Patriotic Right not stupid - huge shocka

And I was just a boy, giving it all away.

I’ve been pondering these last few days quite how to respond to David Cameron’s recent statements about the EU and Lisbon, and waited until I had something politely-worded to post on the subject.

Mrs. Northwester assures me that I’ll go straight back in the cellar and the chains’ll go right back on me (and not in a nice husband and wife relaxing in the privacy of their own home and just how they do it is nobody else’s business kind of way) if I don’t find something positive to say about the Leader of the Op.

Okay, here goes. Any second now. Phew. Gulp. Cripes.

David Cameron has led the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from being merely one amongst several opposition parties that did not: debauch the Constitution; install separatist administrations in each of the non-English parts of the Union; corrupt public service to such an extent that Party and State have merged indistinguishably in some places; import as many foreigners as possible to deliberately change forever the nature of British demographics; bankrupt the public finances; or render Britain’s wholly necessary and righteous defensive war of existential survival against the world’s most virulent and confident totalitarianism unpopular with the very people whom it protects (including the united Right who should be 100% behind its prosecution if not its conduct in detail), to being the very party that might just win a huge majority at the polls.

Well done, Mister Cameron.

Conversely, he might only lead them to a hung parliament (as distinguished from a hanged parliament which is an entirely different thing.)

‘Ah’, you might say, ‘But that hung parliament story was immediately after Labour’s party conference when all the cameras were on it and its leaders were being interviewed in a sympathetic light. I’ll be different in a real general election.’

To which I might reply, ‘Well, what do you think the mainstream media’s election coverage is going to look like next summer? What do you think the BBC’s treatment of Labour versus the Conservatives' ‘Left v Right’ struggle will resemble – from an ‘impartial’ national broadcaster that two weeks ago all but supplied David Dimbleby with a wig, black silk cloth and Royal Navy cutlass for the Nick Griffin edition of Question Time?’ Perhaps that Tory lead is not as solid as it seems.

More than that, perhaps it is not evenly spread.

Here’s part of why. Last year Mister Cameron was full of vim; giving it some rabbit about what he’d do if the Lisbon Treaty which is The European Union’s permanent Constitution in a fig leaf disguise (the fig leaf being all of our broadcast media plus almost everybody in each of the three main parties and the Celtic-fringe Nationalists and most of the national newspapers and news magazines) was passed into 'law.'

Via Voice of the Resistance we are reminded of Cameron’s 2008 words:

The Tories would hold a referendum on the EU treaty, if they won power before it was ratified by all EU states. Party leader David Cameron said even if Parliament ratified the treaty, a Tory government would hold a referendum.

Translation: ‘I’ll give the British people a say in which nation(s) shall govern them despite what the New Labour State decrees in this, its last Parliament.’

Give it to me, big boy. It’s so big. It’s so hard.

By April this year he’d lost a little of that delightful buzz.

”We have pledged that if the constitution is not in force in the event of the election of a Conservative government this year or next, we will hold a referendum on it, urge a no vote, and – if successful – reverse Britain’s ratification”.

Translation: ‘I will not give the British people a say in which nation(s) shall govern them despite what the New Labour State decrees in this, its last Parliament. But I’ll make a fuss about any fait accompli.’

Um, do it a little harder please, Dave. Don’t stop.

By today, the rabbit’s batteries have gone quite flat.

David Cameron is set to announce within days that he will not call a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty if he takes power and it is already law.

Translation: ‘I shall not give the British people a say in which nation(s) shall govern them despite what the New Labour state decrees in this, its last Parliament. And I won’t even make a fuss about this fait accompli, and my party, including its Right wing, won’t either, probably.’

Don’t bother. I’ll do it for myself.

And doing it for themselves is indeed what a hefty chunk of the British people have determined to do. It seems that national self-government-wise our patriotic companions have discovered that there are more choices to political life than doing it upstairs in bed wearing pyjamas with the lights switched off.

UKIP achieved another fantastic gain in vote share at yesterday's Huntingdon North By election, reports Eastern Regional Organiser Cllr Peter Reeve.

The by-election was caused by the resignation of the sitting Liberal Democrat Cllr.

UKIP increased its share of the vote from 8.2% in 2008 to 22.3% . (Increase of +14.1%)
The Liberal Democrats held the seat by achieving a small increase in their share of the vote (+2.7%) and the Labour Candidate also achieved a small gain (+1.8%) but came 4th Place being beaten by UKIP.
The Conservatives saw their vote plummet going from 47.2% in 2008 down to 28.5% (Down -18.7%). Despite their candidate being a local sitting County Councillor for the area (Cllr Liane Kadic)
Cllr Reeve, who was elected as a UKIP Councillor on to Huntingdonshire District Council and Cambridgeshire County Council in July this year, said: “This result is typical of what is happening to UKIP right across the country.
"Voters are now deciding to back UKIP in huge numbers because of our commonsense policies and our passion for listening to and representing the man in the street. Though Cllr Kadic is an impressive individual, the Conservatives adopted some desperate measures including delivering an all Polish language election address. It seems that the Conservative Leadership no longer wish to represent traditional British values and as well as being passionately pro-EU and led by a Polish MEP in the European Parliament, they also now seem to be anti-English language.
"We would like to thank the residents of Huntingdon North for voting UKIP and to Peter Ashcroft our Candidate, our hard working local resident, and also thanks to the election agent Robert H Brown and the dedicated team in Huntingdonshire.

Now Huntingdonshire is an area where, really and truly, (and wimping out to the local Liberal Democrats aside), at Westminster elections they shouldn't count the Tory votes at all: they should be weighing them. They’re not planning to recommence fox hunting with hounds in that sort of constituency if the Conservatives get in – they’re going to move straight on to the social workers.

Even if at a General Election some of that UKIP share of the vote turns out to have been tactical, ‘personal,’ locally-determined or ‘protest’, it’s still likely that nationwide the expected Conservative majorities in many constituencies will be reduced and a clear message will have been sent via UKIP saved deposits and second or third places, and perhaps even a UKIP MP or two.

The victorious Tory backbenchers can be made to hear that message and ponder it:

You’ve lost a constituency that just won’t come back to you (and not even to throw out New Labour’s gaggle of traitors and dhimmi-colonialists.) If you continue to behave as if Mister Cameron throwing out the conservative baby with the ‘Mean Party’ reputation bathwater and in so doing abandoning the notion of personal hygiene altogether was a permanently good thing, then you’ll never get us back.

Country trumps party.

But here we are in our millions; distinct, organised and determined. And when you spot that your party’s popularity is falling in the polls (as the federast and Big State media will surely arrange eagerly as Labour’s crimes fade in the public’s memory), then you don’t only have the choice of handing out more organic, carbon-neutral lollipops, say, to steal a few Liberal Democrat votes and get a slightly gentler battering on Question Time, or of abandoning Britain’s nuclear deterrent or caving in to teaching unions and even cease to build any new prisons, if you want to be re-elected. You can have us. At a price.

The Conservative Party is like Western Europe in the early 1940’s; basically a decent place with mostly good institutions and civilized people, but currently occupied by an alien power; one intent on stealing its good name and deeply perverting all that into something new and wrong. Some of its best talents are either collaborating with the invaders for the time being because they can see no way to break free, or are organizing a liberation from exile. Cameron and his political class cronies (the reimported Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine and all their supporters) are Big-State Goerings marching up and down its Champs-Élysées and posing for photographs and planning how they’ll dig themselves in for generations.

To change metaphors yet again, the Conservative Party couldn’t more resemble its previous idiot form in the early 1970s if it sang Grandad’s Christmas Disco Womble instead of Land of Hope and Glory.

If it is to be liberated once again and thus allowed to perform its true raison d’être of providing Britain with conservative government, then there also has to be a place where free people can offer refuge for exiles, plus encouragement - and allies for those who will help return it to its true path and nature. For all the cavilling and scandals and egotism that there have been at its top, I have to say that UKIP most closely fits the bill.

It’s not perfect or all-powerful or superbly resourced, but then neither was Britain after the fall of France.

Tory genius 3: special takeaway edition

Spare me if you will for a moment the accusations of racism that might rightfully derive from this post’s title.

There’s method in my madness and it’s not to rile my non-anti-immigration readers; nor to win undeserved praise from some of my fellow anti-immigration readers.

Both 13^th Spitfire and Calling England have pointed out this piece from Conservative Home from the Conservative MEP Nirj Deva, concerning who rules Europe.

Read this interesting and truthful article, and look at the Lisbon breakdown graph that the gentleman has provided.

Much of what Mr Deva says is true, and even sounds a bit like Euro-skeptics such as I might make. In the main body of the argument, with a squint and a quick read and a full bladder that makes you finish it fast and move on, you might think that I had penned many of the criticisms, or Trixy, or EU Referendum. (How’s that name-dropping and egotism for you! I’m on holiday, so I’m treating myself.)

I’m just going to take exception to one or two things in the early, descriptive part of his post, just for fun and context, and then I’m going to do what I guess most of my readers will have done when reading the speculative part of his post.

The European Union, first established as the EEC in Jan 1958 comprises of three separate but interdependent institutions.

What’s in a name? An alleged collection of economic groupings which developed from European Economic Communities to the European Community to the European Union. What’s next, we wonder?

Unless you think that that old thing in the Treaty of Rome about ‘ever-closer union’ actually means something, but that would be crazy, right?

Remember this history so when we get onto the Tory-bashing it’ll be fresh..

Oh, and:

In legislating for these 500 million people my primary duty is to first determine what is best for my own constituents in the South East of England, what next is best for my party the Conservative Party and third what is best for all the peoples of Europe whose interest are represented by the European Parliament.
This is no more different than a Member of the Indian Parliament from Mumbai going to Delhi every week and representing first his electorate and then the interest of the whole of India or a United States Senator from California going to Washington every week and voting to protect the interest of California and then that of the United States according to his party interest be they Democrat or Republican.

Did you see what he did there? He said that a national of one country legislating for his constituency first and then for all the members of a collective polity of many nations is the same as, say, an Indian legislating for his home constituency first and then the nation of India, or an American legislating for his home state and then for all of the United states of America.

It might do some good explaining to someone involved the difference between regional representatives from all over a single nation (albeit some very diverse nations) legislating for the whole nation, so that Indians only make India’s laws and Americans only making America’s laws, and Englishmen making Ireland’s laws (without bayonets being involved,) or Germans making France’s laws (ditto) or Austrians making Italy’s laws (but with nicer pastries.)

Now for that table.

Wow.

I’d love to know where those percentages come from. I imagine they’re true in some way though as with all things ‘European’ we’re in a number of halls of mirrors as well as smoke-filled back rooms when trying to quantify anything at all; except possibly the number of ‘member states’ involved.

Now it’s time for the boot of sarcasm to meet the buttocks of Cameronian ‘Euro-skepticism.’

So how do we fight back?

Firstly, like all British Conservatives, I am working tirelessly to demand that Prime Minister Brown deliver upon his party’s manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on the European Constitution.

So, trying to persuade Gordon Brown to fulfil a promise is your first line of attack?

What’s number two: build this big horse and then run away from Brussels, but when the Belgians come out to drag it inside, and you what…?

It is a travesty of political and common law justice to deny the British people and (peoples of other nations) a say in how they should be governed.

So restoring legislative sovereignty to the nation-states would be a minimal first step, I’d guess, unless you have a sophisticated new version of ‘pooling sovereignty’ which has always made the same sense as ‘pooling virginity,’ and for similar reasons. Let’s see if restoring legislative sovereignty is on your menu, shall we?

Secondly, the importance of the party’s new European Conservative and Reformists Group in the European Parliament – the body’s first ‘official opposition’ - should not be underestimated.

Oh, I’m sure that we don’t underestimate it, exactly.

As British Conservatives, we are an outward looking, free-market oriented and in favour of greater individual freedom and less regulation.

Anybody out there not either glumly nostalgic now or weeping tears of laughter again?

For the first time, the European Parliament has a group which shares our credo – and a genuine commitment to reform.

In the early days of the group, we should now be asking the following questions:

How do we reform the EU to bring about smaller government and more powerful citizens?

Who knows? Nobody’s ever tried it, though I did read in a libertarian science fiction book once that there’s no political situation anywhere that can’t be improved by the importation of a couple of million Saturday Night Specials.

Of course, I’m not a libertarian and would prefer some solution based around an actual collection of elected and genuine representatives of the people such as, you know; big place built by Pugin, in London – no foreign citizens allowed voting for representatives except for certain Irishmen by long agreement, big fuss about some receipts a few weeks ago.

How should Europe do less… –

Mate, just exactly who in the Commission, the powerless ‘parliament,’ or the Council of Ministers actually wants ‘less’ and is prepared to make sacrifices (such as facing up to critical editorials in Le Monde, the Guardian, or on the BBC) to achieve ‘less?’ When did anyone in the Court ever pass a verdict that enforced ‘less?’

Ever?

…and how should they do it better?

‘Better’ implies well. What does the EU do well that anyone ‘outward looking, free-market oriented and in favour of greater individual freedom and less regulation’ would sincerely want it to do, and which couldn’t be done easily enough by mutual consent and goodwill without the ’help’ of the Commission, parliament, Council, and Court? Customs union? Nothing easier for nations that really wanted to co-operate, I’d have thought.

It’s not like, say, building armed forces and then getting them to agree to enthusiastically and effectively fight a common enemy which would be a good idea if you could do it, but I wonder if you managed that you’d also need a powerful and intrusive continental bureaucracy to enforce more intimate things like weights and measures, plug design, banana curvature…

Recognizing that an average birth rate of 1.5 will leave a deficit of skills talents and a depopulated internal market,

… or who shags whom and with what result.

Though effective border controls that doesn’t allow floods of modernity-hating barbarians to head for European welfare entitlements might help, plus lower taxation that allows working couples to have a decent standard of living and to afford modest but slightly larger families. But if even we can’t manage that in Britain - and we’re an island for crying out loud! – then it’s unlikely (to say the least), that ‘Europe’ will be able to do it.

… how do we deregulate the EU?

Without latter-day Lancasters and Wellingtons, you’ve got me beat.

Any ideas yourself given the permanent institutional and legislative bias for centralization explicit in the Treaty of Rome’s ‘ever closer union; you being the elected and publicly financed professional politician and all?

How do we develop new safeguards for the rights of member states?

Tricky...

Might have something to do with the fundamental nature and internal processes of the European Communities…EEC…EC…EU…

Nope. Nothing springs to mind.

How should subsidiarity be strengthened: by a subsidiarity panel, new treaty provisions on interpretation or a ‘states' rights' clause?

How has ‘subsidiarity’ ever returned delegated powers back to ‘sovereign’ nations without larger powers being internationalized up to the EU by treaty or just plain cheating? Has it ever been done? Is it possible given, blah, blah, blah…

What legislative areas should we repatriate and how?

See above. I mean it. Seriously. Check the history.

How can – and how far should – National Parliaments otherwise be more closely involved in EU decision-making (by pre-Council meeting mandates for ministers, for example) or by sitting as the revising Upper Chamber of the European Parliament to review subsidiarity and intergovernmental pillars or through a permanent "Congress of National Parliaments" to review subsidiarity and pass treaty amendments (except those of "constitutional" nature)?

Putting national parliaments on top of continent-wide European institutions to check that continent-wide European institutions pass internationalized powers back to national parliaments, huh? It’s so simple, it’s brilliant!

Oh.

B) Does this mean we get to play the boy for once, and even so how does it prevent us still being screwed? or

A) Is this on offer?

I mean, seriously; are they just humming in Paris and Berlin and Madrid and Rome to let their 65 year-old parliaments (along with our 745 year-old parliament) climb on top the 55 year-old European institutions and ask them to Stop! Wait a minute! What do you think you’re doing? That’s no way to treat an expensive constitutional instrument.

Is there anyone singing that song who isn’t a British Tory speaking in Britain to other British Tories?

How do we open up the Council of Ministers?

I’d use surgical knives myself but hey, that’s just me.

Should its legislative work be held in public?

That worked so well in Britain these last few years, yeah? We were right on top of that old expenses thing – we hardly let it get anywhere these last 12 years…

Maybe if you did it like the US Congress does it, and also broadcast all the committee proceedings…

Maybe then, and only then, would the BBC inform us it’s all so beautiful and sign off with a humourous piece about the Yoghurt Wars, or Alfonso, the Commission cat…

How should we increase the reporting requirements to national parliaments of ministers before and after they attend the Council of Ministers?

You know, if ministers only governed their own countries according to the traditions, moralities and the shared myths, histories and legal systems of those particular countries, then they’d only have to report to their own parliaments, and you’d get to cut out the middle man, and even the ubermensch…

How do we make enterprise, employment growth and wealth creation central to the EU's instincts and philosophy?

I think we may well be back in Lancasters and Wellingtons territory here.

Look, the continentals vary a lot, from state-worshippers to liberty-lovers, but I doubt that continued membership of the EU or its looming successor is going to achieve anything of the sort. Why not let the French do their own thing and farm weekday mornings and drive to Paris in the evening for income top-ups? Let the Germans make cars to go fast on their autobahns only to slow down when they hit everyone else’s wiggly roads anyway, and let the Czechs, poor buggers, be free for once.

A career open to the talents was a French aspiration: let us all dream of such a thing by not telling us how many hours we can work, and for whom, and for how much.

Should we make even greater use of "mutual recognition and cooperation" rather than "harmonisation", in completing the single market?

How about free trade or separate intra-national agreements? Look how well suppressing landfill to meet Dutch and Danish drainage needs is working for UK refuse disposal and see how well continent-wide legislation about work and trade function.

Is there much further scope for self-regulation by sectors on the basis of EU-wide guidelines and codes of conduct?

Try non-regulation of sectors, or the law of the land, buster – they just might work.

This particular land, by the way.

Which European social legislation poses the biggest burden on the labour market and needs to be repealed?

Nobody help him, folks. He’s got to work this one out by himself.

Is further action needed to tackle the continuing problem of anti-competitive price differentials across Europe, as Conservative manifestos have proposed?

Protectionism, tariff-unions, or free trade. Take your pick, and stick to it, why don’t you?

How much co-financing or re-nationalization of the CAP should there be?

This isn’t a trick question. I think he really means it. Oh dear.

How far should the CAP provide financial incentives for environmental protection?

Or anti-virus software? Or better munitions? Or nicer-shaped tomatoes? Or better footballers?

Should the CFP be abolished?

!

If so, what should replace it?

Er...Fishing?

How do we allow two-way flexibility, with opt-outs available to member states in policy areas other than internal market, competition policy and trade?

How indeed? How also do we allow two-tone flip-flops with bake-outs to member states in hay fever areas other than internal junket, quizzes and fade?

Keep it simple, if you can.

These are but some of the challenges facing my political generation. If we do not address them, future generations will not thank us for leaving behind a Europe of turmoil, chaos, failing birth rates, debt, low employment and even conflict - the very thing the founding fathers of the EU set out to eliminate forever …

(Failing birth rates? Really?)

… when they created the current unstable, undemocratic, unrepresentative edifice.

That was simple but somehow I don’t believe he’s got it, do you children?

Someone seems to have taken the clue away, and I don’t think it’s coming back via the Conservative Party any time soon.

A clue has landed

Like a schoolyard gang leader who has been caught out and punished by the teachers and with worse threatened and an angry and vengeful schoolmates, David Cameron is trying to make nice and promise to be good to the First Formers and to let anyone join his gang - his reformed gang that is no longer smoking in the toilets and pushing kids' head down the pan and stealing their tuck money.

David Cameron is reopening the list of candidates so anyone can apply to stand even if they have not had anything to do with the Conservative Party before...
He also backed more "open primaries" where everyone in a constituency can vote at public meetings to select the prospective Conservative MP.

This is typically half insane and half sensible.
Primary selection was how the useless but liberal-media backed Republicans selected John McCain to be the cherry on the top of the Bush administration's destruction of conservative rule in the USA. The otherwise lovely Daniel Hannan supports open primaries and his respectable arguments for them are here. I think that having electorates which contain large numbers of socialists, Left-liberal public-sector Global-warming bed-wetters and Muslim fundamentalists selecting who the Conservatives put up for the constituency for general elections has obvious faults.
I'd expect anyone who told Mister Cameron that to receive short shrift in today's climate as he scrabbles to distance himself from a despised system of which he was until recently an enthusisastic beneficiary and in which he was a willing and ruthless participant. You can still smell the cigarettes on him, and searching him for tuck money might still produce pocketsful of stolen dinner money envelopes.

But - and it's a big but - there is the non-insane part. It's the idea of representative government.
He claims ( and I'll believe it only when I see it and even then only if and when independent-minded candidates are chosen and get stroppy with the Westminster Tory hierarchy) that he'll allow public-spirited people to stand for selection in Westminster constituencies and therefore cease to micro-manage the potential choices for local parties. This is important because constituency parties do the work of supporting conservatism locally and recruit and train some of the leaders of the future and are the backbone of the Conservative Party.
Constituency parties is where actual conservatism happens in Britain; now that the churches and the papers and the academy are Red to the core. Without them, we might as well form a London-down national Christian Democratic Party and accept our tiny place in a centralized Europe.

Professional politicians - also known as party hacks - have been toeing whichever is the party line (or stamping on it in the case of the federasts) for two decades now. They have been part of the political and media class that has homogenized and Left-centralized and corrupted public life since Tony Blair's election victory and some would say earlier. Most are university graduates and have not had jobs and lives outside politics and the media in various opinion-forming organizations.
They live very far removed from wealth-creation or law-enforcement or trouble-shooting which ought to be the main beneficiaries of practical politics.

I recommend Peter Oborne's The Triumph of the Political Class as the briefing document for those who want to see what's gone wrong with government that allowed all the parties to bleed us dry twice: once to pay for over-large and stupid government and once more to pay their damned expenses, and in so doing to spray the underclass the bloated bureacracy the statist fake charities and quangos and the Europe Union with our wealth and to decorate their false altars with our hollowed-out freedoms.

But if Mister Cameron allows in retired doctors who've not been party hacks, and recent ex-soldiers who've met the enemy and who don't dine with their 'clerical' apologists, and angry, over-taxed businessmen and scared and determined housewives and mothers and non-PC policemen who fear for our children's safety in Britian's poorly-policed streets, then he might just have something like a democratic party on his hands.
It might have greater appeal than the thirty-something male solicitor or the forty-something think-tank alumnus or financial journalists that constituency elecorates might otherwise be offered. He will have to overcome his Political Class control-freakery if any of these people ever gets past the selection meetings and into the Commons.

That's two big 'ifs' again - constituency parties tend to be composed of determined women who prefer to choose married and male candidates, and especially lawyers, and thus who are potentially recruits to the Political Class. Then they'd have to presuade the electorate that they're serious about doing the right thing and not being sock-puppets. But that's not necessarily too complicated a task - shouting 'I've not been involved with party politics till now' at every opportunity would be a good start.

It would be good for the country and the constitution if Burke's idea of the 'little platoons' flourished once more in the Conservative Party. If the dream could be revived of locally-based politics stemming from and strengthening and improving neighbourhood and country life, then such a process in turn would generate affection for and loyalty to the great, distant and frugal institutions of the State and Nation, then we might be back to a place where the good life could occur.
Independent-minded, locally-loyal Tory MPs who owe their seat to the party and people of that constituency are less likely to rubber-stamp a centralizing party line at Westminster or to kowtow to federast quietism in the committees over European 'legislation' as it's catapulted past Commons 'scrutiny' in 24 hours.
They are less likely to be part of the elite, permanent talking-and-voting caste that has allowed the Marxian long march for the institutions to enter, subvert, and destroy our institutions becasue they'll be less scared of being defamed by the Left's ever-growing list of curses, slanders, and unacceptable beliefs and policies.
They'd be much more likely to tell the Tory leader he's dining with the Revolution again, instead of hunting with the hounds.

It might to be good for us social conservatives, too.

Who cares if you can't dine anywhere in the Westminster village's tofu-eating Islington bubble if you're too busy listening to and persuading the people of Truro or Bury or Pocklington that vouchers will save the local grammar school and also grow more grammar schools? Why worry if the Today Programme calls some ex-soldier MP a racist if his constituents are grateful that he's taken on the Police Authority and persuaded them to swop their speed camera budget for more patrol cars and more Saturday night overtime for the towns, and to adopt a zero tolerance policy for violence, theft, and property damage? Who's afraid about being lumped in with the nuclear-armed phallocentric patriarchy for opposing partial-birth abortion when you helped steer the new bypass away from the hospital that you yourself helped to keep open in the face of NHS bureaucratic empire-building five years ago?

And think of all the talent and knowledge that would be brought to Westminster if people who'd actually had proper jobs were let back in?

It's such a good idea, that I'm surprised that David Cameron thought of it; but then he is in deep trouble.
For a moment yesterday when I listened to Mister Cameron announce this, I felt a little bit of hope for my country and for my old party for the first time in years.


Now watch some bastard spoil it.

Green blue sprouts' green shoots shoot Greens' shouts

This looks hopeful.

David Cameron will head a party dominated by MPs more socially conservative and less concerned with the environment than their leader, an analysis of Conservative parliamentary candidates suggests.

The Times - scarcely a cheerleader these days for any form of 'Right-wingery' - presents us with the tantalizing prospect of a Conservative government whose backbenchers believe in something actually like conservatism. After years of David Cameron's unnecessary 'de-toxing' of the image of 'Thatcherism,' (New Labour got elected claiming to offer Thatcherism without the Tories) it's seemed unlikely till now that any Conservative party administration would put any, let alone a great deal, of emphasis on:

preserving the nation-state
defence of the realm
defending the family
law and order
sound money
lower taxation
education that actually teaches
dealing with those harmful effects of globalization that actually exist such as the upcoming energy crisis.

And even though this doesn't look too hard a-starboard to me...

A Liberal Democrat election candidate Norsheen Bhatti has defected to the Conservatives, blaming Nick Clegg for abandoning his party's commitment to widen representation of ethnic minorities. It is also vindication for his strategy of "lovebombing" the Lib Dems, by which the Tories aim to attract Liberal support by agreeing with them on issues such as civil liberties and the environment. Ms Bhatti is now hoping to go on the Tory candidates' list and be selected for another seat. Conservative Chairman Eric Pickles said he was delighted to welcome her and claimed that both parties had much in common. "We are a broad church and are welcoming new people to the party all the time as we hold this tired and discredited government to account. "Liberal Democrats can achieve the changes they so desperately want through the Conservative Party. Like them we share similar values on civil liberties, the environment and quality of life issues." Up until a few weeks ago Miss Bhatti was heavily criticising the Conservatives. Her website still displays an attack on Sir Malcolm Rifkind for not voting on a parliamentary bill aimed at ending fuel poverty.

...there's still something potentially tasty to be gleaned from the following:

The analysis of Conservative candidates by the ConservativeHome website suggests that Mr Cameron should worry less about the odd eccentric and more about the general character of a new intake.
It finds that far from being a group of “Cameron clones” those most likely to be new Tory MPs are, in general, less concerned about climate change than terrorism, oppose green taxes and are hostile to gay adoptions. A majority oppose the party’s official policy of raising green taxes to reduce the taxation burden on families, according to a survey of 148 Tory candidates.
The survey, carried out in seats on a list of the 100 most-winnable constituencies and those already held, also finds that only 15 per cent believe climate change is a more important issue than terrorism. The survey suggests that an overwhelming majority of candidates in winnable seats – 83 per cent – support a significant expansion of nuclear power.

So that's: social conservatism on the family regarding gay adoptions; an awareness that one good way of people not dying is to avoid letting terrorists kill them; and a resistance to funny stuff with carbon taxes. Seems almost sane.
Not that gay adoption is all that big a deal in this neck of the woods because it doesn't happen very much and there are much worse fates for kids than growing up amongst throw-cushions and freshly-picked herbs: much, much worse. But it's the thought that counts.

Who knows what good seeds might germinate in David Cameron's head if a favourable reception to such attitudes comes out of focus groups and targeted polls?
Maybe a move on the real baby-harmers on the dole?

And there's more.

He will be less worried that 94 per cent of candidates believe that too much power has been transferred to the European Union. It is his own view and, as even Ken Clarke acknowledges, the “settled will” of the Conservative Party.
An almost uniformly Eurosceptic Conservative parliamentary party after the next election would, however, place additional pressure on Mr Cameron to deliver on his pledge to win power back from Brussels.

Of course, they can try to ignore the hell out of their backbenchers as all federasts do to all anti-EU folk, but David Cameron's likely to have it made patently clear to him by them that in a time of great economic stress - as provided by Labour's chainsaw massacre of the economy and the silence of those Tories whose mouths were stuffed with expense-account gold - that populist attitudes are the only peacetime morale-boosters and vote-winners available.They could start right now with a parliamentary purge of the Tories' Top Ten Greediest expense-account MPs. Then see Gordon Brown try to match it.
Marginal-constituency MPs are good at identifying such lifelines and they can't all be stupid enough to think that another drift to the centre would bring more votes over to the Conservatives than reclaiming some of the lost UKIP million or so votes.

Immigration controls and a prison or two could do wonders; as would flashy, legislatively simple, money-saving assaults on the Welfare State's breed-a-socialist-electorate scheme via child-related welfare benefits and low educational achievement for all.

Regular readers of this site in their drove will be aware that I'm a million miles from hopeful about David Cameron because I doubt his conservatism is of the die hard rather than the ditcher sort. If that...

But there are few things in Britain's political life you can rely on so confidently as Tory MPs' desire to be re-elected to Westminster.
It destroyed Edward Heath and it toppled Mrs Thatcher.

Who knows: it might put a vertebra or two into call me Dave.

Tory Genius 2. This time it’s personal.

I’ll be quick, what with my age and blood sugar problems.

I’m going to put Real World comments just after the bits that make me want to reach for my culture club…There’s a serious analysis at the end if you’re interested, but I’m all light-headed at the moment, what with Labour doing something halfway decent for the second time in a mere four years…

This from the Times.

David Cameron tells party that NHS is key to victory at the polls.

Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor.

David Cameron is to make the NHS a key campaign theme in an attempt to convince voters that the Conservatives share their priorities.

Gordon Brown is to make the protection of grammar schools against further comprehensivisation a key campaign theme in an attempt to convince voters that Labour shares their priorities.

In a private briefing to shadow ministers yesterday, the Tory leader set out how he planned to build momentum towards victory in the general election.

Success in the European and council polls in June was a must, Mr Cameron told his frontbench team in a pep talk at the Commons. Stephen Gilbert, his campaign chief, revealed that the party had set a target of winning 43 per cent of the vote in both elections.

Say just about what the general polls say most of the time (talk about aiming high!) now that Mister Brown’s been rumbled as having put the Christmas Club money on a whippet called Bubble. Poor Bubble.

But while such an outcome would help to boost confidence, the party faced a serious challenge convincing voters that it was not out of touch, Mr Cameron said. He showed shadow ministers polling that suggested a gulf between voters’ own priorities and what they believe the Conservatives care most about.

Those old polls, eh? Pray, do tell.

In a warning to hardline Eurosceptic MPs, he pointed out that most people do not rank Europe among the ten most important issues. The NHS and education remain key concerns.

So the wise thing to do here is obviously:

A) Ignore and then insult and outrage the very people who’ll be stuffing the envelopes and manning the phones and driving the old dears to the polling station on Election Day; you know, those…What was that word? Ah, ‘Conservatives’, I think.

B) Concentrate on the one hand on one topic that if any conservative mentions it outside the privacy of his own silk-sheeted boudoir (complete with handcuff-equipped head board and flogging post for the privately-educated and collection of Biggles novels for the last surviving grammar school boy), then everyone in Britain over the age of six will immediately accuse the Tories of promoting cannibalism on the Intensive Care Ward and prompt the BBC and Channel Four to run 24-hour telethons showing American ambulances stopping to drop black gunshot victims in the gutter once the paramedic’s phoned the victim’s credit card rating through to the dispatcher.

C) Concentrate on the other hand on a topic for which your entire cure involves Carol Vorderman (pbuh).

Now look, David. Carol Vorderman can cure lots of things, including a problem of mine which I choose not to elaborate now before my reading millions, but…

The whole of the teaching profession (bar about twelve individuals and the tiny private sector) plus all the local education authorities and all the universities [except maybe Buckingham] would rather die than do anything conservative up to and including saying something nice about Britain since the Old Stone Age – and even then the people here weren’t vegetarians so that’s touch and go too – and you think someone who can do Sudoku in the bath in ink is going to change the cultural Marxist stranglehold on our school children’s’ minds?

Can we just pause a moment and think about that?

OK, thought about it. Back to politics.

Senior strategists have been dismayed at recent polling evidence showing a dramatic slide in the Tories’ ratings as the party best placed to run the NHS.

Senior strategists have been dismayed at recent polling evidence showing a dramatic slide in Labour’s ratings as the party best placed to run the Quorn Hunt.

Where once it led Labour on the issue,..

Would that be when the whole economy went south or when the anti-Tony-Blair-war fuss was at its height, I wonder? I forget. Happy days, but now long gone, I fear.

… it now trails by about 8 per cent, according to the last Populus poll for The Times.

“His main message was that we should be doing better on health,” one senior Conservative said. Another reported: “He said we needed to do more to reassure people that we had changed and that we weren’t threatening the public sector.”

So that whole idea of having different parties in this country suggesting different visions of the good life is where, exactly, in all this?

Mr Cameron said that entrenching the Conservatives as the party of economic competence was a key priority.

‘Economic competence’ here meaning national spending levels equivalent to the Royal Navy in a foreign port on New Year’s Eve with a year and a half’s pay in cash in every man’s pocket – that kind of ‘economic competence’, huh?

But showing that it could best tackle the recession did not mean abandoning efforts to convince voters that the party had changed, he said.

Although the Tories maintain a pledge to match Labour spending on health and schools until 2011, the downturn led Mr Cameron and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, to ditch a commitment to equal public spending overall last year.

So it’s a bad thing to spend less than Labour and we promise only to start doing so in two years’ time, right?

Say, I think I’m getting the hang of this entrenching the Conservatives as the party of economic competence thing already.

Mr Cameron said last week that the Tories must accept a share of the blame for the “cosy economic consensus” that allowed debt to rise to unsustainable levels.

‘Yeah, just what he said’ doesn’t make it any more.

The Conservative leader’s private presentation reveals that he expects that the political battleground will shift back on to public services in the months ahead as Labour accuses the party of preparing to slash spending.

You’re in a spot of bother here, aren’t you, David?

The pep talk to about 70 senior MPs and peers was given in the Boothroyd Room of Portcullis House. In his presentation on the June elections, Mr Gilbert said that the party was targeting the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, Somerset and Cornwall.

A Conservative spokeswoman said: “We do not comment on leaks of private meetings.”

Meanwhile, a Guardian/ICM poll shows the Conservatives maintaining a 12-point lead over Labour. The two parties are unchanged on 42 per cent and 30 per cent, with the Liberal Democrats up 2 points on 20 per cent.

And this is the problem. The culture war problem. The propaganda problem. The party political problem.

If you spend your whole career as leader trying to get the other kids to like you by joining in their games and by not being too rude about their Transformers and Thundercats but kind of hinting that maybe your He-Man dolls might be a bit better and also telling the whole schoolyard that you’re not too different from those nice Lib Dems with their Power Rangers and you do manage to take some of their friends away from them because your Castle Grayskull’s, like, totally awesome, then when your pals’ voices start to break and action figures lose their allure and maybe some of the lads start to look meaningfully at the lasses what do you do?

You’ve invested so much time and drawn limited praise from your command of the Masters of the Universe worlds that nobody believes you’re really interested in or up to the grown-up stuff.

But now it’s time for the grown-up stuff, and his culture’s all wrong. And the best things in life aren’t free, it seems, and someone’s spent all of our pocket money for us and…

David Cameron, George Osborne and all are Political Class through and through, which means that they can’t think of; can’t contemplate let alone deliver a smaller and more efficient State.

It’s just not in them to do so; they can no more wish for and seek limited government as beloved of both libertarians and Old Right, than the Puritans of the Civil War period could understand and desire sustainable development, or the Vikings a centralized Welfare State.

Wrong minds. Wrong world.

So a barnstorming piece like this from Camilla Cavendish of The Times just won’t compute.

“We have spent an extra £90 billion on the health service, the third-biggest employer in the world after the Red Army and Indian Railways. We have Third World maternity wards, elderly patients discharged with malnutrition, lower cancer and stroke survival rates than most of Europe and Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, which has apparently allowed more than 400 people to die through sheer neglect.
Why? Not for lack of money. Not for want of teachers, doctors, nurses, therapists or radiographers. But because the law of diminishing returns kicks in particularly viciously in heavily unionised, bureaucratic, monopoly services.”

For Call Me Dave and his pals, the above just isn’t real. We’ve got to have high levels of public spending on services, especially health and education because, because… because that’s what “we needed to do more to reassure people that we had changed and that we weren’t threatening the public sector” means. That’s what the Political Class does, all the time. They can’t envision responsible, independent people shifting for themselves in life and seeking to run their own lives without massive, tax-funded public spending run and owned by government .

“But this does not just affect accountants. It also lets down the most vulnerable people. Take Baby P. He died not because Haringey Council had no money: he was visited 60 times by different agencies. He died because bureaucracy had grown to a point where no one took responsibility for him. This Government created safeguarding boards, children's trusts, Cafcass, Sure Starts, children's services departments, and required them to work together. This means that people are attending meetings rather than seeing families, ticking boxes rather than exercising judgment.”

No, sorry, still not getting it. If we allowed churches or private charities – the sort of charities that actually have to collect money to finance them rather than being given wedges of tax and thus become quangos – or even reduced the number of agencies and their duties and staffing then who knows what might happened to the children of the poor? They might die? In large numbers.

CMD & Co. live in the political world of broadsheet editorials and focus groups and policy conferences and TV interviews with their blinkered perspective.

Cutting childcare budgets must lead to genocide in their tunnel vision.

In chasing some mythical ‘middle ground’ in the focus groups and polls that they run they’re missing the majorities they need to win and govern.

40% of the working class voted for Mrs. Thatcher’s Tories in the 1980’s and a few stuck around whilst Mister Major blew the whole deal.

Mrs. Thatcher’s government weathered all kinds of storms because it connected, across party lines, with ambitions and hopes – and fears – of people across all party lines and across class lines.

Her administrations were scarcely lily-white and scandal-free, but until the federasts blew it on behalf of their home country of Europe, nothing could touch her:

# Not Western rearmament and small wars against the will of the USSR despite massive Soviet rearmament and worldwide ‘peace’ propaganda campaigns because the British people rightly feared the USSR.

# Not the sometimes vile private misbehavior of Tory politicians when the economy was freed up, growing, and ever-more prosperous because the British people rightly wanted to share in prosperity.

# Not the ever-shrill shrieking of the Leftist firmament about jobsandhealthandwomenandhousingandcuts when people were free to find jobs or start their own businesses and provide for their own health - or a least not abuse it by working in stinking old factories that ‘she’ shut down - and were buying or renting the much more readily available private housing.

All the sources Mister Cameron seeks his advice from are up there in their ivory towers, and would run screaming from what millions of voters would leave their homes and their UKIP membership, and BNP meetings and council and housing association homes to achieve at the polls if offered:

# A majority of the British people would like to leave the EU, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like violent criminals locked up for longer, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like cleaner hospitals, though few of the Political Class does to the extent they’d contemplate allowing the sacking of NHS trade union members being disciplined for unsanitary behaviour of poor cleaning work.

# A majority of the British people would like to limit immigration, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like better discipline and recognizable subjects in schools, though few of the Political Class does.

# A majority of the British people would like a bigger share of what they earn for themselves and their families rather than the meat people-carriers and hoodie armies on the dole and on the sick.

Suggest any of that, and practically everyone whom Mister Cameron knows personally and professionally would be up in arms calling for his (humane) removal from office. All he has is the Political Class and their tunnel vision.

Which is why he comes up with the idea of freezing the BBC budget instead of selling off the Marxist filth-mongers to scrabble in the marketplace. Which is why he seeks help in maths from the adorable Ms. Vorderman instead of abolishing the LEAs and putting the rest of the education budget into parents’ vouchers and setting up examinations charities to run the O-Level and A-Levels on a you-can-fail basis.

Which is why this is so ‘important’ to him.

Conservatives in disarray over 'sooner or later' tax promise
Kenneth Clarke appeared to cast doubt on whether the Tories would deliver on their inheritance tax pledgConservative Party tax policy was in disarray last night after George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, was forced to contradict Kenneth Clarke over a flagship Tory promise to voters.

Big deal. We need a chain saw taking to the overspending on quality-of-live political correctness of quangos and fake charities and all the soppy, stupid, anti-wealth ‘health legislation’ and their sponsors and employees and the tax reductions to follow, and all the public will see on TV is ‘disarray’ or disunity.

Nobody outside of the circles of the Wise and the Good cared a hoot if Mrs. Thatcher’s ministers or ‘friends’ were cross with her, or if backbench Tory MPs were internalizing all kinds of organic and non-organic compounds and objects as long as she was delivering spendable prosperity, national security, and some sense of law and order.

If your political culture doesn’t let you connect with the nation and follow its dreams and morality, then all you have left...

…is political culture.

And the jelly it grows on.

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Coming soon. The answer.