Emma Bateman v Green Party: Three Expulsions, One Woman - Labour Heartlands

[IwantToRetire]

... At Speakers’ Corner in March 2022, Bateman asked how far her fellow Greens would prostrate themselves before what she called the pronoun police, coined the phrase “cognitive cis-connance,” and mocked the suggestion that “a person with fairy pronouns literally dies” whenever someone says men are not women. She also read out the party’s own policy on trans identity, and a disciplinary panel later recorded, in a sentence a grown adult wrote down and signed, that she had done so “in a clearly overtly sarcastic fashion.” Her remarks about “fae/faer” pronouns, the pronouns of mythical beings, were found to be “clearly antagonistic” and a breach of the party’s rules on welcoming diversity.

Stop and look at what is actually being described here. A British political party convened a formal hearing, took evidence, and produced a written finding against a 58-year-old woman for sarcasm. Not for harassment. Not for abuse. For declining to be solemn about another adult’s conviction that they are a fairy.

... The women the party keeps expelling are not entryists, and they are not reactionaries. They are, in the main, exactly what Bateman is: veterans of the left who believe that politics begins with material reality, that women are oppressed on the basis of their sex, and that rights written into the Equality Act in 2010 were not written to be defined out of existence by internal party committees. These were mainstream positions in every left party in Britain within living memory. Nothing about them changed. What changed is the price of holding them.

Bateman is 58. She has been suspended, reinstated, expelled and re-expelled by a party she served for more than a decade. It would have been easier to walk away, and plenty have: fourteen in Scotland alone. She stayed. Asked whether the party might one day admit its mistake, she gave the answer of a woman who has taken the full measure of the institution she is fighting. The Green Party, she said, “will be the last party to ever acknowledge that what’s gone on is wrong.” ...

Full article https://labourheartlands.com/emma-bateman-v-green-party-three-expulsions-one-woman/

It's called a purity spiral. Many organisations who try to act on improving the world/are progressive get trapped in it. If they don't, they risk losing members to the other extreme ie "you've abandoned your principles for power/delivery".

Thanks for the link, it was quite an depressing read, I hope she wins.

"Then there is the money. According to reporting on the leaked dossier, the party spent around £190,000 fighting these cases in 2024 and has set aside £350,000 more. That is subscription money, taken from members and spent defending the party’s treatment of its own activists. An organisation that does this has ceased to operate as a democratic association. It has become an ideological protection racket, and the members are paying for their own prosecution."

The way the party is prepared to waste it's own money on fighting useless court cases is a good reason to make sure it never gets into power in parliament.

It always reminds me of the behaviour of the Green's in Bristol, they won't even engage in the democratic process with anyone who doesn't see things their way, the Greens stopped being even democratic adjacent years ago.

Anyone who stayed in the Greens after the Challinor debacle and who thinks they are anything to do with the environment any more is fighting a lost battle IMHO.

Personally I agree. Or rather, I just wouldn't want to spend the time.

But if you feel strongly the organisation you have been part of for years, and whose values and purpose you supported, has been hijacked by fanatics, it is quite brave (and exhausting) to continue to fight them.

It is only because of, quite often individual, women rejecting a TRA take over, that not everything is captured.

They should be applauded whether in the Green Party, the NHS, Universities, etc..