We Seem To Have Been Here Before
During the afternoon on Sunday, Tim Montgomerie extolled the supposed virtues of voting for the Conservatives in the local and European elections in less than a month, on the 4th of June.
He disagreed with Lord Tebbit, Peter Hitchens and that anarchical prat, Paul Staines who called for the electorate to ditch their support for the main political parties as a means of registering their disgust and disapproval over MPs handling of our country and parliamentary expenses.
Conversely, Tim claimed that a large victory for the Conservative Party would accelerate momentum towards the end of the Blair and Brown years. He also commented that Cameron had acted decisively and with resolution over the MPs expenses scandal, and that the formation of a new Conservative-led coalition in the European Parliament would act as a serious opposition.
The other few reasons he gave amounted to little more than a ‘vote for us because the rest are worse’ – and there really is little merit in that line of persuasion. In fact, let us be honest, there really was little in the way of merit in any of his arguments at all.
For example, how exactly will a large vote for the Conservative Party at the European and local elections hasten the end of the Brown and Blair years? Since David Cameron, the self-proclaimed ‘Heir to Blair’, and the Conservative Party are pursuing policies that are virtually identical to that of New Labour, how is voting Conservative meant to be end the Brown and Blair years when politically they seek to continue them in terms of policy?
Furthermore, how exactly did David Cameron act with ‘resolution’ over MPs expenses? Like so many other MPs he too was caught with his hand in the jar, and he had never seriously complained about the purposefully deceptive system of expenses before.
Did Mr Cameron actually sack anyone that mattered or was not in a minor role? No. He simply asked Conservative MPs (and himself) to pay back the money they had immorally taken. This ‘pay it back and we’ll all just forget about it’ attitude is not what I would call ‘acting with resolution’ at all, despite what the media may say.
Finally, you cannot create any real opposition to the European project in the EU Parliament. It is the EU Commission that acts as the Executive and produces legislation. The Executive are not drawn from Parliament and therefore the EU Parliament cannot repeal EU laws or create them – only agree or disagree.
Thus MEPs and parties cannot fulfil their manifesto commitments because they do not have power or authority to execute their mandate. Therefore, having more Conservative MEPs in the EU Parliament arguing for ‘a freer and more decentralised Europe’ will not make the blindest bit of difference to the make-up of the EU. You cannot initiate real change from within the Parliament.
The Conservatives as a whole are not particularly interested in the issue of European Union any more. David Cameron has used the European elections campaign as a platform for national issues including calling for an immediate General Election and his attempted cover up of the MPs expenses scandal, rather than to discuss the Lisbon Treaty or loss of sovereignty to the EU. As Lord Tebbit suggests, do they really deserve our vote?
