IT’S TIME TO ‘PASS THEM IC’ TO WOMEN IN POLITICS
Should good men step aside to help smart women step up?
That’s the controversial question raised last week by Jess Phillips, who dropped out of the race to replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, after admitting she was struggling to squeeze her ideas into campaign soundbites. Jess being Jess, she went out with a bang, urging men in the party to ‘pass the mic’ to women and give them a chance to shine. It would, she insisted, be ‘embarrassing’ if the Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer won as the only man on a shortlist of five (now down to four), when Labour is now the only major British party never to have chosen a female leader. ‘When you’re a woman in politics you’re always “the next time”,’ she added. ‘It’s always, “We have to pick the best person for the job” – they often mean the best man and that is disappointing.’ Days later, party chairman Ian Lavery, no friend of Jess’s but a long-standing ally of her leadership rival Rebecca Long Bailey, also called on Keir to stand aside and let a woman through.
Keir isn’t, of course, a token man. He’s popular with party members thanks to his past as a radical young barrister and his early support for a people’s vote on Brexit. As Britain leaves the EU this week, some will wonder what might have been if he’d led Labour into last month’s election.
But this contest is hardly lacking in female talent, with the Wigan MP Lisa Nandy through to the next round alongside Keir, and Rebecca widely expected to join her there as Grazia went to press. And that’s got some questioning why the self-proclaimed party of equality always seems to end up gravitating towards a man. Deep down, do too many people still associate power with a white guy in a suit? (Clive Lewis, the only black man to pitch for the leadership, fell at the first hurdle while the two BAME candidates for deputy, Dawn Butler and Rosena Allin-khan, struggled initially to get on the ballot paper.)
Similar questions are now being asked in Washington, as the Democrats choose their candidate for next year’s presidential race against Donald Trump. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently accused her Democrat rival Bernie Sanders of telling her privately that a woman couldn’t beat Trump. He denies it, but their public spat has got America arguing over how to deal with sexism on the campaign trail.
Nobody is arguing, obviously, that women should be given top jobs solely because of being female. But they shouldn’t be denied those jobs because of it either and that’s the trouble with arguing that we should leave gender out of it; the fear is that it’s in there already when voters are considering someone as a future PM. And that’s where the question of men passing the mic, or at least being good feminist allies, comes in.
Nobody’s seriously expecting Keir to throw in the towel now, and even if he did his female rivals would never hear the last of it. They still have time to beat him fair and square.
But if all this makes men in politics think harder about the extra hurdles their female colleagues are up against, then that can only be a good thing. There’s only so long women can keep waiting for ‘the next time’.