This fracture is of David Cameron’s making
So whatever happened to the Conservative Party’s willingness to debate and tolerate differences of opinion? At first sign of trouble it vanishes. The fall-out from the signing of the Lisbon Treaty has Tim Montgomerie planning to “take a vow of silence on Europe” and Iain Dale brands dissenters as “self-indulgent”.
Rather coincidentally, WSJ blogger Iain Martin says Cameron’s message to MPs can be summarised as: “Shut up. The Conservative Party is as little as 16 weeks away from power. Don’t cock it up.” — of the few to have the courage of his convictions, Daniel Hannan MEP has resigned.
But the real question is: why did this split take so long to come up at all? Did the Tories really think Cameron would have withdrawn entirely from the Lisbon Treaty or from the EU? The new EU policy is a joke for precisely that reason: there has never been a coherent plan hatched by Cameron to deal with Europe. All they did was try to ride the populist tabloid outrage at Euro-myths.
Sunder Katwala on Next Left points out that in many ways the Euro-sceptics never understood Cameron’s instincts. Now they’re finding out why the schism was inevitable.
But it took so long because the media gave Cameron a free ride. No one properly questioned went through the scenarios and seriously asked what Cameron would do if the Lisbon Treaty was ratified or wasn’t. And now when the question is forced, Cameron is in trouble. Now, even his allies admit the trumped-up Sovereignty Bill will be “meaningless”.
The right-wing French government is calling Cameron’s moves “pathetic”. That about sums it up.
A Whiff of the Branding Iron
Perhaps the most perceptive commentary I’ve ever read on the subject of public school education came not from an educationalist or politician but from what I suppose could be called a ’socialite’. She said, in an otherwise typically fatuous interview, that the problem she had with public schoolboys was that their education gave them such a ‘gloss’ on their character that it could take ten years to realise just how stupendously thick they really were.
I’ve had my suspicions about the Tory’s Shadow Justice Minister, Dominic Grieve, for some time. Since, in fact, the publication in the Telegraph of a commentary on the always fractious subject of crime statistics in which he claimed that:
The BCS is a poor measure of violent crime. It does not count homicides, rapes and multiple assaults and excludes some of the most vulnerable victims of violence, including the homeless, elderly people in care homes, students in digs and until this year children.
Much of what he had to say is, of course, untrue.
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Why are these EU-haters so silent?
In 2007 around 47 Conservative MPs, including prominent ones such as Iain Duncan Smith and Douglas Carswell, signed an EDM calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty even if it was ratified.
And now? What will they do? Why are they so silent?
Yesterday Daniel Hannan MEP wrote:
I’ve argued many times that the case for a British referendum shouldn’t be dependent on what happens in other countries. The case for a British referendum is simply that all three parties promised one and that, in any case, no one under the age of 52 has had the opportunity to vote on the EU. Alright, a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty might no longer be the most logical option: it’s hardly for us to tell the Belgians or the Slovenes what institutions they should work under. But a referendum on European integration – ideally on the broad repatriation of powers – is essential.
What a climb-down. Regardless, I can’t wait to see how David Cameron is going to square this circle.
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Will Tories delay Human Rights Act repeal?
The Conservatives may not complete the repeal of the Human Rights Act and the introduction of a new British Bill of Rights in their first term in office if they were elected to government. And it is also becoming increasingly difficult to work out what substantive difference the policy would be intended to make.
“I would like to think we could do it in the course of a parliament”, shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve tells Joshua Rosenberg in an interview for his Standpoint magazine column.
Perhaps the more important part of the policy is that Britain will not pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights – so British citizens will keep the right to appeal to Strasbourg. (Tory Eurosceptics like to grumble about this, but in doing so they are usually appealing to the public’s inability to tell the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union apart).
More broadly, he makes it perfectly clear that Britain will not pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. We will not be able to send people to countries where they will be tortured, he promises. Whatever else happens, individuals alleging breaches of their human rights will still be able to take the British government to the European Court in Strasbourg
And so the new “British Bill of Rights” will seek to protect the convention’s rights British law, to prevent British citizens having to go to Strasbourg to protect those rights. Rather as the Human Rights Act has sought to do, it seems to me.
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The real questions we should ask Mr Hague over Europe
LibCon reported that Labour MP Denis MacShane sent an email to journalists attacking William Hague, following the latter’s claims in the Mail on Sunday that David Miliband and Labour “spend their time trying to orchestrate a ruthless smear campaign against the Conservative Party’s allies in the European Parliament.”
Now, MacShane’s attacks on the Tories’ European alliance have not, in my view, been at all effective, and the emailed list of questions is also fundamentally wrong-headed. The questions are intemperate, and each take a ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ type format, for instance:
4. Does he [Hague] support kaminski’s homophobic language?
6. Will hague be joining his new friends in Latvia when they commemorate the Waffen SS?
10. Does he agree with the Economist that he has created a “shoddy, shameful alliance” with Kaminski and Vile?
This type of non-serious questioning is counter-productive: it only aids the Tory counter-claim that Kaminski and others are the victims of a baseless smear campaign. If interest in the details of the Conservatives’ Euro alliance dies a premature death, or the public and media swing decisively behind the Tories’ narrative, it will be because of misjudged attacks like this.
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Be scared, be very scared
The busier you are, the faster time passes. So right now it feels to me like we’re hurtling towards the day David Cameron will be in Number 10. And i’m increasingly scared.
I’m scared because of the Conservative’s rhetoric on economic policy. Tory grassroots have already launched an attack on the Financial Times (that renowned bastion of worker solidarity) for allegedly being biased against Cameron and Osborne.
But it’s not just the FT that’s sounding alarm bells about Conservative economic rhetoric.
Think tank Centre:Forum last week released a report on Tory economic proposals. Despite having many political differences with CF, over the past few months I’ve come to respect their economic output – and in particular, their chief economist Giles Wilkes – a great deal.
I’ve not had time to read the “Slash and Growth?” report yet, but I have read part of the conclusion posted on Free Thinking Economist:
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ConHome threatens civil war with Cameron over EU
In anticipation of David Cameron’s u-turn on Lisbon, Tim Montgomerie has mounted what could charitably be described as a face-saving operation at ConHome, while trying to extract his own pound of flesh for the support.
He says:
Unless Vaclav Klaus u-turns again, the Lisbon Treaty is about to be ratified. The Conservative leadership will say that, if elected, there’ll be no attempt to ‘unratify’ it via a referendum. Lisbon is not the only problem in our relationship with the EU, goes the argument, and it would be a referendum that cannot undo Lisbon. I’m 99% certain of this position having worked the phones over the last 24 hours.
So far so unexpected. In fact Peter Oborne earlier predicted this with an article in the Observer: ‘Cameron has only himself to blame for this mess on Europe‘.
Tim Montgomerie then proceeds to counter expected criticisms with headers such as:
‘DAVID CAMERON PROMISED A REFERENDUM ON AN ‘UNRATIFIED’ LISBON TREATY, NOTHING ELSE’
and
‘DAVID CAMERON DESERVES THE CONTINUING SUPPORT OF EUROSCEPTICS’
and
‘THE NEXT CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT WILL SEEK A ‘MANIFESTO MANDATE’ FOR RENEGOTIATION’.
Again, so far so unexpected.
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MacShane attacks William Hague with 10 questions
Yesterday Labour MP Denis MacShane sent an email to various hacks attacking Conservative MP William Hague and accused him of “laying down a smokescreen” over Tory allies in Europe.
He followed up with ten questions for William Hague and the Conservative Party over Europe. Having seen a copy of the email, we publish it here in full.
* * * * * * *
Subject: 10 Questions for Hague after his hysterical Mail on Sunday outburst
William Hague’s hysterical attack on David Miliband in the Mail on Sunday is a response to the damning criticism in the current Economist of the “shoddy, shameful alliance” the Comservatives have forged with the right of the right in east Europe
Hague also is laying down a smokescreen for reneging on Cameron’s referendum promise on the Lisbon Treaty. At a stroke the UKIP vote will surge as the Tories betray their referendum pledge. Hence all the Hague ranting on EU top jobs and now this attack on Miliband to divert attention from cameron’s failure to delay Lisbon and now the withdrawal of the plebiscite promise.
I have been watching Foreign secretaries and their shadows for 15 years. None has been so over-cited and demagogic as Hague. I wonder if Cameron dare keep him as For Second if Tories win?
But Hague’s over-excited argument still does not answer the following questions:
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Conservative Party in deep trouble over Europe
This morning Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, appeared on the Today programme in an effort to salvage the reputation of Michal Kaminski – the leader of their European grouping. Predictably, this is being spun as final proof their man is innocent, and trying to shut down the difficult questions about his past.
Toby Helm’s stark assessment this morning that the Conservative Party is now completely isolated and pushed into the fringe in Europe is worth reading:
The Tories’ old allies in the European People’s party and Party of European Socialists held meetings before the summit to decide their positions on the jobs, their strategy, views, approaches. Had the Tories been in the EPP, they as the likely UK government in waiting could have influenced those talks, or at least put their oar in and rubbed shoulders with Merkel and Sarkozy, making their presence felt.
But the Tories’ new grouping, which Kami?ski leads, had no meeting at all. They did not get round to organising one, their spokesman told me. Well, there we are then. They were nowhere. Absent. Out of it.
But one suspects this is unlikely to be that troubling to some Tories, who have always seen themselves as outsiders in Europe. They’ll huff and puff but are happy to pretend they don’t care for what’s going on in Europe.
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The Kaminski questions Cameron didn’t answer
David Cameron yesterday said of the man the Conservatives have chosen to lead their new European grouping, Michal Kaminski:
“I see this as a totally politically-driven campaign and particular nonsense.
“In terms of Michal Kaminski, who I have met, he is not a homophobe, he’s not a racist, he’s not an anti-semite. When he came to the Conservative conference the one event I know of he had lunch with the Israeli ambassador.
But there remain many serious and contested questions about Kaminski.
Does David Cameron think Michal Kaminski told the truth about his political history when questioned about it before and after becoming leader of the ECR? If not, why not?
Following our earlier post, here is a recap on just some of the claims made since becoming leader of the ECR which have fallen apart.
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Trojan Horse of Tory localism: open letter to John Denham MP
Localism is such a hard thing to argue against. Either you’re genuinely in favour of devolving power and resources, or you can’t really say you’re not.
That’s why the Tories are using it as cover for their plans to introduce, ‘within weeks of coming to power’, says Cameron, sweeping legislation that will allow councils to sweep away a raft of commitments to their residents, and start to compete gleefully with each other for which one can deliver the LEAST services.
I’ve been banging on about this for a bit. Fortunately, John Denham MP has heard my faint call, and we may still be saved.
In that spirit, I have written to John, and this is what I’ve said.
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So how did Nadine Dorries MP get selected?
You’ve got to feel a little sorry for Tory MP Nadine Dorries at times.
Not only does she seem rather confused by this whole business of the Tories mucking around with all-women shortlists, but the stress of it all seems to have brought on some differing views of the past.
Writing for ConservativeHome she said:
Three weeks before the 2005 general election I, a council estate Scouser, was selected as the Conservative candidate to represent a southern rural constituency. Because the vacancy occurred so quickly and so close to D-day, the party provided my association with a shortlist of seventeen candidates, of which, about five were women. Following a long day of interviews in hot sunny rooms, the list was whittled down to a shortlist of three.
The by-election procedure David Cameron spoke of yesterday existed then, however it was a little more generous to the association in terms of choice. At 9.10pm that evening, Sir Graham Bright invited me to walk back into a packed school hall where I had just delivered my final speech of the day. Met by a wall of applause and a standing ovation, with tears in my eyes, I was informed that I had been selected outright on the first ballot.
I have never, other than when looking into the eyes of my new born babies, felt as proud as I did on that night. That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high in this place. It’s what humbles me every morning when I walk into Members’ Lobby. It gives me confidence to take on my male colleagues with not just a little bottle, because I got here by exactly the same process that they did. They are no better than me and I no lesser than they.
That is also not quite the account that you come across when you consult independent sources.
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Whose Tory meritocracy is it anyway?
291 women and 4559 men have been elected to the House of Commons since women were enfranchised in 1918. So those shouting “not in my name” and “meritocracy” to argue against the possible means of all women shortlists do have a prima facie case to answer.
David Cameron’s claims that his party gets it enough to continue if he fell under a bus is rather challenged by the ferocity of the response from the Tory netroots. Aspiring candidate Iain Dale declares not in my name while the Isaby/Montgomerie co-premiership at ConservativeHome seems to think the sky might fall in. (Tory ppc Joanne Cash has offered a rare pro-leadership view).
By definition, meritocrats must share the goal of “fair chances and no unfair barriers”.
The simple question: what is the cause of the scale of under-representation? And what is the solution to deliver fair chances and equal representation?
2001 was the last General Election in which no party used an all women shortlist measure. How did we do on gender equity? Most noticed a small drop from 120 to 118 women in the Commons. The real story was missed. Just 9 out of 92 MPs elected in mainland Britain were women. Not quite 10%. The Conservative class of 2001 – 38 white men and 1 women (2.5%)- was well below the post-1918 historic Commons average.
So whose meritocracy is it anyway?
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Top 10 ways Cameron has made an arse of himself
Following my recently popular Top 10 Tory ‘out of touch’ gaffes, I thought I would follow it up with a focus on the golden boy David Cameron.
So here is an incomplete list:
10. Not knowing how many houses he’s got, only a while after John McCain made the same mistake.
9. Being photographed by Dave Osler.
8. Getting embroiled in a doctored photo fiasco in relation to some now embarrassing pictures of him being an arrogant-looking git at university.
7. Pretending he’s all green on his bike, when it’s total bollox.
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Why is Camera-off backing off from TV debates?
After the initial hype around TV debates, it looks like David Camer-on is getting cold feet, even though he was earlier doing his best to goad Gordon Brown into a TV debate. On Saturday the Telegraph’s Melissa Kite reported that the Tory leader was morphing into Camera-off and had rejected the idea of TV debates:
Mr Cameron has proposed the most slimline option, involving one debate with all three leaders. But Mr Brown has told broadcasters he wants at least six. He and Mr Cameron would go head to head in one, Mr Brown would face Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, in another while Mr Cameron would face Mr Clegg in a third. Then there would be three more debates between Mr Brown and Mr Cameron focused on a different issue each time, such as the economy.
Presumably Mr Cameron only wanted one debate so he could illustrate his soundbite skills and escape without elaborating on silly things such as policy. Unsurprisingly the Tory blogs have been very silent on the issue.
The article added:
Mr Cameron believes that the Labour strategy is to have so many debates that the Tories will eventually unravel under the sheer volume of questions. Mr Brown is said to be particularly keen to put Mr Osborne under the spotlight because he is seen by Labour as the Tories’ “weakest link”.
For “sheer volume of questions”, read: ‘forcing them into concrete policy proposals’.
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Iain Dale’s selective denunciation of homophobia
Yesterday, via Twitter, Iain Dale joined the rest of the known universe in condemning Jan Moir – for instance, by RT-ing a post by Total Politics editor Shane Greer, calling the Mail writer a ‘bigot of the worst kind.’ This follows a recent episode in which Dale was also a victim of homophobia from the Mail.
Dale rightly complained to the PCC on that occasion, and I later followed his appeal for others to add their voices, by complaining to Paul Dacre and the writer of the offending column, Peter McKay (it hardly needs saying that, to date, I have had no reply).
But whilst Dale is happy to condemn a newspaper that has a history of targeting him personally, he singularly refuses to criticise anti-gay prejudice closer to home. Indeed, he has not merely failed to speak up against homophobia among Conservatives and their allies.
To take one example: as regular readers will know, recently I uncovered how Valdemar Tomasevski, a Lithuanian MEP who is part of the Tories’ coalition in the European Parliament, personally voted for a severely repressive and homophobic law that has been condemned by human rights watchdogs, including Amnesty.
Thanks to the considerable help of Sunny, that news spread fairly widely around the leftie blogosphere, was picked up by The Observer, and commented on by Lib Dem Shadow Foreign Secretary Ed Davey.
Yet Dale refused to be drawn on the subject, even when, on a visit to my blog, he was directly challenged to explain his inconsistent stance on homophobia by another commenter. Instead, he gave a brief, obscuscating answer, and disappeared.
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Introducing Another Anti-Science Tory
As was amply demonstrated during the debate on the abortion amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, the Conservative Party has more than its fair share of mouth-breathing morons festering away on its backbenches.
But for sheer unadulterated nuttery even Nadine Dorries struggles to live down to the standards of David Tredinnick, the Eton-educated Member of Parliament for Bosworth.
Thus far is his parliamentary career of 22 years, Tredinnick cuts a noteworthy figure only for having been suspended from the House of Commons for 20 days for accepting a payment of £1,000 in return for asking a question in the House of Commons about an entirely fictitious drug – (no, not Cake, unfortunately) – losing his position as a Parliamentary Private Secretary (unpaid bag carrier) in the process; and for having spent a little over £500 of taxpayers money on a piece of Astrology software, and associated training, which he claimed was to help with a parliamentary speech on alternative medicines.
Given that the only previous occasion on which Tredinnick waxed lyrical on the subject of astrology was in 2001, I must assume that the speech in question was the one he gave on Wednesday in the course of an adjournment debate, in which case, and speaking as a taxpayer, I’d very much like my fucking money back.
The Quackometer has already started to pick over some of Tredinnick’s more delusional, and wholly untruthful remarks, although for sheer entertainment value it would be remiss of me not to highlight one particularly spectacular piece of outright lunacy:
I could have referred to radionics, for example, for which a double-blind trial is almost impossible, yet it is very popular because people believe that it gives them the ability to get remote healing. We need to think out of the box here. As with healers who can do remote healing, it is no good people saying that just because we cannot prove something, it does not work. The anecdotal evidence that it does is enormous. I know that the Minister is a forward thinker, and I believe that the Department needs to be very open to the idea of energy transfers and the people who work in that sphere. Will she comment further on that?
Like many, if not most, advocates of woo, the idea that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, let alone evidence, is one that utterly fails to register with Tredinnick, as does the simple proposition that there is absolutely no plausible scientific mechanism within either biology or physics that could account for ‘radionics’ for the simple reason that what he’s actually talking about here is magic – plain old-fashioned pig ignorant witch-doctoring ju-ju.
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Fact-checking Michael Gove on Churchill
Further to my recent blog on Michael Gove and his education policies, there was one other part of Gove’s speech at party conference I found pretty irritating:
The body responsible for writing the curriculum – the QDCA – spends more than one hundred million pounds every year – and after hiring an army of consultants, squadrons of advisers and regiments of bureaucrats they still wrote a syllabus for the Second World War without any place for Winston Churchill.
I guess it’s always possible that he’s right. Maybe there’s some secret document doing the rounds, written by scores of ‘unaccountable quangocrats’ which does indeed remove Winston Churchill from the history curriculum. But it would have to be a secret document, because when you hop over to the QCDA’s website, you’ll actually find quite a few references to Britain’s Greatest Ever Tory.
He’s mentioned here, here and here, in these guidance notes for teachers and, rather inconveniently for Mr Gove, in this rather unwieldy PDF (p22):
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Top 10 Tory ‘out of touch’ gaffes
Because I love lists, here is my list of top 10 pieces of real documentary evidence that the Tory hierarchy by virtue of their privileged upbringing, are incapable of government which takes account of ‘real people’s’ experiences. The top 10 is limited to Tory parliamentarians or wanabee parliamentarians, as it would have to be a top 100 otherwise.
No. 10 Anthony Steen, soon to be ex-MP for Totnes, on his inordinate expense claims:
‘You know what it’s about? Jealousy. I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s the photographs that make it look like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant’s house from the 19th century.’
A fairly obvious one in for starters, only down at No.10 because he’s not going to be an MP.
How David Cameron will help Tracy Towerblocks
Could Polly Toynbee secretly be moonlighting as David Cameron’s speechwriter these days? Or maybe the Conservative Party leader had a quick butcher’s at the latest edition of Socialist Worker prior to mounting the podium in Manchester last week?
I only ask because, as a socialist, I hate having to agree with even one sentence any top Tory ever utters. It makes me feel … dirty, and not in a good way. Trouble is, it was hard to argue against some of the soundbites on offer on Thursday.
Excuse me? Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories … you, Labour: you’re the ones who did this to our society.
Well, up to a point. The Tories are no slouches themselves at making the poorest poorer and presiding over three million long dole queues. Anyone who was around the 1980s will recall that Thatcherism did not exactly work wonders for the UK Gini Coefficient. But yeah, Cameron has New Labour bang to rights. Cheeky little so and so.
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