Throw a brick at a Liberal Democrat MP and you have more chance of hitting a knight of the realm than a woman. Which, if nothing else, goes to show that all the arguments against all-women shortlists are bunk. Unfortunately, what it doesn’t show is that the Rennard scandal is something that could only have happened to the Liberal Democrats.
The Rennard crisis, yes, that could only have happened to the Liberals, whose members seem to both need a crash course in feminism and crisis communications, but the Rennard scandal? I would frankly astonished if there wasn’t a mini-Rennard in every single constituency Labour party in the country. I might comfort myself that there are probably two little Rennards in every Conservative association, but let’s be honest: the only difference between us and the Liberals is that we’d be making a better fist of it if any of our Rennards ended up on Channel 4 News.
That’s not a surprise: sexism has been part of society since we painted on caves; Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women is barely 220 years old. Feminism doesn’t have true believers, only a series of compromised double agents, but we all, whether we recognise it or not, believe in the patriarchy.
Left to our devices, in fact, we’re just as sexist as we ever were. We still flock to newspaper stories about celebrity indiscretion, we’re most of us addicted to the Mail Online – a website with the unofficial slogan of ‘Well, she’s no better than she ought to be’ – and most of our assumptions about what we should be are still just as patriarchal as they were in the 1950s. Parents ask Google if their sons are geniuses; the question they ask of their daughters is whether they’re beautiful. That’s why we’ve got all-women shortlists, it’s why we need quotas in our boardrooms and in our courts: because we are none of us feminists yet.
The trouble is, though, is that our movement is now suffering from the intellectual equivalent of the 33 per cent problem. The 33 per cent problem is what happens when the number of women in an organisation reaches a large enough chunk that people can start to believe that the battle is over; essentially, this is what happens when people say we don’t need all-women shortlists because Harriet Harman is deputy leader and the judiciary can sort itself out because of Constance Briscoe. The intellectual equivalent is when the word ‘sexist’ becomes a dirty word, so no one admits that they’re sexist, too.
So I’ll go first: I’m a sexist. My idea of leadership was, as a child, shaped largely by television: by characters like Optimus Prime (a man), Han Solo (a man), Batman (a man), and the president in Independence Day, who, spoiler alert, was also a bloke. That all but a handful of the dominant politicians of my lifetime were men was little help either, and all of that didn’t just fade into airy nothing the first time I picked up The Second Sex.
Misogyny is like oxygen: men and women of all parties and none can’t help but breathe it in. So laugh at the Liberal Democrats by all means. But remember that we still can’t – and won’t ever live to see a day when we can – be trusted to pick a good woman from a field of indifferent women, or even pick an indifferent women from a field of indifferent men. We might be better than Chris Rennard. But we’re still not very good.
———————————————————
Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb
———————————————————
It could happen in any party. I doubt the LDs are any more sexist than Labour or the Tories. But it’s more damaging to a party that was based on moral piety and a ‘holier than thou’ approach. Also more damaging to a party that is struggling to convince that it can take tough decisions and show leadership.
Huge hysteria over sexual harassment, but make overtly racist and antisemitic statements like Jenny Tonge and you get a knighthood!
Simple solution to the great inequality problem. All men, who are in a political role, who believe it exists in politics and don’t make noise to appeal to a shouty minority to feather their own nests, resign and give their jobs to women…
The Italian Mafia would disagree -vehemently- about Mama being second to Papa on any patria-matriarchal bookies’ betting odds. But this is England where a woman can never be seen as being ‘to blame’ for anything, not even the fact that she is a woman.
In [most] religious contexts [yes, since Adam & Eve] the woman is subservient to the man. That is just not the case: …behind every successful man there is a woman. No-one is above the Law.
Unwritten [social] laws are broken daily by millions. Its all a matter of degree. Whether the [man or woman] had any malice-aforethought intended isfor a Court to decide. No-one is above The Law. Period.
If “El Seville” [& many YET 2B-reported others] had been ‘outed’ earlier, I contend his 50 years of unchastised sexual deviances would have been nipped in the bud; and many tears avoided.
My vote goes to any woman who shows the way here, as men are still stoopid on ethics.
It takes two to Tango. And what’s sauce for the Goose is sauce for the Gander [Anon]
From a purely pragmatic standpoint, can Labour’s head-office-policy-advisers/makers and moreover, LABOUR VOTERS afford to be associated with Liberal Democrats in the forthcoming 2015 GE? Are there any LD courtships currently in train that WE THE VOTERS are unaware of or are bubbling currently on the back-burner at LHQ? We, as trusting Members, have a basic right to know the way our Leaders thoughts are currently [Progressing]; or not.
To say that this current LibDem [Lord Rennard] episode is just ‘a-fly-in-the-ointment’ and will go away if you close your eyes or that that LIbby will sweep it under the carpet very fast may be a wrong guess — what if its not disposed of quickly and half the LD’s WOMEN voters pull their vote?And vote GREEN? And if LABOUR were to be seen as being ‘”Politically-in-Bed” [as we know, Politics makes for strange bedfellows] with Libby by the eve of 7 May 2015, will that mean half of Labour’s women will pull their votes as well? Just a thought …. nightmares are made of this, eh, Tone, Mandy and Al !