Party Member Attitudes and Women’s Policy (by and for women?)

Abstract

The pre-Cameron Conservative party lacked electoral competitiveness on ‘women’s issues’.² By the 2010 general election this was very much less the case. Policy pledges on maternity and paternity leave and pay, and flexible working, amongst others, suggested substantial reform, if not redirection of the party’s position, even if Cameron’s public commitment to recognizing marriage in the tax system, at least for some commentators, tempered such appraisals (and may, indeed, have outweighed the other initiatives in terms of the public and media attention it attracted). The party’s ‘women’s’ policy commitments were evidently designed to market the party to women voters, especially middle income mothers, as well as others who, whilst not directly affected by them, would see in them a sign that the party was now more in tune with modern life. Some of these policies looked risky in terms of the party’s ideological traditions and its core vote, especially those whose dispositions might be expected to favour more traditional gender roles and who might wish to protect business from what they would consider ‘costly’, in both economic and social terms, social engineering. Indeed, of the 2008 Women’s Policy Group Report, Women in the World Today, which underpinned the party’s 2010 manifesto commitments, a leading Conservative woman felt sure that some in the Parliamentary party (and one might add too, the party’s grassroots) would be concerned that the Tories had ‘stolen a march’ on Labour.

Stealing a march on Labour.¹