Tory leader must u-turn on austerity policies that harm women most
Harriet Harmon, former deputy leader and interim leader of the Labour Party, has offered her congratulations to Theresa May and warned that ‘it’s not good enough to just be a woman Prime Minister.’
‘The real question is, what will she do for women in this country?’ Harman said in an interview with talkRADIO this afternoon.
She went on to criticise the Conservatives’ austerity policies, which have hit women hardest, and called on May to start turning those policies around.
“I think there are many things that she needs to start U-turning on, which this government has made women suffer from. For example all the cuts in social care – women care for elderly relatives and it’s made their lives much harder that the social care services are few and far between.
They’ve closed children’s centres all around the country. She should U-turn on that and open those centres up because it’s mostly women who are looking after young children as well as holding down a job and they need to be sure that they’ve got affordable and accessible childcare.
She also called on May to make sure that resources are available to tackle violence against women at home and abroad, and said that the new prime minister ‘needs to have fifty per cent of her cabinet be women and fifty per cent of all her ministers.’
“And if she does that, it will be more than just having a woman in Downing Street, it will actually be a woman who’s advanced things for other women.”
Despite taking a tough line on May’s responsibilities, Harman — who has been a leading advocate for gender equality in Labour — did offer her congratulations:
“She’s only the second woman in our history to become our Prime Minister and she’s beaten the overwhelming majority of Tory MPs who are men to get to the top job.
And that is important because it’s more difficult for people to say to girls or women, ‘You can’t do this because you’re a woman’ because the person at the top of the country, the Prime Minister, is a woman.”
See also: Are the Tories really ‘streets ahead on gender equality’? The numbers say no
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5 Responses to “Harman: Theresa May must ‘deliver for women’”
John Jones
No she mustn’t. She really mustn’t. A Prime Minister should aim to deliver for the country as a whole, not focusing on one gender, one ethnic group or any other discrete sub-set of the population which the identity-obsessed Left currently regard as being especially deserving of patronising favouritism.
Meanwhile back in the real world of government the Tories have just produced their second and Britain’s second female Prime Minister, while Labour, the party of tedious women-only rules and positive discrimination, at least let Harriet Harperson drive round the country in a pink bus at the last election, just to show what Labour really thinks about women’s place in politics….
Richard MacKinnon
Three words come to mind, smug, sanctimonious, and hypocrisy.
Mike
What a load of absolute rubbish. The duty of any government is to deliver for all the people where gender, race and sexual orientation are irrelevant. Stupid muttering like that are at least part of the reason why this silly person has spent a considerable amount of time as interim leader with no prospect of becoming leader.
Richard MacKinnon
John Jones,
I don’t think Harriet Harman realises just how insulting her patronising tone is.
Justin
She will stand for women, bourgeois women!
@John Jones. No, a PM should aim to deliver for the working class, including in the rest of the continent, and the world. For the have nots, not the have yachts.