The Mumsnet election: it’s a poisonous divide

Why are the party leaders falling over themselves to be associated with Mumsnet, the social-networking site for mums that discusses everything from sex after pregnancy to toddlers who bite?

It isn't because they suddenly care what parents think or want. It's because Mumsnet is made up of what our leaders consider to be their perfect audience: people just like them, self-selected middle-class parents and former professionals who read the Guardian or the Times and can hold a conversation about politics for five minutes or longer.

It is for the same reason that the Conservatives have unveiled their tax break for married (read "respectable") couples and New Labour has re-embraced Blairism in its manifesto, promising war on crime and anti-social behaviour: because the parties are all desperate to appeal to that safe, sedated, familiar-feeling ground of Middle England, where Mumsnet is squarely plonked.

Mumsnet is the new Women's Institute. Its webmasters and promoters might wear Prada rather than pearls and buy organic mashed banana rather than grow their own veg. But like the WI, the Mumsnet core is a collection of reasonably well-off, media-savvy women who spend their days swapping recipes and holiday ideas yet who wield an enormous, disproportionate and fundamentally conservative influence in the sphere of politics.

‘I’ve just deleted myself from that stuck-up site. I just ain’t posh enuf!’

Political leaders can't get enough of Mumsnet, which was founded in January 2000 by Justine Roberts, a former sports journalist, and Carrie Longton, a TV producer. It recently celebrated its tenth birthday at Google's HQ in London.

Gordon Brown has hailed it as "one of the great British institutions" and said it is spearheading a "social revolution" (one should always be suspicious of "revolutions" that win the backing of mainstream leaders).

All the party leaders have been interviewed in a Mumsnet webchat (where they were asked such burning questions as "What is your favourite biscuit?") and according to the Times the forthcoming election will be the "Mumsnet election", with the parties going to "extraordinary lengths to woo the mums".

These are the same parties that normally treat parents with contempt – ordinary parents, that is, rather than the special parents who run Mumsnet.

New Labour holds parents responsible for everything from crime to declining educational standards. When he was Home Secretary, David Blunkett said anti-social behaviour was the fault of parents who had "disengaged from their children's lives" or who simply lacked "even the basics of parenting skills".

Labour instituted parenting classes to put these bad mums and dads on the straight and narrow. Jack Straw said he hoped parenting classes would become as common as ante-natal classes, to help parents deal with their potentially "delinquent" children.

Last year, a study by a mental health charity which wildly claimed that "80 per cent of crime could be due to poor parenting" had all the parties promising to do more to tackle "problem parenting".

And one of Labour's last pre-election wheezes, announced in its Families Green Paper in January, was to offer "lessons for fathers" to ensure that they "engage with their children". Because, of course, dads can't be trusted to look after or hug or play footie with their kids without guidance from the state.

It is striking that the very same political leaders who treat normal parents with such patronising authoritarianism should be so indulgent towards "Mumsnetters".

This is because they see the Mumsnet lobby as reassuringly middle-class and erudite and therefore trustworthy, unlike those unknowable masses in the non-metropolitan parts of Britain where God knows what they feed their children or allow them to watch on TV.

The "Mumsnet election" is formalising a poisonous divide between worthy mums and unworthy mums – between decent parents that the state will listen to and slovenly parents that the state will seek to correct.

Where the WI was a clique of women from a certain class who were indulged by conservative political leaders, so Mumsnet is a clique of "responsible parents" who are flattered not only by conservative political leaders but by Labour and Lib Dem ones too.

But some mums are challenging the idea that Mumsnet speaks on their behalf. At Netmums, a rival site, one member says she found Mumsnet "rude and cliquey" and all "jolly hockey sticks". Another agrees: "I've just deleted myself from that stuck-up site. I just ain't posh enuf!"

What Labour really likes about Mumsnet is that it's actually a lot like the government. As Sarah Brown said at Mumsnet's tenth birthday, it is like "a doting mum, a new no-nonsense mother-in-law and a new supernanny all rolled into one".

Could there be a better description of our authoritarian rulers themselves, who have all the humourlessness of the no-nonsense mum-in-law and are as nosey and bossy as the most interfering of supernannies? No wonder they love that website. ·