Miss Black made an unsisterly bid for the limelight with the C-word
SID James and Benny Hill might have been banged up longer than the Yorkshire Ripper, if Melanie Onn had her way. Mrs Onn (Lab, Great Grimsby) yesterday proposed criminalising misogyny (ie discrimination against women). She and other MPs demanded ‘appropriate sentencing’ for culprits of ‘street harassment’ such as wolfwhistling and the sort of hello-darlin’ pavement ogling that can occur outside pubs on balmy evenings.
Welcome to liberal Britain. Blow up a British Cabinet with a terrorist bomb and you will walk free. But if you and your mates are outside the Pig & Whistle and compliment a lass on her summer frock, you could face clink. We’d better start building an awful lot of prisons.
Mrs Onn (majority 2,565) opened a debate on ‘misogyny as a hate crime’. Only nine MPs were present and only one was a man. Tut tut. Worse, he was Philip Davies (Con, Shipley), serial skewer of political correctness. He was there long enough to ask two awkward questions.
Did Mrs Onn think there should also be a law against misandry (ie discrimination against men)? She did not. ‘There is a power imbalance in society that disproportionately affects women negatively, so I think misogyny should be an exclusive strand of hate crime,’ she averred. Glowering.
And did Mrs Onn think it had been misogynistic (and thus equal to hate crime) for a man to allegedly say Tory minister Esther McVey should be ‘lynched’? When Mr Davies asked this he did not disclose that he and Miss McVey share a toothbrush mug. Nor did he explain that the brute who reportedly wanted to lynch Miss McVey was Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell. Mrs Onn, who would perhaps not be everyone’s first choice for University Challenge, did not seem to spot the danger. Yes, she gaily said, such a remark was ‘unnecessarily aggressive and had no place in political debate’. Mr McDonnell’s Momentum thugs will be interested to hear this.
If Mrs Onn thought the debate was going to give her untrammelled publicity, others had their own ideas. Stella Creasy (Lab, Walthamstow) and Mhairi Black (SNP, Paisley & Renfrewshire S) made unsisterly bids to grab the limelight. Was that oneupwomanship? Miss Black made a speech which contained numerous instances of the C-word. This may well be a parliamentary first. They came while she described some of the nasty things that have been said about her by the public.
HAPPILY,
Miss Black has such a formidably strong accent that the dreadful words she uttered were almost completely incomprehensible to your sketchwriter’s softy-southerner ear.
Intellectually, did Miss Black nail down the argument that attacks on her were misogynistic? Perhaps not. I know plenty of male MPs who have been called similar names. And I have sometimes been called the same – by MPs. Last time I had a squint below decks, I was a chap.
As for Miss Creasy, she said she had been pestered by a man on a London street and that just showed there was ‘a culture of power’ that needed changing. She spoke with eloquence, the words pouring forth in a grammaticallycorrect torrent. All very impressive. But as can happen with Miss Creasy, a lot of it seemed to be about her rather than the strict, legislative argument.
Labour frontbencher Carolyn Harris disclosed that some people tease her because she is on the chunky side and wears garish clothes. With admirable nonchalance she said, ‘that’s their problem, not mine’. And yet she wanted ‘misogynistic acts to be treated as the serious crimes they actually are’. Like others who spoke, she saw ‘prejudice’ as only a bad thing. I am prejudiced against dictators and arms dealers. Is that hate crime?
Victoria Atkins, for the Government, mewed in a sympathetic way but made no commitment to alter the law.
In other news, the Government seems to be flirting with the idea of letting the EU continue to plunder our fishing waters. Might that not be of rather greater interest to Melanie Onn’s voters?