Thursday 28 April 2011

David Cameron Special - Calm Down Dear

By Kate B ( Hangbitch) & Rog T

David Cameron tells a senior Shadow Cabinet member to "Calm Down Dear".
Hangbitch & Rog T have been analysing Mr Camerons record. Looks like this
sexist crap is part of a bigger pattern.

As we approach 1 year and two budgets of this ConDem Coalition, the
 mist is clearing and we can start to see what the real priorities are
 - and the real winners and losers. The leading players - Cameron,
 Osborne and Clegg are all products of privileged backgrounds and
 public schools. One thing which is obvious - if you put a bunch of
 public schoolboys in charge of the economy, you get an economy which
 is geared towards the boys.

 Let's have a look at the latest budget. The headline policy is a 1p
 tax cut on a litre of petrol. Who gets the biggest benefit? The old
 lady on the no 9 bus, or the city boss in his Jag? Suppose you commute
 from Berkhampstead to London in your jag and fill your tank twice a
 week? You'll probably see a £1.40 a week tax cut. Will it change your
 life? Doubtful. Sadly, for many, the £72 might make a big difference.

 Let's think about the extent to which your gender will determine how
 you fare under the ConDems.

 David Cameron happily talks about big society. We all ask "What is big
 society?" It's all about members of the public working for nothing.
 And who are these people who are expected to do this work? Is it the
 bosses of the banks (to a man, erm Men)? Hardly. They won't be wiping
 any geriatric relatives' bums for their sins. So who will? The women
 of Great Britain will. As public sector job opportunities shrink and
 care services are cut, the pay packets of many carers will disappear.
 Councils outsource care to the private sector – which pays low wages.
 How many minimum wage agency and outsourced staff are ex-Etonians? For
 that matter - how many of them are male?

 A local Tory suggested to Roger that big society was merely an
 extension of what we see in Roman Catholic churches up and down the
 country - where old ladies hoover the church, arrange the flowers and
 have coffee mornings to raise money for starving kids in Africa. The
 penny really dropped then. Big Society is female slavery, by another
 name. Who looks after the elderly relatives? Who looks after the
 children? Who looks after the old lady up the road? Many churches
 would shut down if the old ladies who looked after them demanded so
 much as the minimum wage. Sadly, this kindness and generosity is
 misinterpreted by our high Tories as a sign of stupidity. "They clean
 the churches for free - why can't we get them cleaning the streets?
 Then we can sack a few roadsweepers and knock a penny off the top rate
 of tax".

 How little society moves on. I've been re-reading Marilyn French's
 “The War Against Women” and marvelling (as you always do when
 re-reading feminist greats) how little has changed in the fundamental
 sense.

 Here's French on Reagan's Conservatism:

 “Cuts (to social services and federal entitlement programmes) were
 rooted in patriarchist theory, which is woman-hating. The idea that
 poverty is a result of human inferiority is rooted in the beliefs that
 aggressive pursuit of wealth is a characteristic of superior human
 beings and that economic inequality, stratification of classes, is
 adaptive, beneficial to the human race. This is essentially to worship
 domination. Conservatives like Reagan believe that poverty is a result
 of personal failure and that programmes aimed at ameliorating poverty
 actually increase and perpetuate it by encouraging sloth in the poor.
 This belief masks an implicit agenda on women.”

 Here we are again, then, with a government that lines women against
 the wall with the services so many women rely on – the services that
 offered some buffer between themselves and the caring duties and
 poverty that fall first to females. There are too many examples to
 count, but let's have a few: there is Lancashire county council's
 drastic tightening of care eligibility criteria - nearly 4000 service
 users will be reassessed and many will be told they are no longer be
 eligible for care. That caring work will fall to women. There are the
 daycentres for people with learning and physical disabilities at
 Middlesbrough's soon-to-close Breckon Hill community centre. That work
 will fall to women, who so often make up the majority of volunteers.

 We have the Fawcett Society's devastating, and largely ignored,
 observations that cuts to the public sector will affect women out of
 all proportion:

 “Female unemployment is already at its highest in more than 20 years
 and is set to rise still further, but the one million unemployed women
 in Britain will find little in the way of welfare support to fall back
 on. Women’s incomes will be further squeezed as child benefit is
 frozen, housing benefit capped, maternity payments scrapped and the
 value of benefits and tax credits reduced.” Employment opportunities
 for women hardly look set for a bounce: women, as Fawcett observes,
 make up 65 per cent of the public sector work force. “”The threatened
 600,000 job losses are very much hanging over women’s heads.”

 French again: “Men's motivation to shift to conservatism may well be
 their opposition to women's increased economic power and political
 voice.” Indeed.

--------------------------------

Rog T suggests you to check out the Hangbitch blog.  We've been writing this article for a couple of weeks and after Camerons outrageous comments, I had to post it today

6 comments:

hangbitch said...

Cheers dear!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't you just love this government for equalities? I suppose us girls should just be pleased they still feed us. Can't ask for too much, etc.

Jaybird said...

I think you are right about the fact that the cuts, and the Big Society, shifts work onto women who will largely be unpaid for their contribution.

Two things I would like to add. Firstly, the Cabinet Office has suggested scrapping the Equalities Act 2010 as a way of scrapping "red tape" whilst at the same time they have 193 bills before Parliament.

http://www.redtapechallenge.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/equalities/

They also withdrew the already watered down draft regulations to the Act, which came into force on 5 April 2011 except as regards age discrimination, in order to weaken them further, meaning the Act came into force without formal guidance.

The cuts to legal aid make these decisions harder to challenge.

I think you are right: the Big Society harks back to a time when wealthy upper & middle class women cared for children and ran fundraising committees for charity (which were largely "do for" rather than "do with").

I agree with Michael Portillo who said that Cameron's Big Society is the same policy as Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society"

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689

It was interesting to see when Cameron made his deeply offensive comment to Angela Eagle, George Osborne laughed his head off (no George it wasn't droll) whilst Nick Clegg looked extremely uncomfortable.

caroline said...

Sadly Rog, as I remember, when we had a female PM she didn't do much for women either.

APML said...

At least Mrs T had the backbone and courage to stand up for this nation,unlike these spineless so called politicians we have today..

You know what? people are rather pissed off right now of being accused of this-and the-other,ism this ism that ism and the other,it,s bollocks WAKE UP !!!!..

Murray-Leonard arising thank you a god does exsist,so stop your whingening.equalities this and that WTF,who is really representing you at the moment,tell me !!!

zwanzig20 said...

re: the 'deeply offensive' comment.
What a mountain out of a non-existant molehill.

Extract from the BBC:
He has also used the "calm down dear" line before in the Commons - directing it at then Foreign Secretary David Miliband in 2007, while responding to a statement on Afghanistan being made by then PM Gordon Brown."

Is Mr Cameron sexist towards men as well?
Disagreeing with political views is one thing but dont claim something that does not exist.

Rog T said...

Zwanzig20,

Welcome back. Did you bother to read the blog about the deeply sexist policies of David Cameron? The comment was just the icing on the cake.