A Tory-UKIP Pact Would be Bad for Britain
In many ways the most damaging and destructive strain in British politics is the one that thinks UKIP is just a crisis for the Tory Party. The idea is that some sort of deal between the two organisations will solve the Tory difficulty – and that this is somehow the beneficial and desirable result for which all should hope.
But why? This quarrel is not about the Tory Party, it is about the country, its independence, laws and liberty. Why would anyone sacrifice the country to save the Tory Party? It would be like sacrificing the ship to save the figurehead.
UKIP is not the reason for the Tory Party’s unending, unstoppable decline. Indeed, the only reason that decline has not been far greater is that the Tory party has long been on life support. This has come from billionaire donors , the state and (since the Tory party became explicitly Blairite under David Cameron) the BBC.
The crisis of the Tory Party long predated UKIP’s rise. No serious opinion poll has predicted a Tory Party general election win for two decades. The Tory Party struggles to get much above 24% of the national vote (though this tends to inflated into 36% in headline figures, by leaving out all the ‘don’t knows’, ‘won’t says’ and ‘won’t votes’ who together now form the biggest single political grouping in the country).
In regional terms, the Tories remain pitufully weak in the North of England, Scotland and Wales. In organisational terms, it barely exists in most of the country. The party’s real membership figures are a secret, with good reason. British Leyland in the days of the Austin Allegro was a more viable prospect than the Tory Party is now.
The Tory Party, as I correctly stated for years before 2010, never had a chance of winning that year’s election. It has even less hope of winning in 2015. This is not because of UKIP.
UKIP has come into being as a result of the Tory decline. It is not the cause of it.
The Tory decline is the result of two things: much of the Tory vote has either passed away, or finally, after enduring years of insults and contempt, realized that the Tory high command hates its members and voters, and simply uses them to obtain office for its own cynical and unconservative purposes.
In fact, such a UKIP-Tory deal would be deeply dishonest, and its only aim would be the destruction of UKIP and the crushing of the conservative revolt against the liberal Tory monolith. It is only being talked about now because the Tory party’s original more honest strategy, of abuse and smears against a declared enemy, hasn’t worked.
You might call it ‘The Hannan Delusion’, since the Euro-MP Daniel Hannan likes to voice the idea.
I have never been an admirer of Mr Hannan, and my regard for this Euro-MP has grown less over the years. The more he parades himself as an intellectual, the less he seems to be thinking.
Take this article in today’s Daily Mail:
The utter wrongness of it is set out very early on:
Mr Hannan laments :‘But the real sadness is that there should be two such parties in Britain, their rivalry retarding their shared objectives.’
Whatever *is* he talking about? The two parties do *not* share objectives. They are rivals because they differ utterly on the right future for the country. A coalition between them would be an abomination, like those science fiction creatures in the horror movies, with the head of a bluebottle and the body of a man.
UKIP exists precisely because the Tory Party has become, in recent years, a socially liberal, globalist, pro-immigration egalitarian party, committed to permanent British membership of the EU.
This is not because the Tory leadership believe in any of these things. It is because they believe in nothing, and so readily absorb the spirit of the age. It rushes into the vacuum in their heads and hearts.
The Tory decision to deal with Blairism by embracing it left no sentient being in any doubt that the Tory Party is simply an alternative New Labour formation.
The substantial number of people who do not share these Blairite objectives have either abstained from voting for the Tories, or, in increasing numbers, have switched their vote to UKIP. They have not, in many cases, done this as a ‘protest’. They have enough experience of the Tories to know that this is futile.
The Tory party does not change in response to protest. It pretends to change.
The best they can hope for are some more attempts to smear the same old lipstick on the same old pig – vague, distant , worthless pledges to do something or other at some point years hence, while doing the precise opposite now.
Many former Tories have grasped (as so many journalists have been incredibly slow to do) that Mr Cameron’s protestations of ‘Euroscepticism’ (whatever that is) are utterly insincere and cosmetic. They have grasped that a jam-tomorrow referendum is not a commitment, but a manoeuvre.
In fact, it may be worse than that. The referendum almost certainly will never take place. But if it does, in the hands of the Tories, it is a danger, not an opportunity.
A referendum on EU membership, in which all the forces of the establishment will fight and lie for a vote to stay in, could close the debate on the subject for 30 years, much as the 1975 vote did.
Before Harold Wilson seized on the idea of a plebiscite, to save his own bacon, most serious experts viewed such votes as violations of the British constitution, in which Parliament is sovereign. I still do.
In any case, what use would a vote to leave the EU be, if the Parliamentary elite still wanted to stay, and there was no Commons majority in favour of leaving?
Westminster’s power to delay and frustrate is enormous, especially if the executive and the civil service are involved. The act of leaving the EU is legally simple. But it would be politically and diplomatically complicated, and we could easily end up officially ‘out’ but actually ‘in’ for all practical purposes.
The only way to leave is for a party committed to leaving to secure a parliamentary majority for that policy, having openly campaigned for it. The Tory Party cannot possibly be that party.
Since it lost the Empire and bankrupted the country in 1939, and then made things even worse at Suez in 1956, the Tory Party has been almost obsessively searching for ways of exaggerating Britain’s power and influence – when a far better policy would have been to accept that we were not what we had been, and work instead on being a successful and prosperous medium-sized independent nation.
Mr Hannan persists: ‘The values of Ukip and the Tories are not so very different: patriotism, freedom, family, enterprise, dislike of the European Court of Human Rights, support for our Armed Services, resentment of the power-crazed EU.’
Let me take these one by one. Firstly, see the bait and switch here? ‘Values’ are not ‘Policies’. ‘Values’ are vague feelings embraced in public by politicians trying to suck up to voters. Specific policies, which you intend to implement in office, are quite different. ‘Values’ are as unlike ‘Policies’ as lottery prize promises are unlike written contracts.
Patriotism as bombast is worthless. Patriotism as policy involves such things as the protection of our distinct legal system, the very thing the Tory party is now actively trying to hand over to the EU, when it doesn’t actually need to.
Freedom depends very heavily upon that legal system. I do not think the present-day Tory Party has much to say about ‘freedom’. How long (now we are at permanent war with ISIS) before we face a new bout of ‘anti-terror’ laws, the usual excuse to undermine habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence, to menace freedom of speech and freedom of movement?
The Tory party has been complicit in the 50-year assault on the family - easy divorce, huge powers for social workers, destruction of the authority of parents, pressure on women to go out to work. Enterprise? I’ll leave it to others to say what they think of the Tory Party’s attitude towards this. All I know is that I’d be terrified of starting a small business in the midst of the current maze of regulation, legal liability and taxation.
As for the ECHR, the question is not whether you ‘dislike’ it but whether you accept or reject the doctrine of ‘Human Rights’ which underpins it, and whether you are prepared to liberate the laws of these islands from this wholly alien and harmful influence.
Westminster politicians love being able to use the ECHR as cover – claiming it has ‘forced’ them to do things they secretly want to do. It has no such power, unless they give that power to it. The Tories have had years to come up with proposals to lift the Human Rights burden. They never emerge, but noisy speeches are made when elections are in the offing. Does Mr Hannan, who is undoubtedly intelligent in a general way, really not grasp what this is about?
As for ‘support for our armed services’, this is actually quite a funny way of describing the most devastating cuts in Britain’s armed forces in the modern era. And ‘resentment of the power-crazed EU’ is just blowhard posturing, like the ludicrous campaign against Jean-Claude Juncker a few months ago. It may even be that the Tories do ‘resent’ the EU (though in practice they seem to get along quite well with its laws and institutions) . But they don’t resent it enough to want to do the only thing that would reduce its influence – leave it.
In any case Mr Hannan is bright enough to know that ‘resentment’ is not equivalent to a policy of withdrawal. That’s why he uses the word ‘resentment’. He knows that if he said ‘opposition’, people would spot his bait-and-switch.
What he seeks to do is to give the impression that Tory posturing and bluster, designed to make it look as if the Tories hold certain positions when they don't really, is equivalent to real UKIP policies, which actually express and aim to fulfil those positions in practice.
As for the fact that a lot of Tory supporters favour a trade-only relationship with the EU, that’s just a measure of how deluded Tory supporters are. The Tory high command, who are totally immune from the wishes of their members and supporters, are wholly committed to continuing EU membership and integration. There is no mechanism in the Conservative Party constitution, by which members or supporters can influence the policy of the party leadership. None. This is why the Tory leadership loathes the Tory membership. The puzzle is why the members don’t give the loathing back with interest. But party loyalty is the secret weapon of the anti-British elite.
Then look at Mr Hannan’s next piece of sleight of hand. He warns that if Ed Miliband come to office he will ‘cancel’ the ‘referendum on EU membership for which Conservative MPs have voted’.
No he won’t.
There is nothing to cancel. The referendum would only take place if the Tories won the next election, which they were never going to do. How on earth are they supposed to win in 2015 if they couldn’t win in 2010? What opinion polls have ever shown them in a position to win? Does Mr Cameron either want or intend to fulfil this airy, distant promise? What do you think? What does Mr Hannan think, honestly? If he’s as bright as everyone claims, how come he is fooled by this transparent dodge?
The most recent poll I’ve seen, done by COMRES for the Independent on Sunday and published yesterday(28th September) shows Labour at 35%, the Tories at 29% and UKIP at 19% (Lib Dems are 7% and ‘others’ at 10%) - and the fieldwork for that must have been done *before* the events of the weekend.
If you look at many poll reports in the pro-establishment papers, they give figures for the popularity of the leaders, but bury or omit the actual voting intention numbers, which are the only ones that matter, and which tend to show Labour in the lead despiet the incessant belittling of Ed Miliband. This is because the media classes are once more trying to help their friends, the Blairite Tories, by pretending that they are the winning party, in the hope that the appearance of success will bring in more votes.
The fact is, even if you can tell the political difference between Mr Miliband and Mr Cameron, and care which of them is Prime Minister (which I can’t and I don’t), you are quite free to vote UKIP, or abstain. It will make no difference.
Labour will be the largest single party after May next year and might just score a small majority. Anyway, who cares much? Name one significant practical difference between New Labour and the Blairite Tories except (as I never tire of pointing out) that New Labour would never have dared smash up the armed forces as badly as David Cameron has done. Mr Hannan claims that under a Labour government ‘We’ll have more EU integration’ – Oh, you mean, like handing back home affairs powers to Brussels which we could have kept? . Oh, sorry, the Tories are doing that.
And then he prates of ‘a reversal of the education and welfare reforms’ – The education reforms are backed by many Blairites, flatly refuse to address the key question of selection by ability, and entrench the system of selection by money and cunning which has cursed British state education for 40 years. And who will miss the ‘welfare reforms’ - cumbersome , apparently unworkable and in some cases unfair and stupid, totally ignoring the real need to rebuild the married family?
As for ‘higher taxes, higher borrowing, higher immigration, higher unemployment’, isn’t that precisely what the Tories have been doing? The 40% tax rate now reaches into the lives of modest earners. Unemployment is concealed by legions of ‘self-employed ‘ people who aren’t actually working much, borrowing rises every minute of the day thanks to George Osborne’s continuing profligacy.
And immigration – thanks to Mr Cameron’s Libyan adventure, combined with our total loss of control over our EU borders – is about to surge to unprecedented levels.
But it is possible that we might still be able to deliver a death-blow to the Tory party itself, the greatest existing obstacle to the development of a genuinely pro-British political formation, because it is incapable either of standing up for the country, or of winning a majority. And so we would do the country some long-term good.
Finally there’s this outstandingly mistaken passage: ‘From a Conservative point of view, a Ukip MP is surely preferable to a Labour one.’
I should have thought the Tory high command would much prefer to see a Labour MP to a UKIP one. UKIP, for all its faults, is a genuine subversive threat to the pro-EU, pro-immigration, pro-crime, anti-education, anti-marriage three-party consensus which has spent the past half-century messing up the country. Labour is part of that consensus, as are the Tories, and as Mr Hannan is for as long as he remains part of the Tory machine.
