Suffragettes? A terrorist gang who delayed women’s votes
CAN everyone please shut up about the suffragettes? You would think, from the way the BBC is going on, that we lived in a society which still treated women unfairly. Any conscious person knows this is rubbish. In reality, women are as equal as they can be, in the workplace, in politics, in education and in life in general, until someone finds a way of making men have babies. The fact that the Hollywood salaries of some very senior BBC stars (unthinkably huge in the eyes of most men and women) are not all exactly the same does not really prove that women are an oppressed minority in the workplace.
But precisely because women are in charge of so much at the BBC, listeners have to endure ceaseless propaganda based on the absurd idea that this is a womanhating, male-dominated country.
I let this twaddle float past me most of the time. But it was the BBC’s decision to devote an entire three hours of its main radio news programme Today to droning on about the suffragettes that snapped my patience.
As it happened, there was a huge story which needed to be told and explained that day. There had been a violent convulsion on the world’s stock markets which is not yet over, as far as I can see. But you would barely have known it as the programme rambled, misleadingly, round the distant past.
Can we get something straight about the suffragettes? Many intelligent women hated them at the time, fearing that their violent tactics – arson, bombs and vandalism – were wrecking a good cause. A lot of people who now lazily praise this behaviour would be furiously hostile to anyone who acted like this in the present day.
The suffragettes planted explosives in railway stations and in crowded streets, sent letter bombs to opponents and actually blew up David Lloyd George’s house.
Several postal workers (not rich enough to have the vote at the time) were badly injured in a fire at a sorting office started by suffragettes. Feminist militants argue they didn’t actually kill anyone. But that was probably because some of their more important bombs – especially one left outside the Bank of England – were defused by brave policemen, or didn’t go off.
Anyone who plants a bomb in a public place knows it may kill, or maim horribly.
The historian Simon Webb has written: ‘The terrorist bombings carried out by the suffragettes have today been almost wholly forgotten. Far from hastening the granting of votes for women, the suffragettes impeded the political progress towards this aim by their dangerous actions, causing most people to reject them as violent fanatics. Had it not been for the bombings, there is every chance that the vote would have been given to women before, rather than after, the First World War.’
The idea that long-dead people should be pardoned today for doing things that are still crimes now is not just ridiculous and self-indulgent. It is legal and political nonsense.
I know of no evidence that their noisy and lawless campaign hastened the arrival of votes for women by a single second.
Britain was then, as it is now, a free country in which it was quite possible to campaign for a cause without violence or destruction. Many men supported votes for women, as I believe I would have done at the time. There is no rational case against it.
The non- vi ol ent campaigner Millicent Fawcett welcomed men in her movement. The militant suffragettes rejected them.
THIS gl ori f yi ng of t he suffragettes is all part of a general rewriting of history to suit the prejudices of the Left-wing cultural revolutionaries who have now got control of almost everything in this country. These revolutionaries have not yet finished. To pursue their final aims, they need to pretend that they have not won, that things are worse than they are.
They also like to spread the idea that only shouting, violent militancy gets results, because shouting, violent militancy is what they like. It is not true. We have a long, proud record of peaceful constitutional and political reform and we should not despise it.