Struggling, but with scant success, to get her head round the concept of an independent Scotland, the mother in the much-viewed Better Together advertisement, the Woman Who Made up Her Mind, cuts a pitiable figure. One section, if she is typical, raises questions about women's suffrage throughout the UK. "My Paul is worse than the telly these days," says the Woman Who Made up Her Mind, of her comparatively engaged husband, on whose mind political matters weigh suitably heavy. "He started again first thing this morning" – puts on masterful voice – "'Have you made a decision yet?' I was like, 'It's too early to be discussing politics. You eat your cereal.'"
Cereal? While a milky bowl with stray Cheerios communicates at least some mental competence, it is clear that the Woman Who Made up Her Mind, further evidenced by her painful gurning, really does have trouble processing abstract thoughts and, at the same time, providing her husband with a nutritious, if simple, breakfast – whose detritus he has now left her to wash up. Men!
Accusations that this represents an archaic and insulting picture of female political awareness have been rebutted by the campaign director of Better Together, Blair McDougall, a man who occasionally places his own reflections on film , minus props, against a backdrop of NOs. Although it remains unclear why he chose to place the muddled woman in a kitchen – clinging to her mug and surrounded by children's toys – as opposed to say, in a laboratory or a truck, he claims all the words were authentically spoken by "women in dozens of focus groups around the country", prior to being stitched together in this latest triumph for the fashionable, verbatim school of drama.
And the result is, unarguably, a significant advance, in terms of realism, on its celebrated public information predecessor: Women, Know your Limits!, in which the woman character's principal contribution to a political debate is the highly unlikely – given not a single cat is in evidence – "I do love little kittens."
In fairness to Mr McDougall, whose effort has been subjected to sustained derision, many men south of the border view women with equally unembarrassed contempt. Indeed, you could argue that Better Together's estimation of women's political contribution is more respectful, for instance, than that of the Labour MP Austin Mitchell, and a school of thought that finds, with him, that women are not so much too preoccupied, as too feeble, mild, parochial and, basically, female, not to be discriminated against. What, he recently asked , in his attack on all-women shortlists (AWSs) if local people genuinely believe women to be inferior? Don't they have rights too? Objecting, at length, to the "feminisation" of his party (as he conceives of equal numbers of male and female MPs), Mitchell complained about the number of selections made "on the all-women basis, even where hairy-arsed local politics, a major Ukip threat or a substantial Muslim population might suggest that it's better to choose a man".
Like the Victorian opponents of universal suffrage, he does not mean to deprecate women, believing them to be "attractive", but, as his predecessors said in 1889, when they denounced women's suffrage, unsuited to prevailing ideas about what constitutes an MP: "To men belong the struggle of debate and legislation in parliament; the hard and exhausting labour implied in the administration of the national resources and powers."
No offence to Mr Mitchell and his Labour sympathisers, but nowhere is this principle better expressed, today, than on the board of the Tory party, compared with which even Lynton Crosby's recently refurbed "catwalk" cabinet is the acme of proactive feminism. The degree to which the Conservatives' "ultimate decision-making body" is anxious about its party's staggering levels of discrimination can perhaps be judged from its own composition: three women against 18 male incumbents, none of the latter, one imagines, self-defining as "hairy-arsed".
For all the official protestations that followed Mitchell's intervention, along with criticism from women such as Stella Creasy (who might, if the hairy-arsed/Ukip/Muslim-pleasers had their way, never have been heard of), sustained antagonism to all-women seats suggests that much of the public believes, like him, that AWSs do not correct, but actually embody, discrimination. In Wales's Cynon Valley, as well as in Grimsby, local officials have raged against central imposition of an AWS, to the point of threatening a strike if they are not allowed to choose "the best candidate regardless of gender", the assumption presumably being that an AWS will inevitably be more deficient than any of Labour's all-male ones and that a more balanced party would not benefit Britain as a whole.
By way of context, political parties in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, not countries strongly associated with discrimination, have previously reserved places for women. The Hansard Society long ago warned that AWSs were the only way to increase women's representation in parliament, where it currently resides at 22%.
But it can only strengthen resolve in Cynon, as in the AWS-free Liberal and Conservative parties, that a new YouGov poll has found that, across the social, regional and political spectrum, a majority of the public opposes AWSs. An overall majority of 56% is against them, including 51% of women and 46% of Labour voters. Given the uniform hostility, in a context of recent noises by both senior Liberals and Tories, to the effect that AWSs may have to be introduced if local activists persist in discriminating against women, you can see this developing into a cross-party movement, rather like the old National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, quoted earlier, dedicated to protecting Westminster from further female colonisation.
In the absence of any other plan, it is hard to see opposition to temporary positive discrimination, in the shape of AWSs, as anything but a preference for the status quo, an endorsement of Lord Hurd's belief that further agitation is "ludicrous". Among younger opponents of AWSs, admittedly, the convention is more absurdist: an admission that of course the current situation is dreadful, but that pointless endurance is superior to unfair, even "morally wrong" AWSs. One Tory thinker, Charlotte Vere, has implored "our best minds" to seek a solution to the imbalance, in the manner of the Board of Longitude, except, of course, that in 1714 they were still minus the marine chronometer and nobody preferred drowning.
Meanwhile, say the opponents of AWSs, parity should be worked for "organically", incrementally, by mentoring, education, childcare, silent prayer, the evolution of species, the ultimate emergence of politicians who do not scream and swagger – all the processes that still guarantee inferiority after years of progressive agonising. Without Labour's all-women lists, parliament would resound, indefinitely, to the grunts of its Mitchells, Soameses and Fabricants. Unrecorded in the YouGov poll are people who dislike all-women shortlists but dislike yet more the reason for their continued existence: the very culture that just created the execrable, the relentlessly mocked Woman Who Made up Her Mind.
