Caroline Escott

29th Jul 2011

Before media and political circles became engulfed by, consecutively, phone hacking, the Oslo attacks and Amy Winehouse’s death, there had been a welcome spate of articles examining the cooling-off of the love affair between women and Cameron’s Conservatives.

For reasons that ran the gamut from the public spending cuts to Ken Clarke’s rape sentencing gaffes, female voters have, apparently, been going off us.  This was giving Conservative Party strategists nightmares as they began to realise that, without female votes, the maths required to win the next general election was not looking promising.

However, most of the analysis finished somewhat uselessly by concluding that you couldn’t win over female voters with gimmicky PR stunts, only through boosting public expenditure- impossible in the current economic climate. So there was nothing to be done.

Clearly we don’t have the money to do everything that women (and men) may want us to do in terms of public services, and Tony Blair and his legacy of spin have left the UK with a knowing and cynical electorate. But there is an option open to us, one that would not only help us with the crude electoral arithmetic but could also strengthen the on-going detoxification strategy and potentially help us appeal to Iain Martin’s “aspirational working classes”. It wouldn’t even be necessarily costly – a vital factor in the current economic climate. 

What I’m thinking of is a renewed impetus towards increasing female participation in politics (and, more generally, ‘women-friendly’ issues – though my focus here will be on women’s political involvement).

The argument for this in terms of appealing to an individual woman’s vote is obvious – most people gravitate towards the party that most looks like them.   But perhaps a more powerful motivation would be that actively placing the emphasis on “women in politics” could be a potent and visible symbol of the detoxification strategy that almost won us the last election. 

From photos with huskies to an election manifesto which emphasised our green and international development aid credentials, the Tory party under Cameron, Hilton and Osborne has shifted firmly to the centre. Yet the rapidity with which people still accuse the Tories of being the same old “nasty”, slash-and-burn party indicates that this strategy has not been entirely successful.   It is clearly necessary to have a dispassionate examination of which “signals” of the detoxification of the Conservative brand have worked, which haven’t, and which should be added to the list.

We need to do more to convince people we have changed – and, just as “Blair’s Babes” (ugh!) were a symbol of the newness of Tony Blair’s New Labour as potent as the dropping of Clause 4 in their manifesto, I think that the same issue could do likewise for his self-proclaimed “heir”.  Moreover, despite a promising start from Ed Miliband during his leadership campaign on women’s rights, he has yet to capitalise on it, leaving some space for the Tories to make it their own.

An emphasis on gender equality and female involvement in the political process would also alienate far less the lower middle-class that a political party needs to carry in order to win convincingly than, for instance, overseas aid.  Research shows that lower-middle-class women in particular have never quite got over the impression that Labour is the “working-class man’s” party – just look at the make-up and typically “masculine” aggression of the tactics and posturing of the trade unions, which remain a key part of Labour’s DNA.

But how do we increase female political participation? Elsewhere on Platform 10, Clara X has argued persuasively that you can be a feminist without believing that the only answer to inequality derives from diktats from the centre.  This argument is tremendously appealing.  It’s also in keeping with the activities currently undertaken by the Conservatives to promote female participation, such as the mentoring and training activities taken up by the Conservative Women’s Organisation (CWO).  In this way, progress happens organically, but it also means that it happens at a snail’s pace.

The UK, with just over one in five female MPs, still languishes near the bottom of the international league table in terms of women’s involvement in politics.  And the situation is no better at either the local government level or in the Lords.  Yet there remains space for the Conservative Party to do something bold to increase the number of women in politics, namely, something that has already proved to be very successful both in the UK and elsewhere at increasing female participation at a national level. And that’s “positive discrimination” through, for instance, the use of All-Women-Shortlists (AWS).

We should ignore the doubters: AWS works. Look at what happened when the Labour Party adopted it in 1997; over the course of just one election, there was an increase from 37 to 101 Labour female MPs – in large part helped by AWS.  When it was outlawed, the number of women MPs actually decreased at the 2001 election.  Bringing it back into the Labour party when the 2002 Sex Discrimination (Elections) Act was passed led to a surge in female candidates and MPs.

Because the truth is that constituency associations still tend to pick white, middle-class male candidates. It remains rare for female candidates to be taken seriously – just think of the uproar in Surrey East in 2009 when they were presented with a shortlist that “only” consisted of two ethnic minority candidates, one gay man and three women. Or the opprobrium heaped upon Norfolk South West’s candidate (and eventual MP) Liz Truss when somebody did a Google search just a little too late in the day and ‘found out’ that she’d had an affair with Mark Field.

Positive discrimination of this sort is deemed “un-Conservative” by certain  factions in the Tory party.  Yet the Conservatives were arguably gendered-positive-discrimination pioneers: in 1927, for instance, they specified that each constituency must send at least one woman delegate to Conference out of a delegation of 4.  And David Cameron was talking about instituting AWS as recently as February 2010.  Like many of his fine words recently, however, there has been little in the way of real progress on the issue.

There are of course issues with the AWS – it can be deemed to be patronising and positive discrimination is, as we see from examples ranging from university admission to job interviews, a clumsy tool.  But if we really believe that we want more women involved in Westminster life, then this is the quickest and most effective way of doing so. 

Positive discrimination could be complemented by other “female-friendly” policies – this Government has already made a good start with their Action Plan on domestic violence against women, and the recently published human-trafficking strategy has so far received cautious praise from interest groups.  A more coherent attempt to sell these initiatives could work wonders – and would capitalise on Theresa May’s growing credibility and effectiveness as Home Secretary.

Although there is no such thing as a silver bullet, least of all in politics, a greater focus on women’s political involvement could help Cameron appeal to his female core supporters.  It would also cement the new, modernising Tory brand in a way that other symbols of detoxification like international development have so far failed to do, and in a far less costly fashion.  It could even reach out to those disaffected lower middle-class women who have been put off by the actions of the trade unions and reassure them that, although they may be angry at the slowdown in spending on public services, the Conservatives are not ‘anti-women’. 

And, although I’ve spent this article discussing the electoral maths, it is important to keep the primary objective of all this clear in our minds: the best policymaking comes from legislatures consisting of people from different backgrounds and with a variety of life experiences.   Simply put, more women makes not just for good politics, but for good policy as well.