Jennifer Dempsie: The SNP is out to capture your mother’s heart

On THE off chance you have missed the consumerist advertising bombardment to grab your hard-earned pounds and remind you that you love your mum, here’s an advance warning – it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. I think you should appreciate your mum everyday and don’t need Hallmark to remind you. But maybe they could lend their services to the SNP to reach out to the mothers of Scotland too.

The SNP government has always followed a social democratic model of equality, high investment in social services, education and trying to ease pressure of family budgets with council tax freeze, business rates relief and abolishing prescription charges. But the prescription that is really needed is a targeted and bold message direct to women to close the gap in support for independence between men and women.

This was delivered by the party at its spring conference at the weekend, in what was a pretty huge signal that mums matter.

To set the tone, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her mum Joan took part in the knitting parlour in the Hobbycraft fair at the SECC. They were surrounded by a demographic of women who are politically astute to send a clear message – mums matter and we want your vote. This was followed by SNP leader Alex Salmond announcing the new Children’s Bill, introduced to parliament next year, would include a statutory guarantee of over 600 hours of free nursery education for every Scottish three- and four-year-old and for every looked-after two-year-old. He described it as “the best package of free nursery education on offer anywhere in the UK”.

What did not receive much attention was the bit that came just after this, and to me was equally important: the commitment to the living wage across Scotland by every SNP council elected at May’s local government elections. This could have just as much impact for women as increasing free nursery education. Guaranteeing £7.20 an hour will particularly benefit part-time workers who are mostly women and almost 80 per cent of NHS staff who are women also.

Already every employee of the Scottish Government, the NHS and agencies, have been guaranteed from this year at least the living wage of £7.20 an hour. Two-thirds of the thousands who have benefited already have been women. The potential for improving standards of pay with this policy for Scotland’s female workers is commendable. But Scotland has to vote SNP in May again, just like it did last May, if this is to have widespread impact.

And on Sunday SNP independence referendum campaign director Angus Robertson, MP, announced that an independent women campaign group would be set up as part of the Yes campaign sectoral push. This direct targeting will be continued on Mother’s Day with the launch of an independence Mother’s Day e-card. This will be sent to 8,000 female SNP members, more than 12,000 Twitter followers and 19,000 Facebook fans with a Mother’s Day challenge to send to ten other mums.

The Mother’s Day challenge will carry on with the First Minister’s theme from his conference speech that “a little independence has been good for Scotland. But real independence will be even better”. It will outline what achievements have been done for women, such as increasing free nursery education to 600 hours, the Small Business Bonus, which has helped women entrepreneurs with more of Scotland’s small businesses owned and operated by women (19 per cent) than the rest of the UK (15 per cent), protecting NHS spending, helping to preserve the majority of health service employees who are women, vaccinating young women from cervical cancer, increasing female bobbies on the beat and, importantly, free education.

The e-card will detail what could be done for women with real independence, including a more ethical environmental and foreign policy, increasing female employment by following the Nordic model of social insurance, providing higher levels of parental benefit and early years education, also improving standards of living with increased wealth. Importantly, highlighting the main reason of independence – people who live in Scotland should make the decisions for Scotland.

In the Scottish Parliament election campaign, the SNP closed the gap between the male and female vote. One of the reasons behind the push for female support for independence is to capture the hearts and minds of Scottish women and follow that progress. There is a lot of speculation about why this gap exists. I believe it’s a politics thing.

The way politics is communicated and reported has a strong male bias. You just have to walk past the offices of the Holyrood press corps to see vast majority of male macho journos prowling the corridors of parliament. And the robust rough and tumble of political rhetoric, jibes and jousting is a serious turn-off.

A small chink of light has been BBC Scotland’s Politics Show moves to increase female guests, which has made the past few weeks’ programmes more enlightened and representative television.

There is also the pragmatic issue. About women focusing on matters of importance to their lives, rather than political ideologies.

The challenge for the pro-indy campaign is to go one step further and articulate what independence will mean directly for women under independence.

The polls show it’s not so much a matter of women being against independence, it’s a matter of them being undecided. A recent Panelbase poll for the Sunday Times and Real Radio Scotland showed 43 per cent of males to 31 per cent females support independence but the ratio of undecideds is much higher for women at 26 per cent compared to 14 per cent for men.

This means it is all to play for. Mums, I hope you are listening.

lJennifer Dempsie is a communications adviser to the SNP and former special adviser to First Minister Alex Salmond.