Zoe Allan (she/her) is a candidate for Labour’s National Women’s Committee.

The decision to stand for the National Women’s Committee of the Labour Party was an easy one for me as there is so much to be done and it’s important that socialist voices are heard. We can actually make a difference by being in the room when decisions are made. That means we need socialists to keep paying their Party subs and to vote for like-minded folk at internal Party elections.

Women’s rights have been fundamental to the Labour Party since its beginnings. Our founder, Keir Hardie, was a close friend of Sylvia Pankhurst. Back then it wasn’t just women who were denied the right to vote but working class men as well. In 1912 the policy of calling for full adult suffrage, on an equal basis for men and women, was adopted by the Party. This was finally achieved in 1928. Solidarity gets results!

Fast forward to today and workers’ rights still go hand-in-hand with women’s rights, as well as Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic rights and disabled people’s rights. The RMT together with various action groups have just won a minor victory to extend the consultation about proposed ticket office closures. I doubt I need to stress to anyone reading this that having real humans around is absolutely essential for safeguarding anyone vulnerable and for accessibility. If you haven’t already, please add your views to the consultation: https://www.rmt.org.uk/campaigns/rail/save-ticket-offices/

It’s crucial that we have robust women’s structures within the Party, ones which are accessible, inclusive and have meaningful policy-forming input. Myself and my colleagues supported by the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance are calling for a two-day, stand-alone Women’s Conference which continues to send policy motions to Party Conference. For accessibility for disabled women, like myself, and those with caring responsibilities, I believe it needs to be hybrid as well. We all have things to contribute and policy turns out best when all our views can be heard. If elected, I also hope to raise awareness of neurodiversity throughout the Party.

The list of issues we want to collectively tackle is too long for this piece but a few foremost ones are investment in our NHS and social care, childcare, support for migrant women, issues with women’s representation, menopause rights and reproductive rights. Am I the only one who was shocked to discover, when Carla Foster was recently imprisoned, that abortion is still illegal in Britain? Incredulous that the 1861 Act used against her has never been repealed?

I was relieved to hear that her sentence was halved and suspended on appeal and now, like many others, I’m determined to raise awareness and campaign against this cruel, outdated law. This law wastes NHS time as doctors have to be tracked down for signatures, causes stress for medical professionals who worry about police heavy-handedness and in extreme cases, as we’ve just seen, causes immense trauma for families. It must end in Britain, as it has in Northern Ireland. I encourage anyone reading this who’s able to, to attend the Abortion Rights: March for Choice on 2^nd September in central London, 1pm at the Millicent Fawcett Statue in Parliament Square, to outnumber the annual rally of the anti-abortion movement.  #ReproductiveRights

Our solidarity naturally goes out to all women suffering oppression across the world, whether that’s about bodily autonomy, the right to an education, to wear what we like or any other right we might ourselves take for granted – but we can’t take these things for granted under the Tories.

Only last week a refugee rights campaigner, Tigs Louis-Puttick, was arrested in London for holding up a placard in protest at the illegal migration bill and floating prisons. It seems the officer was acting under the Tories’ anti-protest law which is so new and so unreasonable, he had to Google what it was when she asked what she was being arrested for.

 Labour in government must repeal all the Tories’ most dangerous legislation. We can’t slide back to the days when women were routinely imprisoned for political protest, and I recommend people look up the podcast interview of Women’s Rights activist Shiva Mahbobi by Annie MacManus to see why.

If you’re a delegate to this year’s Women’s Conference, please vote for all of us candidates supported by the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance: Chloe Hopkins, Helen Smith, Cecile Wright, Claudia Boes, Juliet Miller and me, Zoe Allan. If you’re not attending, please lobby your delegates to vote for us because, if there’s one thing I learnt when I was recently at the full NPF meeting, it’s that having socialists elected to represent the grassroots in these forums really does matter.

We do make a difference and together with trade unions and socialist societies we can set about undoing what the Lib Dem/Tory coalition government started with: austerity. We must occupy these spaces to live up to the memory of Keir Hardie, Sylvia Pankhurst and all who fought so hard for equal franchise for women.

Main image: Women’s March Liverpool. Author: Samwalton9, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

End image: Photograph of Sylvia Pankhust. https://loc.getarchive.net/media/photograph-of-sylvia-pankhurst Creator: Library of Congress | Credit: Library of Congress via Picryl.com. Copyright: Public Domain