Nadine Dorries was behind recent Conservative calls to shake up abortion counselling. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian This week MPs troop back to parliament. And one of the trickier problems in David Cameron's in-tray is the issue of abortion counselling . Many people have argued that the issue is specious. Women have drawn from their personal experiences to press home the point that the most important thing is to ensure that a woman's right to choose is not eroded. But for Cameron, abortion counselling is not just one of those random issues that flares up and then disappears. It can only be understood in the wider context of social conservatism. And for him it poses the problem of how to manage his own right wing. The right in this country have long looked with envy at conservatives in the United States who have successfully detached millions of "blue collar" American voters from the Democratic party on the basis of so-called "values" issues. Thomas Frank's " What's the Matter with Kansas " sets out what happened. Values in this context are a euphemism for the socially conservative agenda. In America this encompasses not just abortion, but gay rights, women's rights, stem cell research, school prayer, abstinence instead of birth control and more. But this is a more difficult strategy to pull off here in Britain. We do not have the equivalent of the religious right. And even if we did, far fewer Britons are regular churchgoers. British media regulation does