Sunday, 30 August 2009

Trousers down, Mr Gove. It's time for your conservative test

I’m not sure I approve of cruel sex examinations for gruff-voiced female athletes. 

But I really do think we need some sort of intrusive trousers-down test to discover whether Tory MPs really are conservatives. 

Most of them would fail it. Parliament is full of political hermaphrodites and neuters. You can see it most clearly over Afghanistan. 

As we learned last week, the country is sick of this stupid, doomed adventure and of the Government’s cretinous fantasies about democracy and elections in that place.

Five men died to keep open a polling station that almost nobody dared go to, in an election whose result was fixed in advance. 

Yet the main ‘Opposition’ party is still uncritically committed to supporting our alleged mission in Helmand.

Where are the majority, who want to quit, supposed to turn?

 

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But it’s not just that. Now, if a Tory frontbencher had said something conservative last week – that mass immigration should be stopped, that we should leave the EU, that criminals should be punished, that State schools should be allowed to select their pupils – there would have been a great fuss and the offender would have been fired by a righteous David Cameron.

But what if a Tory frontbencher had launched into a slurping song of praise to Anthony Blair, supposedly the enemy? Well, this actually happened, and there was no fuss at all.

  

More from Peter Hitchens...

 

Here is what that frontbencher said in an interview in a Left-wing newspaper: ‘He [Blair] is not as popular as he deserves to be and he’s emphatically not as popular within Labour as he deserves to be – amazing ingratitude on their part. 

But if someone were to look at some of the views that I’ve argued and say, “Tony Blair said that,” it would be fatuous of me to deny it and dishonest, so therefore I may as well acknowledge it because it is true.’

The person speaking here is Michael Gove, Shadow Education Secretary, and so close to David Cameron (self-described ‘heir to Blair’) that his dubious expenses have been forgotten and forgiven. 

I might add that the two men also share a school run, as their children both go to a chic and oversubscribed little Church primary school, allowing them to pretend to themselves that State education is really OK.

Their wives, sweetly, both pen articles for the local parish magazine.

I do keep trying to tell you. The ‘change’ offered to you by the Useless Tories is actually no change at all. 

Were we really better governed, or differently governed, under Anthony Blair than we are under Gordon Brown? 

Is a return to the days of Blair (but without all the funny money sloshing around) what you want? That’s what you’ll get from the Tories.

If you won’t take my word for it, take Michael Gove’s.





Bloated, self-indulgent and an enemy of Britain


How can it be that Edward Kennedy is treated, at his death, as if he were some kind of hero? 

What I say now is made necessary by the praise heaped on him. 

If his supporters had maintained a decent silence, as they should have done, there would be no need to say it.

But Mr Kennedy was not a hero, least of all here. 

He was, like his crooked, horrible father, a dedicated enemy of this country. 

He gave aid and comfort to the violent and unreasonable wing of Irish Republicanism and to the ignorant and sentimental strand of Irishry in America that does so much damage to Ireland itself.

He was, besides, guilty of many evil actions – both as an individual and as a politician. 

Without his sinister and bizarrely idealised family’s money and power to protect him, he would have gone to prison for his shameful part in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.


And he would have been driven from public life for ever.

You might think, from the obituaries, that his role as a supporter of ‘liberal’ causes – including the killing of the unborn, specifically forbidden by the faith he claimed to espouse – had in some way atoned for his bloated, selfish private life. 

Surely the truth is a little different.

As a man who lived a life of gross self-indulgence, he could hardly oppose policies that condoned the same indulgence in others, could he?

Liberal, for certain. A lion? Hardly. Other creatures, with more legs, come to mind.


We are urged to buy the ‘Royal Navy Sovereign of the Seas Chronograph’, which looks like a watch to me. 

It is an ‘official licensed product of the Royal Navy’, adorned with the White Ensign and the odd motto ‘Defend, Deter, Defeat’, which I have never seen in any of Her Majesty’s ships. 

The Defence Ministry confirms that the Navy really is lending its name to such promotions. 

And it says the watch is actually made in China.


Ex-Communist ‘Doctor’ John Reid understandably hates being reminded of his 2006 Kabul remark (200 British deaths, three years, four months and one week ago) that ‘We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot’.

Actually, he said it three times, which suggests he was rather pleased with it – then. 

Now he’s gone whining to the BBC. 

And the BBC, which, of course, is totally unbiased, has responded sympathetically, issuing guidance on how the quotation is to be used and how there should be no ‘judgmental’ words. 

I wonder if they’ll do the same about their incessant misrepresentation of Lady Thatcher’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as society’ or Norman Tebbit’s never-uttered order to unemployed people to ‘get on their bikes’. Actually, I don’t wonder at all.


And still we tiptoe round the truth: that we no longer govern ourselves. 

The Video Recordings Act of 1984, famously brought in to control ‘video nasties’, turns out not to be law at all. 

Well, that’s bad enough. But the real story is the reason for this mess.

The Act was not reported to the European Commission. 

So what? Well, the trouble is that it actually matters, because we have ceded ultimate authority to that secretive, despotic body. 

All the palaver about Royal Assent is just a pantomime for the tourists. 

The real power sits in a concrete block in Brussels, just as our real Supreme Court is in Luxembourg.

And they talk about making Britain more ‘democratic’ by abolishing the last independent voices in the House of Lords. 

If we want to be a real democracy, we have to start by leaving the EU.

 
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1209932/PETER-HITCHENS-Trousers-Mr-Gove-Its-time-conservative-test.html#ixzz0PehkeNOi

Posted by Britannia Radio at 10:04