Uproar at the policing of a rally to honour Sarah Everard, kidnapped on a 50 minute walk home in London then murdered, briefly looked like a distraction. Too many issues rolled into one, with an attempt due in Westminster this week to give police more powers against protest.
Then attention focused as it should on violence towards women, the harassment many if not most face at some point in their lives, the figures that show two women a week on average are killed by their partners, and the weight of misogyny that too few men acknowledge. International Women’s Day last week saw bright and lively celebration as always, but also pious and empty words.
Not a good time for Boris Johnson’s female press officer to try re-casting him as ‘a feminist’ but no time would be. The current British government’s real disposition toward women, and the low-paid of whom women are such a high proportion, was summed up in that pathetic proposed pay rise for health service workers from Rishi Sunak. So ill-judged even for this government of multi-millionaires and ultra conservatives that it is already in line for revision. During this year of lockdown and panic women, perpetually underpaid, have been doing more in the disproportionately female health service and in the home. Where, as women in that Clapham Common protest kept trying to point out, they are less safe than on the street.
Just ahead of the London scenes, on Friday Johnson whisked in and out of the UK’s offshore region. The spin from Boris-friendly London media was that he’d arrived to soothe unionism, so unsettled by predictable post-Brexit checks that in traditional form it has been predicting possible violence by loyalist paramilitaries.
Asked what he had to say to those loyalist groups who sent him a letter full of dark warning, Johnson said he hadn’t read ‘the letters’. It would be difficult to draft a response less likely to soothe, although this sounded more like Johnsonian open-mouth, empty head.
The Northern Ireland Office centenary of partition programme didn’t get the delivery de luxe with a Latin dressing. But he did avoid a meeting with Sinn Féin leaders Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill, who wanted to talk about financing Troubles’ pensions and other awkward issues. The SF version stood on its dignity, Johnson’s arrived in fuzzy, non-provocative language. He didn’t specify TD McDonald, was said to believe that O’Neill had another engagement.
Did he please Arlene Foster simply by turning up on her turf as the prime minister of her government? One first minister to another, no pesky visible SFers? Did combined back-of-envelope and back-of-hand apply balm to the soul of the benighted DUP leader? These are thin times. Surely no unionist, loyalist, NI person proud to be British, could be reassured by the sight and sound of Jacob Rees-Mogg reciting God Save the Queen.
Unionist, loyalist and those no longer sure they fit in either category have watched helplessly as modern Britain shrinks the concept of ‘the Union’. It must be as painful to watch those who represent them politically make bad decisions, uncertainly but belligerently, as in their support of Brexit and in how to handle its predictable consequences.
As people struggle in public and privately with pandemic realities, maybe uncertainty is inevitable. PSNI decisions – to fine distanced and disciplined Black Lives Matter protesters but not intervene against intimidating loyalists in the Pitt Park estate, to choose only two instances – line up alongside the delay in publicising intent towards SF’s leading figures at their Bobby Storey funeral ceremonies. Prosecute, don’t prosecute? Delay means the police lose now either way.
It took McDonald and O’Neill a long time to complain that abortion provision in the north had stalled. Now SF announce they will push it in the executive. The north is on the south’s radar again and a 32-county party has to tend its feminist pretensions.
