Voting mothers are seen as a key battleground, but the economy is not a gender-specific concern
FROM WORCESTER Woman to the Mondeo Men who helped propel Tony Blair to power in 1997, every British general election has its symbolic swing voters. This year, analysts and journalists have pounced on the name of a popular parenting website to declare the May 6th poll the “Mumsnet” election.
The expression gained momentum after Gordon Brown’s pollster Deborah Mattinson declared the site to be “totemic of the modern mothers who will be the key political battleground at the election”.
Since then, the notion of a Mumsnet election has prompted rather breathless headlines, including one which declared that the battle for Downing Street “will be won at the school gate”. Beyond the media hype, Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems have shown that they place great store in the elusive female voter. Apart from putting family policy at the heart of their manifestos, all three parties are going to considerable lengths to woo the women they believe are the key to electoral success.
“There is some historical evidence that the women’s vote is less tribal and more of a swing vote,” says Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, which counts almost 900,000 monthly users. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have gone online to court the Mumsnet vote, as has Brown’s wife Sarah and a host of Labour MPs.
But reaching out to voting mothers is fraught with potential pitfalls. “This idea that if you chuck your wives into the campaign or if you talk about nurseries or family issues enough, you will influence the way women are going to vote, is patronising,” says Roberts. “I think the most important issue for [Mumsnet] members is undoubtedly the economy, and that’s not gender-specific.”
In the final full week of campaigning, it is undecided voters such as Lucy Pilkington who matter. A mother of two, Pilkington lives in the battleground constituency of Tooting, on the edges of what has become known as south London’s ‘Nappy Valley’ due to the preponderance of young families.
Ethnically-diverse Tooting has been solidly Labour since the 1970s, but the sitting MP, transport minister Sadiq Khan, is considered vulnerable due to general antipathy towards his party and changing demographics which have brought gentrification to what was once a predominantly working class area with a large Muslim population.
“I don’t have much faith in politicians,” Pilkington said, after dropping her children to school. “Having worked in the NHS, I know only too well that they say one thing and do another. I haven’t decided who I’m voting for yet, but health and education are definitely priorities for me.”
Mark Clarke, the area’s Conservative candidate, needs a swing of 6.1 per cent, the minimum required by David Cameron to form a government.
Tooting’s significance has made it the third most canvassed constituency in the country, with some 2.5 million mailshots distributed in the area over the past three years. Clarke has targeted the area’s burgeoning number of young middle-class families. His campaign literature highlights issues such as school admissions and the future of a local hospital maternity wing.
Echoing the views of many other mothers at the gates of St Anselm’s primary school, Victoria Pender says she has been impressed with Tooting’s Labour MP, but can’t stand Gordon Brown. “I’ll probably vote Conservative,” she said.
Emma Staton, a nurse expecting her second child, also differentiates between national and local Labour. “Sadiq Khan has done a lot for this area, but Labour are definitely out this time,” she said. “I voted Lib Dem in the last election but I’m still undecided.”
Rozzi Hufton, a mother of two, also voted for the Liberal Democrats in 2005, but plumped for the Conservatives in local elections. Hufton, who previously worked in finance, rails against Gordon Brown’s economic record. “For much of the last 13 years, he was in charge of the economy, and he ruined it,” she said.
“I will vote anything that will help get Gordon Brown out.”