No Action Offered

‘No action offered on migration’ says the BBC News website headline – a phrase derived from a Conservative party press release by the Shadow Immigration Minister, Dominic Grieve.

This comes after Labour’s Immigration Minister, Phil Woolas had been forced to partially backtrack on comments he’d made in an interview with the Times about reducing the number of immigrants entering Britain.

In a post-Times interview, Phil Woolas told the BBC’s One Show:

I think, frankly, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about the cap…

The European Union population can come and go just as we from Britain go and live in Spain, perhaps, or France - so, too, can others come to our country.

So it’s very difficult to see, even if we are in favour of a cap, what it should be.

And here, for once, we have the truth from a Government Minister – well, almost. Phil Woolas is indeed right that there is ‘a lot of nonsense talked about the cap’. It is nonsense because, as even the dim-witted journalists at the BBC have finally grasped:

Immigration from inside the EU cannot be controlled, and neither can a limit be placed on genuine claims for asylum.

We cannot control immigration whatsoever within the European Union as our old friend EU Commission Directive 2004/38/EC put pay to that. However, in his interview with the One Show, Phil Woolas fails to actually mention the elephant in the room (ie. the role of the European Union). To mention the EU directly in British Westminster politics is just not the done thing.

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Quote Of The Month

The insults have been flying thick and fast on ConservativeHome in the past few days since its editor Tim Montgomerie attempted to take a recent Peter Hitchens Mail on Sunday column, which attacked the Conservative party, to task.

Well, unsurprisingly Tim’s efforts at actually rebutting Peter’s article were somewhat poor to say the least. Again unsurprisingly Mr Hitchens took the opportunity to reply to Tim’s criticisms – and he did so in stunning fashion.

It is worth reading both pieces and the comments in the section below each one. Take note of the fact that those that disagree with Peter generally do not argue against his points but just personally attack him and then dismiss him. Very telling I think.

Anyway, here is my favourite comment from Hitchens’ reply. It’s perhaps just as good as his previous statement that ‘you can’t be in Europe and not run by Europe any more than you can be in Wormwood Scrubs and not run by Wormwood Scrubs’:

In my view, 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. I don’t think there’s any serious dispute about which side of this fence Mr Cameron is on.

If Tim at ConservativeHome started to regularly post more critical articles (which ConHome’s sycophantic pages currently lack,) in a similar thoughtful vein to Peter’s piece then I might actually be tempted to started visiting and commenting on the site again. Just imagine it – reasoned, reasonable discussion rather than mindless wittering and blind allegiance.

A Lack Of Opposition

On Friday I posted an article entitled The Continuation of Failure in which I argued that the Conservative party was no longer a true opposition to our current Labour administration due to a complete lack of differentiating policies.

Now, if both Labour and the Conservative party support our membership of the European Union (which they both very much do) then they also by extension support the 70% to 80% of new laws, regulations and bureaucratic dictates that are issued by our real government presiding in Brussels.

Labour and the Conservatives can claim that they disagree with individual directives and EU legislation, but at the end of the day they have to accept it (and willingly do so) because that is how the EU works. You cannot pick and chose which policies and laws you adhere to; it’s all in or stay out. There is no in between.

Thus, given that neither Labour nor the Conservatives are prepared to advocated a policy of EU withdrawal, this already indicates a clear majority of agreement between the two parties – and that is without even taking into account their similarity on the national domestic issues over which our Westminster administration still has some miniscule level of control.

On domestic issues David Cameron has said he might give Parliament a ‘free vote’ on the repeal of the Hunting Act 2005 or ‘let sunshine win the day’ (whatever that might mean), but has pledged nothing meaningfully or substantially different to what our Labour administration are currently undertaking.

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Rat Flees Sinking Ship

The BBC are reporting that Ruth Kelly is to stand down as MP for Bolton West and will not be seeking re-election. Ms Kelly is claiming that she made the decision because she wants to spend more time with her family and children.

Could it be that the old left-wing fanatic is afraid of losing her seat at the next election, which she currently holds with only a slim majority of around two thousand votes?

Whatever the true reason for her departure, good riddance I say. Unfortunately however, the damage she helped cause in her time as Education Secretary under Tony Blair’s premiership will not be undone by her political demise.

Ruth Kelly, like so many of her Ministerial predecessors across the decades, presided over the imposition of increasingly pitiful state education on the poorest in Britain while, as emerged earlier this year, allowing her own children to escape the system by sending them to good public schools. Of course, afraid of the public backlash that her hypocrisy would have sparked, she desperately attempted to suppress the truth before the story broke.

Unsurprisingly, Ms Kelly’s arrogant and hypocritical stance is not unique within the Labour party. Diane Abbott famously described her own decision to send her child to a public school despite being against them and for the hopeless state educational system in this country as, ‘indefensible’.