Workington Man was 2019’s symbolic voter – a pro-Brexit former Labour voter without a university education whom the Tories hoped to attract in droves. Looking ahead to the 2024 election, Labour eyes are on voters from Workington, as well as Worthing and Worcester – but they are on middle-aged women.
The party is targeting women who might be seen as traditional Tory voters: those aged between 45 and 65 but often squeezed between childcare, social care and a demanding career, as well as at the brunt of some of the worst NHS waiting lists.
On Saturday, Labour’s chair, Anneliese Dodds, will launch the party’s drive to attract new female voters with a keynote speech to the Women’s Institute – the first politician to do a major speech there since Tony Blair received his slow handclap in 2000. She will say the party intends to spark “a national conversation” about the lives of mid-life women.
It is a difficult audience to talk to about tribal politics – which was what earned Blair boos and jeers – but Dodds, who is also the shadow minister for equalities, says she closely identifies with the women of the WI. Dodds is about to turn 45 and says the women she most admired during her childhood in rural Scotland were those dedicated to the Scottish Women’s Institute.
“I feel quite at home with the kind of women who are involved in the Women’s Institute,” she says. “My father was a small businessman, he supported a lot of farmers, so I understand that kind of way of life and I think that it’s important that it’s reflected in politics.”
Few women in their forties would now identify with the WI, but Dodds says many will identify with the values of community. In her speech, Dodds will say Labour and the WI were “both forged within the same historic period of social upheaval, with a shared belief in the importance of community and the power of conversations across social divides”.
Speaking to the Guardian, she says mid-life women “will resist being pigeonholed, but their concerns have not been often listened to by successive Conservative governments.
“They are the ones who are often juggling looking after their kids, and often looking after parents as well, at the same time as often being some of the most experienced workers. And what I’m determined to do is to make sure that they have a voice and that they are listened to.”
Labour says there is a political, economic and moral reason to reach out to these women. New analysis from the party suggests that if women aged 50-64 had the same employment rate as before the pandemic, they could be contributing up to £7bn more to the UK economy.
The pitch to those voters spans several different policy areas – improving NHS backlogs, shifting a culture in primary care, new flexibility for women during menopause, and helping women to stay in work as they have new demands on their health, and caring responsibilities.
Polling suggests female voters are already more inclined to vote Labour – but that trend is still mainly driven by younger women. For women in their fifties and sixties, concerns about healthcare and the NHS are often greater than for men at the same age, making them an ideal target group for Labour.
Dr Rosalind Shorrocks, who researches gender and politics in Britain at the University of Manchester, says: “These are voters that Labour could potentially win over. They are much less geographically concentrated, too, than younger and more educated women. For older women, the concerns over the NHS and social care make them a natural group for Labour to target.”
Dodds announced this week that Labour would require workplaces to produce action plans to support staff going through the menopause. But it is NHS waiting lists and chronic illnesses that are often pushing women out of work, even when they would prefer to stay.
Dodds says she recently received a card from a woman she met in Plymouth who had been treated for suspected breast cancer within two weeks under the last Labour government, a target now routinely missed. “She said to me if she hadn’t been seen and referred within those two weeks, she felt she wouldn’t have been able to see her grandchildren.”
Dodds says women’s health is at the sharp end of the NHS backlogs. “Cervical cancer screening levels are going down. Thousands of women having to wait for more than a year for gynae operations.”
Labour will also focus on women’s health in primary care, introducing strategies aimed at shifting the perceptions around female pain, and champions for women’s health in GP surgeries.
“I was in Stroud and the junior doctors that I spoke to were extremely clued up about menopause … because one of the practitioners is really enthusiastic about it,” she says. “Unless you see more staff across the piece, then you’re not going to see that improvement.”
Labour has also pledged to introduce a right to flexible working, to try to help women with additional caring pressures stay in work if they want to.
Dodds, who has children in school and lives on a council estate in her Oxford constituency, says: “I think the different pressures that women experience can come to a head at that kind of age, because you often will still have children at home, in some cases have grandchildren, but very often caring responsibilities for your own parents. They suddenly start to escalate.
“They are often in positions of responsibility at work in really important occupations. Very often those women aren’t backed in the way they should be.”
Dodds has often found herself at the forefront of Labour’s internal battles over gender and trans rights, including frequent mockery of whether the party can define what a woman is.
There are deep division between younger activists, who criticise the party for having been too equivocal on trans rights, and gender critical campaigners, such as the MP Rosie Duffield, who say their concerns have been ignored.
Dodds emphasises a belief in the difference between sex and gender and a commitment to the Equality Act which protects same-sex spaces, as the party’s way of navigating the territory. Asked if she can avoid her own slow handclap moment on the issue, she says she believes the party’s view is the mainstream in UK politics.
“All of the polling work shows the British public does recognise that sex isn’t the same thing as gender and they have particular areas, for example when it comes to refuges from male violence, where it is important the Equality Act is held to,” she said. “But people always say that they believe that trans people deserve dignity and respect as well.”
Dodds says she will always “enable a conversation”, but that the conversation around women and their priorities must be wider. “We need to be talking about menopause, childcare, women’s economic empowerment, violence against women and girls where the statistics are horrendous. All those issues that really matter to women.”
