From the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Labour conference speech to packed fringe meetings, feminism and women’s rights feel important to this still newly elected government. That Rachel Reeves opened her landmark speech as the first female Chancellor in history on the importance of female role models, paying tribute to the “trailblazing women” who went before her, was significant in this respect.
“I’m here because of thousands of women… who broke down barriers and defeated low expectations to pave the way for the rest of us,” Reeves said, clearly emotional as she reflected on her achievement (following 800 years of male chancellors). While so much has been accomplished by women in terms of equality, Reeves also acknowledged that there was further to go: it was up to her “generation of Labour women… to write the work of all women back into our economic story; to show to our daughters and our granddaughters that they need place no ceiling on their ambitions.” There can be no doubting the sincerity of the Chancellor’s words, which for some were emotional to hear.
Speaking to women at the Liverpool conference, I detected a sense of hope. The government has committed to halving violence against women and girls over the next decade, and seems to be shifting on the issue of sex-based rights.
The latter can be seen in the fortunes of the Labour Women’s Declaration (LWD) – a movement started in autumn 2019 to raise the profile of women’s sex-based rights in Labour and across the wider socialist left. In Liverpool this year it held two packed fringe meetings and it was also granted a presence inside conference with a stall in the exhibition hall – similar applications in 2022 and 2023 had been rejected. Tonia Antoniazzi, the back-bench Labour MP for Gower, said “our party has come a very, very long way since 2021” at the first standing-room-only event. At the 2021 party conference in Brighton, the group had faced a noisy and intimidating protest outside. (The third article in the LWD’s declaration is that “women have the right to discuss policies that affect them without being abused, harassed or intimidated”.)
Perhaps most significant for the LWD’s second event is that it was attended by a minister – Jess Phillips, who holds the portfolio for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls. The expectation that Phillips will deliver for women was apparent across several events, including one hosted by the charities UK Feminista and CEASE (Centre to End All Sexual Exploitation), which launched their campaign to make paying for sex illegal, while decriminalising victims of sexual exploitation and providing support and exiting services. Mia de Faoite, an activist who had been involved in bringing about similar legal changes in Ireland, talked of her own story of surviving prostitution. Over six years she had been “purchased by a buyer to be sexually assaulted” 4,000 times, she said. She had been raped a dozen times, she added.
De Faoite said to the crowd: “Be a liberal, but never be a liberal at the expense of human dignity.” And she expressed consternation with the labelling of “sex work” as traditional “work”. Meanwhile, Phillips described how she crossed out every single reference to “sex work” in a brief presented to her ahead of a parliamentary debate on commercial sexual exploitation in July 2024. She replaced it with “prostituted women and men”. The minister herself had single-handedly tabled 77 amendments to the last Conservative government’s 2021 Domestic Abuse Bill.
Phillips’s commitment to halving violence against women and girls cannot be doubted. But she was clear that legislation would not solve everything. “I don’t want to be able to stand up and say ‘I’m the best feminist for passing this law’ if it means naff all on the ground,” she said. Government, she contended, along with the police, health service and society, needed to make sure that the system worked along the way. Those who had been prostituted needed their housing and health needs met in order to make the exit from prostitution possible. And – she asked – even if victims of sexual exploitation were prioritised for housing, what good would that be if it amounted to waiting three years rather than five?
Another event that looked at how Labour can achieve its ambitious target of halving violence against women and girls made the scale of the problem clear: 14-year-old girls now report rape more often than any other age group. That should make everyone take notice. “We are in government, we are going to change things,” Antoniazzi promised rooms full of (predominantly) women. “I’m going to be that pain in Jess Phillips’ arse,” she joked.
That all these events were packed is indicative. If there was any doubt whether Labour members cared about women’s rights, there can be few now. It seems, for the first time in years, that the party is listening.
[See also: The unspeakable horror of the French mass rape case]
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