No, the suffragettes should not be pardoned

Exactly 100 years after (some) women won the right to vote, Ruth Davidson has joined calls for a posthumous pardon for jailed suffragettes – the militants who violently fought for that right. ‘Voting was a value judgement, not an intrinsic right,’ says Davidson. And that historic inequality is why she supports the pardon, no questions asked. Jeremy Corbyn agrees, vowing that his government would pardon the suffragettes.

It’s a nice idea on the surface – it has #MeToo written all over it, doesn’t it? – but there are a few reasons it should be resisted. For a start, even supporters of the suffragettes would have to concede that they deliberately broke the law to further their cause – and by (rather patronisingly) pardoning them a century later you are denying them their agency.

But most of all, a pardon would glorify unnecessary political violence. There is a ‘Mary Poppins’ view of the suffragettes that airbrushes over what they really got up to (even if Mrs Banks was right to sing: ‘Our daughters’ daughters will adore us’).