Labour would have the Suffragettes spinning in their graves

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This will be the first ‘post-hope’ UK General Election. Once there was Blair and then there was Brexit – both wildly different, but people did actually get excited and hopeful about them. I don’t believe that anyone really believes that Things Can Only Get Better this time around.

It’s partly down to the quality of the candidates; as an audience member said to Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak last week during the BBC’s Prime Ministerial Debate: ‘Are you two really the best we’ve got?’ Even Peter Cunnah of D:Ream – one of the composers of what became the Blairite anthem – told the i paper last week:

‘At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which team you vote for. You’re still going to get the same outcome. My worst fear is that all of these people are signing up to this globalist agenda, and want a one-world government.’

‘One world’ was once a term of hope. Now it describes a faceless conglomerate of puppet masters, treating voters as things to be corralled and counted rather than courted and appreciated.

The ultimate proof that we are a post-hope nation is that the old don’t envy the young any more. On the contrary, we oldies feel sorry for the youth. Fewer than half of 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the last election compared with three-quarters of those 65 and over. An international study last year claimed that 42 per cent of people aged 18 to 35 would support some kind of undemocratic government, against 20 per cent of older people. So much for the notion that one becomes more reactionary as one gets older. It must come from disillusion with the ‘grown-ups’ who have let things get to this state – and that goes more for the smug ‘centrists’ than it does the populists.

Most people, no matter how they will vote, believe that things will only get worse. I’d say this is especially true of women, the 51 per cent of this country’s population who are now treated as though they are invisible, as the establishment falls over itself to trample their rights in favour of a tiny minority of sexually disturbed men.

In the light of this, it’s poignant to think how the Suffragettes struggled and suffered so that women could vote. The last actual Suffragette has a blue plaque two streets from me (Victoria Lidiard, who died in 1992, also campaigned for animal welfare and the ordination of women throughout her life).

Even in 2024, we are still arguing over who the Suffragettes were, whether they were bad or good – and who ‘owns’ them. We still face the same enemies when attempting to hold on to the rights the struggle of the Suffragettes helped to win for us.

At a meeting of Let Women Speak in Brighton last month, organised by Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker), the mainly male trans-activist counter-protesters made so much noise that they all but drowned out the voices of women talking. They were not as physically menacing as the men who attacked the Suffragettes, however. Working-class men are no longer the enemies of women’s rights – that privilege has moved to the student class, or the Black Pampers, so called due to their black balaclavas, their youth and their emotional incontinence. Their loudest Brighton voice, sounding barely pubescent, bore a strong resemblance to that of Rik Mayall in The Young Ones, an impression strengthened by his chosen chant of ‘POSIE PARKER IS A FASCIST!’.

I’d bet that most of these trans activists have never had sex. One imagines a future Kevin the Teenager scenario when the morning after finally getting lucky, they would be reborn as well-balanced supporters of women’s rights. But for now, they are livid. They are incels who have mistaken themselves for revolutionaries. They are angry because they can’t have women – and because they can’t be women. It’s a strange and toxic mix.

One thing that’s new is that these men now claim to be feminists. ‘YOU’RE NOT FEMINISTS!’, the trans activists chanted at us. The anti-female-suffrage men of old wouldn’t have claimed to be Suffragettes, although Mrs Pankhurst would still have recognised the type. ‘When men come to disrupt women’s meetings, they come in gangs, with noisy instruments’, she wrote.

The real-world stand-off at the Let Women Speak rally was followed by an online scuffle between social-media posters, some of whom claimed that Mrs P would have been ‘trans inclusive’ in her feminism and those who believe that she would have been a TERF. It’s always hard to take seriously the opinions of the gender-woo-woo brigade, as once you declare that a penis can be female, your other opinions can’t really be trusted. Suffice to say that the statue of Mrs Pankhurst, which has stood in Manchester since 2018, has recently been the repository of unwanted offerings from those who believe that the feelings of men trump the rights of women in everything from toilets to trophies. In 2022, the statue was given an apron fashioned out of the trans flag. It also had a noose in the same colours put around its neck by a man in a balaclava.

Far from being a supporter of trans activists, Mrs Pankhurst would immediately identify them as exactly the kind of men who led the physical attacks on her kind. They wouldn’t puzzle her at all. But I believe that she would be truly dumbstruck and absolutely repelled by the women who choose to put themselves on the side of militant transvestites and against their fellow women. You can call them Vichy Feminists, as Graham Linehan does, or you can call them ‘Transmaids’, as I do. As I wrote on spiked in 2021, Transmaids are women ‘who act in a servile manner towards men, like a handmaid, but only if that man wears a frock’. They practise ‘a sort of Frankenfeminism, which, whatever their intention, ends up gratifying men and degrading women’.

And here we are at the General Election, with the party that has always claimed to be a defender of women’s rights already planning to whittle them away. Starmer wants to make it easier for men to legally identify as women, thus letting them force their way into women’s spaces. This is happening with the assistance of female Labour politicians who will soon have the power to shaft their sisters as much as their strange little hearts desire. Though Mrs Pankhurst would be saddened by these creatures, she would soon deduce that they are no different to the women in her era who were against women’s rights, preferring the age-old option of sucking up to men in order to gain some influence.

There is another group of modern women she would be absolutely baffled by – namely, those feminists (proper ones, not the Frankenfeminist kind) who still intend to vote Labour because ‘bigger issues’ are involved in the General Election. I could just about get this if Starmer was planning something huge, comparable with the founding of the National Health Service perhaps. But you couldn’t slip a wet wipe between him and the Tories when it comes to policies – except on those regarding women’s sex-based rights.

The relationship that left-wing women have with the Labour Party is the UK’s greatest ongoing abusive relationship. Female Labour supporters must be livid with self-loathing (‘I must stop being so selfish and hoarding rights, like a dinosaur!’) or have successfully been gaslit (‘I’m not really being threatened with choking on lady-dick, I’m just a whinging little fucker!’).

Mrs Pankhurst herself was barred from joining her local Manchester Labour Party because she was a woman. Her friend, Labour’s founder Keir Hardie, made a special dispensation so that she could join the London branch instead. Little has changed. A few females are allowed into the shadow cabinet so the rights-robbing optics look okay. Yes, sexism – like snobbishness and anti-Semitism – used to be even worse in the Conservative Party than the Labour Party, but those days are gone. The new difference between them when it comes to women’s rights can be seen in the vastly differing ways Rosie Duffield and Kemi Badenoch have been treated by their respective parties.

So wake up. Women with any self-respect, do not waste the vote the Suffragettes fought so hard for you to have on a party that sees your rights as expendable, disposable and inferior to the fulfilment of the sexual kinks of angry transvestites. Do not vote for a party that would happily throw the rights of 51 per cent of the population under the bus – or indeed the king’s racehorse – in order to demonstrate their devotion to cross-dressing men.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.