Winners Or Losers?

Nadine Dorries MP has been right in the past to campaign for measures such as a reduction in the legal abortion limit and selective education.

For having the audacity to stand up for her beliefs and probably those of millions more then she has come under intense and personal criticism from the Left – and for this at least she deserves acknowledgement.

Yet, I do find her rather annoying. Despite her brave, if at times ignorant, stand on traditionalist issues such as abortion, at times she lacks a sense of credibility. Perhaps the attacks by the Left really are hitting home, or perhaps it is because when she gets things wrong it is arguably in spectacular fashion. Who knows?

On her blog last night, Ms Dorries did nothing at all to alleviate these concerns of mine. Quite openly she cited ‘rumours’ from a close yet unnamed source who suggested that the MPs expenses scandal may have been created and exploited by the apparently ‘fiercely eurosceptic’ Barclay Brothers, who have since 2004 been the multi-billionaire owners of the Telegraph newspaper group.

Nadine went on to declare that she agreed with her source who said the Barclay Brothers wish to destabilise Parliament and allow anti-EU parties to gain votes at the European elections because the Conservative Party are not ‘eurosceptic’ enough. Yet, if she really believed the Barclay Brothers were conspiring against MPs then she should have said so rather than using weasel words.

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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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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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