Labour ballot paperLabour Party members, affiliates and supporters are currently voting in the second leadership election of five years, following defeat in the May 2015 General Election. The original ‘outsider’ candidate, Jeremy Corbyn looks poised to win on Saturday on an anti-austerity platform. As Emily Wight has written for 50.50, this is good news for women, who have borne the burden of austerity on top of that of patriarchy. Austerity measures have also disproportionately impacted Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people. Despite an overall decrease in unemployment figures, long-term unemployment for BAME youth has risen by 50%. Institutional sexism and racism have been greatly exacerbated.
As his opponents – both within and beyond the Labour Party – seek to deride Corbyn’s policy positions, they use gendered language which tells of a political establishment entrenched in patriarchal traditions. Corbyn’s supporters are commonly described in mainstream media as succumbing to ‘Corbynmania’; as ‘loony’, ‘idealists’, ‘maniacs’, ‘fantasists’, or led by their hearts rather than their brains (prompting Tony Blair’s intervention: ‘get a transplant’). These are all terms that have historically been used to disparage women, wrongly based on assumptions about our physicality. Indeed, before the British government granted limited women’s suffrage less than a century ago, anti-suffragists argued that women were ‘emotional’ and therefore incapable of sound decision-making.
Notably, before the General Election this May, Nick Clegg positioned the Liberal Democrats as able to ‘add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one’ – thereby ‘feminising’ the Labour Party as a whole. Caring, but not fit for stately affairs. With a different subject, this could have been anti-suffragist propaganda.
