The (literal) end of the Women's Equality Party

[WomanDaresTo]

Proposing to close themselves: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/26/womens-equality-party-to-vote-on-closing

Shame it didn't work out - i was excited when they launched.

Like CK's family would give a shit what the WEP thought anyway.

It was a vanity project as PP's have said. Otherwise they would have been standing with, and speaking for, the millions of women who feel threatened and violated by self ID. The biggest issue for women this century.

I was a founder member and volunteer. They were very unprofessional and lost me around the time of the Brexit referendum.

Bloody hell. With all the thousands of women on Twitter, they couldn't even drum up one in support.

That must make them think, surely.

you reckon these swivel eyed loons can think? Blimey.

She will blame it on far right bigots and complain about all the ‘hate’ they got. There will be zero self awareness.

yep. worth a look on X. WEP announcement has 411 thousand views. 242 likes. Comments are, er, robust.

I thought they'd died a long, long time ago.

The best thing about this is that, assuming WEP eff off, there will now be space for a left-leaning genuinely feminist party - a home for all the Labour-supporting or left-wing feminists who wouldn't feel comfortable in PoW (but would be happy to cooperate on core women's issues).

They really became defunct as a party in 2017, it's just taken this long to finally admit it.

Edit: okay, 2015, having read Empress' post!

Is anybody on Tx able to copy any of the comments? No worries if not.

Screenshots. Pressed post too soon, I’ll add them below.

Screenshots!

Good.
Probably only kept going this long with Sandi's money.
Not being able to define a woman was always going to come home to roost.
Will Sandi and the others reflect on this? Sadly, I doubt it.

It is striking how limp and unjournalistic that Observer article is. Basically, it just seems to allow the WEP to report its own narrative of why the group failed. That narrative focuses entirely on the environment in which it operates (rather than on any problems with the WEP) and includes some bizarre uninterrogated claims like the one about the "normalisation of far-right narratives". Perhaps that does mean something (potentially -- not sure what that meaning would be), but without any explanation it just sounds like social media footstamping, rather than analysis.
There is a suggestion throughout the article that the political landscape has changed so much in ten years that a brilliant, innovative and thriving party was wrong-footed out of existence. That just doesn't make any sense at all.

I think the article is suggestive of how corroded people's cognitive capacities become when they are required not to see what they can plainly see.

Perfectly put (although I think it's a Guardian article).

Ah, ok. It certainly reads more like a Guardian article than an Observer one! I was confused bcs of its timing on the website, because they do sometimes put observer articles up on a Saturday.
Roll on the sale of the Observer and (hopefully) the opportunity for it to have it's own blimmin website.

I don't know much about the WEP except that I looked them up once and saw they were TWAW and would be neither use nor ornament in this crisis for women's rights. When I read the Observer article I suspected that "normalisation of far-right narratives" might translate to "a lot of other people realised those nasty TERFs were right after all". And reading about Heather Brunskell-Evans - I didn't know about that, thank you for the links! - I am sure of it.

Any organisation that works so hard to avoid confronting the very obvious elephant in the room is wasting its energy in denial and will be unable to make constructive progress.

Well they were radical in that they thought men could magically become women. Stupid but radical.

Dicking pandering handmaidens. May they fucking ROT IN HELL!

I never thought they had potential. Their policies were only the kind of things nice privileged ladies would think of - allowing women into the Garrick Club, etc. They were posh birds playing at being a political party and their structure proved that.

Skeet's money which gave him substantial influence.

Some suggest policy was heavily influenced by the fact that its only remaining major financial donor, Jon Skeet, is the outspoken parent of a trans child. (Reid dismisses this as “nonsense”.)

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4690386-janice-turner-on-the-fall-of-the-wep

Quite. There's more sense, and clear information, in your post (and in many others here) than in the Observer piece.

A women’s party that campaigns to give men women’s rights as well as their own…. yeah, right …..

I realised they were all talk early on when two volunteers turned up at my doorstep during an election. I asked what their candidate MP was going to do about [enormous local issue that everyone was cross about] and got blank faces. They'd come up from London on the train and hadn't even bothered to google where they were canvassing. Perhaps they thought it was missionary work to the regions!

Same here. I had high hopes that they might actually achieve something. But I left the party over the gender self-id issue.

I resigned from Humanists UK at about the same time, for the same reason. I'd been a member for more than 30 years.