Rejoice, rejoice; feminism is dead. And like me I expect you’re wondering what to do with all the time saved. It’s terrific news, clearly, and not just for the poor men shown being oppressed by a scary suffragette on the front cover of this week’s Spectator (the latest in a growing line to proclaim that the war is over and you ladies can relax).

Two cheers for the Women’s Equality party | Anne Perkins Read more

Freed from worrying about pay gaps and FGM, no longer forced to consider whether austerity or shaving your legs or Rihanna is a feminist issue – not to mention having the housework halved, now gender stereotyping has been eliminated overnight – women must have gained literally hours in the day.

How sad that some people just don’t get it, ploughing on with their inexplicably popular new films about suffragettes and new political parties dedicated to gender equality. Can’t they see we’ve become such an irreversibly progressive nation that even the clocks will probably refuse to go backwards this weekend?

Sarcasm aside, however, something about the launch of the Women’s Equality party bothers me. But it bothers me not because feminism is dead, but because it isn’t. I want to like the WEP, I really do. I like women. I like equality. I’m all for compulsory sex education in schools, cancelling the marriage tax break and cheaper childcare, while doubting that £1-an-hour nursery places even for wealthy professionals are a better use of scarce resources than doing something big for women hit by child tax-credit cuts.

I know two of the WEP’s three founders a bit and they’re smart people. And they’ve certainly spotted a juicy demographic there for the taking: broadly progressive female voters who don’t want to waste a vote other women died for but are profoundly depressed by what’s on offer.

What has happened to soggy centrists of a liberal persuasion this year is rather like what happens to women in later middle age: the slow, dawning realisation that nobody’s chatting you up any more. You used to get chased round bars by men trying to get a phone number. Now, if someone taps you on the arm it’s to point out that you dropped something.

Having been considered hot stuff for two decades, ardently pursued by Tony and David and Nick, the phone has similarly stopped ringing for female swing voters. Jeremy Corbyn just isn’t that into us. Michelle Dorrell – the Kent beautician who broke down in tears on last week’s Question Time over her tax credits – has made David Cameron look somewhat all mouth and trousers. The Liberal Democrats are rumoured still to exist, but confirmed sightings are rare. Many women want more, which must be why thousands have joined the WEP; but is a new party really the answer?

This week I interviewed the Labour MP Naz Shah, who survived a forced marriage and domestic abuse to defeat George Galloway at the polls. I heard the new Tory MP Heidi Allen’s maiden speech attacking the chancellor over tax credits. (Yes, I know she voted for them; the argument about whether it’s better to go down in a blaze of rebel glory that changes nothing or try to do deals behind closed doors is one for another column.) And I watched the videos Yvette Cooper posted from Lesbos, where she’s investigating the refugee crisis.

None was revolutionary but all three made me feel quite cheerful about how far we’ve come since 1997, when the new Labour women were dismissed either as robotic “Stepford Wives” or basically unserious, and the few Tory women looked on enviously because their own party wouldn’t countenance measures to boost their numbers.

Feminists still have good reason to be bloody angry | Helen Lewis Read more

There are still too few female MPs and a million things to change. But watching those three did not make me think that strong female candidates would be better off heroically losing their deposits for a new party than becoming MPs for old ones, and using that platform to shake things up. If anything, it was a reminder that being corralled into safe spaces, outside the rough and tumble of the mainstream where stuff actually gets decided, is dangerous for women; and that the progressive feminist vote probably doesn’t need to be split any more than it is.

The WEP models itself on Ukip, as a movement seeking to nudge other parties towards its position rather than run a country. It’s an intriguing idea but there are two ways in which they’re not Ukip. First, Ukip’s raison d’etre is saying things other politicians won’t (usually for good reason) say. It occupied a perfect gap in the market for EU withdrawal, something popular with a vocal minority but not advocated by any mainstream party, and mostly championed within those parties by people dismissed as eccentrics.

The WEP’s cause is one mainstream parties fall over themselves to advocate – even if they sometimes screw up in practice – and is already championed inside those parties by a critical mass of credible people, and outside by credible pressure groups.

And second, Ukip was happy to succeed by hurting the party closest to it. It couldn’t take Tory seats in 2010, but by splitting the rightwing vote it sometimes let Labour do so. That helped force the Conservatives to take it seriously, but also helped repeatedly keep candidates from the party most likely to hold an EU referendum out of power.

If the WEP did snaffle thousands of votes – say, in big city seats with lots of vaguely liberal-minded professional women – it would probably take them from Labour and the Lib Dems. Which might serve them right. But if the result was a greater likelihood of Conservative government, would its supporters feel entirely confident that this had helped the cause? If the party goes nowhere fast, on the other hand – perhaps because it turns out equality matters hugely to women, but not as much at a general election as the economy or the NHS or a realistic chance of changing governments – then it’s a gift to the “see, told you nobody cares any more” brigade.

Because popular movements for social change aren’t destroyed by opposition: look at Corbynistas, who only draw more energy from feeling that big business, or Murdoch, or the rest of the Labour party is out to get them. It’s apathy that’s the killer. That, and a tendency to splinter just as they’re finally getting somewhere.