Working-class women in the North East of England are well used to being patronised, dismissed, and ignored. Formidable, uncompromising and tenacious, they are often hugely underestimated by people who don’t begin to understand how tough life in the region can be.
I grew up there myself. Though I left more than four decades ago, most of my family remain, and when I visit, I am always struck by the same thing: ordinary women showing extraordinary grit, taking on injustice with a determination forged in hardship.
Yes, women everywhere fight against unfairness. But in the North, the struggle can be relentless. Recent research from Northumbria University lays bare the challenges for women: women here live shorter lives, are more likely to be poor and face worse mental health challenges. They are at greater risk of domestic violence and of being drawn into the criminal justice system. Infant mortality is higher; qualifications fewer.
Such adversity can crush, but it can also forge a certain mindset of resilience and resistance. The North has a long, proud history of female defiance, after all, from the Battle of Newcastle in 1909, when suffragettes gathered to lobby David Lloyd George over votes for women and the force feeding of hunger strikes — to current campaigners such as Ann Ming, Maggie Oliver and Sharon Henderson.
Each of these women began as “ordinary” mothers or workers. Each was dismissed or disbelieved by those in authority. And each refused to back down. They changed the system by the sheer force of their persistence.
Ann Ming epitomises this spirit. And her name is on people’s lips today because her extraordinary fight for justice after her daughter’s murder has been turned into a TV drama which documents her 17-year fight for justice.
In 1989, Ming’s 22-year-old daughter Julie was murdered. The killer, their neighbour Billy Dunlop was eventually arrested — but after two hung juries he walked free. Refusing to accept the outcome, Ming, a working-class woman from Stockton, Teesside, spent 17 years waging a determined campaign against the 800-year-old legal principle of “double jeopardy”.
What makes Ming’s story so emblematic of northern working-class women’s spirit is her doughty refusal to be cowed by authority. When police dismissed her initial concerns at Julie’s disappearance, saying her daughter was a “typical case to take off”, Ming’s response cut straight through their condescension: “I don’t care how common this is, I’m telling you my daughter would never have left her child and her family.” This was neither politeness nor deference; it was a mother’s certainty, delivered with northern directness.
Such was the level of police incompetence, they didn’t even find Julie’s body, even after a five-day forensic search of the young woman’s house. Instead, that appalling discovery fell to Ann, three months later, when she recognised the smell of death in her daughter’s bathroom and discovered the corpse hidden behind a bath panel.
Ming’s anguish was only just beginning. Despite a wealth of forensic evidence which put Dunlop in the dock, the jury twice failed to convict him, and he was acquitted, to be protected forevermore by the “double jeopardy” principle. Or so everyone thought. Not Ming, though.
In 1998, Dunlop seriously assaulted an ex-girlfriend and her new partner, and was sent to prison. It was during this spell inside that he confessed to a female prison officer that he had murdered Julie. When police told Ming that they were taking Dunlop to court on perjury, and that this was better than nothing, Ming was appalled. The ancient law was an aberration and her fight to change it began.
Despite being told she was on a hiding to nothing, Ming badgered MPs, Lords, and anyone else she could get access to — including Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, who was sympathetic to her plight. Civil liberties groups and fancy prominent lawyers, including defence barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC and Imran Khan (the Lawrence family lawyer), opposed her campaign, but she didn’t back down. She understood something they didn’t — that sometimes the system is simply wrong, and it takes ordinary people with extraordinary gumption to fix it. And the system underestimated her. As Ming said to me when we spoke recently: “These people often think of northern women as stupid or whatever, and I didn’t care — I just got on and did it and proved them all wrong.”
How wrong they were. Her indomitable spirit kept her campaigning until, in 2003, the law was overturned with the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act. In 2006, Dunlop became the first person retried under the new law and was finally convicted of Julie’s murder. Her campaign has since enabled other landmark convictions, and so far there have been 12 successful retrials since the law came into effect: including those of two of Stephen Lawrence’s killers.
In her tenacity, and the way she was willing to stand up to complacent authority, Ming’s case is similar to another formidable northern working-class woman: Maggie Oliver. Yet if Ming acted for the good of her daughter, Oliver was willing to sacrifice her career and future security to protect the scores of vulnerable women that the system refused to protect. As a detective with Greater Manchester Police, she investigated the grooming of young girls by organised gangs. But when she realised her force was burying evidence and abandoning victims, she resigned in disgust and at great personal cost went public.
Like Ann Ming, she refused to be fobbed off and, only fuelled by the intransigence and corruption of the police, set up the Maggie Oliver Foundation, a charity that looks at how to tackle the endemic problem of organised child sexual abuse. There can be no doubt that, without her efforts there would be no statutory inquiry into the institutionalised failure of many agencies to deal with the grooming gang scandal. No less important, even fewer perpetrators would be sitting in prison today.
Yet if Oliver’s grit and courage were belatedly acknowledged, it’s also telling that, like Ming, she came up against institutional prejudice. And if both cases clearly share a grim dash of sexism, Oliver’s battle with GMP also hints at how class prejudice is still wrecking the lives of working-class northern women.
It’s a fact Sharon Henderson knows well. In 1992, her seven-year-old daughter Nikki was kidnapped just yards from her home before being brutally murdered. It was over three decades later that David Boyd, Nikki’s killer, was finally sentenced to 29 years in prison. His conviction was largely down to Sharon Henderson’s unwavering efforts.
The night she was taken, Nikki had left her grandfather’s flat and walked the few yards across the veranda and down two flights of stairs towards home. Her killer must have seen his chance: he took her to a derelict building, hit her twice over the head with a brick, and stabbed her 37 times. Nikki’s body was found in a disused warehouse by locals the following morning, following a massive search.
Police failed catastrophically — they didn’t even interview Boyd, a convicted child sex offender living just three doors down, until 26 years later. Instead, they wrongly pursued another suspect, whose confession was thrown out at trial. A series of police failures helped Boyd escape justice for many years.
Henderson’s life had never been easy. She had spent most of her childhood in care, and became pregnant with her first child at 16. That class dynamic would arguably influence her subsequent interactions with the case. Certainly, she endured three decades of police indifference, mental health struggles, and addiction, but never gave up on her relentless pursuit of leads. After being repeatedly ignored, she finally approached the outgoing police chief constable Steve Ashman, begging him to reopen the case. Her persistence paid off. Ashman appointed a cold case team, and Henderson gave them the names she’d been trying to give police for years: including that of Boyd. Following a thorough investigation, and with the help of advanced DNA evidence, his conviction was secured in May 2023.
Were it not for Henderson’s steadfast determination to win justice for Nikki, Boyd would never have been caught.
After the sentencing, Henderson called for a public inquiry into why it had taken the police nearly 30 years to find her daughter’s murderer. She is currently working with her lawyers and the Independent Office for Police Conduct to expose failures in the original police investigation, and is determined that others should not endure what she did. “What sickens me,” she tells me, “is how many families I am still contacted by today that don’t get justice, because the professionals think they are scum. I will fight for these people, just like I fight for Nikki.”
That determination is what unites these women — not simple geography. They refused to know “their place” or accept the limitation society tries to impose on women like them. Each was patronised, each faced the same contemptuous authorities, and yet each refused to accept it. None backed down. They thrive on common sense and have absolute moral clarity, which is exactly why politicians are never going to get away with fobbing them off.
This is not a matter of temperament alone, but also of context. In the North, hardship is often a constant companion. Communities shaped by industrial decline and political neglect cannot afford illusions about authority. Women in particular learn that if they don’t fight, nobody else is going to step up.
At a time when successive governments have failed to tackle police corruption, systemic violence against women, and the failures of the justice system, these three cases show what leadership could look like. They have fought not for power but for justice. And they have achieved change when all around them said it was impossible.
Imagine if women of this calibre were to go into politics. Imagine if moral clarity and tenacity counted for more than spin, slickness and personal gain. Imagine if the vulnerable counted.
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Author: Julie Bindel
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