Labour’s patronising Barbie bus isn’t a route to more female voters

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/11/labour-patronising-barbie-bus-female-voters

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How did that campaign strategy meeting go, then? Was it the Woman’s Hour poll last week that showed that more than a third of women have yet to decide how to vote and that young women are serially uncertain? Or the Mumsnet poll before Christmas that suggested the Labour lead among women was shrinking, down from 14 points to nine? The lingering impression that David Cameron has a women problem – his “Flashman” persona finally beginning to count against him? Or the research that shows women tend to be less engaged with the political process than men? And, whichever one it was, in what way will bussing female Labour MPs around the country help?

Related: Harriet Harman denies pink battle bus to attract female voters is patronising

Still, there’s the minibus. Or perhaps it’s a van. Harriet Harman, who has fought so valiantly all her career for women, says she signed it off for her Woman to Woman campaign, and it’s not pink, it’s magenta. This is exactly what voters really don’t like about politicians, this habit of saying something is one thing when it obviously isn’t. Politicians see themselves “putting the record straight”, changing the emphasis or shaping public perception. Voters call it lying.

This bus is pink. PINK. The are so many colours in the rainbow, yet they chose pink. Are the Barbie years so far behind them that they have forgotten the twin peaks of the anatomically preposterous doll and her passion for pink?

Or worse – maybe, just maybe – the voters are right. Politicians really don’t live lives like other people. So they do not know that pink is the colour of patronising. Or (at risk of disappearing up my own vanity mirror) maybe they think only people like them think pink is patronising.

Harman is unabashed. She says the target audience “will not be discussing the colour of the bus”. I salute her optimism, but sadly I cannot share it. For what is already clear is that the van will always be the Barbie van and the jokes about parking, reversing and women drivers must all have been made, even if not everyone has yet made them.

Let’s deconstruct this minibus idea. Reaching out to voters? There’s lots of evidence to show that personal contact matters. High media impact? It’s certainly getting lots of coverage. But the adage that there’s no such thing as bad news doesn’t invariably hold in politics, and public derision sticks worse than scrambled egg to a pan. So then maybe it will draw attention to Labour’s record on recruiting and promoting women and pro-women policies? I’m happy to oblige, but don’t hold your breath for too many others.

Harman insists that the value of her roadshow and its pink/“magenta” bus is to show other women that politics is not just for men. “The reason why it has to be eye-catching is that there is a big hole in our democratic politics,” she says. “In 2010, 9.1 million women didn’t vote and that’s because they just don’t think that politicians have any interest in their lives.”

But surely the problem politicians have to tackle is that far too many people – men as well as women, gay, straight and trans – all think politics is in fact only for politicians.

There is only a very slight difference in turnout at general elections between men and women. What makes a difference is female candidates and although there is still a way to travel, Labour should be proud of its record recruiting women into the political process. More than two-thirds of candidates selected for the most winnable seats – where an MP is retiring – are women, thanks to the use of all-women shortlists. But if you do dig into the voluminous polling studies and disaggregate, as the pollsters say, the results by gender, you find that what is troubling female voters is what is also troubling male voters – the future of health and education. This election is not about women or men, it’s about every one of us. Set beside the existential question of the future for public services, making a particular effort to engage female voters seems at best a diversionary tactic.

Labour is right to try to engage with people who don’t vote but it needs to start somewhere else altogether. The gap in voting between haves and have-nots is where the division becomes really stark: more than three-quarters of the social class AB vote, but only 57% of those at the other end of the pollsters’ social metric bother to turn out. And if race is added to class, the gap is starker still. Barely half the ethnic minority population votes, against two-thirds of white Britons. These are the people who really feel politics is not about their lives. Politicians must reach out to them. Here’s a question for Harman: what colour van do you need to reach out to people who are poor and black?