…it is a salute to Valerie Coultas and all the other women and men who have hung in there for Your Party, and still hope to build socialism there. Sexism has always been there – where has the socialist understanding of it gone?

1910

When women thrown into prison for marching for women’s rights began a hunger strike in protest at their treatment, the King wrote to the government, asking why they weren’t force-feeding them. The government obediently started engaging in this barbaric practice.

When women marched on Westminster, the London police hired thugs from local gangs to help beat them off, but it was regular police officers who spent the day grabbing women by the breasts, knocking them to the floor and shouting foul, sexual insults at them.

A woman in a wheelchair was assaulted, her chair shoved down an alley, the valves were removed from the wheels and she was abandoned.

There were two fatalities from the day – Henria Williams died from her injuries, Cecelia Haig suffered illness and breakdown after being violently and indecently assaulted, never recovered her health and died the next year.

When the Daily Mirror published this front page, the government tried to have the edition withdrawn from sale. Winston Churchill later rejected calls for a public inquiry into police behaviour.

Why am I writing about this now? Because the women of 1910 saw in their treatment the escalation of the violence they had long endured in private. As Rachel Holmes puts it, “the epidemic of male sexual violence common in homes, whatever the class of their inhabitants, now exploded onto the streets.”

That urge to violence against females is embedded in our stratified, property-oriented society. It is why, as well as battling for the right to vote, women spent decades battling for the right to protected spaces and services, such as dedicated toilets and changing rooms, for women and girls.

The politicians who oversaw these attacks on women then set to and took us into a world war.

This is what would-be warriors do. Violence in the home, violence in the street, then violence on the international stage. Andrea Dworkin wrote long ago of the extreme and extremely dark forms of violence and pornography Israeli men indulged in as the long genocide of the Palestinian people got into its stride in the decades following the Nakba. It’s not even a secret. Our current politicians in the UK may think they’ve successfully limited the fallout from the Epstein files to a story about Peter Mandelson but it was never a secret – as Jimmy Savile said, “I hide in plain sight”, and we never believed Mandelson (or Savile, or any other individual) was unique.

Ordinary people have long seen our Westminster politicians as a danger to all of us, but in a more mundane, run-of-the-mill way (because women are so used to it) a danger to women and children. Ordinary people had a very good idea what the Epstein files were going to reveal, and looking back at the run up to World War One, it’s no surprise to see that our politicians have followed Trump straight from the Epstein exposure into what is quite likely to become the last and final war.

It’s about sex – it’s about males

It’s not about left and right, it’s not even primarily about rich and poor, it’s about a culture that allows the sexually violent male to rise to the top, and see himself as superior and therefore endlessly forgivable, and untouchable.

But it’s not just about the Trumps and Mandelsons, the same wave of violence and hatred towards strong women, a violence that Churchill protected and rode upon, can be seen happening in our politics now, right across the board.

The generation currently reaching adulthood have every reason to be angry, frustrated and vengeful. It’s all too easy for all that anger to ride on society’s tendency to focus anger on women – especially older women – and this is the latest tide the cultish left, and other ambitious political groups, have attempted to ride on.

The Green Party, who are supposedly the good guys in all this, have to date spent £450k in legal battles with their own women, trying to stop them talking about women’s sex-based rights, and in the nascent Your Party, this just happened…

Make no mistake, women’s determined campaign to protect our legal rights in recent years has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘transphobia’, its our desperate defence of the safeguards that women and girls need, and we need them desperately when the war-hunger is rife in our society.

And the other side of the coin — the ferocious attacks on women’s place in politics and society such as the Lambeth YP members’ attack on Valerie Coultas, have nothing whatsoever to do with any regard for the welfare of trans people. The left use the predicament of young trans people as a stick to beat feminists with, and the right use youthful anger to ramp up the wider hatred and violence that is required to persuade a country to go to war.

 I regularly have people telling me there is no patriarchy, and people try to prove it by telling me there are plenty of women upholding the gender ideology that calls feminists transphobes. If they would only stop and think, they would realise the fact that there’s no shortage of women in Your Party advocating for the ‘trans liberation agenda’ (the one that demands the return of males into female sport and facilities, and the sterilization of young women) is actually proof that ours is a patriarchal society.

Have they never heard of Uncle Toms? Have they not thought about the fact that Uncle Tom was the creation of a FEMALE author?

The slave is very likely to be openly complicit in his or her oppression, even to support it passionately. Their minds are no more free to roam than their bodies. That’s what oppression does.

Go to the party

But not everyone is compliant. The real Your Party has only just started. The election of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) just over a week ago was the point where Your Party could finally start officially doing politics. The selection rules favoured women to the point that we’ve got a large majority of women on the committee (a result many members of the ‘Grassroots Left’ gang immediately started complaining about).

Soon, the CEC will send a call-out to all members to come along and form branches. That will include emails to many people who’ve never been to, or have given up going to, those ‘proto branches’ those ad hoc organisations that are acting as though they own the party and in many towns are largely made up of members of other parties, prominently the SWP.

When that attack on Valerie Coultas kicked off in Lambeth, I saw way too many commentators saying ‘that’s it, I’m leaving YP’. I say to them oh please, you’ve come this far. What Valerie and Stuart resigned from is one of those unofficial, proto-branches. What really would finally kill YP would be having no sane members left to come along and start the real branches when the call comes, as it will very, very soon. And if we can’t save YP, the only so-called ‘progressive’ party the UK will have left to vote for will be The Green Party, which is already deep in a war with its own women and so, following the pattern I describe above, it is more than likely to go to war on everyone everywhere, once it gets its hands on power.

The bleedin’ obvious

Socialists are internationalists, and so they are anti-war and anti-imperialism. Socialists are materialists, so make a realistic analysis of the oppressions of sex, race and class and seek to right those wrongs in all their politics, so they don’t harass women over policy disagreements. Let’s do socialism.

Socialists understand that not everyone’s a socialist. Not everyone has studied political history, but pretty much everyone can see that we’ve got problems, and will come together to challenge them. Socialists work in the community and get along with people. Let’s do socialism.

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