Mick Hartley

Over the past few days the feminist FiLiA organisation has been meeting in Brighton, only to be met by violence from trans activists operating under the name “Bash Back”. They vandalised the Brighton Centre where the meeting was held, smashing windows and spray painting the front of the building, and then kept up the by-now familiar tactic of disruptive noise and masked blokes with loud-hailers shouting insults at the women. You’d think would be as clear an indication as you could wish for of what’s actually going on here: nasty violent men trying to stop women speaking. But, astonishingly – or perhaps not so astonishingly – the Greens, the Lib-Dems, and Labour party have all disgraced themselves over this – particularly Sian Berry, the local Green MP.

Tom Harris in the Telegraph:

 Sian Berry, who represents Brighton Pavilion for the Green Party, tweeted that: “Events that inflame division and create tension should be guarded against and [Brighton and Hove Council] needs better policies for which events it will host in our council-owned venues. The choice of Brighton was clearly provocative from organisers and the problems predictable.”

Note how an elected representative makes such great effort to avoid blaming the vandals and thugs who carried out this act of intimidation; look how she blames the women taking part in the conference for “provoking” innocent men into breaking the law against their will. 

Does this victim blaming sound at all familiar? As the Labour MP Jonathan Hinder tweeted: “Why did she wind him up? She knows he’s got a bad temper!” How many women have been told that if they provoke their husbands, it’s hardly their fault if they lash out violently at them?

It wasn’t just the Greens who shamed themselves by their behaviour; their progressive stablemates, the Liberal Democrats, after reports of the night time attack, were only too happy to crow about how their own conference had been free from such violence and vandalism: “We thought the Brighton Centre looked much better when the [LibDems] had our conference there a year ago,” tweeted the party’s LGBT section.

Maybe that’s because Sir Ed Davey’s party is careful not to say anything that might upset certain sections of the community who are ever ready to slip on their size 12 stilettos and do some damage to anyone who disagrees with them. In this way, they guarantee “protection” for their events: “Nice little conference you’ve got here – it would be a pity if anything were to happen to it…”

Making up the triumvirate of shame was the Labour Party, which controls the local council and which refused to provide security protection for the women using one of its venues on the entirely unconvincing basis that it would be “disproportionate”, and not at all because they wanted to keep on the good side of the many trans people in Brighton who currently vote for them.

Shameful all round. Though the responses to Sian Berry’s original tweet make excellent reading.