We owe it to women to win

I was born in 1979 at the opening curtain of 18 years of Tory rule. One of Thatcher’s (reluctant) children, my earliest memories of politics was of a British establishment dominated by our country’s first female Prime Minister.

The Iron Lady was a common site on our TV screen in those days, all handbag and shoulder pads and free market zealotry, railing against the advocates of working people even as she laid waste to our communities.

She was the dominant force in British politics, a violent splash of colour against the grey men in grey suits who filled her cabinet and her party.

Unsurprisingly my hero growing up wasn’t Thatcher. It was my mum, a woman as different to Maggie in outlook and circumstance as you could ever meet. A single parent raising her daughter in a council flat, she worked her way up through the ranks of the trade union movement, eventually rising to become the Deputy General Secretary of the Manufacturing, Science and Finance union (MSF), and then Amicus.

My mum’s hard work and commitment were incredible, but not unique. Right across the country women were bearing the brunt of government policy and holding their families and communities together with quiet dignity and tremendous courage.

As the dole queues lengthened and the miner’s strike dragged on, that support for family and community developed into a new working class radicalism as thousands of people, under the banner of Women Against Pit Closures, rallied in Barnsley and marched through London, supported by groups the length and breadth of the country, including  my own Stoke-on-Trent.

It is one of the more bitter ironies of recent history that our first woman Prime Minister did so little to help other women. She strongly opposed any policy of affirmative action to correct gender imbalances in politics or the workplace, and her government did nothing to deal with the desperate need for childcare provision. Hostile to the feminist movements of the time and dismissive of the structural discrimination that women still suffered in the public sphere, she ignored rather than tackled many of the issues that women faced.

Under Thatcher, women and workers alike found themselves on the receiving end of vicious cuts and spiralling unemployment.

So where was the Labour Party while all this was going on? The answer, sadly, was in the community but not in power.

Demonstrations never translated into votes. Our own divisions and self-indulgent rows dominated the news and allowed Thatcher to thrive. When our communities were on their knees, when we needed a Labour government more than ever, the party was not able to deliver.

Feminism, like all politics, is ultimately about power: the power of women to gain control over our own lives, our own bodies, our own futures. And it is the understanding that power is never given up voluntarily by those at the top, it must be taken.

That is a lesson that was forgotten by the Labour Party then, and it is one that we must not forget now. For all their energy and enthusiasm, it was not the marches and protests that introduced maternity pay and paternity leave, transformed childcare, or passed the Equality Act. It took a Labour Government to do all these things.

As we head into the most important set of elections we will face before 2020, we should remember the lessons of that period. It is not enough to win the argument if you don’t win the election, and that principles without power are meaningless.

We must challenge head on the attitude of those within our movement who push a mantra of ‘revolution or bust’, who denounce the concrete gains of the last Labour government even as they protest the Tories plans to reverse them.

Those of us who grew up under a Tory government know the damage they can do. This Government has already been granted 10 years too many, we cannot allow that to stretch to 15 years or longer.

The crumbling schools and over-stretched hospitals that Labour inherited in 1997 are the legacy of 18 years of Tory rule, but they are a legacy also of our own neglect, a stark reminder of the time when the Labour Party abandoned our people to the caprice of Thatcherism.

Now, as then, women are bearing the brunt under a Tory government that understands the price of everything and the value of nothing. Now, as then, it is only Labour who can provide an alternative to the cuts to healthcare, education and local government that are ravaging our communities.

Heartfelt speeches won’t cut it, and neither will face paint or placards. If we really want to improve the lives of women there is only one way to do it, and that is to make sure that 2020 is this Tory Government’s curtain call.