Imagine you are a mother who has worked hard, played by the rules and saved every penny. You finally fulfil your dream of buying a slice of countryside paradise: a charming home in a peaceful village, surrounded by nature, where your children can enjoy a happy upbringing away from the horrors of busy cities. It is the life you always imagined for your family.
Then the Labour government intervenes. It looks at you and decides that your family’s peace and security are secondary to the immigration chaos it has created. Your bubble will be burst to accommodate thousands of unvetted males from countries where the treatment of women is often closer to that of dogs than men.
That the potential 3,500 arrivals would outnumber the 350 residents of your Oxfordshire village by ten to one is apparently by the by. Concerns about sexual violence and assault must be set aside because ‘everyone must play their part’ in housing and feeding economic migrants who need to be told that raping a baby or forcing themselves upon a woman is not acceptable behaviour in Britain.
This government has an increasingly contemptuous attitude towards women’s basic rights and safety
That is the case for the poor, unfortunate village of Piddington – and is just one example of this government’s increasingly contemptuous attitude towards women’s basic rights and safety. There are others.
On the BBC’s Politics Live this week, I politely explained to the Labour backbencher Samantha Niblett (of ‘summer of sex’ campaign fame) that most women would prefer not to be confronted by the sight of a penis in a gym changing room. I told her that the Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of a woman was critical to protecting the safety and dignity of vulnerable women in prisons and domestic abuse shelters. Before the judgement, depraved men were increasingly exploiting liberal rules governing access to women’s spaces to commit horrific acts of violence. This is unacceptable in a country that supposedly upholds equality between the sexes – and under a government that claims to be determined to tackle violence against women and girls.
Niblett’s response was to dismiss my reluctance to undress in front of a man. If I was so concerned, she argued, I should find somewhere private within the changing room to hide from them. In other words, women should inconvenience themselves to accommodate the wishes of a small number of men who identify as women.
On domestic abuse shelters and prisons, Niblett argued that only a tiny proportion of trans women are predators and that safeguards are therefore unnecessary. Women, it seems, should accept the inevitable instances of violence as the price of allowing male people into female spaces. Her views speak for themselves.
Labour claims to champion women but keeps asking them to surrender their safety
Then there is the Labour MP Stella Creasy. This week, she took to X to celebrate a gender-segregated Muslim march through Walthamstow, at which women were barred from walking alongside men as equals. To prove that women had participated in some capacity, Creasy posted a selfie video with a group of girls draped in black robes, some of whom were covered entirely except for their eyes. Not one of the men appeared to have been required to conceal his body in the same way.
I pressed Creasy on X: ‘I would be keen to know why none of the men at the march were required to cover their entire bodies in black clothing with the exception of their eyes? Unless I missed something I didn’t see any men nearly this covered up? Please could you explain why this is?’
She responded: ‘I think misogyny is inbuilt across society and every religion is interpreted by cultures to justify it.’ When I asked which other culture requires only women to cover their entire bodies except for a grille through which to see – and whether she would condemn that discrepancy – she did not reply.
These three examples expose a particular problem for Labour, a party that presents itself as the bastion of female empowerment in politics. It claims the mantle when it comes to promoting women and paving the way for them to flourish. Yet Labour has never had a female leader, and the Prime Minister is content to impose thousands of men upon a tiny community, completely outnumbering the grandmothers, mothers and daughters whose only crime was to build quiet and peaceful lives there.
A party that claims to champion women cannot keep asking them to surrender their safety, dignity and equality whenever those rights become politically inconvenient.
Comments