“Dear Harriet: Your pink bus isn’t equality. It’s bollocks,” was a pervading sentiment yesterday following the launch of Harriet Harman’s “Woman to Woman” tour of marginal constituencies, as Labour try to win back the 9.1 million women who failed to vote in the last general election. In a pink van. As soon as I saw a picture of the thing – sprayed gingivitis pink – I said, “Fuck me,” aloud at my desk. It was never going to be an instant hit.
The word “patronising” has ricocheted through social media like a blind rat trapped in a bin. Twitter parodies have run the gamut from Barbie to Sheila’s Wheels. Some have been funny, while others – the, “I’m voting Labour because they have a pretty pink bus,” kind of thing – felt more gleefully spiteful. Either way, the idea that women might find the pink bus patronising has become a big question. Have Labour been a bit silly?
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Perhaps. But it’s not really as simple as some women feeling patronised by the colour pink, or that Labour are using another unorthodox way (remember The Red Wedge?) of reaching potential voters. Gendered politics often run the risk of being utterly absurd, but if you are going to attempt to tackle the rottenness at the core of a system – in this case, that millions of women across the country feel utterly silenced and fucked over – you have to acknowledge the system itself in order to stand out from it.
For all the lols it might generate, Harman is right to defend the colour of the bus, because to make a serious pledge to address women’s issues, you have to be conspicuous. There will be plenty more people asking Harman if there’s going to be a blue bus as well, and I’m sure in the run up to May we’ll read all kinds of thinkpieces about how Labour are Cath Kidston-ing politics, but… I dunno. I can’t help but think I’d rather feel a bit grossed out than completely ignored.
If real conversations are going to be taking place with women about rape, domestic violence, childcare and equal pay during an election campaign rather than politicians parroting the same lines about Trident and the economy, I’ll happily put the packaging to the back of my mind. I’ll try to fight the urge to sing Beverley Craven’s ” Woman to Woman” whenever anyone brings the bus up. It may seem like a divisive gimmick, but can’t we accept that it might be necessary? It’s not just a pink bus – it’s about our democracy.
For all Labour’s faults, of which there are many, at least they’re acknowledging that something needs to be fixed. Women do work to different schedules and they do spend more time at the public spaces – at school gates, in shopping centres, in public playgrounds – in which Harman is going to set up her stalls. It’s pertinent, too, that these public spaces are the very ones the Tories are trying to sell off.
In being so glaringly specific with this Woman to Woman campaign, Labour aren’t just acknowledging the fact that women engage with politics – i.e. not in shouty, point-scoring debates, but with concrete concerns like where to get free school meal vouchers – differently to men. They’re addressing the foundation of inequality, the bigger picture. Because when you ignore the bigger picture, you end up like David Cameron – a man pleading with big corporations to increase their workers’ wages while simultaneously acting as some kind of privatisation Pac Man, gobbling up huge areas of the workforce and only offering people a lifeline with shitty, zero-hour contracts that leave them, ultimately, feeling as disposable as a crisp packet.
There is nowhere to hide with what Harman is doing with women’s issues – she’s bellowing, not whispering behind her hand. And her detractors will be just as loud. Besides the inevitable, “Why aren’t there any blokes involved, eh?” line of questioning, the fear is that women will be left feeling humiliated by such obvious targeting, or, worse, that they’re being painted as victims. And the answer isn’t simple – some might.
The pink van gave me acid reflux initially, but it’s just not good enough to say there’s no such thing as “women’s issues” any more, not when men are still earning 17.5 percent more than women and private charities are doing more for victims of domestic violence than the government. According to research carried out by KPMG in 2013, 2.9 million women are paid below the Living Wage – 60 percent of those living on it.
Our current government has failed women in more ways than can be listed here, but failed them they have.
Like pouring salt on a razor clam, it’s amazing how a party putting proper money behind a woman-to-woman campaign immediately draws the, “What about the men?” brigade to the surface. It’s like a chemical reaction.
The detractors will shout, too, because the term “women’s issues” has become a bit of a stinky cheese. Those that believe that the pay gap exists because women “choose” to have kids and shatter their careers may not believe there’s such a thing any more – “You’re doing alright, you lot!” – and while we definitely do talk “women” in big, sweeping statements that don’t go into the intricacies of our experience, it’s just too risky to turn away from “women’s issues” completely, boring as it is. Otherwise, how can you begin to build clear arguments about the ways in which half of society feel like they’re discriminated against? That are disproportionately undecided about who to vote for because they probably don’t feel their voice will be heard?
Like pouring salt on a razor clam, it’s amazing how a party putting proper money behind a woman-to-woman campaign immediately draws the, “What about the men?” brigade to the surface. It’s like a chemical reaction. You only have to do a quick Twitter search to see the kind of questions being asked about male victims of rape, domestic abuse and circumcision since Harman has stepped up and said, “Right, we’re going to try something here.” These are very real, very frightening issues for men that cannot be navigated through a female-biased system, but it’s awful and short-sighted to only bring them up in a tokenistic way in order to make feminists – politicians or otherwise – look silly. It does the very opposite of making you look like you take it seriously.
Another key issue in stirring up ideas of what does and what doesn’t patronise women is the assumption that all women have the kind of encylopaediac political knowledge to be affronted by the idea of a campaign van being painted pink. They don’t. But then that’s part of the problem.
A Lib Dem spokeswoman said: “Women voters won’t forget Labour’s car crash record on the economy just because Harriet Harman turns up in a pink van,” but does it really matter what a young victim of domestic violence moving from shelter to shelter knows about the ins and outs of the economy? She wants to know she’s going to be able to safe. That she’ll have enough money to care for and feed her kid who’s just started primary school (where the vast majority of teachers will be women). That she’ll be able to go back to school herself if she wants to. Maybe she would engage with politics if someone came to the school gates and asked her directly. Maybe that “maybe” is better than no conversation at all.
I imagine my late grandmother, too – a caustic working-class woman who worked as a school cook in the East End her entire life – and what the pink bus might mean to her. I don’t remember how she voted, but I know if someone had come to her school and talked to her about how she had to work until she was 67, on a low wage, and juggle it all with caring for me as a baby so my 23-year-old parents could try to make a living, I reckon she’d have listened.
When women engage with other women about things that directly concern them, it can be very powerful. It’s not reductive to acknowledge that there’s something very different that comes from the conversations that happen in all-female company, like the way Stella Creasy encouraged groups of young women to talk about consent, for example. It is, like the fact that politics is still completely male-dominated, a reality.
Besides, Harman can’t exactly speed around in a big red number, can she? It’d look too much like a Royal Mail van – another thing that needs to be renationalised. But that’s a different piece entirely.
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