Europe: Why Women should Vote Out

Harriet Harman MP recently told women to vote to stay in the EU. She suggested the EU has secured women equal rights and British politicians might undermine them.

In fact, the most significant equal rights legislation was passed before we entered the Common Market and won after hard struggle by our own women’s movement, reforming politicians and trade unions. From the Sexual Offences Act (1956), the NHS (Family Planning) Act (1967) and the Abortion Act (1967), through to the Equal Pay Act (1970) these were rights won here in the UK. The strike over equal pay by British female workers at the Ford car factory in Dagenham led directly to the passing of the Equal Pay Act. Between 1972 and 1974, it was local women who set up Women’s Aid refuges and rape crisis centres to challenge violence against women.

British people voted to endorse the decision to join the Common Market in 1975, the same year the Sex Discrimination Act was passed. This followed a campaign by the UK women’s movement, owing nothing to Europe. Also in 1975, following domestic campaigning, the Employment Protection Act introduced statutory maternity provision and made it illegal to dismiss women due to pregnancy. This pattern of domestic campaigning has continued. As the EU tightened its grip on British legislation, there was no significant related increase in women’s rights. The EU failed to protect lesbians from Section 28 and did not end it. Neither has the EU led the domestic fight against forced marriage and FGM. The UN leads on violence against women.

Harman claimed there is a “phoney perception” that women’s rights would remain regardless of whether the UK is in the EU, saying: “Why should we trust the likes of Boris Johnson, Iain Duncan-Smith or Nigel Farage with our rights as women?.”

In fact, there’s no reason to believe that EU politicians would be more likely to protect women’s interests. The current growth of overtly fascist parties in Europe poses a far greater threat to women’s rights than anything these British politicians could manage. So too, does mass male migration to the Continent from countries where sexism and contempt for women is institutionalised and underpinned by ideology and religion. Predictably there has been an increase in sexual violence against females.

It stuns me that politicians suggest women should look to Europe for protection, when so many EU countries are worse than our own at protecting women’s rights. Only now, are French female politicians beginning to speak out about widespread sexual abuse by male colleagues. In Italy, the era of Berlusconi casts a long shadow. German politicians have responded to a wave of sexual offences by migrant males by abandoning victims, suppressing information, disrupting criminal investigations and offering ‘sex education’ to males – education which focuses on ‘western’ sexual manners (and encourages the use of pornography), rather than challenging sexism and defending all women’s right to freedom and safety.

The EU’s commitment to free movement of labour has brought huge profits for corporations by actively encouraging immigration of unskilled or semi-skilled workers, most of them non-unionised. This has driven down the wages of low-paid female workers, increased insecure contracts and undermined the capacity of trade unionists to negotiate better conditions. Women’s continuing responsibility for child and elder care, as well as their relative poverty, makes them primary users of public services, which are currently under siege. Women are at the sharp end of deliberate policy decisions aimed at undermining public services and workers’ rights – without regard to the suffering it causes. Current political leaders are failing to defend them.

Women should vote Out – then gather together to organise. It’s the only way our world will change.

A Nation Once Again.

As I potter about the house, I sing to myself. It’s amuses me that the tunes are often an inadvertent commentary on matters of the day.

Just recently, I’ve been singing Thomas Osbourne Davis’ A Nation Once Again. I know I’m in Britain and this is a nineteenth century anthem to Irish independence, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

I started humming it when the EU referendum campaign began. I sang it louder when David Cameron spent nine billion pounds of our money sending out a leaflet advising us to vote In. But I began to belt it out in earnest when an arrogant US President came to visit and threatened us we’d be pushed to the back of the queue for American trade deals if we voted to leave the EU.

For barefaced nerve, this intervention was hard to beat – as was the letter from former Secretaries of State and Defence urging an In vote and warning Brexit would diminish our ‘influence’. In fact, the last thing the US wants is a resurgent independent Britain. We provide an obedient voice in a German-led bloc which the US needs to fight its corner against Russia – a country that is not our enemy. This is why the US has encouraged rapid eastwards expansion of the EU, fostering conflict with Russia and causing unsustainable levels of mass migration to the UK.

The US is currently negotiating the EU into TTIP, an appalling trade agreement which will fetter individual parliaments and put our country’s public services, especially our NHS, at the mercy of large US corporations. Even right wing Tories like former minister Peter Lilley have argued against it, warning that large corporations will be able to sue governments which act to protect their national interests.

My favourite verse of Davis’ great rebel anthem is: “And then I prayed I yet might see/ Our fetters rent in twain/ And (Britain), long a province, be/ A Nation once again!”. It may seem odd to call our country a “province” , but it’s an accurate representation of this country’s post-war relationship with the US and the EU. We are both a US client-state and a province of the EU.

I’m an immigrant and, I realise, a patriot. I came to this country because I hated Apartheid. I admired Britain’s courage in standing up to European fascism. Like so many in the former colonies, I was inspired by the British people’s struggle for equal human rights and democracy.

Cameron dared to refer to Commonwealth war dead as a reason to vote against Brexit. My grandfather fought in East Africa in the First World War and I consider Cameron’s words an insult. Britain deployed its own and its colonies’ people to fight and die in two bloody world wars – amongst other things to prevent German domination of the European continent. It is beyond belief that Britain has now turned its back on those former colonies, in order to meekly co-operate in the latest German-led exercise in European domination. Recently leaked German government papers have made it clear that Germany plans to “assume leadership” of a proposed European defence force, which will absorb national armies.

I don’t believe the EU is reformable, neither do I think it preserves our rights. Such rights as we have we have fought for over centuries, including the right to self-determination and to elect our government. Yet now we are governed by unelected European Commissioners. We cannot control our own borders, our infrastructure is collapsing under the weight of unmanaged immigration and we cannot plan effectively for the future.

It is time for Britain to assert its independence, forge new alliances and reshape old ones. Time to be a nation once again.