Blanket pardon for Suffragettes would insult all who worked for votes equality

It is interesting that Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson and UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seem to have found common cause. In the euphoria over the centenary of the Act that granted votes for some women, they both want to see suffragettes convicted of crimes pardoned (your report, 7 February).

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has wisely urged caution over this; granting pardons might be complicated not simply because of the time lapse, but because arson and violence not just against property but against individuals was involved. Who is right?

I think it is important to see the suffragettes’ contribution to democracy in the round. At the start of the First World War Emmeline Pankhurst urged her Women’s Social and Political Union to suspend campaigning and to urge people of both sexes to support the war effort wholeheartedly.

By the middle of 1917 the energies of men and women of all social classes and all skills had to be used to help overcome a critical wartime situation. It was inevitable that Prime Minister Lloyd George would seek to extend the franchise, for men too, partly out of political expediency but also as recognition of commitment, sacrifice and suffering. Votes for women came about only partly because of the suffragettes’ pre-war campaigning. It needs to be seen, too, in the context of an unprecedented effort for military survival by the whole population. Simply to grant pardons because of a romantic notion that Mrs Pankhurst’s followers alone were the champions of rights for women would be mistaken.

Ms Rudd made a relevant point about the so-called “Turing clause” – which overturned convictions of men found guilty of homosexuality before the change in the law in the 1960s. This might be used as a precedent to support Ms Davidson’s and Mr Corbyn’s views. But even here the actual type of offence was taken into account when granting the pardon. A blanket pardon for all suffragettes convicted of offences would not only bring the law on both sides of the border into disrepute, it would rewrite history in a way that does injustice to all who strove for universal suffrage.

BOB TAYLOR Shiel Court, Glenrothes

It has become the fashion to quash retrospectively the convictions of long dead luminaries for antediluvian laws now considered absurd, but those suffragettes jailed for using violence in pursuit of the vote should not become the latest piece of legal historical revisionism.

Let’s be clear about this: Britain hanged anarchists and Irish republicans for bombing offences at the same time it soft-soaped Pankhurst’s thugs, and it was only the incompetence of the budding suffragette terrorists which prevented their letter bombs, fire bombs or rocks through windows antics from resulting in serious injuries or deaths.

Millicent Fawcett, the real heroine of woman’s suffrage, lamented bitterly they cost women earlier equality of the vote with their immature undemocratic antics – the original “aged 30-plus property ownership” qualification left the vast majority still disenfranchised, and it took another decade for justice to prevail.

Let’s not make martyrs of those we would reflexcondemn today for actions done instead in the name of their God or ideology.

MARK BOYLE Linn Park Gardens Johnstone, Renfrewshire