Offering False Hope

In recent weeks there has been an increasingly notable and concerted effort by the Conservatives to present their party as ‘eurosceptic’ and conservative when of course it actually isn’t.

At the beginning of the month it was conveniently revealed, on the wink and the nod, that Mr Steve Hilton, the Director of Strategy in Downing Street, and Oliver Letwin MP were privately in favour of EU withdrawal. Yet, as I noted in the case of John Redwood, until individuals make their alleged privately held views public, such speculation is not worth a cursory glance.

This morning it was the turn of the Daily Mail to play willing fool as it dutifully repeated a leak claiming Steve Hilton had suggested:

…the Government should abolish maternity leave and scrap all consumer rights laws to help kick start the economy. [He] also suggested that the Prime Minister should abolish all job centres and ignore all European labour rules.

This afternoon we had Tim Montgomerie recounting the thoughts of the great sage and former MP, Paul Goodman who once described Steve Hilton as ‘Edmund Burke beamed into contemporary San Francisco’. It must be that Mr Goodman was referring to another Edmund Burke, rather than the Whig MP who proved so prophetic in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, because as far as I can determine then there is little in the way of similarity between him and Hilton. To compare the two as equal is to do the memory of the father of conservatism a great dishonour.

If, as David Breaker recently wrote, Steve Hilton is ‘a traditionalist in disguise,’ then I’ll be the first to say that it is an incredibly good one. Hilton had me completely fooled. I, along with many others, honestly thought that he was just another liberal social democrat purporting to be a ‘conservative’. How silly of me.

I recant. Now I see Mr Hilton’s vision of the ‘Big Society’, his pursuit of an ethnicity-based candidate selection process for the Tories, and push to waste more money on the NHS as intrinsically conservative in nature. Truly he is the heir to Edmund Burke!

On a slightly more serious note, all these faux leaks tend to have one real aim, which is to deceive conservative-inclined members of the electorate into voting for the Conservative party. Once again, as Helen Szamuely highlighted, there is a common theme in all this:

…the presentation of the Conservative Party as the one and only truly eurosceptic political organization in this country, for which all ‘true’ eurosceptics should vote.

Much is suggested, without any supporting evidence, that a Conservative Government shod of its Lib Dim partners would be more conservative in its policies and approach. Yet, it is a false hope. A majority Conservative administration would differ little in its policies from the Coalition or indeed New Labour.

With ‘traditionalists’ like David Cameron and Steve Hilton at the helm, who move so freely between the metropolitan classes and the liberal elite, then the Conservative party are run by a group where conservativism is viewed as repellent and the leftist creeds of climate change, equality and diversity are worshiped. This is why Cameron and Hilton are as they are, and shall remain forever so.

At The Heart Of Almost Everything

This morning The Daily Telegraph reported that Britain’s last train making company, Bombardier had announced plans to make 1,400 jobs cuts.

The decision to shed these workers was made after the Government awarded a lucrative contract to German company, Siemens, for the construction of 1,200 new carriages for the £6bn upgrade to the Thameslink route.

The Railway’s Minister, Theresa Villiers, said the bid by Siemens, which will build the new carriages in Germany, represented the “best value for money for taxpayers” and stressed that the contract would create up to 2,000 new British jobs.

This is particularly interesting in light of the comments Ms Villiers made when in opposition during the previous Parliament. Well, I say ‘opposition’, but then there never was very much actual opposing of the Brown Government’s policies by the Conservatives. Indeed, sometimes I wonder whether we even had a change of Government at all. Most of the guff the Government spouts these days could just as easily have been announced by a Labour Minister.

Richard North drills home the duplicity of Government Ministers who say one thing in ‘opposition’ and another in Government:

How very different this was two years ago when our Theresa was outraged by the government’s decision to award a £7.5 billion contract to replace ageing high-speed trains on the Great Western and East Coast main lines.

Bombardier also lost out on that one, that time to a consortium led by the Japanese firm Hitachi, called Agility Trains, which included John Laing and Barclays Bank.

Then as now, the government said the contract would “create and safeguard” UK jobs, claiming 12,500 would benefit. But the then Shadow Transport Minister, who just happened to be Theresa Villiers, dismissed this as “typical spin” from the Government.

“This announcement raises further questions about Gordon Brown’s claims about British jobs for British workers. Geoff Hoon needs to stop the spin and tell the UK’s hard pressed train manufacturing industry the real truth about his decision on replacing intercity trains,” she stormed.

Then, however, the fair Villiers did not have to confront the “real truth” – the realities of the EU’s procurement directives, which prevent British firms being favoured, even if it is more economic in the longer term.

Gosh, now that was a surprise, wasn’t it? As we’ve learnt by now, at the heart of almost every political problem in this country lies the European Union. Such is the degree to which our sovereignty has been diminished that our own Government is incapable of deciding which companies may be awarded state contracts.

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Pure Fantasy

In recent weeks the Daily Express among others has speculated that Government ministers are becoming ‘more eurosceptic’ and now want the UK to quit the EU. So, what do we make of such announcements?

In light of the recent media speculation, John Gill on the Freedom Association’s website asks whether the Conservative party have rediscovered euroscepticism? He says:

The Daily Express refers to these revelations as a ‘surge in anti-Brussels feeling within the Government’; and, whilst I have my reservations as to how accurate these reports are, it is encouraging nonetheless that even arch Cameroons, such as Letwin and Hilton, are beginning to see just how damaging an institution the EU is.

Whilst I won’t hold my breath that this will happen any time soon, I am confident that sooner, rather than later, the Tories will have to rediscover euroscepticism to stand any chance of keeping up with public opinion.

While John says he won’t hold his breath at this happening, even to believe that it could happen is of course wishful thinking. In fact it is so wishful as to be almost pure fantasy, since you cannot rediscover something if you had never discovered it in the first place – the Tories never having been a ‘eurosceptic’ or anti-EU party.

Eurosceptic as a definition is pretty much meaningless these days, which could best be summed up as ‘supports the EU but pretends not to’. We’ve had three decades to gaze upon the workings of the European Union and to understand it for what it really is. This is very much a black and white issue. You either do not agree with the European Project and wish to leave it, or you support it and wish to remain within it. There is no in-between, wishy-washy, middle ground. The EU cannot be reformed or changing from within, in part because there is no overall will to do so from the majority of pro-EU member states and even if there were then no mechanisms to bring about such ‘reform’ exist. Therefore ‘euroscepticism’ is a ploy to dupe the gullible into voting for so called ‘eurosceptics’ who are politicians who support the EU because they do not wish to leave.

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Cracks Appear In The Facade

There was an extraordinary intervention by Lord Tebbit in the Daily Mail on Monday, repeated again by the Peer on Tuesday on the BBC’s Today programme and then later that day in a televised interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson.

Lord Tebbit called for the electorate to withdraw their votes from the three main political parties at the European elections in June in order to send a message to those parties that their votes should not be taken for granted. He wrote:

Local elections, the great British public should treat just as normal but at the European elections, in my judgment they should send a very sharp message to the leaders of the three national parties by not voting for any of the national party candidates.

He went on to add in later interviews that the electorate should steer clear of voting for the socialist and racialist BNP, but other than that he did not mind who people voted for (or not at all), just that they didn’t vote Lib Dem, Labour or Conservative.

Even less than a decade ago this story would have caused a media storm. There would have been multiple front page news headlines detailing ‘furious’ Conservative splits over ‘Europe’ and the culturally leftist BBC would have had a field day.

Things though have since moved on. The Conservatives are still irrevocably split over the European Union, but the official media and political narrative has changed. Today’s official line is David Cameron good; Gordon Brown bad. In order to facilitate a change of Government, or rather Westminster administration, the media, having failed to make David Cameron popular, are now trying the other option which is to make Gordon Brown unpopular.

Therefore, any stories that might portray Cameron in a negative light are now willingly suppressed by the media. How else could one account for the complete lack of coverage over Lord Tebbit’s intervention, especially by the BBC, and the establishment papers of the Times and the Guardian?

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