'You can't be a feminist and a Conservative'

Harriet Harman interviewed in today's Daily Mail:

'You can't be a feminist and a Conservative because (feminism) is all about equality and fairness.'  

If only that were true. Tories are feminists, have long been so, and worse they do believe in 'equality'. ('Fairness' is just rhetoric - everyone believes in that, including people who believed in slavery or auto da fe.)


Toryism and equality should be mortal foes. Equality of outcome of course would be tragic in practice but is equally objectionable in principle. But equality of opportunity cleverly hides the premise that inequality is illegitimate and the implied corollary that it is the business and even the duty of the state to iron out inequalities - that as Lord Mandelson said a greengrocer's daughter and a High Court judge's daughter should have the same life chances. We should aim to improve life chances but not use the concept of equality which is fatally tainted by socialism. So many of the problems of the modern world spring from the fact that people are uncomfortable about the idea of hierarchy and inequality. This may be connected to decline in religious belief and is certainly connected to the influence of Marxism.



As for feminism, has it been women's worst enemy or a mixed blessing? Women should better answer this than I. It seems to me it has made women who want careers far freer but women as a whole far less free - forced in most cases to go out to work because of mortgages. And it has led to the huge unemployment we had in the 1980s and to the disastrous fall in the number of births which is spelling the death of the English.

What I am certain of is that Labour has been the working class's greatest enemy. And after 1997 a great enemy of the English people.