“THIS is only the beginning … We are not finished … Our targets have blood on their hands… We refuse to let them wash it off in peace.”

This could be mistaken for a corny line in the kind of throwaway thriller you pick up at the airport, but it was in fact a threat posted online from a group claiming responsibility for vandalising the Brighton Centre last week, smashing a window and daubing the building in graffiti, for hosting the largest feminist conference in Europe, FiLiA.

“Bash Back” took the liberty of bashing in the Brighton Centre — whose ’70s Brutalist charms will be familiar to many readers as a frequent venue for TUC Congress — because, the Bashers said, FiLiA had “played host to transphobia and platformed numerous hate groups.”

Meanwhile, in the queue to get in, gathering feminists were unfazed. There was bewilderment (“Who even are these people?” “What are they talking about?”) along with resignation from some and insouciance from others — but no sign of any disinclination to attend and network among the 2,500 women attending the three-day conference.

So what was FiLiA actually playing host to?

Here’s a snapshot.

In a full-to-overflowing session, Philipa Harvey of FiLiA’s Trade Union Network explained how her group was attempting to rejuvenate women’s representation in the union movement by working from within and “starting where the women are” — but “you have to be in it to change it,” she emphasised.

“If you look at things around maternity leave, around the menopause, around abortion rights, around health and safety equipment — all sorts of things have come through the trade union movement,” she said.

Ann Henderson, a parliamentary worker for RMT in Scotland, underscored this point by discussing some inspiring trade unionists from history, including Mary Macarthur, who in the early 20th century played a “crucial” role organising jute workers and in trades boards campaigning around minimum wage rates and who in 1906 became secretary of the National Association of Women Workers.

She also told of Eleanor Marx, who “organised the Silvertown workers [in east London] into a women’s branch and this was the first women’s branch of what we now call the GMB.”

“She understood that you couldn’t subsume the women into the male-led union, but likewise she believed you couldn’t be separate from the struggle of the men.”

Marx’s way of doing this was to organise the women’s branch, which then was accepted into the general union and “became a very important model of organising and allowed the emphasis on a wrong done to one is a wrong done to all.”

“The GMB now, interestingly, has an Eleanor Marx award, so I encourage anyone who wishes to do so to watch out for the award and nominate good women for that award,” Henderson added.

Surrounded by the luminous glow of the suffragette colours in the main auditorium, Rahila Gupta, writer and chair of Southall Black Sisters, led a discussion on migrant women and class.

It took a sombre tone: “This conversation [takes place] in the shadow of one of the biggest far-right mobilisations in my lifetime and uniquely something that is receiving support globally from a kind of a global elite.”

Beginning with the Southport killings last year, the current spate of violent anti-immigrant actions has continued with mobs outside asylum-seeker accommodation this year, and today, the “racist constructions around migration and sexual crime are reaching such a fever pitch that we feel that we have to undertake in-depth research … framed by more rational assumptions in order to dispel these allegations once and for all,” Gupta said.

A common argument is that “asylum-seekers [are] sponging off resources that are not available to the local poor working classes. And the common refrain that we hear is ‘they’re being put up in hotels where we can’t get access to housing’.”

“Many arguments have already been made in support of the economic benefits that migrants bring to the UK,” Gupta said, but “Apart from the fact that services like transport, health, education would collapse without the presence of migrants, what people don’t realise is that the share of the economic pie is not reduced by the arrival of the migrants — it’s not static. It grows. The economic pie grows with their arrival. And really, poor housing and other issues are a question of government policies of austerity.”

And another session, in the Brighton Centre’s Skyline room, flanked by the misty seascape of the English Channel, saw victims of the notorious “spycops” scandal speak out.

“Alison,” one of the women affected, explained how the group Police Spies Out of Lives (PSOOL) was set up in 2011 by eight women who took legal action against the Metropolitan Police after they were deceived into long-term intimate sexual relationships by undercover police officers infiltrating political groups.

The campaign led to the setting up of the undercover policing inquiry in 2015, which had been originally due to report in 2018, and is still ongoing, with a current reporting date of 2027.

Alison described how she first met the man known to her as Mark Cassidy — real name Mark Jenner — in 1995 when she was an anti-racist and anti-fascist activist. She ended up in a relationship with him for five years, during which the level of deception about his true identity as an undercover police officer was total.

“I thought we were in a monogamous relationship. It turned out, I found out some years later, that he was actually married with children throughout the whole relationship.”

“Mark and I travelled,” Alison said, “he lived with me, and we went … to Thailand, … Crete, we went to Israel, we went to Holland, and we went to a lot of different places. He had a passport, a proper passport, he had a proper driving licence, no-one would have guessed in any way.

“Some people might say ‘how could you not know?’ but you wouldn’t know, these people were state sponsored and were backed up, and all documentation required to have a fully fledged fake identity.”

Helen Steel, then an activist with a group called London Greenpeace, described how in 1990 she had been deceived into a relationship with a spycop called John Dines, who suddenly vanished “while seeming to go through some sort of mental breakdown.”

“So then I started searching for him,” Steel said, “because I was worried about him. And through the course of that search, which took many years, I actually found out that he didn’t exist, that he’d been given the identity of a child who died when he was eight years old. And that had an absolutely massive impact on my ability to trust other people, because suddenly, here was this person who I thought I knew best, didn’t exist. What did that say for anybody else that was around me?”

The sheer scale of the spying is astonishing. Alison said: “Our group work[s] closely with about 25 women, but we know more than 60 women now, who have been affected by these sorts of relationships.”

Adding: “So just taking Mark Jenner, my ex-partner as an example, we now know that he reported on about 300 people.

“And he was one of 10 officers over a period of 50 years. So if you multiply and do the maths of all of that, you’re talking about at least 30,000 people being reported on, probably thousands more. And the undercover officers were reporting on people who were activists in unions, who were grieving their loved ones who’d been killed in contact with the police, people who were involved in social justice and political campaigns.

“We only know of three organisations out of the thousands that were spied on that were on the far right. So it was overwhelmingly organisations on the progressive left.”

Alison said that one of PSOOL’s key aims today is “to raise public awareness of this state-sponsored violation of women’s human rights in order to contribute to a culture in which this will never happen again to other women,” and she encouraged sisters to follow the ongoing inquiry in the news and sign the group’s petition to “Prohibit police officers from having sexual relationships while undercover.”

So at the end of yet another whirlwind FiLiA, full of resilience, courage and sisterhood in the face of adversity, we have to ask ourselves what kind of politics wishes to “bash back” against these women — fighters for workplace rights, against racism, for migrant justice, and against police intrusion.

It’s a serious question that deserves a serious answer.