Protest against abolishing the Women’s Committee
1988
Steve recalls during the late 1980s, “There was an incredibly contentious decision, as a result of protest and picket of Birmingham City Council, where it was decided to abolish the Women's Committee of the Council and merge it into the Equalities Committee. There was a view that equalities could be dealt with as an amorphous issue, but we thought abolishing the Women's Committee was retrograde, if you looked at what was happening in London, where there was also a Lesbian and Gay Committee, and we would have had aspirations to have created committees, not reduced them, and that was incredibly acrimonious. I think it was born of the timidity on the part of the ruling Labour group, that they didn’t want to be seen as one of the ‘loony left’, they wanted to be seen as less controversial, and that has been my view consistently since joining the Council ten years ago (1997).