Labour's pink van says more about Labour than it does about women

Labour's pink minibus, touring the country to persuade women to turn out to vote for them, is the epitome of why I dislike the Labour Party and it's condescending attitude to the groups they believe owe them their loyalty.  

Like Blair's "for the many, not the few" Labour seek power through division and the expected blind patronage of their client groups. Whilst tediously reciting the mantra of "equality and justice"  Labour know that their only route to power is to continue to divide and stigmatise. If you keep telling woman that the Tories don't recognise equality; keeping telling the BME community that the Tories don't respect or want them, keep telling the poor that they are better-off with another hand-out rather than a hand-up....  then you keep people divided and angry; then you can exploit that anger and division for selfish political gain. .

Last year a friend's daughter, a natural Conservative who had never bothered voting, wrote to me and asked me why she should vote and why she should vote Conservative and not for one of the other parties. Here is the passage I wrote about why I believed Labour was unworthy of her support. 

I wouldn't change a word.

Unlike you, Laura, I was born in real poverty. My parents divorced when I was a young child and my mother moved back to Liverpool from Scotland, to be close to her mother and support networks. Apart from some limited financial support from my father’s family, they had nothing. My grandfather was a dock worker and my grandmother worked in a cotton mill. I was raised in a two bedroom  council flat in Wirral and educated at the local comprehensive. I was lucky. I had a mother who believed in hard work and self-reliance and a school which still retained its previous grammar school ethos, under a Head Master who believed in discipline, hard work and respect. The estate I grew up on was Labour to its core – unthinking, dependency-culture Labour. I saw from the earliest age what Socialism did to individuals. It created (indeed required) a client culture to survive. It removed hope by keeping people dependent for their jobs, benefits and houses. Comprehensive education rewarded mediocrity – no one failed but few excelled. You may think this odd, but for a young boy who had hopes and dreams, I loathed Socialism and all it stood for. And I still do. Some theorists say it’s ‘fair’ – the only fairness is the equal sharing of misery. It is telling that hardly anyone in the upper echelons of the Labour Party grew up in poverty; had they done so they would never want to impose it on others. Many people were born into the Conservative Party; I wasn't. I chose it because I believed it offered me hope.