I'm sorry ladies, but Labour thinks you're second-best

I’m sorry ladies, but Labour thinks you’re second-best. Yes, that’s right: Labour is the party that has a problem with women.
Yesterday, a lot of fuss was made of Andy Burnham’s “when the time is right” response to the question of whether it would be a good thing for Labour to have a woman leader – a response that resulted in Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall heckling him and demonstrating their finest credentials as Machiavellian wannabes who are, in fact, politically bankrupt fools. “When will that be?” Demanded Cooper. “Say yes, Andy,” piped Liz.

The meaning of Burnham’s response is obvious: the time is right when the best candidate for the job happens to be a woman. His detractors might have tried to depict this as sexist to try and advance the cause of the other candidates, but self-interest wasn’t the only reason for their dismay. They are continuing Labour’s fine tradition of stunts and gestures that, cloaked in the self-righteous discourse of equality, are patronising and demeaning to women beyond belief. Nothing more powerfully illustrates this than their poisoning of democratic candidate selections by the legalisation of all women short lists (AWS). These were famously used in 1997 in half of Labour’s winnable seats, or at least would have been if brave male candidates hadn’t taken it to court under the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. This positive discrimination was enabled by Labour subsequently enacting legislation permitting affirmative action in such circumstances, legitimising the practice and giving David Cameron, in his earlier ‘policies for the papers’ days of leadership, rather silly ideas. The message was clear: there weren’t enough women, so we needed more. It didn’t matter if they were the most competent, they just had to be there, and that was enough for Labour to congratulate itself on making politics somehow more equal. Heaven forbid that these bright, educated ladies should have to compete for the prize with similarly competent men. Heaven forbid that we could try and introduce equality by encouraging women to participate, rather than giving them a free ride in a safe seat. By 2010, Corbynite lunatic Diane Abbott was whinging that all the shortlisted women were white. Where does this end? When will the day come where a northern constituency in Labour’s heartland will be contested by a one-legged, lesbian Muslim who’ll work flexible hours to manage her childcare? I’m not having a go at any one-legged gay Muslim with children (I'm not Richard Littlejohn), just the idea that Labour thinks she needs to be given all the prizes in order for us to say we have a fair society and representative political system, and the idea that we will condemn her to feeling inadequate and belittled in the knowledge that we thought her too special, or too suitably oppressed to make her fight for it.

Labour’s affirmative action nonsense has poisoned politics, but its rhetoric is equally toxic. Jeremy Corbyn’s ridiculous all-female train carriages are absurd and clearly show that Labour’s future leader may have been taking too many lessons from his religious fundamentalist chums, but they aren’t the real story. The real story was a few years back when, sparring with William Hague across the Despatch box (I think he was filling in for David Cameron), Harriet Harman launched a scathing attack on the Conservative party. I can’t remember the reason, but only her declaring that in the Tory party “women are seen but not heard.” I nearly fell off my chair. Margaret who?
Harman has spouted out similar attacks on the Tories in relation to their view of women since this exchange, always failing to see the iron lady-shaped hole in her argument. Earlier this year, a journalist finally pointed the obvious out to her, prompting an immediate new line of attack. She now argues that it’s not about having women in the top jobs, it’s about what those women do and particularly what they do for other women. Well done Harriet! That’s exactly the meritocratic argument that ultimately saw an outsider from Grantham called Margaret Roberts, enter this male-dominated arena and conquer it completely. Thatcher didn’t expect special treatment, or even delight in the fact that she had not only broken the so-called ‘glass ceiling,’ but smashed it. And if Harriet Harman now can only sustain her attacks by criticising the accomplishments of powerful Tory women, she necessarily disputes the idea that a woman being there because she’s a woman is good, and puts herself in opposition to the special treatment that Labour has given women for years – special treatment that has led to the colonisation of the party by the great and the good of the screeching, whining sisterhood. Liz Kendall cries sexism when a newspaper innocently asks about her appearance, wrongly asserting that men are never asked about it just weeks after a big news item about Cameron’s weight gain following all that exhausting dining room diplomacy across Europe, and that paper having written about George Osborne’s weight loss in the past.
Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper thinks voters want a ‘feminist economy’ (yep, I’ve no idea either), as though we still live in the era of the Suffragettes. All people want is a sustainable economy that grows reliably and is geared to creating opportunities for work and business development. They don’t want Yvette’s feminist claptrap.
And that’s why it may be some time before Labour find’s what Burnham calls the “right candidate,” from among its female big guns; the “right candidate” will have to vocally oppose Labour’s sexist ideas of women, and its belief in disregarding fairness as the only means to elevate them from second-class citizens to pretty faces on the Commons benches. Labour’s sulking prima donnas will make that job a very difficult one for her. One could hardly expect anything else, when they are so incapable of looking beyond their stereotypes and acknowledging that the Tories have surged ahead in the equality game (for want of a better term), and they have been formed in a political party that can’t ever tell the delicate flowers that they mightn’t be as good as the boys.