Sylvia Pankhurst’s popularity shows the shifting nature of politics

Sylvia Pankhurst’s popularity shows the shifting nature of politics | Martin Kettle

She was not the most celebrated suffragette at the time. History is as much about the present as the past

Newspapers are about the present not the past. It’s rare for a long-dead historical figure to make it into them, let alone twice in just a few days. That’s the sort of feat that only someone with instant name recognition like Winston Churchill would normally achieve. So when, just before Christmas, there were two separate news stories about Sylvia Pankhurst, it got me thinking about how we make use of our history nowadays and what it says about us.

The first Pankhurst story revealed that the former suffragette had written to the postmaster general in 1934 to complain about government phone-tapping. There was no firm suggestion that Pankhurst’s own phone might have been tapped. But her eye had been caught by a contemporary news report about post office eavesdropping, and she wrote to protest at an activity she felt was “opposed to the very best interests of the community and contrary to public policy”.

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2rTJExh

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