When you receive a gift like London’s newly named Suffragette line, perhaps it’s ungrateful to cavil. For as long as trains run between Gospel Oak and Barking Riverside calling at Walthamstow and Wanstead, female passengers can reflect that at least one mayor of London (all of them, to date, being male) chose to celebrate, as Sadiq Khan put it, “the working-class movement born in the East End that fought for votes for women”.
Hang on. Didn’t it originate in Manchester, in the middle-class home of Emmeline Pankhurst? No, never mind, it’s still a lovely thought.
If the decision seems to have been taken at too high a level to hear from women who could have mentioned to Khan or his advisers that his inspirational photograph of a suffragette heroine was in fact of Millicent Fawcett, the suffragist leader famously opposed to violent tactics, it’s nice he tried. Though “Fawcett” might have been a neater railway name. Maybe so would “courage”, from Fawcett’s, “Courage calls to courage everywhere.” Still, deeds not words. The publicity might even focus attention on women’s political participation at a time when, to judge by the imminent all-male Rochdale byelection, it could really use the interest.
It’s understandable, of course, that reporting of this contest has recently been dominated by the antics of George Galloway and Labour’s inept response to contemptible comments by its candidate, Azhar Ali. The party is now unrepresented in Rochdale while he remains in contention. Even so, when the candidates list was confirmed on 2 February, the fact that, being composed of 11 men and no women, it could double as a tribute to the politics of, say, 1904, was received, bar a few honourable exceptions, with complacency. That two of the men are associated with disturbing attitudes towards women has again caused notably limited upset in a country currently celebrating Khan’s memorial to women’s civic engagement.
Admittedly, it’s some time since Galloway depicted hostile women, in his 2005 book I’m Not the Only One, as “air-headed blow-dried telly-dollies” who’d been “chosen for their dentistry”. And mentioned others who wouldn’t – presumably unlike himself, had the series ever cast celebrity cat impersonators – “get a spot in Sex and the City”. But there can be no accommodating Galloway’s assertion, in his memorable attempt to trivialise alleged sexual misconduct by the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, that uninvited sex was not rape: “I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.” Rape Crisis objected to his “ignorant, factually and morally incorrect” contribution.
Following hallowed pre-electoral tradition, leading parties are already sorting women into manageable types. Stevenage Woman has been targeted by Labour; the Lib Dems seek tribes they call Waitrose Women and M&S Movers. While this obviously covers much of the female population, Rochdale’s lineup indicates an opening for at least one more retail automaton, Charity Shop Woman, a useful type who aspires to nothing fancier than cast-offs. Because vying with Galloway is Reform UK’s Simon Danczuk.
The most famous thing about Danczuk outside Rochdale, where he was once Labour MP, is the party’s rejection after he found time, in a demanding schedule, to text thoughts like, “God I’m horny” and, “You want me to spank you?” to a 17-year-old. When he sent the texts, he was “drunk, horny and on my own”, he later explained. Also: “Younger women are my achilles heel.” But if this is an achilles heel the latest Mrs Danczuk (28 years his junior) can live with, then so, Reform UK thinks, can constituents: “Simon Danczuk, with all his knowledge, his guts and experience, is best placed to challenge and change Rochdale for the better.”
In its application forms (many seats still available, submission £25), along with screening for membership of far-right parties, Reform UK asks candidates to confirm they are not aware of “issues in my background that may embarrass Reform UK or bring it into disrepute”. The appointment of Danczuk, though it may embarrass some members, should reassure otherwise eligible talent – NB tractor porn man Neil Parish, the convicted sex offender Charlie Elphicke, Peter Bone – who could easily have feared transgressing Reform’s “Christian values and ethos”.
If selecting Danczuk for glory will strike many women as a strange way to, in the Reform catchphrase, Make Britain Great, this is conceivably intentional. Maybe Reform’s leader, Richard Tice, really hopes to create, as a delayed rebuke to the suffragists, a men’s party? Certainly, with its male leadership troika, and massively male-dominated list of prospective parliamentary candidates, Reform seems to be the closest a mainstream British party could now come to being single sex. And not, scanning the available biographies, because the male talent is unimaginably superior.
Along with once-active Tories, who include Richard Langridge, the former chairman of David Cameron’s old constituency, the list features some disarmingly apolitical résumés. Gordon, for instance, is “a Christian and follower of Jesus Christ”. Steve, a “local allotment owner”. Ian has been “on the committee of Hatch End Lawn Tennis Club since 2015”.
But possibly women are not so much unwanted by Reform UK as unmoved by fantasies of national revival that come unaccompanied by anything on, say, childcare or violence against women and girls.
Either way, well over 80% of Reform’s candidates in English seats are now, by my rough count, male. In London, home of the new Suffragette line, its seven “borough organisers” are all men. The front of Reform’s website further confirms, for the absence of doubt, which sex gets to stand in Reform’s front row, and which at the back. Though, given some Reform women are visible, it’s an improvement on the Rochdale row of candidates.
I’ll think of that advance every time I take the Suffragette line.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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