Parliament has dissolved, so the country now has to run all by itself as we go into an election campaign like no other. Only it is a bit like the other ones already, isn’t it? For the main parties it resembles the one five years ago when women were sidelined as wives and mothers, as side orders to the main dish. There always seemed to me a direct correlation between the way women were underrepresented during the last election campaign and a coalition that chose deliberately to use austerity to bear down on the poorest women and children.
Wheeling out the wives as light relief, as the humanising element of the big party political beasts or, in that dreadful phrase, as “the secret weapons” who will bring voters flocking in droves, is as revolting as it is retrograde.
One difference with this election though is that on Thursday we will see four men debate with three women. The SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, the Green party’s Natalie Bennett and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood will be there alongside Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage and they are not even married to them. This has already caused some real issues regarding the height of the lecterns. Wood is 5ft 6in, Bennett 5ft 5in and Sturgeon 5ft 4in. Women in politics? The problems are insurmountable. If only they were taller.
Their presence will highlight the completely condescending attitude inherent in the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem use of the leaders’ spouses to attract voters. Where is the evidence that this works? Do floating voters think: “I won’t bother to look at policies, I will vote for the person whose wife is the most supportive”? If so, the amazing news so far is that Samantha Cameron thinks her husband should be prime minister: “He’s definitely for my mind the best man for the job.” She will go on the campaign trail with him, though he has revealed the startling information that: “She has also got other things she has to do, including making sure the children make it to school every day.” And how will the nation cope with the fact that there may be fewer date nights for the supreme couple during the campaign?
Justine Thornton, who is married to Hell Yeah Ed, is also “totally up for this fight”. She is said by friends to be “independent minded”. What sort of friends are these, you have to wonder? Friends who have to inform us that marriage is not some kind of mind meld. She is keen to campaign in her own right and be out on the stump and is going to speak out against Scottish independence. Why? We are not voting for her.
Miriam González Durántez will also be doing her bit and is admired for being “her own woman”. She is always generally assumed to have won the hotness battle that is, after all, the point of all this. But what has it got her? Nick Clegg.
The media is desperately trying to hype up excitement but the break up of a two-party system is revealing many kinds of disconnection and this one – between the big parties and women – is part of it. How much prominence in the campaign is given to formidable politicians, including Theresa May and Harriet Harman, remains to be seen. So far it’s still looking like the battle of interchangeable blokes.
It’s a basic point but representative democracy has to represent us and look like us, and at the moment it doesn’t. Nor does it even much attempt to. On Saturday I went to a meeting to talk about starting a new political party whose goal would be to push women’s equality on to the mainstream agenda. There are so many older women out there dismayed at the pace of change, and a younger generation full of energy who want to see more women in power. Still, in 2015, this seems a ridiculous, idealistic thing to attempt, which is exactly why we must.
For if the main parties are going to rerun 2010 and the only women we see are “wives” I am afraid this does not bode well. Wheeling in women to humanise men simply highlights how peculiar all this is. It plays absolutely to a right-wing and regressive agenda. This election is not about spousal loyalty and a nice frock. It is about where precisely the axe falls in the next round of cuts. It will fall on the silent and invisible majority. Women and children first.
