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?

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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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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.

A Political Sham

It’s all gone a bit quiet on the MPs’ expenses front at the moment with the majority of the media and political class still predictably continuing to occupy themselves with what has now rather amusingly been dubbed by the newspapers as ‘smeargate’.

While both scandals undoubtedly serve to remind us and the electorate of how out of touch the political class are with the rest of the country – both morally and politically – this cannot, I think, necessarily be seen as entirely desirable.

In the few years leading up to the 1997 General Election, the Conservative Government of John Major was engulfed in scandal after scandal involving the sleazy activities of Tory backbenchers and Ministers. The bedroom antics and financial misdoings of MPs whom nobody had heard of previously were suddenly splashed all over the front pages of the daily newspapers.

It would be fair to say that all Governments who have been in office for any considerable length of time are susceptible to these scandals. This does not, of course, make it right that they should have been carried out by the individuals in question, but simply to say that such human and political failings will almost certainly happen under any Government of any party given enough time.

As it happens, the supposedly ‘whiter than white’ Labour party that followed the Conservative implosion and electoral landslide of 1997 was swiftly involved in its own set of financial and sexual scandals, with Robin Cook choosing to sack his wife at the airport after a phone call with Blair and later marrying his mistress, while Peter Mandelson was caught up in the Hinduja passport row.

Yet, with a change of Government, very little by comparison was made of these similar scandals in the mainstream media, and sleaze suddenly became politically unimportant again (to most journalists at least). This therefore suggests that sleaze only seems to matter when a Government is perceived to be doing a bad job. This was the case in the mid-nineties under John Major and is equally so now under the tenure of Gordon Brown.

However, more importantly, the cry of sleaze levelled at individual MPs and Governments can be used by the media as a means by which to allow the political opposition into office without ever having subjected them to reasoned or thorough scrutiny of policy.

In short it is an unreasoned, mindless frenzy. It happened in 1997 with very little public scrutiny of Labour’s policies under the leadership of Tony Blair, and it appears that something similar is happening again with the Labour Government and our Tory opposition under David Cameron. The effect will be that ‘real’ political issues will not be discussed (or often even aired) and that as a consequence no honest political choice will be given to the electorate – they will simply be voting on personalities.