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A Foreign Land

I don’t know what to think, reading the Telegraph I began to think that perhaps I was reading the Guardian by mistake. Matthew d’Ancona wrote a piece “Mr Howard is teaching the Tory party to hate losing” which seem to me to be full of weird phrases that had no relevance and certainly no authority.

The fact that the results of the poll are bad for the conservatives is beyond doubt, but the journalistic spin on what they should do about it is not making any sense to me. Matthew d’Ancona wrote

“There are two possible Tory responses to today’s poll: the first is for Mr Howard to ditch the dignified strategy he unveiled last week and scramble for whatever votes he can with whatever populist gimmicks he can dream up between now and polling day. The second is for him to stick with a sound plan, and, in the words of one shadow cabinet member, “bore ourselves stupid between now and the election” by repeating the message of the conference again and again and again.”

“However depressed party strategists are today as they digest ICM’s poll, they would be mad to submit to pre-election panic and squander the assets accrued last week. For the first time in more than a decade, the Conservatives’ annual seaside gathering was not dominated by speculation about the leadership”

A sort of steady as she goes plea; but go where? would be a good question, how can Matthew d’Ancona suggest that the Tories gained any assets last week let alone enough to “squander” when the poll shows just the opposite. The Tories policies are simply not attracting the voters, if the polls are to be believed, so it seems a stupid answer to say they should just keep on with the policies which are obviously failing and have been failing for the past several years.

“Mr Howard should be concentrating in his speech on issues that affected the nation as a whole, rather than trying to assemble a coalition of angry single-issue groups” “Mr Howard’s task is to win over those who are more worried about education, health and crime..” exactly the task that he has set out for himself a year ago and exactly the undertaking that is failing to attract the voters, to the Conservatives cause.

Mathew d’Ancona is right to point out that “The Tory party’s relationship with the voters has to be visionary as well as contractual” but we see neither vision or obligation in what was on offer last week. That is where the Tories a failing themselves and the country.

“It was no accident - though few spotted the allusion - that, in praising the Swedish education system and the French health service, Mr Howard said: “I do want to take you to a foreign land.” This, I gather, was a quite deliberate echo of William Hague’s disastrous “foreign land” speech of March 2001, which warned of sinister alien forces taking over this country, and epitomised for many the worst of Mr Hague’s so-called “skinhead politics”.

It ill becomes an intelligent journalist to miss-represent what William Hague said in this way and thereby helping to confirm the basic lie put about by the Labour spin machine. Perhaps he should have read the speech before he called it “skinhead politics”.

“We shall see if the Tory leadership can treat this most sensitive issue with the restraint it deserves between now and polling day, resisting the temptation to outflank UKIP (a xenophobic rather than a Eurosceptic party). But Mr Howard’s position, at least, is clear”

Again we see Mathew d’Ancona taking the labour line, a dictionary would have shown him the difference between (A person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples.) and what UKIP stands for and to try to confuse the two is just jumping onto the bandwagon with Dennis MacShane.

To underplay the EU involvement in this countries law when the EU is responsible for making over 50% of it is simply to bury your head in the sand. Has it not occurred to this journalist that all the major parties are involved in conning the British people that they if elected would be in charge when it is obvious that they will not be.

What the Conservatives need to do is to prepare to be a government of Britain for Britain, to return the peoples sovereignty, so there will be real parliamentary democracy and real accountability, to look at ways of undoing the harm the labour party have done to our Constitution, and restate the basic rights of the people of this country to be ruled by their own consent, to in fact become real Conservatives again.