eurealist.co.uk

Lord Tebbit trying to help Dave Cameron, suggests he might like to do some sums, in a letter to the Telegraph this morning he says;

The Conservative party of today is trying to find a place for itself within a basically socialist structure,

The figures are clear. At the last election that Labour lost, in 1992, Neil Kinnock’s vote was 11.6 million. In 1997, Tony Blair scored 13.5 million, an increase of 1.9 million. John Major’s vote fell from 14.1 million to 9.6 million - a loss of 4.5 million. The Liberal Democrat vote also fell by 0.8 million, most of which, one might guess, supported Mr Blair.

So, even if Tony Blair recruited not a single voter who had abstained in 1992 - a very unlikely scenario - no more than 1.1 million Tories deserted to New Labour. In all likelihood the total was less than half a million.

Obviously, they simply abstained and are still abstaining. As Mr Blair’s vote fell from 13.5 million in 1997 to 9.5 million in 2005 - a fall of four million - the Conservative vote, too, had fallen from 9.6 million to 8.8 million.

Just as Gordon Brown’s task is to persuade his lost four million voters to vote Labour, so Mr Cameron must know that his is to develop policies to persuade his missing five million Conservative voters that the Conservative Party is once again a hospitable home for Conservative electors.

I understand that to mean Mr Cameron is trying to attract the wrong people and even if he succeeds that will not be the key to number 10. The Conservative problem is not votes lost to Labour but votes lost to Conservatives policies.

In an ideal world It would be a simple matter to for the Conservatives to regain those lost votes, all that is needed are policies that will attract Conservative voters to the Conservative party! This seems such a simple solution; it is a wonder why the Conservative leadership has not thought of it before. But it is far too obvious to have been missed, in fact it is so obvious that it must have been considered by the leadership and then rejected. So perhaps the real question is why are the leadership of the party content to fight to regain the relatively fewer voters who might have deserted to the Labour party, rather than going for the bigger pool of voters who have become disenfranchised by Conservative policies.

A possible clue to Conservative party problems might be found in the following letter in the Telegraph, this from Tina Sommer, EU and International affairs chairman, Federation of Small Businesses,

With small businesses spending an average of seven hours a week fulfilling administrative requirements, the Government’s suggestion that they should be exempt from the rigours of European red tape is welcome.

European Union legislation has a disproportionate impact on smaller enterprises; too often it stifles their growth and has been a key factor in preventing their expansion.

Reducing administrative burdens by providing specially tailored impact assessments and common commencement dates would be an important start, but the Commission’s pending proposal for a Small Business Act must be far-reaching enough to ensure small businesses remain the backbone of Europe’s economy.

It is quite clear that the FSB is appealing to our real government in Brussels to do something to ease their burdens, and not to the natural internal alternative, the Conservative party. By extension the Conservatives know that they are hamstrung by the raft of EU policies and have designed their policies to be positioned within the overarching EU policies, unfortunately for Conservatives the EU is a socialist structure, so its overarching policies are basically anti-Conservative, thus by trying to design policies the fit with the EU the Conservatives have turned their backs on conservatism, and are now only a different shade of socialist party.

The Conservative party of today is trying to find a place for itself within a basically socialist structure, so it has come up with family friendly green policies, that fit nicely within the main ethos of the EU and therefore must content itself with going for the smaller goal of attracting back those who deserted to Labour rather than the easer goal of regaining disenfranchised conservative voters.

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