Who’d be a female MP these days?
Their dream of public service has become the stuff of waking nightmares
Who would be a female MP in these dark, dangerous days of political misogyny? Not Justine Greening. Not Claire Perry. Not Kate Hoey. Not Helen Jones. Not Dame Louise Ellman.
Not Nicky Morgan, the current Culture Secretary, who is standing down, citing the “clear impact” on her family and “the other sacrifices involved in and the abuse for doing the job of a modern MP”.
Not Gloria De Piero, the ex-shadow justice minister, who expressed concern over the “lack of tolerance for different viewpoints” within her party. Not Dame Caroline Spelman, weary of the “intensity of abuse arising out of Brexit” in her resignation statement.
And not Heidi Allen, the former Conservative and Change UK MP, who only joined the Lib Dems a few weeks ago, but can no longer stomach the “utterly dehumanising abuse” she faces as a serving MP.
The dream of public service once harboured by ambitious young women has become the stuff of waking nightmares. Parliament is haemorrhaging female MPS who, quite rightly, are refusing to remain in the firing line. Around 50 are leaving, 18 of them women. It is their loss and ours.
Take Teresa Pearce, who is standing down after three elections. She had wanted to be “a good local MP”, who was accessible to her constituents. Now she is viewed as a hate figure.
“People don’t even see me as a person,” she told Radio 4. “Social media is what it is. It’s the people who go to the effort of writing me personal letters that I find more upsetting.”
Pearce has been carrying a personal alarm and has a panic button in her office. It is no way to live.
When these women refer, in broad-brush terms, to “abuse”, they mean death threats and sexual aggression. They mean shouts of “Nazi!” hurled at Anna Soubry in the street. They mean Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, who is sworn at and threatened with hanging.
Day after day, the onslaught continues, reducing our political culture to a toxic quagmire.
It is the sort of fear, loathing and patriarchy we associate with fledgling democracies, where courageous women struggle to assert themselves in conservative, autocratic societies.
That such a thing has come to pass in 21st-century Britain shames us all. Just when we urgently need balance, equality of opportunity and a crossgender sense of perspective, women are losing their voice. How can that possibly be right?
One hundred years ago, Britain’s first woman MP took her seat in Westminster. On Dec 1 1919, Nancy Astor made history. Can we hold our heads up and mark the centenary with giddy joy or even gratitude? It’s hard to claim we have built on the legacy of bold suffragettes and committed suffragists when no mother in her right mind would encourage her daughter to pursue a career in politics these days.
Or even any related profession; the hostility is infectious. Yesterday, broadcasters Laura Kuenssberg and Beth Rigby received the first boorish boos of the election season for simply doing their job, posing questions to Jeremy Corbyn at his campaign launch. Anyone who claims there is no gender agenda is, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, a liar.
The Brexit result has polarised Britain, tempers have flared on both sides. But the creeping poison of misogyny was present long before the polling booths opened.
The Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered on June 16 2016, a week before the referendum took place. In the stunned silence that followed, we were told lessons would be learnt.
By MPS, maybe – with personal alarms and minders – but the climate of hostility at large in this country, our country, has worsened.
Earlier this month, a poll revealed that a terrifying proportion of the electorate felt the risk of violence against politicians was justified. The majority of Leave voters who took part in the Future of England study thought it was a “price worth paying” for Brexit to be delivered – 71 per cent in England, 60 per cent in Scotland and 70 per cent in Wales.
On the flip side, the majority of Remain voters felt the risk of violence towards MPS was worth it if it meant we stayed in the EU – 58 per cent in England, 53 per cent in Scotland and 56 per cent in Wales.
Richard Wyn Jones, a professor of Welsh politics at Cardiff University who co-directed the research, said he was “flabbergasted” by the results.
“If we’re going into a general election in which polarisation is the name of the game, it’s very, very hard to see how you can bind these wounds,” he said.
Two weeks on, we are indeed going into a general election, and I am surely not alone in feeling fearful for female candidates across the spectrum campaigning out on the stump. We have descended so far that democracy itself is in peril. One glimmer of hope is that electioneering will be banned from Twitter. I hope other platforms follow suit; it is in nobody’s interest to trigger those cowardly legions of keyboard warriors.
We also need an intervention from our party leaders, who must draw a line in the sand and make it clear that demeaning language and sexist bullying is rebarbative, chauvinism is unacceptable and anyone engaging in the overt or covert abuse of female candidates of any political hue will be made an example of.
Women fought long and hard to gain the vote and participate fully in our democracy. Those who would intimidate, threaten and rob us of that right must be named, shamed and dealt with by the full force of the law. The Mother of Parliaments deserves better.