There’s something I’ve been busting to tell you for ages – and then I could, but all week, I haven’t (remember that feminist quip from the 1970s – I was going to start a revolution but I couldn’t get a babysitter?)

I love Ros Sitwell. I’ve been trying to grab some time to write about the Women’s Liberation Alliance launch but – well you know, work and everything and when I wasn’t working, or shopping, or cooking, there was the Palestine campaign, the save the NHS campaign, and the battle to get poor old Hastings to notice that this rotten government has just switched off the remains of local democracy in Sussex, and then our creaking transport system did its very best to stop anyone getting to anything in London that weekend (it took us five hours, Hastings to Camden and four hours back!) oh and the garden’s a forest, and neeeeds me! …

So I was very happy when I got to the end of the week and discovered that Ros has written up the WLA launch for the Morning Star (and done so in a much more businesslike way than I would have managed). Thank gods for real journalists! Here it is…

…nevertheless, my thanks to Ian McNee, photographer for the day, who sent me pics of the speakers for the blog I never got around to writing. Here’s a selection…

… and to Mike and Dee from Inside films who filmed the main speeches, so they’ll be on the WLA website soon for all to listen to. This is the WLA website…

… and to FiLiA for the groovy wristbands.

… and here’s me telling you why I think this is the best thing that’s happened in politics for years.

This is what lefty feminism looks like

It was becoming a huge problem – not just for me, but for thousands of women who consider themselves both socialist and feminist. If you look behind the scenes, it’s not hard to see that post-modern EDI (‘equality, diversity, inclusion’) and the oh-so trendy Pride/lgbtqetc manifesto both suit corporate virtue-signallers very well indeed, being a PR game that’s cheaper by far than actually doing serious anti-prejudice, anti-exploitation work.

Meanwhile, gender identity theory flies in the face of everything a traditional lefty feminist, gay libber or anti-racist stands for – but astonishingly, it’s taken the best part of a decade for a lot of lefty activists to notice this. We did, because if you stand against the tide and talk about women’s rights, or sex-based oppression, or what lesbians actually are, or try to explain that actual women’s actual experience demonstrates clearly that ‘sex work is work’ is not a sensible statement… if you do any of that, most of the people who think they’re socialist want to run you out of town.

And then there are all the women who think they’re feminists just because they don’t want men in women’s toilets and women’s sport (very few women do), and all the feminists who think they’re socialists but still think Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic and Israel’s destruction of Palestine is a ‘complicated’ situation it’s best not to talk about.

It’s incredibly hard negotiating all that, when you’re a member of lefty organizations that were willing to drop women’s rights the minute gender ideology came along and made believing in sex a bit awkward.

It’s incredibly hard, building solidarity amongst women for a massively important campaign when you believe feminism needs to be on the left, but also that feminism is for all women.

It’s incredibly hard, building a campaign when even the people who agree with you do so in a whisper, and don’t want to stand up and be counted because urgent issues like women’s rights, surrogacy and even genocide are ‘controversial’, ‘complicated’, ‘contentious’…

It’s incredibly hard, when one lot of people think you’re an extremist and an antisemite because you went all out for a socialist Labour Party, and another lot think you’re a pearl-clutching bigot who hates trans people.

But in spite of all that, something wonderful was being born. One of the results of the onslaught of identity politics in general and the gender-identity cult in particular was that thousands upon thousands of women learned that we were living in a seriously misogynistic, anti-feminist society, and turned once more to real feminist activism.

So, around two years ago, at the invitation of some women from the Communist Party, around thirty of us, including the representatives of 14 national women’s organizations, got together at the Marx Memorial Library to work out what lefty feminism should be, and how we could help to support and organize it. In the conversation over those two years were: Mariam Dhawale, the Secretary of the biggest socialist women’s organization in the world – ever –; Pragna Patel, former President of Southall Black Sisters, and member of Feminist Dissent; women from FiLiA and from ForWomenScotland, and many other groups. We reported back on a range of actions along the way – a favourite of mine being the one by the Trade Union Women’s Network that finally persuaded the WTUC conference that sex work is not work, but a heinous branch of a highly exploitative and violent global industry.

Anyway, two years down the line, here we are, and here is the WLA, a meeting point for real lefty feminist organizations, and here are the magic words. The abolition of class exploitation, sex-based oppression and racism is the precondition for women’s liberation. If you have an idea like that built into root and branch of your activism, then the WLA is for you.

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