Campaigners from the Fawcett Society, relatives of suffragettes and Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson have called for the women who fought for the right to vote to be pardoned.

The campaigners argue that although the suffragettes “did engage in criminal acts”, the “fact is that they were not being listened to through the proper channels”.

“Suffragette activism was for a noble cause and many of them became political prisoners,” said Fawcett Society chief executive Sam Smethers. “It would be a fitting tribute to pardon them now. They made such sacrifices so that we could all enjoy the rights we have today. In any meaningful sense of the word, they were not criminals.”

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson has already backed the campaign.

“Voting was a value judgment, not an intrinsic right,” she wrote in The Daily Telegraph. “That inequality is one of the reasons why I support calls by family members to offer a posthumous pardon to those suffragettes charged with righting that wrong.”

And Kate Barratt, whose great-great grandmother Alice Hawkins was arrested five times, said that the crimes merely show “how desperate the situation was at the time”. “And desperate times call for desperate measures”. Maria Miller, chair of the women and equalities select committee, agreed, saying that “women were campaigning in the way that was most appropriate at the time”.

“It would be good to recognise that while suffragettes used in some cases strong measures to achieve their aims, they were driven by the best motives,” she said.

The first calls to pardon the women came in 2004, when then Home Secretary David Blunkett was lobbied to grant a royal pardon by 50 MPs including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. But Blunkett rejected the petition, saying it would be a “dangerous precedent” in other instances of civil disobedience.

Speaking at the time, Meg Munn, who chaired the Labour women’s parliamentary committee, said that the suffragettes “broke the law to make a point”. “It doesn’t seem to me that it makes a great deal of sense to be seeking a pardon. We owe a debt of gratitude to the suffragettes but we can’t rewrite history.”.

Campaigners call for "criminal" suffragettes to be pardoned