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.
The Tories’ woman troubles hit Cameron where it hurts. From the outset, he has declared his intention to be the most ‘pro-family’ (read: women-friendly) political leader of his generation. The Prime Minister wants this to come across not just in his politics, but in his public persona. He takes any chance he gets to talk about fatherhood. He lets the cameras follow him in taxis as he calls his wife to ask if the children are tucked up in bed. But never mind all the emotional outreach — as far as women are concerned, Cameron is losing the rational argument. And it’s obvious why. The Tories came into government to cut the deficit. Women, including Tory women, are both the major consumers of public services, everything from Sure Start to Meals on Wheels, and the major providers of them.
It always feels a bit shaming to consider men and women as different sorts of political animals. It makes Britain seem like one of those old-fashioned dinner parties where the men hang back over the port to talk about quantitative easing and whither the Arab Spring, while the women in the drawing room talk childcare. But there’s no denying that women do have more of what we like to call caring responsibilities — minding children, minding ageing parents — and inevitably, the politics reflects that.
Which isn’t to say that women aren’t every bit as right-wing as men, and quite often more right-wing than men, on issues like crime and immigration. It’s something to do, I think, with women being natural pragmatists. We are in a position to see the effect of government policies on the family, on the streets and schools. It makes for a down-to-earth take on politics, the kind that the Tories, with their former emphasis on family and neighbourhood and parish, used to understand effortlessly. Margaret Thatcher understood that any woman who had run a family budget could understand government accounting: when in debt, tighten the purse-strings. ‘If you want something said, ask a man,’ she said, famously. ‘If you want something done, ask a woman.’
It takes more than warm words about families for women to buy into the Cameron project. Not every woman supported Tory plans for a transferable tax allowance for married couples, which would help families where one parent stays at home to mind the children. But it was at least a concrete policy, something that gave teeth to all the talk about the importance of marriage. Well, what’s happened to it, then?
Then again, the disastrous, cloth-eared decision to take child benefit off families in the higher tax bracket was an example of how not to appeal to women. It wasn’t much, in the great scheme of things, but it was one of the few times when you felt you were getting something back from the state, just by virtue of the fact you had children. Taking it away was a small thing, but it suggested that the Tories belong to the sort of class that wouldn’t really miss an extra ten or 20 quid a week: not a good look.
Above all this, there’s the overriding problem of the cuts. There was a scary report last month — scary if you’re George Osborne — from something called Coventry Women’s Voices and the Centre for Human Rights in Practice, called ‘Unravelling Equality: A Human Rights and Equality Assessment of the Public Spending Cuts on Women in Coventry’. I hardly need talk you through the conclusions with a title like that, do I? But the gist of it is that, in every area, women consume state services more than men, rely on those services more and suffer disproportionately when they’re reduced. In the Incomes and Poverty section, for instance, it declares: ‘Taken together, the benefit and tax changes in the 2010 budget will cost women in Coventry £29,631,532. The cost to men will be less than half of this. This will further increase inequality between women and men in Coventry.’
Leave aside whether the report is right, the problem for the Tories is that this is how the cuts look. This week, the Fawcett Society held a Commons seminar to remind us that ‘women are acting as shock absorbers for the cuts’. This sort of thing may make women seem less like half the population and more like a whingeing interest group, but the fact is, whenever you get pictures in the local papers of people protesting about libraries closing and flinty Tory councils charging for playgrounds, it’ll be women and children crowding out the men. The TUC’s report last year ‘Women and the Recession: One Year On’ said bluntly that public spending cuts hit female employment hardest because around four in ten women work in public sector occupations, compared with fewer than two in ten men. In other words, the client group that was created with the expansion in the public sector under Gordon Brown is disproportionately female. Are they going to vote for cuts?
At this point, Tories may like to engage in an examination of conscience about why it was that the industries that used to employ men in these areas bit the dust, but the upshot is that employment has shifted to women in public services in those parts of the country where the Conservatives need to win friends, not lose them. (As a matter of interest, men suffered more than women when it came to job losses during this recession — 3.8 per cent, compared to 0.8 per cent of women — but they don’t go on about it.)
It’s not all bad news. The coalition is lifting the tax threshold, which will help women in part-time, low-paid work. But that genuinely progressive policy, one of the good things that the Lib Dems brought into the coalition, somehow hasn’t got the attention it deserves. If the government can’t even market its woman-friendly policies, it’s no wonder support is slipping.
There are, of course, other reasons why women are disgruntled. By and large, we pay the household bills, and the bills are getting bigger and bigger while incomes are static or shrinking. The rise in gas and electricity prices, the increase in the cost of basics ̵ 2; pasta, coffee, cocoa, you name it — the huge, above-inflation rises in fares for people who use public transport and the increase in petrol prices for the ones with cars, the inordinate cost of credit-card debt: well, they don’t make for a feelgood factor, do they? And you don’t blame great impersonal forces when it comes to inflation: you blame the government.
Then there’s the problem that the Cabinet is, undeniably, largely a boys’ outfit. If you exclude Theresa May, an increasingly impressive minister, most of the jobs held by women are minor ones. You don’t have to be a positive-discrimination enthusiast to feel that this is an odd reflection of the balance of talent between the sexes. This obviously troubles Cameron: he ennobled the pretty ghastly Sayeeda Warsi because he wanted a Question Time-friendly woman on his front bench. When the next reshuffle comes, we can be sure that some of the new breed of assertive Tory women (think Elizabeth Truss and Mary Macleod) will be promoted.
We can also expect more of the personal, Father’s Day-style emoting about the importance of family. And yes, as a sop to women, we will hear a bit less of the ‘Calm down, dear’ approach from Cameron during Prime Minister’s Questions. The upshot of that episode is that Gabby Bertin, Cameron’s political adviser, now attends the warm-up sessions for Prime Minister’s Questions to make sure his demeanour is a bit less confrontational, a bit more female-friendly.
But for all the Tory anxiety over their woman appeal, they — and it always feels like they are men, second-guessing What Women Want — seem unable to grasp that women don’t just vote according to how we feel, but by what we think, and by what we reckon is in our interest. And at the moment, there’s a lot not to like in what the government has to offer.
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