Women and Politics 2

Dave protecting his Tory clones from infiltration by non-white, non-males.

This wasn’t in my original plan to write about women politicians, but I’m not about to resist commenting on the Times quaint half-hearted moan about Call Me Dave and his lack of ladies.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6182399.ece

Dave, it turns out, had made some encouraging noises about increasing the number of women candidates for the next Westminster election. He had some vague plans about one in three ministers being female sometime after his lot win at Westminster. Judging by the picture above, he's not been successful to date.

Tory ladies have previous. I suspect many non-rightwing inclined voters will mostly recall the various exploits of Maggie and then Edwina. Then there is Anne. Even though I cannot imagine holding any views in common, I always found Anne Widdicome an interesting and colourful political personality. More recently there was Caroline and her childcare, with which I have some understanding. One of the seven demands of the Women's Liberation Movement is free accessible 24 hour childcare and even though this may not have been part of Ms Spellman's motives for paying her assistant for providing childcare, at least she did not expect this to be on tap by the woman. Childcare, whoever the mother is, is always a difficulty and it should always be paid for, whatever job the mother is employed in. I'd much prefer to subsidise childcare over second homes and other 'expenses'.

In this country, the estimable Annabel Goldie is usually in fine form leading the Tory contingent in Holyrood, but otherwise, there’s not an overwhelming womanly presence in the prospective Tory ranks and little hope of increasing numbers in the short term. Mostly their problem is the same as faced by aspirational women in all parties: the boys shout louder, the collaboratrices pull the rug from under their sisters and few if any have a clue about the importance of 50:50 representation. Instead, the pale, male and stale whine on about positive discrimination as though they didn’t operate this themselves.

The selection procedures in most parties do not mean that we get people who are picked on their merit, but are more likely to produce the time-honoured numbers of mediocre white males who are chosen via the old school tie, shared football/sports affiliation or the correct funny handshake or whatever other ‘fair’ route into power for the lads is employed. And no one can seriously argue that we have anything other than the calibre of politicos that we deserve in this democratic deficit culture.

We're not convinced by this tokenism, Dave!