On this, the centenary of some women getting the right to vote, there has been a lot of talk of pardoning the suffragettes. Jeremy Corbyn and Ruth Davidson have both said they back the idea, and the Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said she’ll look into it. But pardoning the suffragettes would be wrong. For many of them deliberately chose to be arrested and to go to jail to highlight the injustice they were fighting. The present has no right to reach back into the past and wipe their convictions, in both senses of the word, from the record.
Take Christabel Pankhurst who, in 1905, deliberately assaulted a policeman, albeit only by spitting at him, with the aim of being arrested. She then refused to pay the fine so that she would be sent to prison. It wouldn’t be right for the current government to, in effect, strike out this episode by pardoning her.
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