‘Farage’s fillies’ are insincere and ghastly. But they’re winning

Naturally, some of what was said there was beyond parody. “I’m proud to have breasts”, Jenkyns exclaimed at one point, hitting out against, presumably, trans-inclusive people, but not half-sounding absurd in the process. Transgender people and their allies have, as far as anyone’s aware, never told women they weren’t allowed to have breasts, or to enjoy having them. No, really, it’s a free country..

In short: it would be easy to dismiss the stunt as ridiculous and worthless, and move on with our lives. Regrettably, it probably would be a mistake to do so. Though Reform was quite strikingly unpopular with women at the 2024 election, polling from More In Common shows that they have gone up by 14 percentage points with them over the past 13 months. The party’s support still mostly relies on men, but the direction of travel for women doesn’t feel particularly positive.

After all, Kamala Harris lost white female voters to Donald Trump by five points only last year; anyone assuming that women can be relied on as a whole to do the right thing, and not vote against their self-interests, may be in for a shock.

More broadly, and perhaps more uncomfortably, there is a reason why Reform’s women are going all in on gendered issues. Some of the problems they’ve identified are real, and being felt by many across the country.

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Of course, they’re wrong when claiming that every evil in the world can be blamed on immigration, and specifically on Muslim men who’ve moved to Britain from abroad. That this is pure, undiluted xenophobia and right wing populism should go without saying.

What is true, however, is that many women do not feel entirely safe in Britain today. Many women worry that, if something awful were to happen to them at the hands of a man, the police wouldn’t be guaranteed to care enough to do something about it, and truly believe them. We all remember the Sarah Everard case, and the following stories about the vile misogyny within some police forces.

Many women believe, not unreasonably, that even if their case goes to court, their attacker is unlikely to end up being found guilty, and being sent to prison. To say that the conviction rates for rape in this country are appalling would be an understatement. Similarly, years of cuts mean that women seeking to leave abusive relationships may well struggle to access even semi-decent resources in their area.

I could go on – believe me, I could! – but you get the gist. The left may now be in government, but it still isn’t clear that the people in power truly care about the welfare of women. At risk of stating the obvious, electing more Reform MPs would not change anything; theirs is an obvious ploy to turn the British public against immigration, in order to get the votes they crave.

What the Labour Party should fear, though, is that enough female voters end up believing Farage’s fillies and deciding to give them a chance. If the party doesn’t really show that it cares about women, it shouldn’t be surprised that some of them may end up deserting them, even if the other options seem ghastly to the rest of us.

After all, the populists’ grossly insincere brand of feminism doesn’t need to convince everyone in order to win; it just needs to peel off enough people to redress its current gender imbalance. Much as we may want to mercilessly mock Women for Reform, their existence really is no laughing matter.