The Blame Game

Dennis MacShane launched a broadside attack on the Conservative Party a few days ago, blaming them for preparing the ground for the rise of the British National Party in the coming EU elections at the beginning of June.

At the moment it would appear that the BNP are on course to win as many as six seats in the EU Parliament, meaning that they will receive all manner of EU political funding, not to mention high salaries for its MEPs which they could divert towards supporting the BNP party machine.

On his blog, Tony Sharp summed up what is probably the general attitude of Conservative Party members in a posting in which he argued that it was ‘idiotic’ of MacShane in attempting to lay the blame of any increase in the BNP vote at the Conservatives’ door. However, I disagree with Tony. An increase in the BNP vote is as much the fault of the Conservatives as it is of the Labour Party.

Members of the electorate who are moving across from Labour (or the Conservatives) to vote BNP are not just interested in ‘big government and more state control’ as Tony says, but a whole host of other issues including crime, immigration, and the EU – none of which the main parties are speaking up about.

If the Conservatives were actually seen by the electorate to have coherent and plausible policies on immigration, crime and the EU (and others) then it is likely that they might gain from the Labour exodus of votes. However, the party does not have credible alternative policies and sections of the electorate have largely realised that in practical terms the two main parties are identical.

Therefore, to the electorate the Conservative Party and Labour represent two tarnished sides of the same dull coin. Neither party will speak out on the issues that are actually important to many people, thereby driving them into the arms of the BNP as a means by which the electorate will attempt to protest.

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Hiding From The Truth

Today brings yet more coverage of the ongoing struggle between Labour Party rebels and the Government over the partial privatisation of Royal Mail. Unsurprisingly most articles do not bring a single mention of the role of the European Union.

It never ceases to amaze me how newspapers and our media manage to ignore the elephant in the room on this issue which is, of course, EU regulatory and legislative influence.

Why, they wonder out loud in their inverted columns, are Gordon Brown and the Government so determined to privatise Royal Mail and risk unpopularity from their voters and backbench MPs? Many times has this important question been asked, but so very rarely has the real answer been revealed by our mainstream press.

As I had previously discussed here, here and here, the European Union’s Postal Service Directives are responsible for this latest bout of angst over privatisation. Many journalists and MPs know about these laws, but, because it is not part of their official narrative, they are publicly ignored, as if they did not even exist.

Desperately they struggle on, twisting and turning over the same old ground in a bitter attempt to come up with any reason, any excuse, anything about the privatisation of Royal Mail by the Labour Government, except to mention the EU dimension.

Yet, the power and influence of the EU can only be ignored for so long. I realise that there are many on the Left who have for some time seen it as an entirely favourable proposition to abolish Britain because it does not conform to their political vision.

Britain has retained its monarchy and yet is democratic, it was traditional and yet able to modernise, was capitalist but had a social conscience, and had a class system but did not present a bar to talent. According to the theories of the Left, Britain should not have existed, and so, slowly but surely, they have sought to make absolutely sure that it did not.

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Vote For Change

The BBC reports that David Cameron is calling on the electorate to vote Conservative in the local elections in June ‘for a change’ and to send a clear message to Brown that ‘enough is enough’.

But how exactly can you vote for a change when the alternative is virtually identical? What exactly are David Cameron and the Conservative Party going to do that is fundamentally different to the current Labour administration?

The BBC article suggests that Conservative run councils will ‘keep council tax down’. Yet, what is really mean by this is that taxes will rise by less than under the current administration. How very considerate, but what of all those millions of people who wish that their taxes would actually go down, rather than up?

At the weekend Neil Parish, likely to be the next Conservative MP for Tiverton and Honiton, told me that the Conservatives, when in Government, can’t lower taxes in the face of terrible economic conditions. But is it really that they can’t, or won’t – and is it any wonder when the Conservatives have now largely accepted the economic and high taxation arguments of the Left?

David Cameron also said that the Conservative Party believes in localism. So do I, but I know that such a view is incompatible with our membership of the EU. Will David Cameron admit that?

What’s more, when eighty per cent plus of our regulations and new laws are dictated to us by the European Union, without scrutiny from our Parliament, then the main political parties have even less reason to be radically different from one another on a whole range of issues over which we no longer have any control.

Yet, even if David Cameron and the Conservatives win the next UK General Election (which is still not anywhere near as certain as the media would have you believe) then we will, by and large, end up with exactly the same government we have already. The personalities will change, the policies will not.

Thirty Years On

It is now exactly thirty years to the day since Margaret Thatcher became the first female British Prime Minister after her Conservative Party swept to victory in the UK General Election of 1979.

During the past few days there has been much discussion of her legacy in the media and on the internet, with Boris Johnson in the Telegraph, the Conservative History website, and even the BBC getting in on the act.

However, with all the fawning praise and, conversely, criticism from the Left, very little in the way of analysis has been given to Thatcher’s Governments from a conservative perspective. How about the traditionally conservative argument that Thatcher’s governments did nothing to stop the social and cultural revolution that has been taking place in this country since the late 1950s?

Firstly, we have to establish the solid fact that Mrs Thatcher was certainly not a conservative – she was a liberal. Her free market ideology was influenced by the economist Milton Friedman and the author Friedrich Hayek, both of whom described themselves as liberals and explicitly said they were not conservatives.

Furthermore, conservatism has not traditionally supported the ideas of any particular type of economic system, free market or not. Traditional conservatism has sought to maintain social stability through maintenance and gradual progression, rather than rapid transition, of the current social order.

The market system which Thatcher imposed upon Britain radically altered our society in a very short period of time – some of the effects of which we are only just beginning to feel now. It was an economic revolution rather than a slow and gradual process.

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