BRITAIN, like all Europe, is in crisis. It suffers from grotesque inequality, long-term decline in working-class living standards and failing public services. These have delegitimised traditional ruling parties and fuel a rising far right.

This has profound implications for women’s rights. A “progressive” liberal ideology seeking to address problems — from climate change to social inequalities of sex and race — within the framework of globalised capitalism is in retreat. Unashamedly reactionary politics is replacing it: climate-denialist, racist, misogynist.

Women’s rights are under threat. So are the processes liberal states have used to measure social progress: the Trump administration’s war on “diversity, equality and inclusion” policies cascades down through US-owned transnational corporations and mobilises right-wing politicians worldwide. 

These policies are often unpopular, giving management greater power to police their workers, and have themselves been deployed against women, as in the case of nurse Sandie Peggie that has embroiled Fife NHS Trust in such controversy.

At the same time, Trump’s war on “DEI” is, like his wider agenda of deregulation and crushing unions, about corporate empowerment, removing the idea that businesses have social responsibilities or any obligations at all except maximising profit. 

It dovetails with the rejection of social responsibility by capitalist states, whether to their own people through social security or through dismantling universal obligations such as to refugees or international law. Women are, in Britain and internationally, the foremost victims of this destructive programme.

But the far right can only mobilise working-class opinion against “equalities” because the liberal framework for advancing these has not empowered the working class.

Equality is further away than ever, in a society in which the gap between the haves and the have-nots grows wider each year. The concentration of women and black people in particular occupations entrenches a still yawning gender pay gap. 

Women in ministries and boardrooms have not stopped policies that harm working-class women: austerity cuts that have hollowed out local government (bankrupting women’s refuges, closing public toilets, reducing street lighting and local transport services despite the risks to women’s safety), or the erosion of pay and conditions in majority-women jobs such as in health and social care, through wage freezes and outsourcing.

Contrary to liberal conceits of inevitable progress, by many measures the oppression of women is worsening. Besides the horrors of war, which women from several warzones detail in awful clarity in today’s Morning Star, the most dangerous is the rise in violence against women and girls.

Brutal attitudes towards women are celebrated on the far right, with the misogynist “influencer” Andrew Tate a notorious example. 

But the epidemic of violence against women is with us already: it is a product of the society we live in now. 

A consumer-capitalist society, in which young boys are exposed to violent online pornography because this is profitable for social media companies, though it is driving sexual harassment and abuse of schoolgirls and women teachers. One in which “sex sells” so the objectification and commodification of women is just business, their exploitation through the sex trade just work.

Labour has recognised violence against women as an emergency, but continues to increase the unaccountable power of police forces exposed incubating rapists and murderers in their ranks. Likewise, it denounces human trafficking and sexual slavery, but wages a war on refugees that drives vulnerable people underground.

This picture is not one in which we can defend women’s rights through defence of fraying liberal norms against the far right. 

The task before all socialists is women’s liberation from the exploitation, oppression and violence of the capitalist system itself. A system which, absent working-class resistance, intensifies exploitation as it concentrates wealth, and a system which can only be prettified, not tamed, by legal equalities frameworks. 

The fight for women’s liberation is a revolutionary one, and a resurgent socialist feminism is our best weapon against far-right misogyny.