Subtitle: and she did, over Christmas, 2010. Deborah Mattinson argues that Labour should concentrate on women as a constituency.
Here’s a post from February. The traditional Tory lead among women, a phenomenon as old as women’s suffrage in the UK, disappeared in the space of three weeks over Christmas 2010. Actually, it’s older – the modern Tory party, as it was organised to work with mass politics in the late 19th century, started organising women many years before they had the vote.
I think the take-away question here is whether this phenomenon can be pushed further. It is possible that the women who switched, switched, and that’s that.
I don’t think, against Deborah Mattinson, that there’s any reason to think that women don’t understand “geeky thinktank language” like calling profiteering capitalists “predators”. I struggle to imagine a group of people for whom that would resonate more. This is in part the Pauline Kael effect, of course.