Just look how far we’ve come – a revolution is already happening

By Anne Perkins

There’s always a tension on the political left, between the urgency of the need for change and an understanding of what is possible. It’s the distinction between campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, the parallel importance of sustainable reform and the demand for revolution.

So Fiona Millar argues that Mrs Thatcher did nothing for women. On one level, of course that’s true (although one of her Chancellors, Nigel Lawson, did finally concede independent taxation). She governed as an honorary man, a bloke who looked good in a skirt.

But the point is, she was there. When she told that interviewer, ten years or so before she became party leader, that she didn’t think she’d see a woman prime minister, I’m pretty sure she meant it. Yet when the chance came, she went for it. Whatever her politics, on a personal level she showed exemplary courage.

She took on her own misogynist party, most of them openly appalled that they had somehow elected a woman. For years, probably until the Falklands in 1982, she was treated as an embarrassing mistake, doomed to fail. She was the subject of humiliating briefings where over long lunches male colleagues and male political journalists and male newspaper editors chortled about how useless she was, how little influence she had on the party, how out of her depth in cabinet. And on, and on.

So OK, her politics did little for women, but her mere presence on the political stage, and the success with which she finally stamped her personality on a hostile political culture leaves me, for one, in awed admiration of her personal courage.

For it is absurd to talk about women in politics without considering the extreme maleness of the culture in a world created by men for men in their own thousand year Reich. There was only one way in the early years for women to make a mark. They all – the Ellen Wilkinsons and Barbara Castles as well as Thatcher – were only able to succeed by behaving like men.

Thatcher, unwittingly, began the deconstruction of this world. In the past fifteen years, many Labour women, and men, have speeded it up. Harriet Harman has never got the credit she deserves for her role in the forefront of a campaign that has represented the demands of thousands of other women in Westminster and outside.

Tackling vested interest is self-evidently a controversial task. So, all-women short lists are unfair to men, but indispensible as a short term way of breaking the mould. The number of women elected as a result were the shock troops (mmm, maybe just the troops) in making working conditions in Westminster at least slightly compatible with family life.

There are still a hundred more subtle discriminations to overcome. The political world remains, like the world outside, essentially man-shaped. So women candidates – like the harshly-treated Tory Caroline Spelman – are still routinely disadvantaged. How does a selection committee think a woman candidate, lacking that all important political essential, a wife of her own, can leave her kids behind to go to school in the constituency while she’s in London all week?

There is still a long way to go. But a revolution is already happening. Redressing the balance is not an event, it is a long, often boring process. And changes at Westminster are often ahead of changes elsewhere. So, for example, progress to tackle domestic violence depends on a legislative framework which is in place, but also on the will to implement it, in the police and in the courts.

Being able to knock the politicians is a prerequisite of a democratic society; just don’t forget, in the brilliant passion for making it better than it is, how far we’ve already come.