Many of us worry about the Prime Minister’s attitudes to women displayed not just by his reported actions but by his own pen over many years. I for one, have been completely surprised and disillusioned by the way that the Sunday Times published Charlotte Edwardes’ writing about an alleged incident that if true, can only be described as a sexual assault. But there was no investigative follow-up whatsoever. I guess #metoo doesn’t last long in Murdochland. But I had trusted the journalists in both that empire and our cherished BBC to do better.
But whatever Johnson’s personal misogyny issues, we need also to look to the Conservative record in office that he runs away from. Or do we really believe he has only been a very senior Tory for 130 days?
What about the crime of austerity and the way it has hit women the hardest, whether those in vital need of NHS services or those trying to provide them? What about the fact that the crime of rape has been all but decriminalised on the Tories’ watch?
Conviction rates for rape are at the lowest levels on record, and charge times have increased by 140% since 2010. Last month a Newsnight investigation revealed that the CPS was prioritising “easy to prove” cases with a hidden conviction target designed to artificially inflate conviction rates.
I literally cannot believe I am having to write this in sorrow and anger - yes some politicians really do speak and write in their own words. But a decade of austerity hasn’t just hurt women and children the hardest, the most vulnerable women have been hurt worst of all.
The traditional wisdom is that Labour is all about the NHS and the Conservatives are all about Law and Order. That is hardly the experience of Britain’s rape victims who are getting neither the health nor the security support they deserve- and this in the fifth richest country on Earth.
A major indicator of the Rule of Law breaking down anywhere in the world is when rape victims are treated so terribly by the system that they have no access to justice.
So if you are undecided about how to vote in this General Election, I urge you to watch the video testimony from Bonny and Annie two young women who have been completely let down by a criminal justice system subject to devastating cuts over a decade.
Bonny talks about being treated like a suspect not a victim, and eventually having her case dropped by an under-resourced CPS despite a written confession by the man in question. Annie talks not just of being denied vital counselling services when she most needed them as a rape survivor, but of being placed in unsafe local authority accommodation housing. The hostel contained 90 percent men, some of whom were convicted perpetrators of rape, and there were “ no locks on the doors” to the women’s part of the hostel.
Our criminal justice system, and women’s services are in crisis. Our austerity-driven government and the public services it has so starved of money are letting down the most vulnerable victims of some of the most serious of crimes. This cannot continue. Rape victims deserve better.
Baroness Shami Chakrabarti is a British Labour party politician and member of the House of Lords.