GC Cooper kindly points out in a comment below that the awesome EU Referendum blog has done the maths on where UKIP (plus the similarly anti-EU and anti-immigration but with Left-wing economic policies BNP) may have prevented Tories from getting an absolute majority in the Commons.
Perhaps my fellow 'Kippers' foot calluses were worth something somewhere in our once-proud province. Castle City, alas, was not such a seat, where Mister Cameron's parachutist did alright for himself.
As the election results continue to pour in and the prospect of a Cameron-led Tory coalition government becomes ever more likely, I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify my beliefs about the man and his policies.
I have noticed that a number of you disapprove of Mister Cameron’s thoroughly modernized and forward-looking conservatism. Worse still, some of you seem to think that I am in some way fundamentally opposed to his Great Project of building a better society; shorn of its ancient abuses and all those fuddy-duddy limitations on political power and personal achievement and happiness by putting this country at the heart of a democratic Europe in the great traditions that continue to this day to be given to us by the Greeks.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I have nothing but personal admiration for this fine man who, against all the odds, and with no more than a private education and wealthy background to help him set out in life, plus six enlightening months working in the private sector before public duty called to him, chose to offer nation and party a new way in the way of newness that only conservatism might bring and chose to drag the Conservatives out of its mire of: petty nationalism; its obsession with lower taxation; its puritanical flirtations with notions around limiting the use of mind altering drugs or interfering with the growth of new and exciting forms of marriage. He has single-handedly rescued our great corner of the European Union from the backwater status that the pure isolationism that freer trade with the rest of the planet would impose upon us. He has finally validated and institutionalized the simple truth that concerned peoples’ feeling about the environment are too importantto allow narrow-minded climatologists to deny both the existence of Global Warming and its principally man-made origins.
In addition to a personal liking for the man for his cool charm when interviewed and the common touch which he displays on all occasions when agreeing with the fundamental world view of the Left and liberal mainstream, above all I respect his sheer courage in facing down the all-powerful Tory Establishment and reducing its outmoded emphasis on preserving ancient institutions and guarding our national life from the obvious need for root-and-branch change to a sad and defeated rump, sulking on the periphery.
If I hadn’t owed an hereditary gambling debt to the local chairman of the UK Independence Party, I am certain that I would have spend six days a week every week since Easter electioneering for Mister Cameron’s compassionate and thoroughly progressive agenda.
I am sure that when and if a Greece-like economic meltdown comes to Britain, Mister Cameron will immediately fly to the European Union to request on our behalf whatever mitigation of its regulations and fiscal regime might be necessary to protect the economy of these little islands, and to bring home the best possible deal for Britain that the governments of France and Germany decide is in our best interests to be permitted.
Finally, I want to put down now and for evermore the rumour that I ever, anywhere, described David Cameron as ‘A dissembling compulsive political turncoat who can’t pass a British national interest or historic institution without selling it out, and who couldn’t conserve a fart even with a Ken Clarke-sized butt plug superglued inside him.’
Dumb Jon's A-Z of Cameron: a must read for those considering going with A Leading Brand this Thursday in the democratic spirit of Hobson's Choice and Buggins's Turn.
26 reasons why I'm pamphleteering throughout Castle City in purple and gold instead of my native dark blue this year, and for those petty souls who will insist on details, here's what a patriotic government might just look like.
My previous post threw up a question that I’d like to answer in a bit of detail.
Anonymous Confused, Angus said...
Having always been a natural Tory supporter and living in Scotland (not a nice position to be in) I'm in a quandary. The Angus constituency should be a straight fight between the SNP and the Conservatives. Normally, it would be a no-brainer. But I'm as pissed off as everyone else with Cameron and had intended voting UKIP. Should I vote UKIP to help their share of the vote or go for the Tories to get the Fife f*$@wit out of power? If a Lib-Lab coalition delivers PR, what would be the point in future of holding centre-right or right wing views?
There are lots of ways by which natural Tory voters can respond to Cameron’s apostasy, and a UKIP vote is only one of them: one, of course, I hope that you’ll take.
If you look at the Peter Hitchens’ blog hereyou’ll see that he expounds the theory that the Tory party is irredeemably broken and corrupt and needs destroying so conservatives can change their allegiances to form some kind of party or party coalition. This could win power and use it to reverse the Leftwards ratchet effect of all postwar governments bar one (in places), especially in the social sphere.
Now I’m not sure whether C & U P’s utter destruction is the only answer, though I’m mortally certain that a thorough scourging is needed and a new Lib Lab pact should do that. Then the Tories might have a palace coup and throw out Cameron and all the post-Howard Lefty wimpishness and offer something different and identifiably conservative to which the old base might flock along with some of the working class Tories on whom Churchill and Thatcher depended when the Oxbridge toffs and the cricket club boys wimped out and went all appeasy and Europhile respectively.
But by then - say three years or so into a Lib Lab pact that gets PR through - such a scourging would not only help the new Tories, but also any non-Conservative party offering patriotic, traditionalist, anti Big State solutions for those people for whom the word ‘Conservative’ is anathema could gain seats or add more seats to Buckingham? CastleCity? Somewhere in Gloucestershire? I think that UKIP could be, or could form the kernel of, a new party whose natural coalition partners would be a reformed C & U P and maybe the Unionists.
Call it the Freedom Party, or Family, or just plain United Kingdom Party.
On the other hand, a Cameron-led Tory majority after May 6th would likely:
A) not be much different from New Labour anyway, and therefore,
B) not even start to fix the wrecked economy. It would also be in office when the country changes from merely heading south and being third-rate to Southern Hemisphere/Third World economically and politically, such as having to deal with brown out and blackouts due to lack of energy investment, and the insupportable cost of having to continue to pay our VE Day generation their government final salary pensions from funds (where they are funded at all!) with the Stock Market in the cellar at a time during Obama’s second term when the US economy is being turned over to full-scale industrial sandal production fuelled by the cheap, clean and sustainable use of lentil bakes.
I can’t see the Germans having enough cash or any will at all to bail us out then, and the word ‘Conservative’ would be mud for more than a single generation, like the Tories after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715-1716
Bottom line, Anonymous Confused, Angus, is that I believe that, as empty threats go, Cameron’s“Send me to Downing Street or you’ll get another LeftieBigState Tax-troughing politically correct federast Liverpool-on-Thames” is right down there with “Drop the gun, copper, or the paedophile gets it.”
Some of the cleverest people on the Right have been taken in by him, but will it last?
How can someone who’s so right about the political class and all they have wrought against us be so wrong in the conclusions he draws about what needs to be done?
There is a certain type of bovine political intelligence which hates David Cameron. It cannot forgive the Tory leader his popularity, his beautiful wife, his upper-middle-class ease — and above all his astonishing success in rebuilding the Conservative party. The core criticism works like this: David Cameron is an empty and opportunistic former PR executive, interested only in power for its own sake, utterly devoid of ideas let alone principles, morally indistinguishable from Tony Blair, and in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch.
Moo, I suppose.
He goes on…
But it is partly for these very reasons that Cameron has been able to rescue Conservatism from the angry factionalism and relentless search for ideological purity of ten years ago. Cameron recognises that great political parties tend to be coalitions.
So he has created an environment where Kenneth Clarke and William Hague can both occupy major positions in the same shadow Cabinet, and where social liberals like Michael Gove can rub shoulders with social conservatives like Iain Duncan Smith. Of course, this kind of co-existence involves compromise and, sometimes, lack of clarity.
And on…
David Cameron has also substantially repudiated the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. He calls himself a ‘one-nation Tory’ — the label chosen by her opponents. It is worth recalling, however, that circumstances obliged Thatcher to be a centraliser, who worked against the grain of the traditional British state..
And on…
Cameron’s own political philosophy predates Thatcher and, for that matter, Heath. It can be traced back to a purer school of Conservatism which was first articulated by Burke, reached its apotheosis with Disraeli and Baldwin, and appeared to have died out when Macmillan left office in 1963. This kind of Conservatism sees itself as above class or faction and profoundly believes that it acts only in the national interest. This is why Cameron says again and again that he feels as profound a sense of responsibility for the poor and the unprivileged as New Labour claims to do. It’s just that he believes that New Labour’s target-setting, centralised edicts, and top-down government have failed miserably.
So a Cameron Tory party will seek to restore the local structures of the British state that have been wiped out over the last 50 years, and rebuild our great institutions, above all the family, which have been undermined by New Labour. He believes that only society, and emphatically not the state, can solve Britain’s most wicked problems of crime, poverty and so on.
He has come into politics out of a sense of personal service and duty. He believes in self-reliance, patriotism and personal independence. He will not, as Tony Blair did, abuse his office for personal enrichment. He will not be intoxicated, as Blair was, by power for its own sake. He will not go weak at the knees when he meets an American president or international tycoon. He may very well fail, but he is rooted in a very clear and purely British set of values. I can think of no Conservative leader who stands so squarely in the Tory intellectual, social, moral and political tradition.
Actually, I can only guess that somewhere along the line Oborne went native and started accepting the liberal/statist flummery that he has anatomized so well in The Triumph of the Political Class.
I mean, if Cameron had indeed spent the years of his leadership above class or faction exposing the uber-centralism of the New Labour state and its fans throughout what passes for the liberal intellectual world, or acting as if he profoundly believes that it acts only in the national interestby recognizing those institutions such as the European Union and international Greenery as hostile and repudiating their internationalist and anti-freedom missions, rather than parachuting further representatives of the urban elite into constituencies as ‘Conservative’ candidates, he might have spread the message to the actual voters.
He might have done what Mrs. Thatcher did and make national bankruptcy seem like a bad thing that we need radical action to overcome , and that welfare dependency and the bureaucratic takeover of much of what passes for family life in Britain as a result of Left-liberals’ ideology of relative poverty was causing more problems that it solved, and so he might have built up a constituency of people in this country robust enough in their recognition of reality and their understanding of what needs to be done despite the hurt and the opposition from the state producer-groups in the unions, ministries, and quangos. Such a constituency might have stood by him, and helped him out when things got tough.They might have had the gumption to hold to common sense and stand with a truly conservative Cameron.
Instead, he plumped for the whole liberal mind-set in order not to upset anybody and get other, non-conservative people on-board and so his would-be ministers were allowed to side with the social workers and praise what they actually do.
And if you make yourself out to be a phony liberal, and you don’t try to make other people appreciate actual conservative policies by, you know, actually leading, then what happens when a real liberal with a pretty face and a slick line of patter gets on the telly?
It is the first time that the party has been ahead in a poll during a general election campaign.
It will cause further concern for Labour and the Conservatives. Both parties have turned on the Lib Dems after Nick Clegg’s success in the first of three TV prime ministerial debates.
But if the results were repeated at the election it would mean (that Labour would mean)sic that the Tories would have the most seats, with 244.
Despite being six points behind the Tories and seven behind the Liberal Democrats, Labour would have 243 seats.
The Lib Dems would get just 134, leaving them the powerbrokers in a hung parliament.
Support for the Lib Dems has surged since Mr Clegg’s performance in the first televised debate on Thursday.
That’s what you get for pretending to be something that your supporters don’t really want in the hope that someone else’s constituency (soggy Liberal Democrats) will vote for you.
When the Real Thing comes along, they’ll vote for that.
Vote for me, I’m a liberal reallyis now looking, even in the mainstream media, as exactly what we on the gun-nut rec-room armoury Right said it would become all along: about as successful arallying cry as Let’s get out there men, and die like flies, and Cameron’s environment where Kenneth Clarke and William Hague can both occupy major positions in the same shadow Cabinet, and where social liberals like Michael Gove can rub shoulders with social conservatives like Iain Duncan Smithseems set to end up resembling the utterly self-deluding wishful thinking enterprise that it is.
And so after the General Election is over and proportional representation threatens to put the Lib Dems into power forever, we can relax at last for a night in front of the telly courtesy of Bob’s Betamax Emporiumand feast on a fast food takeaway fromBernie’s World of Liver.
B) A chap’s bare minimum service level agreement obligation for a first date with an Essex girl, or
C) A conservative’s bare minimum obligation to render unto Caesar this election time?
Having finally sneaked into the fray with my Dawn Chorus leafleting campaign in Castle City, I have to say that C) is definitely what I have to keep in mind as my arthritis and tendonitis accompany me by riding shotgun and walking point as I schlep along the terraces and through the registered social housing estates and up the garden paths of Castle City’s slumbering voters.
Both my advancing years and my bladder have decided that I shall perform my democratic chores first thing in the Ayem, and they have been joined by my cowardice and therefore unwillingness to meet the aggrieved and time-wasting fascists of the establishment parties as I put UKIP’s glossy purple election addresses through the deadly letterboxes of my neighbourhood.
I recall in my youth canvassing and leafleting for the Tories, and how incandescently worked up some of the (usually female) leftie residents would take every opportunity to delay and interrupt us in our free exercise of persuasion by going ballistically bonkers in the middle of the street at some imagined or concocted offence – just as they had learned to do at student union meetings when any conservative said anything at all. This kind of pseudo-insanity is not only universal in any public political event containing patriots and conservatives these days, it is also par for the course and legally enforced via ‘hate’ legislation and in police practices as the ‘authorities’ hassle the enemies of the politically correct dispensation that is New Labour’s Gramscian gift to the nation formerly known as Britain.
Hence the early starts. Like Woody Allen’s Russian soldier in Love and Death, I don’t have a yellow stripe right down my back: it goes across.
********
I didn’t watch the so-called leaders’ debate on television this week because after all those 5.45 AM starts followed by a full day’s work I have better things to do with my evening than watching three identikit social liberals discussing the fine details of those rare variations in their plans to sacrifice the last surviving morsels of our self-government to the EU while ignoring the colossal and metastising public debt to which their ‘caring’ statist consensus has delivered the wealth creation that would have supported my daughter’s dreams and ambitions.
Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Number Three may still seem to some like the leaders of distinct political parties, but they are in fact little more than three children in an upstairs play room, squabbling over a few toys and some of Mummy’s old clothes while elsewhere in the house their parents are deciding whether to sell the house to those nice Chinese neighbours and rent it back, or to just ignore the final demands on all the bills and try to apply for another credit card to max out, whilst ignoring the large gangs of hooligans looking meaningfully in through the downstairs windows as they plan to share out the household goods between them.
The faithful family guard dog hasn’t been decently fed or had his health properly cared for in a long while either, and is running on his happy memories of the esteem in which his master and mistress formerly held him.
And so the BBC and other mainstream media and their pals big up Clone Number Three (banana-coloured tie) as the leader of the only Left-wing party that the non-Marxist middle class will trust for a generation, as if his plans to eventually end our nuclear deterrent just as Iran seems sure to get The Bomb were not worth mentioning.
They’re all alien invaders in our body politic, pretending to be British and pretending to be democrats.
Anyone still wonder why I want to raise a Harvey Smith to the whole rotten lot of them?
We won’t get an outright victory this time, but in a guerilla war when the Establishment doesn’t win, it loses. A hung parliament is a victory for none of the above, and thus it is that I’m willing to risk my first and second fingers as I push something shiny and purple through the various letterbox booby traps ( the guillotine, the lobster pot, the dog) of CastleCity.
********
Shameless UKIP Plug Number One.
Though I joined UKIP mostly to punish the Tories in the hope of a renewal and realignment of the non-totalitarian Right which this chap is sure that we need despite his disdain for UKIP, the party has some policies which I think might actually improve everyday life for most of us here in Britain.
Child Benefit, the Child Trust Fund, Child Tax Credits and the Education Maintenance Allowance should be merged into an enhanced Child Benefit payable for each of the first three children in each family.
Ending the socially corrosive and immoral practice of baby-breeding for benefits after the third child is just like a dream come true for me (except, of course, without all the lesbians.)
Devil's Kitchen points to an article that shows how New Zealand's politicians ignored the mantas of the statist Left and the Statist Right, and made the country fit for human beings again.
Which is so unlike what our own political class is even thinking of, or has even allowed itself to think of for years, as Dumb Jon points out with regard to our own 'Conservative' elite.
I suppose that the logic - if that’s not too strong a word - to David Cameron’s expulsion of all hitherto existing conservative principles from his election pledges and hints and retractions; his publicity, public speeches and no doubt his table talk, is that if he does so and squats on the middle ground ( “middle” here taking as meaning large State; large tax, anti-patriotic and abandoning any notion of free will and personal responsibility from all aspects of law-making, operating the courts and in welfare spending) is that if he doesn’t EXACTLY resemble yet another metrosexual economic dirigiste and a cultural and moral relativist who just loves to feminise or infantilise every aspect of British life he can get his legislative hands on (about 25% given the EU’s silent imperium): but one dressed in a nicer suit, he will be called horrible names such as, variously:
racist, skinflint, advocate of child labour, militarist, Little Englander, fascist, grinder of the face of the poor, capitalist running-dog lackey, homophobic, sexist, anti-intellectual….
Hey, some of that looks a lot of fun…
Terrible electoral result are supposed to follow as the good people of Britain rise up in their deeply held and universally shard hatred of racists, skinflints, advocates of child labour, militarists, Little Englanders, etc, etc, ad nauseam world without end, Amen. So you fake it till you make it, and then fake it some more.
It’s a long shot professor, but just might work.
Let’s see how well it does work, shall we children?
So Britain’s military reputation lies in tatters; tatters camouflaged by our economic prostration and our social and moral decline, and still somehow the party of the nation-state; of defence; of economic competence; of traditional values and a coherent society manages to raise its head above Labour as of 26 February 2010 by a massively respectable 2 percentage points which, I’m sure the BBC’s psephologists will be quick to point, is within the usual margin of error.
In response, Cameron goes full retard here in The Telegraph:
Every day that goes by I feel I have what it takes to turn this country around and get it moving again. And that is what we badly need to do.
And here he is using hyperbole 8 million times more powerful than the hyperbole used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Mr Cameron disclosed yesterday that the Conservative manifesto would be the most family-friendly ever and said that voters would know before the election what tax breaks he would offer married couples.
Though if you’re hoping that ‘family friendly’ here means building several new jails and filling them with classroom-disrupting hooligans and persistent child molesters, wife beaters and daughter sellers, sister-stranglers and those whose criminal lifestyles have raped any chances of childhood away from large chunks of each generation since the 1970s, and also to abolish the Local Education Authorities and breaking the Marxists’ and the producer-groups’ stranglehold on education and educational training and recruitment by giving the bulk of the spending power to parents, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I visited my oldest friends at the weekend: lifelong Tory Party workers; former contributors, canvassers, fund-raisers and officials – folk who always laughed at my youthful libertarianism and boyish hopefulness in the power of freedom and market (almost) unaided to bring the good life to earth. We’re talking suburban driveways with neat, inexpensive cars here. We’re talking life insurance policies and families eating together and going to football together. We’re talking cats, and pictures of cats. And ornaments shaped like cats with pictures of cats painted on them. We’re talking hardcore Telegraph and Daily Mail suburban Tories, from generations of the same and with adult children of the same attitudes and instincts worried for their own kids’ futures. The base. The heart. Conservative England.
They’re voting UKIP. Cameron’s not fooled them one little bit – they are the real thing and he’s not.
If folk like these aren’t going along with it, then Cameron’s years-long project of ‘broadening the appeal’ of the Tory Party’s broad church so widely that it’s stretched into the shallowness of a shadow, have been wasted, and all the sacrifices of his hollowing-out of conservative policy, principle and good name have been for nothing.
So when the day comes and the parliament hangs or a tiny majority is achieved despite the economic and social Armageddon that Labour has inflicted, perhaps Cameron’s successor or the Tory spin doctors ought to learn to fear being called a different set of epithets:
The final nail in the coffin of the party of Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher.
Dumb Jon watches unamazed as the last "I" is dotted on the left-liberals' triumph over our parliamentary party system: they now have the full set.Short of actually declaring a republic or abolishing the Pound, it's difficult to see how the Tory Party could divorce itself further or more spectacularly from its supporters, its ancient principles and its long-standing dreams of ever halting or reversing the leftward stampede of Britain into collectivism, corruption, chaos - and the tyranny that will inevitably follow.
I have a piece of advice for those contemplating voting for Labour to punish the unbeliever who gave Alan Duncan his job and this opportunity to punish the law-abiding in perpetuity: please don't do it.
Much as it might seem right to let Cameron be replaced post haste after a small Labour victory (and if very small, just you watch how fast they'll go in for proportional representation and an end to any chance of inter-party competition, i.e. democracy), that wouldn't necessarily cure the Tory party of its left-liberal electoral fantasy. Indeed, a modest Labour majority might 'prove' to the EU-light bulbs on the new Tory Opposition benches and the metrocrats at HQ that the Conservatives had lost becasue they weren't nearly enough like Labour, and hence that they should be led by someone even better...Nobody was ever disappointed by underestimating the intelligence of the average Conservative MP or PPC, and that goes doubled squared for the hard-core Wets..
No, it should be UKIP; just to show to the apostates who now own that once great party what kind of issues and what kind of policies they have abandoned in favour of their new-fangled hope of an occasional seat of honour in the hot-tub with all the other big government, internationalist, high taxing and rule of law eroding socialists and liberals.If they are too stupid or inward-looking to offer us an alternative, then we have to show them what they failed to offer the country and make it good and plain that it wasn't yet more liberalism.
Usually, I’m a huge fan of the Taxpayers’ Alliance: they are doing the job of public finance sanity and fiscal prudence that used to be at the economic heart of the Tory Party. Whether the Conservatives were truly as penny-wise as they made themselves out to be, they had a reputation for it and whenever Britain was in the financial mire (such as after any Liberal government or Liberal-led mishmash, or any Labour administration or any exhausting war against some European evil or other) the Conservatives and their predecessors were the go-to guys for financial salvation. Then came John Major.
Today, not so much.
But the TPA has been swimming and continues to swim upstream against New Labour’s torrent of public-sector expenditure madness; whether its revenues are raised directly from the citizenry by taxation or indirectly extorted from us via sucking up the real wealth in ‘borrowing’ from the lenders whom it has corrupted and in deliberate inflation. It’s in there nationally and on a daily basis calling the quarters against the State’s zombie armies of spend n’ spend world destroyers. They really are well organised and doing a great job
So it’s disappointing that when it comes to football, some of it staunchest supporters turn out to be Generation Game give away the towels and the set of wine glasses and a portable TV as the rest of us Fallen Ones.
News broke this week that Northern Rock, which is of course owned by taxpayers, has spent £10 million sponsoring Newcastle United. It's absurd that a bank who needed our cash to keep its head above water is now using that money to sponsor sports teams.
Even TPA Campaign Director Mark Wallace - who is a Newcastle fan - criticised the move in this week's press, saying: "A bank that needed to be bailed out by taxpayers should be focusing on repaying that money. Even if they want to spend £10million on advertising, there are much better targeted ways to do that which could reap bigger rewards."
But of the commentators who say they favour the TPA’s approach, two out of three draw the line the wrong side of prudence with footie.
Hmmm, I'm not sure about this, even as a staunch supporter of the TPA. Fundamentally, football is still an area where the citizens of Great Britain continue to waste their dwindling resources. I for one, simply via their association with a resurgent football team, might assume that the fortunes of Northern Rock had changed likewise, and I think that this is probably the subconscious impact they are aiming for, in turn sparking a quite possible upsurge in confidence and investment. Sorry.
And
I am a big big fan of TPA and read their website daily.
However, all businesses need to advertise/promote themselves and although Northern Rock has been bailed out by the Taxpayer, as a business person, I believe that they must advertise/promote themselves to gain new customers and ultimately pays us back. Whether or not the sponsorship deal is good value for money, I don't know.
This is the first time I have had to disagree with TPA. I hope TPA keep up the good work.
Are we all socialists now?
Maybe these commentators have a point, but still and all thinking that Northern Rock is a business in the usual sense is a bit…poetic? The swine who ran it led Britain down Gordon Brown’s primrose path of destruction and now we’re supposed to accept the same cosy local profits for local pols and local ‘businessmen’ at national expense deal less than two years on from mortgage Armageddon. ‘Small’ sums are involved, if you are of the class of people who thing of millions of pounds as small, but even so, TPA fans, don’t they know the power of symbolism?
One of them does:
... I don't want NUFC to be the subject of this sort of back-door pseudo nationalisation. The biggest problem the North East has is our crushing addiction to public spending; its destroyed our formerly great culture of private entrepreneurship and has locked us into long-term relative poverty (see the way relative GVA has "grown" in the region over the last decade). Every penny of additional public investment is therefore bad for US, let alone what it means for taxpayers as a whole.
Every man has his price, and I work in the bloated benefits bureaucracy and so I’m very familiar with hunting with the hounds and running with the fox so these TPA weak sisters don’t exactly surprise me, but any movement or party such as our nation must soon find or perish needs its members to be plentiful and varied in their interests and expertise in order to overcome the many kinds of obstacles that good governance meets – and especially when some aspects of the political life of that nation seem irredeemable even by the brightest and keenest of its specialists.
You need national security campaigners; and those eager to see the upholding (or even the establishment of the Queen’s Peace); and educational reactionaries; and defenders of the national church and religious freedom; and public employment reducers; and those who will go to hell and back to support the family; and people who don’t believe that (however many) million pounds of our money being spent on supporting a football team could be a good thing.
Worse even than his abasement before the European imperial project and the family-hating Left-wing political class is David Cameron’s ceaseless work to make the Tory Party a place that is neither a broad church nor a deep one where many voices and much wisdom will prevail.
On Wednesday I ranted thoughtfully about James Cameron’s film Avatar, with its blue-skinned primitives living in trees in a world bereft of manufacturing industry on any level above the bead necklace and spear trades that are so vital for Britain’s economic recovery.
All of which is, I believe, not entirely unthinkable to our very own Cameron here at the Hometree itself.
This is from our next Prime Minister:
With our energy supplies increasingly sourced overseas, and with urgent action needed to combat climate change, it’s time to rethink the way we supply and consume energy in Britain. We urgently need to move to a low carbon economy in order to strengthen our economy, help guarantee our energy security and protect our environment for future generations.
So that’s goodbye to oil, coal, and gas for the United Kingdom.
(Or Gorastan as it will be called if Mister Cameron’s social liberalism continues to meet his foreign policy based on ‘conflict resolution’ and snuggling up to the Gulf, North Africa and Latin America. “Say, you Jewish chaps, what’s the big beef with your Muslim neighbours anyway? Can’t we all sit down with a glass of Chablis and some dim sum and sort it all out?” Or, “Hola, Comrade Chavez!”)
I know.
We’ll use all those other Green-approved energy technologies to power our homes, cars and workplaces instead. I don’t mean anything clinically insane like nuclear power but - you know - technology that really works, like waterwheels, windmills and anything we might discover while using our Metalunan interocitors.
And
Quality of life and environmental issues must be at the heart of politics – which is why we have pledged to improve Britain's environment by working towards zero waste, providing incentives to recycle, encouraging sustainable water management, and taking action to help our wildlife.
Britain is struggling to cope with mountains of waste. We will introduce a new approach, one which minimises waste and promotes recycling. A Conservative government will introduce a Responsibility Deal on waste – a voluntary arrangement among producers to cut back on the production of waste and improve its disposal. We will put a floor under landfill tax until 2020 to give businesses long term certainty to invest in new forms of waste disposal and we will encourage councils to adopt a scheme which gives incentives to families that recycle.
Aside from the implicitly totalitarian idea that someone in a suit in London can decide for me what my quality of life should be and that he can deliver it via the organs of government (however voluntaty), I’d have thought that The Queen’s Peace, The Rule of Law, The British Constitution should be at the heart of politics for a conservative or, for our friends across the Pond: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Or for their northern neighbours and our dear cousins: La Vie, La Hockey, and la pursuit of government finance for unwatchable films that Jim Carrey wouldn’t be seen dead in.
Hereafter, our few remaining manufacturers and our many, many food-delivering and mortgage-denying service industries will be invited to voluntarily make their lives more difficult and/or their products more expensive for their customers at a time of - and I don’t want to go beyond the pale here and say anything unmannerly about the Labour Party – national financial fragility. But that’s what this far-sighted goose-chase after ‘voluntary’ regulation means because by implication what they’re saying is: Nice little business you’ve got here, squire. Wouldn’t want anything statutory to happen to it, Guv, now would we?
Presumably all that photocopying paper for the umpty-hundred-thousand Diversity Coordinators the Tories won’t be making redundant and the cardboard files that no-one reads because the social workers (whom the Tories won’t be asking to distinguish between respectable churchgoers and drug-addicted perpetual benefit claimants) never let anyone else look at will be made from recycled McDonalds wrappers and delivered to City Hall and County Hall by Clydesdale-pulled carts in future? Save us from the killer egg cartons it will, young Skywalker.
Good thinking, that man. That should save a few billion pounds and make some lumberjacks unemployed.
Or, for the truly serious-minded, how about this for The Countryside?
They need a government that works with them, not against them. So we will…: Press for reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy which reflect the importance we attach to the environment, the long-term sustainability of UK farming and the relief of global poverty;
Because pressing for CAP reform has always worked well so far, hasn’t it?
I love ze smell of camion-loads of breetish lamb in ze matin – it smells communitaire.
Cute., fluffy and non-confrontational positive Europeans such as Camerons’s Tory party will be able to make friends on the Continent and persuade the French, German and Irish farmers to cut their own subsidy-stream with every bit as much success as the apologetic and conciliatory Obama has had in persuading the Iranian government and the Russians to slow down their arms races against the West.
And this:
Our agenda for Rural Action will:
Respect rural people by giving rural communities a voice to decide their own future and only seek to regulate where self-regulation fails;
I for one just can’t wait to see how rural communities will be regulated, if not by law and custom, I mean.
Give power to rural communities, by shifting power and decision-making to communities, so that people have a genuine say over the matters that affect them locally;
If this is intended to be a boost for the power of parish councils, then I’m for it.
I’ve long been in favour of allowing the parishes to operate their own internal security, to enforce by-laws and customs using methods up to and including whipping-posts and the pillory, and to conduct low-intensity conventional warfare against their County Council, but I fear that this is not the case.
Given Cameron’s conciliation of left-wing ideas and his habit of parachuting former (i.e. recent) Labour and Liberal Democrat activists into the Conservative Party, and bearing in mind how almost all local government is mismanaged these days, I’d say that matters that affect them locally are likely to be local squabbles about who gets the fine money extracted from householders who mix rubbish types together instead of strictly segregating them.
Our country is billions of pounds in the red with its unfunded State retirement and its public sector employee pensions, and its private finance debts as well as the official public, personal and institutional debt alike. I’m all for the little platoons and all that, but doesn’t he know there’s a world war on? This is just all so glib and unserious, combining the utterly trivial with sweeping promises that UK government has no longer power to enforce thanks to our surrender to ‘our partners.’
So it’s back to the temperate coniferous forests and mixed and broadleaf woodlands for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and southern Scotland and to the Boreal Forest for the far north, and those peaceful and strangely rare blue-skinned natives skipping from tree to tree forage for nuts, roots and berries are, I think, intended to be the Conservative Britons of the Third Millennium.
