Argh, this is why I'll never vote Conservative

[HeadFairy]

poor loves can't be the main bread winners and it's our fault!

I don't really understand the POINT he's making. Is it

• men can't be breadwinners because bloody nasty women won't let them and insist on working, the unreasonable bitches?

• single mothers are responsible for men who can't be breadwinners?

• women are getting themselves educated and are therefore refusing to marry men with no prospects?

• if loads of men aren't educated and are therefore unable to earn a living that is WOMEN'S FAULT?

Or maybe he's saying "there are lots of unemployed men and it's the fault of employed women."

I think it's;

women are taking all the uni places, thereby depriving the poor men, which means
i) the men can't get an education and thereby be the breadwinner for the family (WTF?)
ii) women have no-one to marry, because they are all educated and want educated men to marry them, but they have stopped the men getting said education by taking their places
iii) women should crawl back to the kitchen and leave the men to get on with the real job of running the world.

OMG am gobsmacked - how utterly utterly bizarre...

Given that women with children under 12 are the most discriminated group in the workplace and the Conservatives themselves recently worked out it would take 180 or something years for women to get equal pay with men I am totally at a loss as to what point he thinks he is making.......

I'd rather die than vote Conservative but since they'll probably be the next Government I am dreading it even more than I was

I hate to say this, but I think TheDullWitch has a point. We are getting to the stage where I can foresee a massive backlash against women who train as doctors/lawyers/whatever and then drop out to become SAHMs.

Oh god, do you think so SSB?

But it's so bloody hard being a ft woth, I honest;y don't blame anyone who just gives up (man or woman) - life just IS easier with one person at home.

Ts, I think you're right and that's a good summary.

It genuinely worries me, www. I have heard more "backlash" type comments in the last six months or so than I ever remember hearing previously in all my years in City-type environments.

I think it is not helped by the fact that women can take this massive amount of maternity leave now - I really do think it would be better if it had to be shared between both parents. We are making it seem like parenting is women's work, not parents' work.

I would not be very chuffed if I had daughters and they trained for a professional career and then packed it in when they had children. It just seems a very retrograde step for society as a whole. Women have fought hard for their rights - if we don't use them, then we can hardly be surprised if one day we end up losing them.

Fucking stupid Tories. If they're worried about unemployment among men, perhaps they should have thought a bit harder before colluding in the destruction of this country's manufacturing base?

but rather than trained women dropping out to have families - we need to change the culture so that all parents can work parttime - sharing the child rearing with their partner and doing the thing they were trained for part time - after all - childrearing is only for a portion of your working life - you can still make a reasonable contribution to the workforce (part times often are more productive than full timers) - and then return to something approaching full time (I never want to do full time if I can help it ) once the kids have grown up.

I have a friend who is a doctor, who is swanning around at moment finding herself on a music course. Doesn t want to go back to medicine. And as someone who struggled hard to get to uni from working class background, I am residually very angry with her.

I just think my parents paid for your 7 yrs of training with their bloody hardearned and you're poncing around when you could be healing the sick as you were trained to do. Why did you take that place on that course if you don t feel a sense of vocation to medicine?

Agree with throckenholt.

Should say she combines it with yummymummydom though kids both at school so she could easily be GP part time.

Yes I agree, parenting absolutely shouldn't be seen as womens work. More men need to put their heads above the parapet and ask for flexible working /other things that improve work/life balance.

TheDullWitch - I agree with you, that must be very annoying.

I hesitate to say this - but if more men were working part time and taking a share in the childcare - we may have many fewer women suffering from depression - and men would realise what is actually involved in childrearing and would appreciate it a bit more (is this a utopian fantasy ?!).

I think the emotive laguage used is very interesting:

"The man who can't go out and command a decent wage is not going to be able to hold a family together.''

My associations are of a man struggling to hold a family together in the face of adversity, imminent possibility of breakdown and a general sense of depair - no decent wage, impending penury etc. It is not a discussion about competition in the workplace but rather a vague emotional appeal of behalf of a certaing group of men whose dominance of their families is under threat.

My father earns a good salary, my mother outearns him by a factor of six and they have been married 30 years. I vote Conservative, btw.

regardless of this nonsense it will be interesting to watch as the different factions fight it off this week, especially regarding taxes and regulation

ah, but, The DullWitch, she was 18 when she made that decision. It's a fact of life that most of us are still growing up when we enter university. I do agree with you on the £££ invested in medical training by the state, wasted in her case, but if a doctor has lost their vocation, do we really want them in practice at all?
I caught up with that documentary series on doctors who trained at St Mary's in Paddington 20 or so years ago and what they have done since. One stellar and formerly very committed GP was honest about how she finds she cannot cope with the more emotive parts of medicine (caring for terminally ill children) that was part of her job, after she became a parent herself, so she quit. Part of me was at the waste of her training and skills, but she was honest about it.

"The man who can't go out and command a decent wage is not going to be able to hold a family together.''

I don't think my stay-at-home writer husband would be too chuffed with that one.
Holding a family together is about both partners working together, not driving themselves nuts trying to conform to someone else's expectations!

Men need self-respect, of course they do, but money is not the only route to it.

I think it is evil and divisive, tbh. There is enough misogyny around without encouraging old-style macho men to believe that women are the villains who have stolen their jobs.

And, er, she became...a journalist...of sorts. An agony aunt.

I am not even going there on David Willetts' remarks.

I can only read it as really saying what TS summarises. Which is a really bizzare statement from a grown politician.

surely there ought to be jobs for medically trained people that are not all face to face with patients ? It does seem a waste to not use the training. But maybe it is a failure of the NHS not to be more creative on how they use their skills.

There are throckenholt, pathologists and anaesthetists
But you'd have to retrain and be competing with other, younger doctors for limited opportunities