why don't more women join Labour party?

[tabbymoomoo]

I would love to know why women Typically vote tory? conservatives ideology goes againist equality, when equality is a fundamental value of the labour party.

We should all be voting for labour because they are the founders of; the two weeks of referral for all
atients with breast problems,opened surestart centres,flexible
working for parents,national minimum wage,working tax credit,9 months paid maternity,Free nursery provision,fairer pension system.
for women,funded 36 Sexual Assault Referral Centres and
expanded the number of domestic violence
courts,96 women
with more women MPs then the other political parties put together,NHS,£370 million to deliver
improved short break services for families with
disabled children, Human rights.
The list goes on and on.

Also the current coalition cuts will hit women three times as hard as men, even though they earned and own less than men.
look at the things being cut: child benefit,housing benefit, health in pregnancy,tax credits,surestart,free swimming for under 16's and more. This will directly effect women.
it would be interesting to know your views.

I'm female and I voted Labour...

Where did you get the statistic that women typically vote Tory? I don't know many that did but, of course, most of my close friends will probably hold the same idealisms as me so perhaps that's not surprising.

Absolutely... Gordon Brown was the master of the stealth tax. He may not have tinkered with the basic rate of income tax (if you don't count that horrendous cock-up with the 10% abolition) but he fiddled with the bandings, increased NI and took a lot of things out of tax-exempt status. Not keeping the inheritance tax threshold up with the times means that 1 in 4 'hardworking families' will be paying this... not the landed gentry it was originally intended to sting. Like dreamingofsun and a lot of other people, I'm also fed up with having seen my disposable income gradually eroded only to find that my extra tax has done very little long-term good. It's been wasted.

dreamingofsun: sorry misunderstanding. VAT is going up.

tabby - as i understand it that is going up to try and solve the budget deficit that the labour gov caused. don't like paying it but something has to be done - country can't just be massively overdrawn and pay vast interest payments forever.

BelleDameSansMerci;

Historically, women have been more likely than men to vote Conservative and less likely than men to vote
Labour. It is estimated that if women had not won the vote, there would have been a more-or-less
continuous Labour government since 1945.
The gap in voting between women and men was at its widest in the 1950s and narrowed significantly in
the 1980s. But by 1992, women were once again more likely to vote Conservative (support among women
being respectively 44% and 34%) and many identified Labour?s failure to win over women voters as a
decisive factor in their defeat.

BelleDameSansMerci;

www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/documents/Fawcett-MORI%20Ipsos%20briefing%208-9-06.pdf

dreamingofsun; if you remember it was a global catastrophe caused by global banks. regardless of who was in power we would be in deficit. Saying it was all labour is used to undermine the Labour party so that people will not vote them in again.

Cut's would need to be made by labour,yes but not to hit those less well off as hard (I?m not just talking about non workers) low-middle incomes.
Not frontline services that we all need and many depend on.

The Budget will take more than twice the income from the poorest households as a share of their annual incomes than from the second-richest group, which has four times as much income a year after tax, the report says.

While the poorest 10 per cent of households, which have incomes of £9,900 on average, will see their take-home cash drop nearly 5 per cent by 2014, all other groups apart from the richest will see their income fall less. The second-richest group ? households with an average income of £43,600 ? will suffer a decline of just 2 per cent.

The richest tenth of households ? who take home on average more than £80,000 a year ? will suffer proportionately more than any other group. But if the effects of Labour reforms in previous Budgets are removed, the coalition?s plans laid out in June clearly favour the well-off.

Let's not forget that lot's of hard working families have lost there jobs and are down to just one income. so this need not be about those who choose not to work.

ooops don't know what happened there. 5% not 5&#8201?

I voted Labour in 2001 and 2005. Primarily (and this is an even less popular opinion on mumsnet than voting Tory) because I believed that Tony Blair was the best leader for the country. I think he made mistakes but I also really felt that I agreed with a lot of what he said, and that he was dealing with incredibly difficult issues in a way that I understood, if not always agreed with. Basically I bought into New Labour.

Then the money ran out, boom turned to bust and I didn't trust Gordon Brown in the slightest. I felt that he was floundering, thought his desperate pop culture references in an attempt to be a man of the people (phoning simon cowell to check susan boyle was ok was my personal favourite) betrayed him as totally out of touch with what was important to the electorate, stop fussng about reality TV and sort out the country! I disagreed with more and more policies, and thought he had no conviction, he bottled it at the last minute on so many things. I subsequently reviewed a lot of my thinking about the spending throughout the governement. They spent as if there would be no more boom and bust, and when it turned out they was a massive bust after all that boom, it rendered their ambitious spending program as being prolifigate and indulgent. How can I trust a party responsible for that level of miscalculation and lack of forsight.

I voted Tory as I believed that they had the best solutions for the economy and that they were most in tune with what is important to me. I don't agree with all their policies (not sure I get free schools for example) but I trusted them more than I trusted Labour. All the maternity leave in the world is no help if you don't have a functioning economy so you don't have a job.

To be honest though, your real question is "Why doesn't everyone think exactly like meeeeeeeeee?" In which case, welcome to the world :)

Thanks tabby will read with interest... I wonder if it's because it's more likely that middle class women will vote than traditional working class? Just hypothesizing - no actual knowledge (as is probably woefully apparent).

tabby - not just the banks, labour failed to have an adequate regulatory system in place. even before that i think the country's finances were looking iffy.

not sure where you get your figs ref budget and affecting poor from. my understanding was that the tax free allowance was being increased, eventually to 10k - so surely the 10 per cent of households you speak about will be paying less.

maybe we would have been in deficit - but not the largest since the 2nd world war.

I'm a bully because I disagree with you? I am a good teacher, so what you think about my choice of profession is irrelevant.

I think you are disingenuous when you say irrespective of who was in we would be in deficit. I disagree. Labour overspent.

You have to look at where the budgets are largest, NHS and Welfare, and examine how savings can be made. I see no reason why tax credits should be available to those on incomes up to £60k for instance. Many of us coped with paying for childcare and working without any government help prior to 1997 on salaries that were far less. Direct the help where it is needed, not by buying a client state.

Lots of hard working families may be about to lose their jobs as a result of cuts that have been forced by the Labour overspend. They won't be voting Labour again, because of that. You also talk about those that 'choose not to work', well, that's why the Welfare bill is so high, because for SOME people, unemployment is a choice, and Labour enabled this.

Tabbymoomoo, your figures on gender and voting only go up to 1992, that's nearly 20 years ago. If you look at the more recent elections here

it says that in 1997 44% of women voted labour, 45% of men. But in 2001 it was 42% men, 42% women. In 2005 it was 34% of men, 38% of women. And in 2010 28% of men voted for labour and 31% of women.

so in fact more women than men have been voting more for labour, and the difference seems to be increasing.

lucky1979: yes my husband accuses me of this, but I?m passionate. :)

Again it was global catastrophe.

I agree that Labour stopped listening to people.

If you look back in history it
took a long time to pay back the deficit after the warII not 4yrs as we have been set now.
If we did not spend then,we would not have invested in the NHS.

scary - agree. if you earn 60k outside the south you are laughing. Perhaps they ought to limit tax credits to people in the south where the cost of living is so high.

fennel: sorry, it was the first one i googled.

'I would love to know why women Typically vote tory?'

Well there wasn't an awful lot to appeal to women in the last Labour election campaign, was there?
Plus the fact that the pornification of Britain (lapdancing clubs etc) happened under Labour's watch; they allowed the rape conviction rape to languish at 6%.
The Tories can't claim to be a party of gender equality (or the Lib Dems - rape anonymity thing for instance) but Labour didn't put up a very good show on this front either.

I quite get that Labour's policies to help people on a low income are going to benefit women more, but whether Labour actually cares about gender equality in itself.... I've yet to be convinced.

So if you're in the Labour party Tabby, sort it out! Please!

and not with that dreadful patronising Blairs babe type crap that they did last time, I want to see more women actually doing proper jobs in the next Labour government.

so you think people with over-average incomes need tax credits?

so you think the govenment ought to be paying privat health companies to do operations in advance (with a 25% take up which means 75% of that money was wasted)?

do you genuinely believe that merely putting someones salary up is enough to make them beter at their job?

and the defecit increasing between 2002-2005 was justified too (becaue that was a period of boom - i don't see their excuse)??

please.

however they may have stuffed the conservatives long term, because i believe the publics appetite for cuts will be exhausted long before the need for them is over.

scaryteacher: you are a bully because you are mocking me for having poor grammar as a result of having dyslexia. that makes you a bully. I did not call you a bad teacher; I said I was surprised as you are being personal and distasteful.
To quote you:
?You also might like to grow up a little, name calling of previous education secretaries makes me think you are still in the classroom, or is this your first job, being a Labour stooge? You don't write as someone who was educated at that time; you would have been taught punctuation and grammar for a start.? You are a bully.

Again it was a global catastrophe because of the recklessness from global bankers giving people loans and mortgages who could not afford them.
Families have changed since 1997; people work for longer well into they are 70 or even 80 for some. Grandparents can not always afford not to work to help out with childcare.

If by highlighting SOME you?re implying I don?t work your very wrong.

"Again it was global catastrophe."

Gordon Brown said that he had put an end to boom and bust. I don't recall the caveat of "We have put an end to boom and bust (unless there is a global catastrophe, or we're not right about deregulating the banks)"

Labour spent and borrowed if there was no possibility of an economic downturn. They deregulated the banks and encouraged consumers to borrow beyond their means to buy houses as their value could only go up (no more boom and bust). They made it a viable lifestyle choice to not work and be totally supported by the state. Just because other countries got it wrong as well doesn't make them any less culpable.

EdgarAllInPink ;no I think someone earning over £60k needs such tax breaks. it should be redistributed to those with lower incomes. Absolutely.

paying private health companies was started to drive down waiting times, to essentially free up NHS time to guarantee 18week GP referral and 2 week referral for suspected cancer paitents.
now there is now limit to the amount of private work a hospital can do. which I don't think is the answer either.

I?m not sure what you mean" by putting up someone?s salary making them better at there job". who do you mean?

could you explain abit more?

:)

More action needs to be done with regards to the bankers however saying Labour was going to do that is fruitless as they are not in power now, so it's easy to say that when they can't show otherwise.

sethstarkaddersmum:
More women do need to be in politics in real roles. I?m campaigning for 50:50 in the cabinet.
Blair?s babes, what utter patronizing tripe.
I agree 100%
:o

dreamingofsun: Do you mean marriage allowance?
Most families with kids won't benefit from £150 a year. when cutting child tax credits, the child trust fund, SureStart and child benefit plus the raise in VAT will erase any £150 a year allowance that only married couples will benefit from.

I think it's abit out of date to be honest.

Not everyone wants to get married :)

I think the tories are seen as more attractive to married SAMHs.

labour always go on as if increasing teacher salaries is enough to make teachers better. that is rubbish - you need training and good management to make people better at their jobs, not merely a salary hike.

the take-up stats i quote represent a phenomenal waste of money - they paid in advance for operations that didn't happen - total lack of skill in negotiation, basically giving money for nothing. inexcusable.

and an average household earns 40k. not 60k.

frankly the VAT Increase bothers me little, because most of the things i spend money on are not VAT-applicable (ie food) or have special rates (fuel)