You Voted Green To Smash The Patriarchy And Now The Crown Prosecution Service Is Investigating Whether Prosecuting Honour Killings Constitutes Cultural Imperialism — The Refuge Helpline Has Been Replaced With A Sensitivity Checklist

You marched. You chanted. You held a laminated sign that said 'Women's Rights Are Human Rights' outside a council building in Bristol on a drizzly Saturday morning and felt genuinely good about yourself. You voted Green because they were the only party, you told your friends over flat whites, who truly understood the systemic nature of gendered oppression.

Fast forward to now. Rape convictions are at a forty-year low. The CPS has seventeen open internal reviews into whether the concept of 'beyond reasonable doubt' inadvertently centres the accused. And the Greens' newly appointed Shadow Minister for Survivor Justice has just published a twelve-page consultation document asking whether the word 'victim' is sufficiently empowering.

Well done, everyone. Take a bow.

The Hierarchy Problem Nobody Wanted To Name

Here's the thing nobody on the Green left wanted to say out loud, because saying it out loud requires a level of intellectual honesty that doesn't fit on a tote bag: when you import large numbers of people from cultures where women are legally and socially subordinate, and then simultaneously dismantle every mechanism that might enforce British norms upon arrival, you do not get a multicultural utopia. You get a postcode lottery of whether the law applies to you based on what your husband's community thinks about women.

The Greens' immigration policy — abolish the Home Office, treat all migrants as citizens from day one, scrap No Recourse to Public Funds — was sold as compassion. And in the abstract, compassion sounds lovely. In practice, it means that women fleeing forced marriages within newly settled communities have nowhere to go, because the support infrastructure is overwhelmed, the police have been told to approach 'cultural sensitivities' with 'appropriate humility,' and the one refuge that used to operate in the area closed after its funding was redirected to a community cohesion coordinator named Jez.

FGM: Still Happening, Now With Better Paperwork

Britain has had laws against Female Genital Mutilation since 1985. In the four decades since, the number of successful prosecutions has been, and please brace yourself for this, almost none. Not because it isn't happening — NHS data consistently records thousands of cases annually — but because prosecuting it requires a degree of cultural confrontation that successive governments have found deeply uncomfortable, and that the Green Party has now elevated into an actual policy position.

Under the Greens' framework, communities are to be 'engaged with' rather than 'policed.' Outreach workers — many of whom are themselves drawn from the communities in question and face their own social pressures — are expected to do the work that the criminal justice system has been quietly asked to step back from. It is, as approaches go, a bit like asking the arsonist's cousin to check whether the house is on fire.

The women and girls this affects are, in the main, not the daughters of Islington dinner party guests. They are not writing Guardian columns about it. They are not represented in Green Party focus groups. They are invisible to the political class that congratulates itself on championing them while simultaneously ensuring that nothing structurally changes.

Competing Victims, Paralysed Courts

What the Green project has created, in its determination to hold every grievance simultaneously, is a justice system that has become genuinely confused about who it is supposed to protect. When a perpetrator belongs to a demographic that the progressive framework codes as 'marginalised,' and a victim belongs to a demographic that the same framework codes as 'also marginalised,' the result is institutional paralysis dressed up as nuance.

This is not a theoretical problem. It is the documented reality of how honour-based violence cases, forced marriage referrals, and sexual exploitation networks have been handled — or not handled — in British towns and cities for the better part of two decades. The Greens did not invent this failure. But their policy platform would supercharge it to a scale that makes previous failures look like a minor administrative hiccup.

Abolish the Home Office. Remove immigration enforcement. Extend public funds to all residents regardless of status. Dismantle the structures that, however imperfectly, create some accountability around who is here and what they are doing. Then watch what happens to the women in communities where male authority is absolute and the British state has been told, at the policy level, to mind its own business.

The Women Who Won't Be On The Poster

The Green Party's women's rights literature features a particular kind of woman. She is educated. She is articulate. She is fighting for equal pay and reproductive rights and the right not to be talked over in meetings. These are entirely legitimate concerns and this article has no interest in dismissing them.

But there is another woman — many other women — whose concerns do not make the poster. The sixteen-year-old in Rotherham whose case was deprioritised because nobody wanted to be accused of racism. The woman in Birmingham whose family has made clear that divorce means death and whose local council's 'community liaison' strategy involves a lot of nodding and very little action. The girl in East London whose school has quietly stopped teaching certain parts of the biology curriculum because parents complained.

These women voted for protection too. They just didn't get a vote on which culture got to define what protection means.

The Greens promised to smash the patriarchy. They have, to their considerable credit, been absolutely relentless about the patriarchy operating in HR departments, on cinema screens, and in the comment sections of broadsheet newspapers. The other patriarchy — the one operating in communities that the Green framework has decided are too fragile to scrutinise — is doing rather well, thanks. It has a sustainability certification and everything.