In adopting suffragettes as role models, Just Stop Oil is painting itself into a corner | Catherine Bennett
Who doesn't love the suffragettes? A group of women who are heroic, right, and, perhaps most advantageously for their collective reputation, no longer with us. Even the older and more exhausting ones have yet to be firmly identified, unlike so many of their successors, as Karens.
In adopting the suffragettes as role models, along with their slogan, deeds not words", Just Stop Oil has, rather brilliantly, picked a group that unites in admiration left and right, old and young, and, probably uniquely, Jeremy Corbyn and the current - at the time of writing - home secretary, Suella Braverman. Corbyn once stole into parliament to erect a plaque to Emily Wilding Davison. Braverman's horror of protests has not stopped her reminding girls: Always remember the suffragettes who gave you and me the right to vote, and cherish that right." In 2018, the centenary of partial women's suffrage, Theresa May paid tribute to Emmeline Pankhurst, founder and leader of the proudly militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose supporters engaged in arson, bombings, window smashing, spitting and throwing missiles at MPs. Postal workers were burned, a full theatre ignited.
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