By
Les May
TODAY
I listened to the
Labour MP Stella
Creasey on the BBC2
Politics Live
programme complaining that she is being harassed. She based this
upon the fact that an American group called the Centre
for Bio-Ethical Reform
(CBRUK) posted billboards showing a foetus, said to be at nine weeks
gestation, around her
constituency. The
foetus is clearly much older than 9 weeks at which time it would be
only about 25mm long, though this is much larger than Creasey’s
claim that it would
be ‘poppy
seed sized’.
Quite
why this group have singled out Creasey I don’t know. Many other
MP’s voted in the same way she did on
her amendment to extend abortion rights to Northern Ireland. It passed 332 votes to
99. Certainly it must be
a source of annoyance to her and if it happened to me I would not
like it. But does it constitute harassment?
Home
Office circular 018/2012 (A
change to the Protection
from Harassment Act 1997)
gives some guidance to
the police on what constitutes harassment. One thing is clear that
the behaviour must occur on at least two occasions. Does
a poster do this? Is a poster sufficiently similar to any of the
examples of what constitutes stalking to be construed as harassment?
This
seems to me to be an extreme reaction and if we are going to express
concern about the language MPs use and how its effect is to polarise
opinions, we need to be concerned with how supposed ‘victims’
react. Creasey has form on this kind of exaggeration.
When
Labour MP Clive Lewis
made a joking comment at a Momentum
event hosted by Novara
Media at which
Creasey
was not present, she complained “It’s
not OK. Even if it’s meant as a joke, reinforces menace that men
have the physical power to force compliance.”
(Just
to be clear the remark was addressed at another man
and was in the context of a light hearted game.)
This
is how the Guardian
reported what someone who was there said:
Novara’s Ash Sarkar, who
was compering the event, said:
“I
asked the audience for a volunteer to keep score in a gameshow
section we were doing. The guy who came up is well-known to us, he’s
doing a podcast with us. I gave him the notebook to keep score, and
asked him to kneel down so the audience and cameras could see the
stage. He made a little face, and then Clive jokingly said ‘on your
knees, bitch’, to him.
“The joke was delivered
in a spirit of campy humour. It certainly wasn’t this kind of macho
expression of sexual domination. It got forgotten as the gameshow
went on.”Sarkar said there was “a rich tradition of leftist, subversive counter-culture, which often has relied on treading lines between the politically correct, the puerile, the extravagant, flamboyant energy that comes with causing a bit of a stir, while also at the same time being inclusive, loving and affectionate”.
Lewis’s comment, she added, “was an expression of a boozy, raucous, party celebration, which was something which at the time made people feel quite close to the people who were on stage, that they weren’t these distant political or commentariat-type figures.
“It was part of an endearing, informal vibe. Had it been used in a way that had made either our audience members, or the volunteer in question, or anyone else on the stage uncomfortable, then I’d be like yeah, let’s have a conversation about its appropriateness. But we can’t mistake puritanism for meaningful action on oppression.
“There’s a certain irony in Guido Fawkes pushing this, when they’ve been one of the chief orchestrators of harassment against Diane Abbott, the most prominent black female politician in the UK.”
For
an alternative take on it see:
In
her own way Creasey is an extremist even though she always tries to
grab the moral high ground. Policing other people’s speech is not
a pleasant trait. It’s po-faced and puritanical. It may get
praise from people who think like her, but does anyone think that
Labour voters give a tinker’s cuss?
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