Disunited Unity
With the Conservative Conference in Blackpool now at an end and the ever fickle opinion polls claiming that the party is on a level footing with Labour, David Cameron knows that he really has to capitalise on this short-term boost.
As we know, unless the Conservative party does exceptionally well in all its target seat marginals, or is around 4-6% ahead of Labour at the time of a general election (based upon a uniform national swing) Labour will most likely still form another lacklustre Government.
Despite this, a number of interesting and perhaps slightly unexpected proposals did actually come out of Blackpool this week. For instance, William Hague announced that a Conservative Government would introduce legislation meaning that any future powers transferred to the EU (of which there are a lot already) would require a referendum.
This proposal would be very welcome news if the Conservative party did not still cling on to its ‘In Europe, not run by Europe’ mantra – thus meaning that the party is at heart still in favour of increasing EU integration, though just at a slightly slower rate (if even that).
The attendance at this year’s Blackpool Conference was massively down on last year, and most likely that reflected the general attitude towards the current direction the party is taking. Members like myself, compared with last year, stayed away in their droves either because it was too expensive to attend or were too fed up with all that the party and David Cameron have recently been doing.
Some people say that British political parties are broad churches of opinion – that they have to be so to work and survive under our electoral system. I suppose I used to mistakenly believe that once upon a time. However, events in the past two years have let me to re-evaluate. It’s difficult to see how people of such different opinions, as there are within the Conservative party, can co-exist together for so long. Perhaps they will not for much longer.
Speculation over an early General Election has been exploited by the party hierarchy to help superficially unite the Parliamentary party at the conference in the face of their Labour opposition and the media. However, if we are honest, that vision of unity and agreement collectively presented to the public does not in reality really exist.
