UK Politics
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Are you fucking serious? You really think this is going to pass through undetected?
WOMEN.
Women literally gained the vote through violence. Check your facts before you vomit your opinions all over the internet and masquerade it as analysis.
Maybe I should repeat that.
The Suffragette campaign was a total failure.
It was abandoned in 1914 shortly after the outbreak of war, with the WSPU turning its efforts to the recruitment of soldiers for Empire. By November 1917 Emmeline Pankhurst had changed tack and now operated within the political system, founding the Women’s Party (with a manifesto commitment to require all civil servants to provide verification of race purity for national security). This was obviously well before the Representation of the People Act 1918 extended the franchise to the first women, and the Act of 1928 making suffrage equal. By this time of course, the senior Suffragettes were mostly getting well stuck in to the British fascist movement.
As to their methods, they had the effect of poisoning the political world and the public against the vote. The painstaking work done over many years by the Suffragists to build consensus in Westminster was obliterated by the violence. Things weren’t helped much by the murder of two naval sailors, two attempts to assassinate the Prime Minister, and a prolonged letter writing campaign aiming to hound all Jewish MPs out of office.
As for the public, the arson campaigns focused on sporting pavilions, schools and hospitals. In many towns vast crowds turned out to burn down the local Suffragette office in retaliation. Bombs were left on commuter trains (making the TfL’s decision to name a line after them hilarious), attempts were made to blow up a canal to flood a town, and an attempt to demolish the biggest sorting office in the country with 200 workers inside. One of the aforementioned attempts to kill the PM was to burn down a crowded theatre. These seemingly confirmed the opinion of those who claimed women were too unhinged to trust with elections.
Most at the time who weren’t Suffragettes agreed that they had put the cause back by decades, and it was only a catastrophe the scale of a world war that put it back on track.
Yeah, and that's why women now have the vote.
Or perhaps Parliament just felt like making those changes for no reason?
Yes, the “no reason” that occurred 1914-18, and the decades of consensus building by the Suffragists. The Suffragettes had abandoned their agitation in 1914, then completely disbanded in November 1917, as I said to allow Pankhurst to focus on setting up an ethno-nationalist political party. The bill to extend the vote to the first women passed in February 1918, three and a half years after the violent campaign had concluded.
Reading comprehension of a 3rd grader. Worse, perhaps.
Definitely mentally challenged by the looks.
You might want to spend an hour combing through the words of the comment you decided to ignore, so you might have a chance of understanding your own, sheer, and utter, idiocy.
The comment I "ignored" (written after mine, so I don't know how you expected me to take it into account) was a biased reading of history. To claim the suffragettes were "a total failure" and that the suffragists would have succeeded if they hadn't existed is complete conjecture. Your resorting to insults shows how weak you believe your argument to be.