Minister: Don’t pardon arsonists
SUFFRAGETTES who torched a hotel risking lives do not deserve a posthumous pardon, a Government Minister has hinted.
Environment Minister Therese Coffey said that arson had not been the ‘right way for women to try and get the vote’.
Her comments come after the Government marked the centenary of women winning the right to vote by saying it would consider pardoning suffragettes who had broken the law.
But Ms Coffey suggested campaigners convicted of serious criminal offences did not deserve a pardon. Her Suffolk constituency includes Felixstowe where two suffragettes Evaline Burkitt and Florence Tunks were convicted of arson after setting fire to the Bath Hotel in 1914. Ms Coffey said: ‘In Felixstowe, there are long memories. That wasn’t the right way for women to try and get the vote – to burn down a hotel with people in it.’
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions, she acknowledged that people inside the hotel had ‘got out’. But Ms Coffey added: ‘I’m not sure that pardoning people who potentially put other people at risk of being burned alive is necessarily the right thing to do.’
Burkitt, 37, and Tunks, 22, were jailed for two years and nine months respectively. The cost of the damage to the building was estimated to be the equivalent of £2.6 million today.