SISTERS from up to 10 groups, hailing from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, gathered at London’s Marx Memorial Library last Saturday for a Communist Party-initiated women’s liberation symposium to discuss the current pressing threat to women’s rights and the possibility for co-ordinated working.

Flanked by the library’s display of red banners of the British Battalion volunteers in the Spanish civil war — one of which sported a caption that it had been proudly stitched by the women of Barcelona — Mary Davis of the Communist Party women’s advisory panel kicked off proceedings, explaining the spark for the event was the extraordinary response the CP had to its statement earlier this year on Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

The statement, issued by the party’s executive committee in March, raised concerns about provisions of the Bill that made it easier for people to self-identify their gender in Scotland and how that might interact with women’s rights under wider UK equality law, which is a reserved matter.