalWombWielder oh yeah and at the time there were not so subtle threats to find me and deal with me

Hello, long term lurker, first time poster.

You're using lots of words like 'head girls' and it's not clear who you mean.

Can you give me a list of who is approved by Mumsnet and who is not?

I don't doubt that. At all.

I'm asking what's been done & is being done now about this very real & serious threat to the women's movement for the far right, that justifies what's gone on since that SFW event.

@GrumpyMenopausalWombWielder

So women who say working with the extreme right is a bad idea should be writing them open letters? We are to blame for not writing letters to men lots of women here are pretending don't exist?

You know what. You're right. I'll get on with one now. Yes I mean it. It's not hard to do.

Can you give me a list of who is approved by Mumsnet and who is not?
The part your referring to was quoted by me but not said by me.

Mumsnet is not a monolith but if you scroll up, Tinsel named names less than an hour ago.

What's offensive @Jeanhatchet is being lectured regarding the extreme far right and including a collage of pictures of women before launching into that lecture, you pointing over there at the man who bombed the immigrant detention centre and Kanye fucking West.

Are any of the women used in the video collage in any way associated with those men?

Are either of those men associated with HoO or the Heritage Foundation?

If not, what was the point of bringing them up?

It's not me making out non academic women are inferior that's WPUK. If you don't recognise what I am talking about then you are either being disingenuous or you have taken little to no notice to what founders, members and supporters of WPUK have been saying.

@GrumpyMenopausalWombWielder

"What's gone on" is that I said there were some "dodgy men" we ought to look at. Not unusual for me. Then Twitter lost its mind for two weeks. But I'll get in with the letter.

"Dear Dodgy Men..."

I'll let you have a draft if you want to chip in?

Mumsnet is not a monolith but if you scroll up, Tinsel named names less than an hour ago.
Although I didn't say they were head girls or weren't approved, I just said that their behaviour on social media leads me to believe they're part of a WPUK outer circle.

Sounds good.

Correction noted and appreciated!

It's your argument. The threat is so real and serious that it's been worth absolutely trashing good women, and their work, for weeks.
So I'm merely asking what those who fear it the most are doing & have done in the past few weeks when the threat seemingly escalated to defcon 1 to tackle it.