Solidarity with Bex Bailey

Reading through Bex Bailey's account of her rape at the 2011 Labour conference made me feel sick. But what it also made me feel was weary, perhaps an insight into the kind of bone tiredness feminist comrades are used to feeling when they encounter these stories and experiences time after time after time. A year later, in 2012 in Manchester, one of my friends was similarly attacked by a conference goer. This had a traumatic impact on her mental health and ultimately drove her out of the party. That these things can and do happen at a Labour Party event, you know, the party responsible for the bulk of Britain's feminist legislative achievements, is fucking appalling. Unfortunately, this is the sharp end of a spectrum of sexist behaviour that exists in the Labour Party. It runs the whole gamut from not treating women seriously, bullying, and a refusal to consider them for seats to lechery, unsolicited text harassment, propositions, touching and so on. Society has a problem with sexist double standards. It routinely does not take claims of rape and sexual assault seriously, and because Labour mirrors the world it inhabits the party has a problem too.

Bex's experience was awful, but what happened next was no one off. While it is unusual for an official to explicitly warn against making a complaint lest it impact her future, there are thousands of women who keep harassment to themselves for very similar reasons. Some also don't want to "make a fuss" in case it casts the party in an unfavourable light. The problem is there are predatory men in our own ranks who know this, and carry on carrying on. And what is truly terrifying is they often see nothing wrong in patronising women, blocking women, touching women, harassing women. It's therefore encouraging the party has reiterated its position and is taking matters seriously. No one can hide behind ignorance any longer. The same cannot be said for the Prime Minister and the army of rightwingers lining up to denigrate and minimise the issue.

Yet while, at least officially, Labour is institutionally anti-sexist, as it is anti-racist and anti-anti-semitic, it was appalling to see some idiots carry on about the Tories on the very thread the story broke on. This was less a case of naive and more one of stupid, tactless, and emotionally barren cynicism, a product of the semi-conspiracy thinking abroad among the new left and conditioned by the suspicion millions of people more or less default to when a woman makes a rape claim. It shows that even on the left there is much to be done.

But what is to be done? Sorting out the complaints procedure in the Labour Party in the first instance, and at Westminster is certainly necessary but is by no means sufficient. Here, the wider left needs to take a leaf out of feminism's book and work to politicise harassment. I mean, it's not as if women comrades haven't been trying. What's going on is a matter of power, gendered power, and we need to talk about it, analyse it, and bloody well do something about it. Things might be better now than they were when sexism on the left got a wide airing 40 years ago in Beyond the Fragments, but the continuum of misogyny is not treated at all with the same degree of seriousness racism receives, for instance. A racist remark comes - rightly - attached with huge social costs, which is congruent with the damage racist behaviour does. The same isn't afforded to women. Everyone agrees sexual assault and other violence against women is bad, but its more (apparently) innocuous relatives doubling up as background culture get free passes too frequently. Changing this culture, changing wider culture demands a statement of explicit political intent. It demands of men not only to take the politics of feminism seriously, not least its trenchant critique of sexism, but to work on our own behaviours individually and challenge male comrades to do likewise - for starters.

Writing praise for Bex's bravery and declaring solidarity with her is the easy part. Taking on sexism, making it as unacceptable as racism, and working to put women on an equal footing to men is the hard part. But is absolutely central and necessary to what socialism is about.