The trend in feminism over the past few years - spearheaded by Natasha Walter's New Feminism - has been to say that equal pay, equal opportunities an… - Natasha Walter

[On the promise of prominent women in the New Labour government elected in 1997.] I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous ­circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, ­because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book's subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don't really think sexism ever went away, it's stronger than it was. It's as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again.

I fear that we are being set a trap and falling into it, by playing this role in a farce that we didn’t script. As many have said, there is a spiralling craziness about this government’s approach, where the actual aim is not to achieve any of the stated objectives but to ratchet up the sense of crisis. We know, and they know, and they know that we know, that one key aim of the Rwanda policy is not to solve any potential challenges caused by arrivals on small boats but to create a distraction from the government’s real challenges. The more polarised and furious the debate gets, the more successful is the distraction. And yet many of us continue to play our role.
But we cannot do otherwise. Because, while this performative cruelty may be in part a game to the politicians who put it into practice, for the people who are actually affected by the policy, it is far from a game. The narrative that the Rwanda policy is just a dead cat, thrown on to the table to distract from Partygate and the cost of living crisis, ignores the real harm that the policy is doing and the worse harm that it would do if people stopped opposing it. Let’s not forget that the deportations last week were halted only because people continued to dig in their heels. Dogged individuals at charities supported refugees threatened with deportation day and night and lawyers worked tirelessly on their legal challenges. They all knew that this is no time to give up, because what may look like a farce to some is in fact a tragedy in the making.
Nobody who has heard or read any of the interviews with the refugees threatened by removal to Rwanda can be left in any doubt that the cruelty is real.

[In an article on Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman (1999).] Greer's fundamental conclusion is that the pursuit of equality is now doomed. Instead, women must pursue liberation. "Equality must be seen to be a poor substitute for liberation," she says. Is this a valid distinction? I believe that the pursuit of liberation - the peculiar, individual, often contradictory journey to find freedom from the lies and conventions around us - is something that each individual woman can take on for herself. And yet I believe that it is only possible to pursue that liberation if you are not ground down by an economic and political system that systematically discriminates against you.
Inequality in Britain is not a side issue. Inequality locks women out of power, and condemns women to poverty. Inequality prevents women from being fairly rewarded for their work, from being able to speak out and be heard, from being able to bring up their children in dignity, from bringing those who rape and beat them to justice. The struggle for equality is not the struggle to reshape women in the pattern of men, since men's lives too must be revolutionised if equality is to be grasped. Feminism must transform society so that women feel that they can have an equal stake in it, at work and at home. Then indeed we will see the rise of the liberated woman.