Dartmouth CWO Christmas Meeting
The Conservative Women's Organisation Christmas lunch was a lively affair and a chance to raise women's issues. Since women were given the vote and eligible to stand for Parliament in 1918, there have only ever been 66 Conservative Women MPs. If elected, I will take the opportunity to speak out on women's issues.
I have an interest in reducing domestic violence and also international efforts to improve rights based family planning. Wherever women have access to education and contraception, they usually chose to limit their family size and thereby reduce poverty.
I would also like to see a more robust approach to championing women's rights, not just in certain authoritarian states, but also in the UK, where it is now depressingly commonplace to see women faceless beneath burqas. One woman's freedom to choose so easily leads to peer pressure on others to wear the veil, and that can only act as a barrier to communication with others. We have only to look at what has happened to women's rights in the Swat Valley to see the ultimate goal of the extremists.
To women who insist that the burqa is liberating, I would say that your freedom is another's enslavement. Individual freedom should always come with the responsibility that it does no harm to others, and I see this isolationism behind the full face veil as directly damaging to community cohesion.
