No woman would set up a system of pensions based on a life-time’s ability to work when it is obvious that it will not provide for many women, they point out. Child care should move up the agenda alongside domestic violence and the health service.Baroness Williams says: “I can remember Gro Harlem Brundtland, the [last] prime minister in Norway, saying she knew the culture had changed when a minister asked if he could leave cabinet 10 minutes early to pick up his child. You can’t imagine that happening here.”Women are not always their own best supporters. Edwina Currie points out that the Tory MP Ann Winterton opposed help for women with children going out to work because she thought they should not. And Dame Jill Knight opposed a creche at the Commons.But Mrs Currie is keen to emphasise the “feminine touch”. She worked with the Ministry of Defence, not on tanks and weapons, but on Army housing, Gulf war syndrome and bullying “The armed forces approach is macho. I took an interest in a different way, in a different tone.”She predicts women would take strength in numbers and adopt a “more militant attitude” to issues affecting women and children, and that the “chaps won’t feel able to laugh and pooh-pooh” anything women said.This has certainly been the habit of some in the past.

The Tory MP David Evans, in one of his more controversial outbursts, made his contempt for his female colleagues clear Women in Parliament were “usually ordinary”, he said. They were promoted even when “dead from the neck upwards”.Lesley Abdela says she suspected many of the new crop of women would be very good, not least because they would have had to fight particularly hard to get there. But as the numbers increased, the women would be like the men – some brilliant, others less so, a reflection of the population they represented.However, ordinary or not, the point is that women’s voices will finally make themselves heard at Westminster “We’re well on the way now But we can’t sit back yet One hundred down, 200 more to go.”. There he stands, plucky little fellow No pasarn! John Major cries.

The armada of filthy, thieving Spanish fishing boats, stealing our fish and our fishing quotas, shall not pass! British hearts of oak and jolly tars shall rule the European waves – even if there is no fish left in them. Hurray!

In defiance of the European ministers’ decision to cut all fishing by 30 per cent, to try to save endangered fish and rescue the long-term prospects for the entire European fishing industry, the Prime Minister announced that he would break the law: “I have not a shred of intention of cutting the British catch unless and until we have a satisfactory agreement on quota-hopping.” (It was embarrassingly revealed that, at the crucial ministers’ meeting, the British minister had failed to speak up at all on the subject.)
But how did we, uniquely among European countries, come to sell our precious fishing quota licences to foreigners in the first place?This is yet another story of the British government blaming its own incompetence and folly on Brussels. Major’s bluster on fishing is the BSE story all over again, a paradigm of the dishonesty with which this government has treated Europe and misled the British electorate about the nature of the European Union and the part we play in it.This is the true story of fishing quotas. Trying to preserve fish stocks, the EU gave each country a fishing quota and a target for reducing the size of its fishing fleet.

The EU offered an incentive to any fishermen wanting to get out of the business, promising to buy up their boats and compensate them, paying 70 per cent of the cost, with each country making up the difference.But, until 1992, Britain refused to pay up that 30 per cent to retiring captains, even though it meant forgoing the 70 per cent EU grant. It was the kind of short-sighted, short-termist meanness that has characterised so much of government in the last 18 years. In keeping with its free-market ideology, Britain allowed the market to rip, and captains to sell their boats and quotas to the highest bidders, often from abroad. All the other countries made full use of the EU compensation scheme, forking out the 30 per cent and so virtually none of their quotas were sold abroad. So how, all of a sudden, is Brussels to blame for British fishermen’s lost quotas?But what, exactly, is Major proposing? If we bought back the quotas sold abroad we would have to offer well above the current market price to persuade foreign owners to sell. And we would have to offer the same high price to any British fishermen too, so there might be a stampede to sell.

The British government would end up in the absurd position of having bought itself a nationalised fishing fleet at an astronomical price.The fishermen are naturally outraged at the prospect of any cuts – but their anger has been misdirected at Brussels, with much deft encouragement from the Euro-sceptics. Remember the bizarre sight of canary-clad Teresa Gorman on a Cornish trawler? In fact there are virtually the same number of British fishermen as there were 20 years ago, and the same tonnage of British-owned ships. (Astonishingly, we allowed the number of fishing boats to increase in the late Eighties, despite EU conservation policy.) But not so the fish. They are dying out, and no one doubts that there is a crisis. In the last 30 years the amount of cod in the North Sea has come down by two-thirds, plaice by half, and haddock by three-quarters.John Major’s last stand on his fish box is all empty gesture.