Here are a couple of my favourite optimists, i.e., actual conservatives who don't feel quite ready to reach for the razor blades and bubble bath.
Goodnight Vienna says: "A few years ago I'd have been jumping up and down, applauding a speech like this but we've been tricked and cheated so much that it's hard to trust - in fact I don't think I'll ever trust a politician again: question, question, question. Until I see the small print and the action to match the words I'm going to keep my hat handy."
David Duff is still more upbeat, thinking that there might be an outside chance, with some parts even worth an A: "I had my caveats on certain points, and I wouldn't trust that bunch of scrounging crooks who sat behind him further than I could piss into a gale, but the overall ideology, if you like, the philosophy, that drove the speech was entirely sensible, honourable and proper. Within a few months words will give way to deeds and then shall we see "power being power what our seemers be."
It goes downhill a bit after that.
Sue, being Sue, is brief and forthright, and if England had bullfighters...
Well, I pity the Nu Labour/Blu Labour 'Brit' who finds his way into her sights any time soon. "It doesn't make any difference whether Cameron gave a rousing speech. After all,..."
EU referendum consigns all my fellow-Tories’ promises to a bin somewhere in Brussels, but, hey, this is a victory speech by Britain’s’ brightest and bluest– it’s supposed to be a happy event; not marred by facts or any form of truth. On some Tory luminary talking the talk: “Has this dumb cluck heard of IGCs and treaties? Because nothing can be repatriated without the treaties being rewritten and that cannot be done without a unanimous agreement at an IGC.”
Peter Hitchens puts it all in an historical context: and it’s the culture war that really decides it, in his eyes.
You can say what you like about public debt, or rearmament, or Europe, but in the end the C&UP is never going to deliver conservatism because it’s accepted the Liberal Left’s culture.
“The Tory Party went into administration, where it remains, controlled by the trustees of the establishment and the thought police of the media — who ensured David Cameron's succession.”
Powerless but office-seeking, apostate and apologetic, authority-spurning and long since bought off the auction block by the political class, I wish my old friends and comrades in the Party good luck and happiness of their time in the “Government.”
Maybe their rulers will let them keep something shiny when it’s been decided that they need to be replaced.
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.
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.
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 ofthe 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.
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…
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 furthercomprehensivisation 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.
“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.
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...
