The leader and co-founders of the Women’s Equality party (WE) will recommend that members vote to close it down at a special meeting called for next month. Financial challenges and a changed political and media landscape mean that, after a decade of activism, the party is no longer the most effective way to campaign for women’s rights, said its leader, Mandu Reid. “It hasn’t been done lightly,” Reid, who is voting to do herself out of a job, told the Observer in an exclusive interview. “The mission is as urgent as ever. There hasn’t been enough progress yet moving towards a world where men and women are equal citizens.” However, she and other senior party figures have reluctantly concluded that their model no longer works. The major parties are less open to taking policy advice from WE, which has always designed its manifestos hoping key elements would be stolen, she said. The normalisation of far-right narratives means it is harder for progressive campaigns to gain traction in traditional media or online platforms, Reid said. Fundraising, always a challenge, became harder after the pandemic and cost of living crisis. “It has become quite difficult to do what we need to do at the scale that would make a difference,” she said. “I realised it might be better at this moment to put energy into other approaches.” The co-founders, comedian Sandi Toksvig and journalist Catherine Mayer, also back closing WE, although the final decision will be taken by party members at a special conference on 17 November. The party has more than 5,600 paying members and about 24,000 registered supporters. Toksvig described herself as “heartsore” but said the movement they launched in March 2015 aimed to challenge the establishment, not become part of it. Toksvig and Mayer recognised that political parties could have critical leverage without winning seats well before the result of the Brexit referendum forced a national reckoning with that political reality. They were convinced that if Ukip could shift the national debate, a small progressive party could also increase focus on issues like equal pay and affordable childcare. They got early proof of the concept during the 2016 election for mayor of London, when then-leader Sophie Walker joined a hustings. “Until she spoke, not one candidate had mentioned the women of London,” Toksvig said.
From the start, they did things differently, successfully encouraging other parties to steal from their manifestos and even from their slates of candidates. In the 2018 Lewisham East by-election, the WE candidate faced a former member now representing the Liberal Democrats. They have won a handful of seats on local councils nationwide but planned most campaigns with an eye to change, not elected office. Reid, who claimed a place in UK history as the first black leader of a political party, said WE’s most important legacies will be the women it drew into politics, and how they transformed the national conversation. “We have dragged into the mainstream issues that other parties at best overlooked, at worst wantonly ignored,” she said, citing their 2019 election campaign that focused on abuse inside Westminster. “We stood survivors of male violence against MPs who had allegations of abuse or harrassment against them that their parties were not investigating,” she said. “We targeted those seats, gave women a voice, and not a single one of those MPs was returned to Westminster. We effectively performed a laundry service.” For an operation which has always run on a shoestring, WE has proved remarkably durable. In 2019, another upstart party, Change UK, was created by a group of 11 sitting MPs with all the access to funds and publicity that their positions entailed. It fell apart within a year. WE has weathered controversies including a bitter internal debate over transgender rights, which led to one spokesperson being removed from her role, then resigning from the party. At a time when toxic disputes on this issue divided British feminism, the party held a members’ consultation modelled on an Irish citizens’ assembly, which was hailed as a model for positive debate, and endorsed backing gender self-identification. Despite its impressive resilience, however, the Women’s Equality party always struggled to get financing and national traction in athe first-past-the-post system, where it was never likely to become a significant force in parliament. A recent emergency appeal produced “an incredible outpouring of support” but wasn’t a route to long-term sustainability. They were only once offered the type of “life-changing” funding that might have put them on a more stable footing, Toksvig said. That proposal came from a man who spent an evening coming on to a senior party figure and said the cash was conditional on dropping “women” from the party name. It wasn’t difficult to turn down. On their current trajectory, fundraising would overshadow campaigning. “To be effective at making change, we can’t be in a position where we’re constantly chasing the resources to do it,” Reid said. “We did not want to risk fading away.” Shifts in the politics of the main parties have also diminished WE’s influence. Under Theresa May’s leadership, even the Conservative government asked them for a briefing on key policies. “I can’t see that happening now,” Reid said, with both prospective new leaders planning to take the party to the right and vying for a harder line on maternity rights. Labour’s large majority and focus on discipline means there is little interest in engaging with WE. In the media, rightwing parties are getting far greater traction than progressive rivals. The Reform party, which won five seats, got more press and TV coverage in the last general election than the Lib Dems, who won 72 seats, a Loughborough University survey found. The Green party won four seats but barely registered. Mayer said closing WEP is “about doing more rather than less” after a tumultuous but inspiring decade that began with a chat over drinks she called “the most expensive beers ever”. The journey has often been exhausting but also fun and sometimes surreal. During their first campaign, in the London mayoral election, they found they had won more than 300,000 votes after watching a candidate dressed as a rabbit get into a fist fight in the courtyard with the candidate from far-right Britain First.
A few years later, a squad of armed anti-terror police screeched up to a van the party was using to project the suffragette slogan “deeds not words” on to the Houses of Parliament. But when they recognised Toksvig, they asked for selfies instead of IDs. Reid will keep campaigning, and urges others to seek out new forms of activism. “I had a baby just over a year ago, and that arguably radicalised me even more,” she said. Toksvig, now working to map the world from a female perspective, is “still in a hurry” for change, and hopes that even the Women Equality party’s ending will be a form of activism. “I would like this to generate a conversation nationwide about where are we with women’s equality,” she said. “Why are we still struggling to sort out affordable childcare? Why has the pay gap not been closed?”