What women want

25 June 2011

The Tories are desperate to regain the female vote – but they have a very patronising idea of how to do it

You’d never think it to look at them, but the Tory party used, for much of the 20th century, to be the natural party of women. That’s right: women are, contrary to what most feminists like to think, instinctive Tories, if you judge by the voting record since the advent of universal suffrage. Not in recent elections, admittedly, but in general. And women liked David Cameron — until about six months ago, when, judging by the figures, as a sex we started going off him. And that has created something like consternation right at the top of the government.

The alarm first sounded during the spring local elections, when the polling showed that women had cooled towards the Tories even more than men had. This came as a disagreeable shock to the party’s sense of the natural order of things. George Osborne, no slouch when it comes to electoral arithmetic, worked out the implications, as did the party’s number-cruncher-in-chief, Andrew Cooper. A little digging confirmed their fears: last Christmas, 45 per cent of women backed the Tories, according to YouGov, against just 34 per cent of men. Now that gap has vanished.

Egged on by Cooper, Cameron is ditching just about any policy that he thinks women might not like. Look closely at the government’s recent U-turns: all of them are designed, at least in part, to go down well with the ladies.

The volte-face on the NHS and prison sentencing; the hasty efforts to soften the effect of raising the pensions age for women; David Cameron’s warm words last weekend on how absentee fathers are as bad as drink drivers (contrast with the Major-era Tories, who had it in for feckless single mothers) — all of them are matters that concern women voters more than men.

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Peter Reeve

July 1st, 2011 10:18pm Report this comment

This essay embodies a curious logic: women benefit more than men from social services, therefore they will be most affected by reductions in those services, and this is unjust. Given that reductions in services are necessary, what is the alternative? To disproportionately target the services that mostly benefit men?

Think about it -- if say, 60% of such spending benefited women and 40% men, then a 10% reduction across the board for example, would result in a 6 percentage-point drop for women and 4 percentage-point drop for men, leaving the ratio unaltered. Would it be more just to effect a 5 percentage-point drop for both? That would result in spending that benefited women over men by roughly 61% to 39%. How is that more just? And the bigger the overall cuts, the more skewed the results would be in favour of women. To be fair, cuts must be proportional across all sections of society, unless the intent is positively to favour certain groups, which is of course what McDonagh is really advocating.

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