From the Conservative conference
Away from the pastel colours and soft furnishings of the conference hall, a packed fringe meeting held by the Thatcherite Bruges Group felt like a foreign land. Here, Enoch Powell was right, Section 28 should be restored, and Britain is no longer a self-governing power. With more than 600 people in attendance, the largest meeting I’ve seen all conference season, the Tory right showed its muscle.
The ostensible motion was: “Are the political parties failing the voters of Britain?” But the meeting was inevitably dominated by the view that the Conservative Party had failed the people of Britain over Europe. Even before the speeches began, a cartoon depicting Margaret Thatcher as Queen Boudicca riding out of Brussels prompted waves of applause.
There were almost xenophobic levels of contempt for David Cameron’s pledge to ring-fence overseas aid. The speakers, including the Daily Telegraph’s Simon Heffer and the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, all forcefully declared that public spending should be cut across the board. But they at least followed the logic of their position: dramatically reducing the size of the public sector will lead to a surge in unemployment. David Cameron has promised a bonfire of the quangos in all but name while vowing to “get Britain back to work” at the same time. Labour must expose this contradiction far more successfully than it has done.
Heffer was also right to point out that Cameron cannot simply “unpick” the Lisbon Treaty after ratification, with no desire among the other 26 states to renegotiate areas such as justice and home affairs. “There is no middle way,” he declared, and called for a referendum on EU membership.
At an earlier fringe meeting on Europe I saw the Sun’s associate editor Trevor Kavanagh watch Ken Clarke like a hawk. He later harangued the shadow business secretary over the “anti-democratic” European Union.
It’s worth remembering that it was the tabloid’s fury over Clarke’s return to the shadow cabinet that prompted Cameron’s decision to appoint the Eurosceptic William Hague as his de facto deputy. With even Daniel Hannan conceding that a retrospective referendum on the Lisbon Treaty would be “silly”, support is growing for the alternative of a referendum on EU membership. If Cameron is elected, I expect the Sun to lead the charge.
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