Opinion: Mother of the Nation, Father of Misogyny – The Conservative War on Women

The Conservative Party does not serve women. It never has. Behind the self-congratulatory myth of Thatcher’s handbag and May’s kitten heels lies a brutal truth: Tory politics has always been about preserving patriarchal dominance. It has co-opted the aesthetic of female empowerment while tearing apart the foundations of women’s actual liberation. Behind every photo-op with a strong female leader is a mother on Universal Credit skipping meals, a survivor of domestic violence turned away from an underfunded refuge, a nurse breaking down after a 14-hour shift in a broken NHS. This is not accidental. This is ideological.

And it is not just the Conservatives. Reform UK, that ghoulish Frankenstein stitched from the rotting carcass of failed right-wing nostalgia, now parades itself as the voice of the “real people” — meaning men, mostly, angry ones. These are not political movements. They are patriarchal restoration projects.

The British right wing has not merely ignored women’s rights — it has waged war on them.

Thatcher, May, Truss, Badenoch: Not All Women in Power Are Progress

Let us first discard the idea that putting a woman in charge means women are winning. Margaret Thatcher was a woman. She was also one of the most effective enforcers of male-dominated capitalist violence in modern British history. Her tenure saw benefits slashed, council housing sold off, and childcare support decimated — all of which disproportionately harmed working-class women. This was not an oversight. This was the plan. “There is no such thing as society,” she declared, and so the burden of care shifted back onto individual women, unrecognised and unpaid.

Thatcher was no feminist icon. She explicitly distanced herself from women’s movements and refused to promote women into her cabinet. The only glass ceiling she broke was the one she let collapse onto everyone else. Her power served the patriarchy, not a challenge to it.

Fast forward to Theresa May. Her premiership was drenched in the language of compassion — and the policy of cruelty. It was under her watch that the Windrush scandal exploded, a bureaucratic cruelty that devastated the lives of Black women who had worked and raised families in Britain for decades. She engineered the “hostile environment” — a phrase that should chill any woman who has ever feared the state. And what of her approach to domestic abuse? Despite years of promises, legislation to protect survivors was repeatedly delayed, underfunded, and ultimately undermined by the very austerity she helped entrench.

Then came Liz Truss — the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Her comical 44-day tenure was a case study in ideological recklessness, tanking the economy and plunging households — particularly single mothers and working-class women — into deeper insecurity. In a grotesque display of anti-intellectualism and free-market dogma, she championed unfunded tax cuts for the rich while inflation soared and energy bills skyrocketed. Her legacy is not one of broken barriers but broken budgets. Truss was not a torchbearer for women — she was a walking indictment of what happens when ideology trumps competence.

And now we have Kemi Badenoch — a woman wielding power not as a reformer but as a punisher. She postures as a champion of meritocracy while denying the structural barriers that hold women back. Badenoch has mocked efforts to decolonise education, dismissed feminism as divisive, and declared war on trans rights — positioning herself as the ultimate avatar of the culture wars. The outrageous former Minister for Women and Equalities, and now, of course, leader of the Conservative party seems to be much more concerned about the legal definitions of gender that men assign to people (and, yes, men – since 10 out of 12 of the Supreme Court Judges are men, all white and over the age of 65), then actually helping the people. She is not a rebel inside the machine. She never even claimed to be. 

Conservative women are not exceptions to patriarchal rule. They are its enforcers.

Austerity: The Most Violent Policy Against Women in a Generation

In the name of economic efficiency, the Conservatives have perpetrated one of the most sustained attacks on women’s lives in modern history: austerity. According to the research carried out by the House of Commons, 86% of the austerity burden fell on women. Eighty. Six. Percent. This is not fiscal policy — it is social vandalism with gendered consequences. Refuges closed. Legal aid slashed. Childcare subsidies gutted. Local council budgets destroyed. The services women rely on to survive — to flee violence, to work, to care for children — were systematically defunded. All while billionaires received tax breaks and bankers got bonuses.

That is austerity. That is the Conservative record.

The cruelty didn’t stop there. Under Universal Credit, the Conservatives introduced policies so barbaric they almost defy belief. The infamous two-child benefit cap, which punishes women for having larger families — and the utterly inhuman rape clause, which forces women to prove they were raped to claim an exemption. This is what passes for social policy under Conservative rule: institutionalised humiliation.

Single mothers have been among the hardest hit by benefit cuts and sanctions. Disabled women are disproportionately targeted. Migrant women are pushed into destitution by “No Recourse to Public Funds” rules that leave them trapped with abusive partners. The state is not a lifeline. It is a threat.

The Conservatives don’t want women to be free. They want us disciplined.

The Culture Wars: Control in the Name of Morality

Unable to defend their material failures, the Conservatives have turned to the old tactic of moral panic. Trans people are the new scapegoats, used to ignite fear and distract from collapsing public services. Under the guise of “protecting women,” Tory MPs have launched a relentless attack on the LGBTQ+ community — while doing nothing to protect actual women from the real threats they face. “Whether it is rapists being housed in women’s prisons, or instances of men playing in women’s sports where they have an unfair advantage, it is clear that public authorities and regulatory bodies are confused about what the law says on sex and gender and when to act” But seems Badenock isn’t confused: anything outside the traditional will always be wrong, anyone who dares deviate from the exact roles that men prescribe is a threat, but not for safety, for the status quo. 

This isn’t about safeguarding. It’s about power. About defining womanhood in a way that suits their narrow, bigoted worldview. About sowing division so we don’t notice the budget cuts, the waiting lists, the food banks, the suicides.

Their war on “wokeness” is a war on every woman who dares to speak, to demand, to exist outside their fantasy of docile, domesticated femininity.

Reform UK: Misogyny Without a Mask

Reform UK is not a break from this tradition. It is its logical endpoint. A party founded by men who look at the smouldering wreckage of the country and say: “The problem was we weren’t cruel enough.”

Nigel Farage and Richard Tice offer nothing to women but insult and regression. They mock #MeToo. They sneer at feminism. They long for a Britain where women “knew their place.” Their policies — if they can be called that — are little more than chest-thumping tantrums dressed up as governance.

If the Conservative Party used women in power to mask their misogyny, Reform simply revels in it. No mask. Just the sneer.

The Followers: Enablers of Misogyny in Plain Sight

The Conservative and Reform parties do not exist in a vacuum. They are upheld — emboldened — by a legion of voters who have made peace with cruelty, as long as it is someone else who suffers. These are not passive bystanders. They are foot soldiers in a war against decency. The elderly man tutting at “benefit scroungers.” The pub bore ranting about “men in dresses.” The middle manager who smugly declares women “just don’t work as hard.” They are the rot beneath the rhetoric.

Let’s dispense with the illusion of innocence. These followers know exactly what they’re voting for. They know about the food banks, the closed women’s refuges, the overstretched maternity wards. They know about the rape clause. They’ve heard the statistics on austerity, on single mothers, on disabled women driven to destitution. And they vote for it anyway.

They revel in the degradation of others — so long as it reaffirms their own imagined superiority. They sneer at feminism not because they misunderstand it, but because they understand it too well: it threatens the hierarchy that flatters them. They long for a world in which women shut up, sit down, and know their place — even if they’d never say so aloud.

What these voters enable is not tradition. It is torment. Not pragmatism, but persecution. Every tick of the ballot box is a ratification of cruelty, a willing signature on a contract of social harm. They may not wield the knife — but they vote for the hand that does.

This is not about ignorance. It’s about indifference, entitlement, and power — misused and unearned. 

Their Power Is Built on Our Silence

British women have been told for decades to be grateful. Grateful to Thatcher for being the first. Grateful to May for trying. Grateful to Truss for… existing? Grateful to Badenoch for “saying it like it is.” Grateful to a system that breaks our backs and sells it as freedom.

We are not grateful. 

The Conservative Party and Reform UK do not hate women in spite of their politics — they hate women because of them. Their politics require inequality. Require control. Require women to carry the burdens of society while receiving none of the credit, none of the power, and none of the safety.

This is not a policy dispute. It is a moral reckoning. For over a decade, the British right has dismantled every structure that offered women a semblance of dignity. They replaced it with cruelty and called it realism. They replaced solidarity with scapegoating and called it patriotism. And they replaced feminism with figureheads — empty symbols designed to pacify us while they went to work eroding our rights.

Enough.

We will not be grateful. We will not be silent. And we will not forget.

Image: 5Skin graffiti, Leake Street by Duncan Cumming, 2024 // CC BY-NC 2.0