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:
Tory Politico publishes a word cloud for David Cameron's conference speech here.
It's inconceivable that any mainstream conservative politician of the Thatcher/Reagan generation would make a major portfolio policy speech without mentioning a certain abstract noun which is one of several necessary conditions for civilised life.
Just try your browser's 'find' facility and search Mister Cameron's speech for the tiny little word that no longer fits into the Tory leader's speechifying to his party faithful.
(Hint, it's the particular virtue of civil society that put Spitfires into the air and sometimes led them to the bottom of the Channel in the 1940s, along with numerous other non-risk-assessed, non-focus group recommended activities for large numbers of young people in various generations over the centuries.)
Well, I guess that just about wraps it up for the Conservative Party for a while.
Paper Tories from the sky
Spineless men who cringe and lie:
Men who mean not what they say
Hollow men of the Blue Beret.
Pale blue rosettes on their chest,
These are men, the EU’s best.
One hundred men will drink today,
But only three on the chardonnay.
Changed to live in Labour’s land:
Run from combat, hand-to-hand.
Men who chat by night and day'
Double-talk from the Blue Berets
Pale blue ties upon their chest
If these are men, they’re PR’s best.
One hundred men will trough today
All but three eat the canapé.
Back at home a young wife waits
Her Tommy brave has met his fate.
He has died for those oppressed
Leaving her his last request:
Who will help the small platoons
Whose pay was swapped for silver spoons?
There'll be a man we’ll raise one day.
He’ll need more balls than a Blue Beret.
I don’t know whether I’ve mellowed out or merely been exhausted by chronicling events in Britain’s first online Right-wing culture festival, but when I went to My Doubts and took the Political Spectrum Quiz I was shocked.
Shocked.
I scored okay on Foreign policy – well into neo-con range - and that was fine.
But on social conservatism, I scored pretty damn low.
I was hardly above the cultural liberal/conservative line at all.
What’s the point I wonder in making a personal ideological odyssey from privatize-the-lot natural rights libertarian anarcho-capitalist and trying to justify all kinds of erosions of traditional morality and the British way of life and upturning the constitution and then changing into a to fire-breathing upholder of traditional social structures and (somewhat modified) common decency …if it looks like now I could get along fine with the editor of The Economist or George ‘Two Brains’ Osborne?
This is terrible. I mean, I know it’s supposed to have been weighted according to nationality so that English conservatives would be to the left of American conservatives, and perhaps Scottish conservatives to the left of us, and French conservatives just a frog’s whisker and two showers a year from being indistinguishable from French communists, but this is ridiculous.
There I was happily turning into the kind of lardy middle-aged grouch that I despised in my idealist Objectivist-Rothbardite could-have-been-outthought-by-yeast youth; going with the flow, girding up my loins against hyper individualism and growing a pair of scrutons, getting some Burke in, with smatterings of the Good Doctor and, damn it, it turns out that I’m a wet.
So, even nationally-weighted for UK scores by your actual Americans I’m still a pinko-Comsymp faggot on social conservatism.
I wonder if that’s because I answered, for example, questions about sexual morality as very important (and they are as any taxpayer who is bringing up children’s kids for someone elsewill tell you : let alone an inner-city rape victim from two to ninety), but left it as "neutral" in the "how much does this matter" axis – mainly because either I didn’t think that an objective can be achieved at all or that it should be left until the longer term.
So maybe the quiz would have rated me higher on this one if I’d implied I’d agitate for banning or more strictly controlling abortion…when I put a higher priority right now on getting the economy sorted out before we all have to support ourselves by foraging for nuts roots and berries: or reverting to cannibalism.
Granted, the American Right starts from a higher place than we do and they tend to have more can-do that we UK gloomycons have (but remember what happens when it mutates into yes we can), and proper conservatives conserve what they already have available and the Cousins have a lot more liberty, for example, to protect - like these chaps bearing arms in the Presence of The First Emperor whilst protesting against the planned nationalization of the human bodies in the Body Politic.
Cool. At least we’re not quite so pussy-whipped about race as they are. Yet. Nobody even seems to have thought of warning me about the N word here, for example.
Or maybe it’s just a meaningless quiz that gives off inaccurate, quite untrue and downright insulting results like that lousy survey I did from Playboy once.
However, I’m not prepared to risk seeing myself as a slack-jawed limp-dick caponservative so I needto dry myself out a bit and thank goodness, I can always go over here to find something to confirm my every curtain-twitching bourgeois suburban instincts – and I don’t even have to bear arms to do it. Even if I wanted to.
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.
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.
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.
