private incomes or salaried jobs that grant leave of absence to run, and that’s assuming they aren’t caring for children or elderly relatives. The Women’s Equality Party wanted to support women to become candidates, not only by paying their deposit money but also by providing bursaries to help with childcare and other costs.
So we were eager to open for membership as soon as possible to establish the revenue stream necessary to do this – any of this. We needed funding just to collect funds. The Electoral Commission allows political parties to accept donations over £500 only from permissible donors: UK-based companies and individuals registered on a UK electoral roll. The regulations are intended to stop foreigners and tax exiles from buying influence in British politics – no representation without taxation, as it were – but do nothing of the kind. Any global corporation with a UK subsidiary is entitled to donate, no matter how breathtaking its tax-minimising schemes. Any person rich enough to stash wealth offshore is probably also rich enough to find channels to donate.
Yet WE risked penalties if, say, a British national living in the UK but not registered to vote gave a series of small donations that in total breached the £500 threshold. The only way to guard against such accidents is to check would-be donors against the electoral register, which inevitably isn’t a conveniently centralised electronic list, but a series of lists held by local authorities. Sian McGee, a new law graduate and youngest member of the original steering committee, became WE’s first paid employee, hired to perform these checks. She immediately spotted a potentially dodgy transaction. The party had launched a time-limited founding membership scheme, ranging from £2 a month to £1,000 and upwards for lifetime membership. Sandi enrolled online for the latter option but Sian could find no Toksvigs on the electoral roll. She could not know that Sandi’s information is withheld since a stalker broke into her house. Sian diligently rang Sandi to query her eligibility to help found the party she had founded.
The final hurdle to gaining official party status involved seeking the Electoral Commission’s approval for our logo and slogan for use on ballot papers. Two wonderfully talented designers, Sara Burns and Jeanette Clement, volunteered to produce a logo for us. They had never met before joining the steering committee, but instantly devised a way of working together, and celebrated that collaborative spirit, and the party’s aims, with a design that turned the E of WE into an equal sign. They chose a palette not in use by any other party – green, white and violet, the colours of the Suffragette movement. The committee then voted on a range of slogans and landed back on the one I had written for the public meeting back in March: ‘Because equality is better for everyone.’
This book aims to test that proposition. It might appear that the only point of debate relates to men and whether by ceding their dominance they would really gain more than they lose. The rest seems self-evident.
Inequality is yawning and its impact is disfiguring. The gap between rich and poor countries, and between rich and poor, is widening. One per cent of the global population owns more wealth than everyone else on the planet combined. Not even the one per cent look happy about this state of affairs as they transfer from one hermetically sealed bubble to the next, ringed with security lest real life accost them. In rich countries, the poor struggle daily to survive. As many as a fifth of Britons live below the poverty line, as do more than 15 per cent of Americans. Social mobility is stalling. Social unrest is deepening. Conflicts spill across borders and reach out violently into distant city centres. Many of the people displaced by those conflicts, some 65.3 million on current estimates, seek shelter in countries already lacking resources; 86 per cent of the world’s refugees are lodged in the developing world. Migrants reaching Europe should expect a mixed reception. Any dreams of universal live-and-let-live tolerance are dissipating as populist hate-mongers and extremist movements find, in their supposed polarities, common cause against liberalism.
Surely if we successfully dismantle the patriarchy, the biggest structural injustice of all, other structural injustices must also begin to crumble. Surely a more gender-equal world will be a more equal world in other ways too.
Yet from the start of WE, easy assumptions frayed. Our first steering committee meeting took place at my central London flat, in my kitchen. We sat around an extendable table owned by my family since 1933, when my widowed great-grandmother started dealing antiques from her front room in a Chicago suburb during the city’s Century of Progress International Exposition (a World’s Fair with the motto ‘Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Adapts’). The table tells a story not just of female entrepreneurship, but of comfort. My middle-class family, émigrés to the US, not refugees, lived in homes large enough for such a table.
There were ten of us at the first steering committee meeting. Not every woman (and neither of the men who joined us) had been born to the same level of advantage, and none of us had problem-free lives. Between us we wrestled with disability, physical and mental health issues, had experienced racism, homophobia, ageism and abuse. Still, we all enjoyed the luxury of political activism. Entry to the steering committee rested on two qualifications: an enthusiasm for the idea of the party and a commitment to getting it started. Many women are too busy with low-paid work or unpaid caregiving to spend time trying to fix the problems of women in low-paid work or unpaid caregiving. Our participation in the committee defined us as an elite, and we knew that to build a representative party we needed to be a representative party at the core. It would take us longer to appreciate the scale and complexity of that task.
As the committee recruited additional members, and culinary contributions became more elaborate, we had to look for other venues. The size of my table wasn’t the issue. Mandy Colleran, an actor and activist, used a motorised wheelchair that could not navigate the narrow doorway to my flat. Other members volunteered to host, but every alternative venue revealed structural impediments that able-bodied residents hadn’t appreciated. A lift in one apartment block proved too small. Another disabled committee member offered her flat but its front steps defeated Mandy’s chair. There are degrees of disability as there are degrees of inequality. Many impediments are visible only to those whose path they block.
Mandy is a coruscating speaker, painfully and often hilariously direct in her opinions. She spoke up at our first public meeting and again at the second, held at Conway Hall, since 1929 the home of the Ethical Society and a fulcrum of liberal activism. Its CEO, Jim Walsh, had quickly decided to support the nascent Women’s Equality Party by making the auditorium available to us for events at low rates with deferred payment. Unfortunately, Conway Hall’s precarious income and listed building status meant that, although it is fully accessible for audience members in wheelchairs, there is no ramp to the stage. We decided against using the stage for that event and anyone who wanted to speak did so from the floor. Sometimes equality is about finding a level that works for everyone. A lot of the time, it’s more complicated than that.
At first we plundered our own address books to grow the party but our London base risked a London bias. It has been exciting to watch the idea spread to other parts of England and to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and in each context to define different sets of priorities within our unified commitment to change. Committee members’ combined circles encompassed a wide range of professions and experiences, even if they were a little heavy on entertainment, media and politics. My friends and contacts came in all shapes, sizes and flavours. If asked, I might well have described them as diverse.
That’s because it’s easy to misunderstand diversity. One friend, a senior figure in the media, explains it well. He is hugely talented, but knows that the fact he ticks some ‘diversity boxes’ made the companies that employed him look good without actually challenging their culture. He speaks and acts like a member of the establishment club despite a mixed-race heritage and comprehensive-school background. He learned to minimise differences, to put people, including people like me, at ease. ‘Frankly, as one black friend who has risen a long way in politics put it to me, we don’t frighten the horses,’ he says. The point he is making is that for organisations to benefit from diversity, be they corporations or political parties, they must accept and value the discomfort of difference. It’s pleasant
