Women Trouble

Yesterday London commuters were trying to find alternatives to moving around our horribly congested capital city as union strike fever returned. Despite only a small minority of Bob Crow’s overall membership voting for strike action, because of union rules he now has an open mandate to call a strike whenever he feels like it. And once again the strike is based on Luddite tendencies of resisting change regardless of the logic.

Curious then that instead of voicing concerns over the way in which the avowed communist and career unionist Crow rode roughshod over the needs of millions of working people, the leader of the party whose very name declares itself for the workers decided to mount a stunt during Prime Minister’s Questions. Packing his side with as gruesome a pack of harpies as you could wish to find and fortuitous that the few women normally on the coalition front bench were away doing useful work he chose, as this week’s tactic to avoid discussing the economy at all costs, to berate David Cameron with the toothless taunt that the Tories have a problem with women. Actually his reasons for doing this are not curious at all; Labour has slipped inexorably back into its old ways.

Why do left wingers fall for the dogma that says e-quality is everything, even at the expense of actual quality? And why, having been taken in themselves do they become so evangelical that they now know better than those who genuinely do know what they are talking about? Why do they always bring about legislation to impose unwanted and unworkable change on those who have to live with and suffer the consequences without redress? During the New Labour years the workplace became choked with pretty round pegs hopelessly adrift in a sea of grubby square holes and to justify it the enemy in our midst ‘Human Resources’ was drafted in to propagandise and feminise and accessories the darkest corners of the most satanic mills – for men are the devil.

In meeting rooms niceties replaced robustness and consensus took the place of healthy challenge. In between offices ‘Break out Areas’ appeared – the adult equivalent of Soft Play facilities – places to share and spread the largely fictional cult of ‘soft skill’ mumbo-jumbo. Just as New Labour sent out search parties for immigrants to suppress our wages, women were sought out and shoe-horned into jobs regardless of talent to suppress our rages. A quip became sexist abuse and a harsh word bullying and some, even though fast-tracked ahead of abler and more experienced men (I preferred it when it was more honestly called flashing your tits) proved inadequate for the roles and left in tears or else kicked the absolute arse out of maternity leave. For all the Demi Moores in movies like Disclosure the vampish, predatory – for which read male-like – female boss is almost entirely a fiction; a left-wing, rad-fem, socialist wet dream.

Do Tories have a problem with women? I’ll say they do: Consumer Affairs Minister, Jenny Willott, is reported as saying that women are being forced into professions that paid less well because of gender stereotyping when they were young children, producing the headline “Parents who dress their daughters in pink and force them to play with dolls are holding back the economy.” Oh, purlease! Maybe women are more naturally left wing, in which case it's a surprise the Conservatives have so many. And if that's so, why isn’t Labour dominated by them? Some might say it already is, although they have yet to elect one as leader.

The roles of men and women have evolved with the species and the fundamental differences are as surely rooted in biology as is the fact that only women bear children. But even that distinction may be under threat as thousands of years of shaping society in nature’s image is no longer good enough for the political theorists. As with all the sacred cows of the left it is all or nothing and they would rather persuade women into jobs they may not suit than have a single woman unable to take up a traditionally male role. So forget about applauding the achievements of the brilliant women who have succeeded and thrive on ability alone. Forget about simply removing gender discrimination, let’s go further and dilute those achievements by enforcing quotas and ticking boxes regardless of merit.

They’ve done it with human rights, suffrage, welfare, immigration, ‘social justice’, multiculturalism and more besides and currently there is a growing effort to identify and diagnose as many strands of mental illness as possible – labels for everyone. And accompanying this I hear every day about the ‘need to change the culture’ in one way or another, social engineering being far more important than the traditional kind, you know, the one that used to provide jobs. So while one of the world’s great capitals grinds to a halt for want of a sensible dialogue, the left are happy to see our entire society go down the tubes in the name of what they still insist on calling progress. Progress? About half a mile an hour. Backwards.