The promise by the Conservatives is, however, not worth the manifesto paper it will likely be printed on. This is because it is practically impossible for any UK Government to abolish Home Information Packs because they have been inflicted upon us by our continued membership of the European Union.

One need only refer to Directive 2002/91/EC which explains the certification of homes and building energy efficiency levels. The Directive came into full force on the 4th of January 2003 when it was published in the Official Journal of the European Communities and all member states (including Britain) had to comply with the legislation by the 4th of January 2006.

The deadline of full compliance has of course long since past. We must, by European law (which now takes precedent), certificate all our buildings and homes regardless of whether we wish to or not – all in the name of tackling ‘Global Warming’. We cannot escape from doing so, and while the Conservatives may try to change the name of the Home Information packs to something else, the energy certification which is the essence of the packs must be retained.

While David Cameron would like to keep quiet about ‘Europe’ (by which presumably he means the EU), as Daniel Hannan noted yesterday:

Almost all the things that really annoy people come from Brussels – home information packs, fortnightly bin collections, metric measures, compulsory car seats, all stem from EU directives.

Thus, in most instances you cannot honestly discuss domestic issues in Britain without considering European Union legislation and regulation. This becomes more apparent to people by the day, but still Mr Cameron, the Conservative Party and much of the media refuse to acknowledge the giant EU elephant in the room.

I have also increasingly disliked the way in which ConservativeHome has become almost completely sycophantic towards the Conservative Party and its leadership, rather than remaining a home for conservative opinion that is independent of the political party as was originally the website’s core aim.

However, today Tim has made the right decision. He announced that he applied to join the Freedom Association’s Better Off Out campaign and stated unequivocally that he believes that Britain must leave the European Union. This is a view with which I fully and wholeheartedly agree – and which I’m glad Tim now shares.

Leaving the European Union is but a stepping stone towards the re-establishment of our national sovereignty, our Parliamentary democracy, and the implementation of the absolutely necessary conservative reforms that our society so desperately requires.

Yet, this is not the view of the Conservative Party, nor do I think it may ever be. The party has become too wrapped up with the desires of the liberal political class and national media, and far too interested in the pursuit of office for its own sake to take action over the detrimental nature and rule of ever closer union.

If Tim really believes that Britain should leave the European Union then he will eventually discover, as I have, that the Conservative Party is not the vehicle through which that will be achieved.

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?

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?

It is not as though Lord Tebbit is a minor party figure either. As a former Chairman of the Conservative party and self appointed keeper of the Thatcherite flame, his comments carry weight within many circles and thus there is even more reason, one would have thought, for a fuss to be made about his public dissent.

During a press conference, David Cameron was asked about the action he would take over Lord Tebbit’s intervention. He said:

As a former party chairman, he should know a thing or two about party discipline and he should probably know a thing or two about the rules about supporting other parties. He was treading a very careful path and I would warn him, if he slips off that path he’s sitting as an independent.

Yet, as Cameron and his Conservative leadership well know, the party need Lord Tebbit more than they are prepared to publicly admit. Their pursuit of office lies in the knowledge that their core conservative vote must come out at the election and send them into office. If the party were to publicly ditch Lord Tebbit then this may act as a sudden wakeup call to tribal Conservative voters that perhaps their party is not quite what it may seem.

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.

Britain is being dismantled before our very eyes, piece by piece. Centuries of tradition have and are being swept away to be replaced with bland conformism and blind allegiance to the benevolent new social and political order.

Yet, there are those within the Labour Party and the Left who still do not believe that capitulation to the anti-democratic European Union is right. These people must quickly learn that if they want to remain a member of the European Union then they will have to accept that their country will be run by the European Union to an ever increasing extent – with further privatisation down the road.

You cannot, as the Conservative Party pretends, find a solution between two such opposing ends of the spectrum. Either you pledge yourself to ‘ever closer union’ and privatisation, or leave.

Perhaps, for some of those on the Left, the privatisation of Royal Mail by their eurofanatical leaders will act as a wakeup call. The national institutions including the Postal Service that they cherish will be wiped away by Euro decree unless they make a stand.

But it cannot simply be a stand against their party’s leaders but a stand against our real Government in Brussels and for the rapid reimplementation of British Parliamentary sovereignty. Only then can we have an open and honest debate about privatisation. Only then will we be able to save our Postal Service.

In 1973, Milton Friedman wrote a column in the American magazine Newsweek entitled, Barking Cats, which attacked the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its bureaucratic control of pharmaceutical drugs, and acted as a follow-up to previous works that he had co-written with his wife calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.

In his column, Friedman addressed his critics who had argued that the FDA should not be abolished but that instead its powers should be changed in various different ways. Friedman wrote:

What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked’? Yet your statement that you favor an FDA provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify the behavior of governmental agencies once they are established. The way the FDA now behaves, and the adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its constitution in precisely the same way that a meow is related to the constitution of a cat.

In his memoirs fifteen years later, Milton Friedman remarked that the column was one of the best he’d ever authored, both in substance and form. Furthermore, such an argument directly relates to the proposed aims of Declan Ganley’s new trans-European political party, Libertas.

Ever since his involvement in the Irish No Vote to the Lisbon Treaty back in June last year, Mr Ganley has consistently stressed that he is in favour of the European Union – it’s just that he wants it to reform and become more democratic. Ganley said:

It sends a very clear message to those unelected elites and bureaucrats, who seek to daily interfere in our lives more closely, that this cannot go on without proper accountability. The EU needs to change. Libertas believes in a strong Europe but also believes unless democracy is at the heart of that we’ll never be able to deliver.

Yet, like a cat that cannot bark, the European Union cannot be democratic because that is not the way it was designed to be. At its heart the EU’s institutions were deliberately created with the intention of being able to make decisions without public approval.

Thus, the EU is democratically unreformable and as such you are left with only two choices: either remain in it and submit yourself to being undemocratically run by it, or leave and forge your own destiny. There is no in between.

Similarly, Gordon Brown said in a speech in Bristol yesterday that private investment in Royal Mail was imperative in being able to guarantee its £25bn pension fund and maintain a universal postal service.

The strength of feeling on this issue in the Labour party is clearly quite strong. I was in the Lords Gallery on Wednesday when the Labour peer Lord Clarke of Hampstead, who is a former postman, shouted ‘shame on you’ as Lord Mandelson brought the Bill to the House of Lords for a first reading. In the House of Commons well over one hundred Labour MPs have signed an early day motion criticising the Government’s plans to sell a stake in Royal Mail.

Furthermore, in opposition to Gordon Brown and Lord Mandelson, Billy Hayes, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union, told BBC News that the privatisation plan was ‘baffling’ and just didn’t make any sense. He also said to Sky News:

I don’t want to see Mrs Thatcher’s ideas, Conservative ideas, being introduced by a Labour government. Let’s be clear: 25%, 30%, Peter Mandelson has talked about 49% owned by a foreign company.

That’s not what people in the Labour Party want, that’s not what people in the country want – they want to see a modern Royal Mail.

Yet, despite so much anger and bitter opposition from many of their key supporters, the Labour Government has ploughed on regardless with the privatisation of Royal Mail.

There has been much discussion in the media and in political circles about why Mr Brown and Lord Mandelson would risk the ire of the Unions and a backbench rebellion when the Labour party is in a weak position in the opinion polls. Unsurprisingly most of this speculation has been far wide of the mark.

The answer is actually quite obvious to anyone who looks further than the end of their own nose – an act which our perennially blind media and political class seem incapable of doing.

The fact of the matter is that Gordon Brown and his Labour administration have no real choice in the matter. They must privatise Royal Mail, not because of pension problems or the need for increased investment in the universal postal service, but because they are required by force of law to obey the European Union’s 3rd Postal Services Directive.

As I previously highlighted, the European Union’s 3rd Postal Service Directive 2008/6/EC clearly states that our Postal Service must be privatised, saying:

Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive by 31 December 2010 at the latest. They shall forthwith inform the Commission thereof.

So, if the likes of those such as CWU Union leader, Billy Hayes, are confused as to why Labour are pushing ahead with Royal Mail privatisation in the face of adversity, then they now should have their answer. It’s an undemocratic decision with which the Unions will have to live – as unfortunately will we all.

Tim Montgomerie, in a piece entitled ‘Ken Clarke: Tories will get more pro-European in office’, has highlighted a few interesting comments made by Mr Clarke at a recent conference:

I think the need to be working with Obama will influence my party on Europe. It is still firmly Eurosceptic but it’s now moderate, harmless Eurosceptism. It’s a bit silly sometimes, like which group do you join in the European parliament, but full-blooded stuff like renegotiating the treaty of accession is as dead as a dodo. We’ve got lots of ideas on European policy on energy, security, relations with Russia, climate change, all that kind of thing [but] somebody like me is far more relaxed about all that [and if the Tories] get into office the pressure of the American alliance will make them more European.

Now, let us be reminded of what Mr Peter Hitchens perceptively observed about euroscepticism:

The word ‘Eurosceptic’ means ‘a person who adopts anti-EU rhetoric in opposition, and then surrenders to the EU in government’. This is inevitable. You cannot be in the EU and not run by it, any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. If you don’t like being run by it, you must leave, as all serious students of the subject long ago realised.

Ken Clarke and Peter Hitchens will be proven right, in time. I also suppose this just confirms what I was saying yesterday really, doesn’t it?