Is the Women’s Equality Party just another single-issue movement?
Tomorrow will be a momentous day for the Women’s Equality Party. At just six months old, it has attracted more than 45,000 people to register as members. Now, the party is launching its first formal policy, outlining how key issues to its membership can be addressed.
These issues include ‘equal pay, equal representation and equal parenting’. This anaphora isn’t just a rhetorical device for the party. Equality lies at its very core.
The party’s leadership has been keen to state that it is strictly non-partisan, with one of the founders Catherine Mayer telling The Observer that “no one party has a monopoly on virtue”.
It’s not the first time a party has, seemingly, been founded around a single issue. Since first taking root in the Netherlands, Australia and Germany in the 1970s and, in later decades, across Europe, the green movement has come to define single-issue party politics.
Green commentators have, however, been quick to point out that defining the movement as such ignores our absolute dependence on the environment. “The world is not a separate human system and a natural system rubbing along in (dis)harmony”, one observer said.
In a similar fashion, the Women’s Equality Party talk of education, healthcare and the economy, among other matters, as areas where entrenched social inequalities exist – to the detriment of all.
The idea that inequality in the personal sphere has a broader, societal significance will be a familiar theory to any student of politics. The second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, for instance, used ‘personal is political’ as their rallying cry.
But there is more at play than operationalising inequality.
Following in the footsteps of the green movement, the Women’s Equality Party provides yet another example of the need to contest the Left-Right divide as the only truly defining feature of modern party politics. Perhaps this is due to the sheer scale of the issue at hand.
Many of the issues at the heart of single-issue campaigners are relatively contained. From anti-EU campaigners and the pro-life/pro-choice movements to ‘cannabis parties’, most single-issue groups focus on causes that, whilst ethically, scientifically and financially complex, circle around a relatively small number of specific policy proposals.
In contrast, inequality is not easily solvable. Much like climate change, one of the ‘megatrends’ of our time, it reaches into most corners of society and tackling it requires concerted political action.
This blog first appeared on mhpc.com