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If you ever met Penny Iveson, even once, you would remember her. Tall, elegant with a shock of red hair falling below her shoulders. It wasn’t just her appearance that made an indelible mark.
It was also the fire in her belly for social justice, particularly the rights of women, that is unforgettable. Very sadly last week we lost Penny after a long battle with cancer that, earlier, saw the loss of the locks of her hair. But cancer could not blunt that fighting spirit.
Last year, after being discharged from a period in hospital when she had been very unwell, one of her daughters had been unable to contact her. When they finally spoke on the phone, Penny said that she had been at the County Hospital. “Are you alright, mum?’, her daughter asked.
“I was on a picket line”, was Penny’s reply. I first met Penny in the early 1980s. She was a regular at Greenham Common, at the women’s peace camp, protesting against the siting of American cruise missiles in Berkshire.
She was arrested on more than one occasion. She was an ever-present on anti-fascist demonstrations in Brighton, and very active in the anti-Poll Tax movement. She joined the Labour Party in 1986.
“After ten years in the women’s movement, the Labour Party was a waffle shop to me, and I would have left within the year had I not found fighting spirit in Militant who advised me to stay in the Party.” (Militant was a left-wing group in the Labour Party that organised around the Militant newspaper). She said that the “cowardice and posturing of the right-wingers (in the Labour Party) were things I wanted to expose in campaigns like non-payment of the poll-tax.
” Most members of Militant, including Penny, were expelled from the Labour Party in the early 1990s. On being expelled, Penny said: “I’m glad that I have much more time now to spend on real campaigns.” She didn’t attend the hearing that led to her expulsion.
“I actually forgot about my hearing because I had too much to do!” Penny was a committed trade unionist and was Secretary of the Brighton Trades Council. However, she was primarily driven by her commitment to women’s rights including campaigning against violence against women and pornography. I remember her on a picket line outside the Duke of Yorks cinema which was showing the film 91⁄2 Weeks which had been banned from other cinemas in Brighton.
Penny and other women in Militant were on the picket line while some men from Militant went into the cinema to watch the film. She was also a strong supporter of the campaign for a statue for the suffragette Mary Clarke. Her last message to one of her daughters referred to the Supreme Court ruling that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act referred to ‘biological woman’ and ‘biological sex’.
She wrote: “I feel overjoyed that sanity has prevailed. There is hope!” Even though she was ill, and aged 78, Penny still found the energy to stand for election, representing the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition in the 2023 local elections in the Coldean and Stanmer ward for a seat on Brighton and Hove City Council. She said she wanted to be a councillor “to vote for no cuts in jobs and services, to vote in a needs budget that will provide a decent standard of living for all, with no capitulation to the false plea ‘there is no money’.
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Every single council service has suffered severely from cuts, from housing maintenance to library staffing to support systems for those with mental and physical needs.” Citing her own experience she said: “There is sparse communication between the council and the companies it employs leading to jobs having to be done twice (wrong part of my roof mended) or lack of advice to prevent problems (mould).” Somehow Penny found time for a career.
She was a retired mental nurse, professional hypnotherapist and neuro-linguistic programming practitioner. Relatively recently she told her other daughter that she had had enough of people and had decided to redirect some or all of her financial contributions to a dog charity and a ‘save the donkey’ charity, highlighting her soft and caring side as she really did love all animals. There are so many people who admired and respected her even when she was uncompromising in her criticisms.
She was usually, though not always, right! One of her lasting legacies are her daughters and granddaughters who, like Penny, are strong women who know what they think and are not afraid to express themselves. Andy Winter is a former councillor who worked in social care and homelessness services for 40 years.
