Or at least, today's big idea, is to increase male retirement age to 66, from its current 65. It is difficult to oppose on principle, because any age-limited activity is arbitrary and pragmatic. The change will have an effect on most men but proportionately relatively small. No doubt there will be individual men who are disproportionately affected by this change; if the policy doesn't address this, that will be a serious failing.
As I heard the news last night, it was being trumpeted as 'raising the retirement age by one year to 66'. My immediate thought was 'three years'.
It seems that overnight, it has dawned on the Tories that their spinning was only partial. And this, to me, is of more significance than what is ultimately an administrative adjustment.
I do not know what properly sums up the Conservative Party's attitude to women. Is it that they don't think that women matter; is it that they believe that women should not bother their pretty little heads with complex matters of politics and finance.
Or is it that the fundamentals of Tory belief and policy making is that instinctively one size fits all. It's not that they ask themselves the question and actively decide that everyone is the same. It is that their instinct is to plough on assuming that what fits them must fit everybody else. It simply would not occur to them to consider the differential impact of a policy change on women. I was about to write that women are an afterthought, but they aren't.
It is pretty clear that the Tories do not intend to govern for women, if by some dreadful occurrence they win the General Election. Announce what amounts to firm plans for men, and then, desperately back-heeling overnight, promise that they'll look into what it will mean for women, because we're marginal to their plans and effectively invisible.
