New Labour Pays Lip Service to its Women

07 Jun 2006
Evening Standard

As a young Leftwing activist, in my obligatory dungarees, the cause of more female representation in politics was dear to my heart. So it brought me up with a start to read that "sources close to Gordon Brown" had crushed the idea of a woman deputy leader on the basis that none of the available candidates was good enough.

As the one woman who had actually put herself forward as a potential candidate was Harriet Harman (and she is a longstanding Gordon Brown loyalist), this seemed a particularly brutal snub to women in general and Harriet in particular. Whatever happened to the feminist cause in politics? There has been a steady tarnishing of the once-bright hopes of the so-called "Blair babes", the record number of women Labour MPs elected in 1997. But while it is widely assumed that the push to have more women MPs was part of the New Labour project, in fact it never was. Rather, it was a legacy of the 1980s and the Left's ascendancy in the party.

Every year we took the issue to Labour Party conference and in debate gradually won over delegates and trade unions. But the leadership held out. However, on the eve of the 1993 conference, the new leader, John Smith, was engaged in frantic last-minute manoeuvres to get the abolition of the block vote through. And a key union, ASTMS, traded its support in return for significant concessions, including all-women shortlists. New Labour inherited the policies and the mechanism that made the big increase in Labour women MPs possible, the fruit of this classic "smoke-filled room" deal. So despite the crowd of new women MPs in 1997, feminism was never intrinsic to New Labour.

The women in its inner circle have tended to be either glorified secretaries, cheer leaders or just for show. Those weaknesses are reflected in Brown's position on a female deputy leader. Indeed the Cameron Conservatives' view is similar, despite their so-called "A list": they have seized on the idea of females as decoration. Presumably, they believe that the new women MPs they bring will distract the public from the fact that Cameron and his friends represent the most naked bid for power by a bunch of Old Etonians since the era of Alec Douglas-Home. It is already clear that all the candidates jostling to succeed John Prescott - in a suspiciously orchestrated manner - will have virtually identical politics. And we now know that anyone can apply so long as they are a man. Maybe its time some of us dusted off those dungarees.

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