Forgotten Henley

With the Irish Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and now the saga of the Zimbabwean Presidential elections riding high on the news agenda, the by-election in Henley today has largely been forgotten by the national media.

In part this is because the result is practically a foregone conclusion. The Conservatives have held the seat since 1910 and at the last General Election, Boris Johnson held a comfortable majority of over twelve thousand.

While William Hague has been doing the rounds on the television networks saying that the Conservatives will take no vote for granted, Henley is still very much considered a Conservative safe seat by all parties and the majority of political activists.

With Labour out of the running and the Lib Dims highly unlikely to spring a surprise, the only thing left to watch for will be the turnout of Conservatives. If the Conservative vote in Henley drops badly as it did in Bromley then this will only go to prove correct the old mantra that it is Governments that lose elections rather than oppositions which win them.

Why, you may ask? Well, when I have been out canvassing in constituencies across the South West, the people I have met will say that they hate Labour and the Government and really want a change so they will vote Conservative next time around.

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Against Not For

There is a bar which serves food at my University. It has always been pretty dire in my opinion, so I know that if I go in with very low hopes then I will not be disappointed and in fact might even occasionally be very surprised.

The same goes for yesterday’s by-election in Crewe and Nantwich. I did not go to bed last night with expectations of the Conservatives winning yet they have managed it with a pretty comfortable majority – for now at least.

I am really somewhat surprised by this result. Although I correctly predicted the Labour vote and most of the independent runners and riders, I was wrong in judging the strength (or rather lack) of the Liberal Democrats and the surge in the Conservative vote which increased well beyond their General Election share. Considering that in all previous by-elections the Conservative vote had fallen below General Election levels then Crewe and Nantwich was certainly somewhat of a turnaround.

Still, it is plain that this by-election was more about what Mr Brown and his Labour party had done to annoy sections of the electorate rather than what the Conservatives were proposing. Let us be quite clear, this was a vote against the Government not a vote for the Conservatives. Likewise, one by-election has not changed the British political landscape overnight. Labour still form our British administration and the unelected bureaucrats and politicians in Brussels still control our true Government and to an ever greater extent regulate our lives.

Yet, Crewe and Nantwich may foreshadow events to come. When I go out canvassing in various constituencies across the South West there is certainly a discernible mood in the air that desires a change of Government – but it is at the moment unfocused and somewhat hesitant. People dislike the Government but they do not quite yet want to vote for the Conservatives.

As I said before, the Conservatives need to come up with a number of policies that crucially differentiate them from New Labour. What’s more, whether in opposition or in Government, we need to massively roll back or leave the European Union – otherwise the next General Election will simply provide a change of faces at the top without any change of policy or direction.

We Have No Control Over Immigration

David Cameron has been talking about immigration quite a lot recently. He says he believes, as do I, that Britain should be accepting far less migrants than it already does.

However, one of the problems with the current debate over immigration is that the Government has absolutely no idea how many migrants are actually entering Britain each year. Similarly the Conservatives don’t have a clue either. Therefore both sides have to rely and argue over completely unreliable estimates.

Furthermore, this past week the Government has already had to readjust those unreliable estimates several times, now claiming that maybe as many as one and a half million immigrants (including British citizens born overseas) have entered this country in the past decade. I suspect in fact it is even more.

So, why is this? How can the Government have almost no accurate record of the number of people entering this country, and why does it refuse so blatantly to admit the reasons why this is the case?

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The Educational Social Experiment

The BBC reported a little while back that, according to an annual report from Ofsted, ‘the social divide in schools in England shows little sign of closing’.

You may have thought that our educational system was meant to be a place for actually educating children; instilling in them fact and intellectual rigour rather than a method of profound and radical social engineering.

Well, if you thought that modern schooling was about learning and teaching then sadly you’re mistaken. Successive British Governments have slowly shaped the educational establishment around the equality agenda and the desire to force everyone down one set path.

In real terms this has meant the gradual decline of standards over the past few decades. This has been exemplified by changes in the examination system, with exams having been purposefully made easier to such an extent that seemingly nobody can actually fail one. Furthermore, through the destruction of Grammar schools and the selective system, the brightest and best children have been thoroughly failed by being held back to further the creation of a more ‘equal’ generation of children.

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