Login
In the wake of her decision to resign, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s outgoing first minister, said that life for women politicians who “put their head above the parapet” is “much harsher” and “more hostile” now than at any time in her decades-long career.
Women are better represented in politics than ever and with flourishing online feminist activism such as #MeToo, more and more women publicly claim their rights. This, however, has created a backlash against women’s rights that women in the public eye bear the brunt of.
There are more women than ever in political office. As of December 2022, 26.4% of parliamentarians worldwide are women and there are 30 women serving as elected heads of state or heads of government.
Yet, the UN Women agency calculates that at the current rate, it will take 130 years to reach gender equality in the highest positions of power. The trajectory is upward. The rate of progress, slow.
Having women dare to “put their head above the parapet” is important. Research has shown that most legislative changes on women’s issues worldwide have been achieved thanks to pressure from feminist movements. Where women are part of the decision-making process they are able to instigate change and improve lives, not only by addressing women’s issues but also by, for instance, promoting welfare policies and investing in public goods. This is also a very current issue. As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been argued that countries headed through the crisis by women leaders emerged form the pandemic in better shape.
All this raises a dilemma. Women’s involvement in politics has been hard won but those who lead the way appear to be paying a high cost. There may be more women in offices of authority and influence than ever before, but everyday women in such positions face violence and abuse directed towards them: from sexist and misogynist comments about their appearance to death and rape threats to physical assault. This is abuse that men do not suffer to the same extent.
Violence against women serves to reinforce a gender system where the roles, responsibilities and norms of women and men are clearly defined. Those who fall outside of them are punished and forced to comply. Women challenging the idea of politics and the public sphere as a “man’s world” are targeted to “show them their place in society” and that has consequences.
A report on violence against women politicians in South Asia, for example, found that 90% of women in India, Nepal and Pakistan felt that violence breaks their resolve to join politics. Another Report by the Fawcett Society this year found that 93% of women MPs in the UK said that online abuse or harassment has a negative impact on how they feel about being an MP.
For our work with Amnesty International on violence against women and girls, we had no shortage of case studies of women in the public sphere who spoke up only to be faced with online and offline violence. Often this abuse is compounded by a host of demographic factors, including race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion and disability. Diane Abbott, the UK’s first black female MP, who has been in the job since 1987, came close to quitting due to racist and sexualised abuse.
For Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, negative media attention “wasn’t just about me as a woman … it was also steeped in classism and about where I come from, where I grew up”.
Kim Leadbeater, sister of the murdered MP Jo Cox, was faced with a barrage of homophobic abuse while campaigning for Batley and Spen. In the UK, Jewish and Muslim women MPs face the most abuse on social media.
In only six weeks in 2022, Muslim MP Naz Shah received nearly 5,000 toxic messages on Twitter. Shah says she has come to see it as part of her routine:
I still wake up to a daily barrage of racist, Islamophobic, sexist and hate-filled tweets.
We need to think about how key institutions (political parties, parliaments, governments) deal with the abuse directed at women who put themselves forward. State legislation, such as the UK’s online safety bill or Bolivia’s 2012 law specifically criminalising political violence and harassment against women, are important steps in the right direction. But without addressing the still all-too common attitudes that assign women to the private sphere and define politics as the sphere of men, we will not be able to solve the problem.
Without creating an awareness among young adults of violence against women and girls, its causes and possible solutions, women who engage in online and offline politics will remain targets of bias based on gender. Indeed, we need political institutions to lead in this cause instead of leaving organisations such as the UN and Amnesty to bear the burden.
Parveen Akhtar had a consultancy contract with Amnesty International Hungary to develop online material on Violence against Women and Girls.
Anne Jenichen had a consultancy contract with Amnesty International Hungary to develop online material on Violence against Women and Girls.
Patricia Correa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
As an academic specialising in part in why political corruption happens, the tenure of Boris Johnson (and its aftermath) has provided me with much to consider. Indeed, over the past 18 months, it has felt like I’m getting asked the same question over and over again. After the Owen Paterson affair: is this corruption? After the cash for curtains episode: is this corruption? Partygate: is this corruption?
We’ve had a pretty workable and simple definition of what corruption is for about 30 years. It is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.
We can use this definition to answer the question in relation to the latest revelations about the Johnson family. The proposal to give Stanley Johnson, Boris Johnson’s father a knighthood: is it corruption?
We need to work from our above definition. Do we have entrusted power? Do we have an abuse? Do we have private gain? In two out of three instances here, we have an open and shut case.
Boris Johnson was prime minister and his father is reportedly being recommended in his resignation honours. Power doesn’t get much more entrusted than that. Is there private gain? Well, in the British system, there’s much to be gained from having a knighted businessman in the family.
The abuse issue is ever so slightly cloudier. We would have to wait to see the justification given for putting Stanley Johnson forward for a knighthood, but it comes down to: what would his knighthood be in service of?
Even if one can make a pretty good case he is deserving of a knighthood, it will be incredibly hard to shake the not unreasonable perception that he’s only getting one because of who his son is – that it is cronyism and nepotism at its finest.
One thing that became quite clear during Johnson’s time as prime minister is that he holds a different view to many on what constitutes acceptable and appropriate standards in public life. He has what I call, “McNulty syndrome”.
Like the famous character from The Wire, Johnson thinks of himself as a maverick. He may not play by the rules – but that gets results. He Gets Brexit Done. Just don’t question his methods.
Johnson has, in many ways, based his whole appeal on this approach. Those who like him do, in part, because he’s not like other politicians. He plays fast and loose with the rules. Those who hate him, do so precisely because they think he debases (and debased) the offices which he holds.
He has a unique appeal to a unique subset of voters – and that, some believe, makes him electoral gold dust.
Viewed in this light, Stanley’s reported knighthood is entirely unsurprising. It is a pattern of behaviour established throughout his son’s time in office. It is born, in part, of a basic electoral calculation.
When push comes to shove, the electorate cares far more about outcomes than process. Johnson believes that to voters, economy, health and (back in 2019, getting Brexit done) are far more important than honours lists.
Long-time frenemy Michael Gove was quite up front about this when reflecting on the 2019 campaign. You may remember Johnson took a few hits for refusing to be interviewed by the BBC’s Andrew Neil. When asked if this was a mistake, Gove’s answer was: “No. We won.”
The problem with this win-at-all costs approach is that it is based on a fundamental misreading of the terrain. There is good evidence outlined by the political scientist Will Jennings, that his unique political talents and appeal, while not to be dismissed, are often overstated.
And the public, in fact, do care about standards, ethics and honour. UCL’s Constitution Unit, for example, showed a high degree of support for reforming the current standards system.
À lire aussi : Voters value honesty in their politicians above all else – new study
They found the importance of politicians holding high moral standards to be of a similar importance to climate change. As the unit’s director, Meg Russell, argued: “There could be electoral rewards for politicians who respond” to public concerns about good behaviour.
The maverick schtick can get tired. Jimmy McNulty was interesting and effective in season one of The Wire but by season five he was (spoiler alert), staging murders with the bodies of dead homeless people. And (spoiler alert) that was pretty much that for Jimmy McNulty’s policing career.
Johnson should therefore beware. With more partygate revelations coming out over a year since the first, his behaviour in office continues to be a fly in the ointment for Rishi Sunak’s political project.
On the surface this might seem like misfortune for the current prime minister, who risks being tarred with the same brush. But a tactical advantage is also within his grasp.
The more Boris Johnson neglects widely agreed standards of appropriate behaviour, the more Sunak can put clear blue water between himself and his predecessor. We know that the public do care about ethics, and they do value these traits in leaders. What they don’t have, is unlimited patience with Johnson.
Ultimately, giving Stanley Johnson a knighthood shows that Johnson has learned nothing from his removal as PM. Aside from among a rump of Conservative MPs and party members, he is not as popular as he thinks.
People care much more about ethical behaviour and perceptions of competence than his calculations tell him. All this suggests that the knighthood looks a lot more like a plot line from a political show in its final season rather than its premiere.
Sam Power has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
The 1990s are everywhere right now. From the fashion trends making a comeback in 2023 (I’m told), to the hotly anticipated return of the flashback mystery-box thriller Yellowjackets, it’s starting to feel like the millennium never happened. And where pop culture leads, politics inevitably follows.
Events swirling around prime minister Rishi Sunak are more than a little reminiscent of the sleaze that dogged John Major’s Conservative government for most of his tenure between 1992 and 1997. So much so that I was recently reminded of a passage written by political scientist Tim Bale:
That he won a leadership contest could do nothing to boost the Conservative Party’s popularity. His tendency to try to conciliate all sides of an increasingly factionalized parliamentary party bought him time, during which he hoped – in vain – that economic recovery would bring voters back to the Tory fold. But it also earned him widespread contempt inside the party and a reputation for fudging and weakness outside it.
If you thought Bale was writing about Rishi Sunak here, you’d be forgiven. It is in fact a description of Major. Like Sunak, he took power after a popular leader largely seen as electoral gold dust lost their lustre (we’ll brush over the Liz Truss experiment here). He was also constantly fighting fires related to standards, made much worse by the way in which he set out his governing agenda.
In 1993, Major announced his intention to lead the UK “back to basics” by focusing on the “traditional values” of “self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family”. He had been speaking about the whole country but his words came back to haunt him over and over as revelations about the financial and personal dealings of his MPs came to light.
After days of mounting criticism, Sunak finally sacked Conservative party chairman Nadhim Zahawi’s over his failure to pay what appears to have been a tax bill of millions. This is the scandal currently plaguing Sunak most insistently . But his predecessor Boris Johnson’s connection with BBC chairman Richard Sharp has caused no small amount of trouble as well. Both matters predate Sunak’s time in office, and are somewhat out of his control but nevertheless show the bind he is in.
There is longstanding research that shows that there are logics of appropriate behaviour in society. And that these logics of what is (and is not) considered alright differ between people, countries and contexts.
So, as I have shown in my research on money in politics, different countries have different understandings of what acceptable levels of donation are. Other researchers have highlighted that sex scandals are much more likely to be an issue for British people than French people, for example. A snap poll taken almost a full week before Sunak made a decision about Zahawi showed a majority thought the chairman should lose his job. Another poll taken around the same time saw 75% of respondents say they think members of parliament should publish their tax returns.
Part of Sunak’s pitch on the steps of Downing Street when he first took office was to bring integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level of his government after the wayward Boris Johnson years. The problem for Sunak, is that it makes him all the more at risk from questions of ethics and propriety than his predecessor.
Boris Johnson was the “greased piglet” of UK politics. He was born slippy. So an amount of misbehaviour was baked in to the cake (until it wasn’t).
Tolerance for Rishi Sunak, when it comes to standards issues, is simply much lower. He is far more at risk from scandal and sleaze than Johnson was, and even more so after tying his premiership to it.
What is happening in British politics in 2023 is therefore similar to the 1990s in more than just one way. The allegations themselves are deeply resonant of course, but the way Sunak has been compromised is also similar. For Major, his “back to basics” pledge simply became a stick to beat him with during the many sleaze scandals that fell onto his lap.
Sunak will be aware that the same could easily become true for him. Even if the specific issues with Zahawi and Johnson are soon forgotten, future scandals are practically written into Sunak’s schedule over the next few months.
In the coming weeks we will see the release of Johnson’s resignation honours, which is said to be stuffed with people who have done him favours, often of the financial kind, over the years. A parliamentary inquiry into whether Johnson mislead parliament over partygate is also about to begin, reminding everyone of the behaviour that triggered the beginning of the end for his government – and potentially of Sunak’s own police fine for breaking lockdown rules.
A pessimist, then, would say that the next election will mark the end of the road for Sunak, and the Conservative party in power. Much like Major was effectively leading a zombie government to inevitable defeat in 1997, Sunak appears to have no distance left to run.
But, despite the numerous historic parallels, there’s an important difference. The Labour opposition has much more work to do now than it did during the final Major years, and will be electioneering with a leader much less popular than Tony Blair. Remember, Labour suffered a catastrophic defeat in 2019, which puts them quite significantly on the back foot leading into the next election.
The current political landscape, of course, should take precedence. But history can tell us a lot about the current travails of Rishi Sunak, and how we might expect the next few years to shake out.
And, while there’s certainly more than a whiff of the 1990s about this Conservative government, the key difference is its larger majority. Of all the small things that might decide the next election, that’s one thing we should never forget.
Sam Power has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.
FreshRSS