Following on from the feminism thread - thoughts please esp from Tory mums on the Nick Cohen article in the Observer this week (thanks Pruni ):
I have always thought that the most interesting stories barely make the news, and last week Cameron proved my point. He gave an extraordinarily reactionary pledge that made a nonsense of his hippy image and no one in the media raised a questioning eyebrow. Writing in the Telegraph, he promised that under a Conservative government Britain would opt out of the European Union's Social Chapter. The immediate effect would be the removal of legal protection for part-time workers and the ending of the rights of women to extend maternity leave. Not much compassionate conservatism in that announcement, I thought.
I double-checked with Cameron's friends to see if there had been some mistake. Not at all, they told me. You don't understand David if you suppose he believes in regulation, particularly regulation from the EU. But what is going to happen to part-time workers - most of them women and many of them poor? Well, they replied, we will exhort employers to be nice to them. David's views on employment rights are like his views on WH Smith selling chocolate oranges instead of real ones. He's not going to force employers to extend maternity leave any more than he is going to ban Smiths from selling chocolate. He is just going to ask them to do the decent thing.
The TUC is appalled and points out that workers will have nothing to fall back on when employers ignore Cameron's lectures, as I'm sure they will. I asked their officials why with the exception of two tiny articles, there had been no follow-up, and one of them said that she feared that Cameron had an alarmingly accurate understanding of the tensions and double standards of middle-class life. As a leading figure in the Labour movement, she hears daily diatribes on how Blair has sold out from members of London's progressive middle class. With barely a pause for breath, the apparently sincere left-wingers switch to anguished wails about the law forcing them to give their nannies flexible working and other benefits. She doesn't dismiss their problems, and accepts that finding and paying for child care can be hellish. But she does come away thinking that many of them would quietly welcome a cutback on the rights of Britain's new servant class, as long as Cameron could make them feel good by covering a right-wing measure in the unctuous language of moral exhortation.