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.

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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