Almost exactly two years ago, three Just Stop Oil campaigners (Deborah Wilde, Simon Milner-Edwards and William Ward) disrupted proceedings at Wimbledon by scattering orange confetti on one of the outside courts. They were charged with aggravated trespass and given conditional discharges – having been barred from raising their concerns about the climate crisis as a legal defence during their trial.
110 years before that (in February 1913), the so-called ‘silent suffragette’ set out to burn down the All England Club (the rather more modest forerunner of today’s Wimbledon) as part of the campaign by the Women’s Social and Political Union for women’s suffrage. She was caught red-handed by a groundsman at the Club before she had a chance to set fire to it armed with a bucket of wood shavings and a bottle of paraffin.
She refused to give her name at her trial, but eloquently represented the Suffragettes’ cause and her own motives for resorting to arson in pursuit of that cause. She was given a 2 month prison sentence, and it’s believed she was involved, always anonymously, in other actions before the onset of the First World War in 1914 brought an end to the Suffragettes’ campaign.
Our current Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, is on the record (on many occasions!) as an ardent admirer of the Suffragettes, having obviously reconciled herself to their incendiary tactics (it was the Suffragettes, after all, that pioneered the use of the letter bomb!), based on a clear distinction between violence against property (totally acceptable) and violence against people (totally unacceptable).
What can one say? The speed with which she has moved as Home Secretary to proscribe Palestine action (which always insisted on exactly the same tactical distinction as that of the Suffragettes), and her continuing refusal even to review let alone revise, the two Acts brought in by the Tories in order to crush UK citizens’ right to protest, reveal Yvette Cooper in her true colours: self-evidently guilty of grotesque, politically expedient hypocrisy.
