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How bad must it get before Labour elects a woman?

In her diary entry for 11 March 1968, Barbara Castle noted with an attempt at nonchalance: “The Daily Express has an incredible feature article: Why Barbara is King of the Castle.” She continued, “Frank Allaun [a backbench MP] popped up to me in the dining room in the House to tell me that at more than one meeting recently … my name has seriously been canvassed for PM.”

In June that year, 850 women workers at Ford began a strike for equal pay. The abortion act had become law. Second-wave feminism was beginning to lodge in the popular imagination. Equal pay legislation, Spare Rib and divorce reform were just around the corner. A woman leader of the Labour party, it seemed, was surely the next step.

Nearly 50 years on, the UK’s biggest and oldest mainstream progressive party has still not elected a woman leader. Women – Margaret Beckett, in the months after John Smith’s death, and Harriet Harman now – are OK to stand in as sensible, effective, interim leaders. But elected? Not a chance. Yet within seven years of the suggestion that Castle could be the pioneer, the Conservatives had elected Margaret Thatcher. Why Thatcher, and why not Castle?

Come to that, why Nicola Sturgeon and Natalie Bennett in the 2015 general election? Why do new parties that have progressive agendas understand that women leaders can bring a humanity and engagement to the dry old bloke atmosphere of Westminster. Yet Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are cringingly quizzed about their weight, fertility and fashion choices, and the implication from one of the other camps that they might not be tough enough for the five years ahead. “Startlingly retro” Cooper called it. There are other ways of putting it.

Writing a biography of Barbara Castle, it struck me as inarguable that her failure to make it to the top was partly an everyday tale of luck. Timing and chance shape political destinies. But 1968 was also the peak of her popularity. Within a year, she had destroyed her standing and undermined – almost fatally – her own political legacy.

After the Thatcher assault on trade union rights, many people would say that Castle’s attempt to reform union law, In Place of Strife, was a courageous attempt to meet the challenge posed by strikes and industrial disruption, which in the end played a big part in exiling Labour from power.

It is also clear now that Castle’s politics were feminine in a way that she – who only ever described herself as a feminist when it seemed to offer some advantage – never considered. Well before she trespassed on the trade unions’ right to self-regulation, she had affronted millions of men by introducing the breathalyser to stop them killing other people, and demanding that they avoid killing themselves by wearing seat belts. She had a blithe disregard for the pay differentials in a way that ate into generations of carefully guarded privilege. A party that was still predominantly about trade union representation in parliament would never have let Castle become leader.

Anecdotally, that hypermasculine legacy lingers in other parties with close ties to the old industrial left. Germany’s SPD, for example, remains a strongly male preserve. And if there is a pattern to where women break through to lead long-established parties of the left, as Ségolène Royal did briefly in France, it has been as an emergency response that triumphs over old hostilities.

It was a sense of crisis that propelled Thatcher into the leadership of the Conservatives. In a party where she was one of only seven Tory women among 270 men, she alone had the nerve to challenge the orthodoxy and appeal to a panic-stricken demand for something completely different.

That was only part of the story. Thatcher herself used to pretend it was as much of a surprise to her as it had been to most observers. But that was one of the fictions she employed in order to disguise how confident she was in her own abilities.

As the first volume of Charles Moore’s biography makes clear, it was Thatcher’s radicalism that mattered, not her gender, which was fortunate since the knights of the shires referred to the contest as “the filly against the gelding”. What they saw in her, along with her good legs, was the guts to make the country great again. They were in a mess. She dared to offer something completely different.

This is not only a political phenomenon. It’s evident in the corporate world, as two recent studies have shown. In crisis? Send for a woman. Boards appoint women to lead when the share price is on the floor, financial crisis looms or a predator lurks.

Maybe it’s because crisis puts a priority on traditionally feminine strengths of team-building and people management skills that generate the confidence to tackle problems. Or maybe it’s just that the male candidates look at the balance sheet and say, nah, not this time. It often doesn’t turn out well, so they call it the glass cliff. Thatcher stepped off it and prospered, but for eight wobbly years it was a close-run thing. In the corporate sphere, women like Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy who turned the firm from junk share to investment status in three short years, have done it too.

But the great example is the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. It was she who had the courage to challenge Helmut Kohl after a scandal over party funding threatened to engulf the CDU in the late 1990s. She wrote an opinion piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung demanding change and said Kohl, her mentor and boss, was an “old warhorse” incapable of the new leadership the challenge demanded. She was party chairman within the year.

It’s a bit late for Cooper to reinvent herself as an aggressive iconoclast ready to challenge party orthodoxy now, and Kendall, who has made it her stock in trade, could scarcely be said to have prospered by it. But there is no one on the planet who thinks that one more heave will return Labour to office.

This is only a guess, but all the evidence tells us that however progressive their policies, old parties of the left are in the grip of creaky, outdated institutional structures – too easily dominated by men, too hostile to women – to create a culture that encourages women to flourish. Labour needs radicalism, innovation, a sense of excitement, a different style of engagement. Just the moment to send for a woman.
source:http://www.theguardian.com