PrintApril 9, 2010
The Coming British Non-Election
A British election is set for May 6. So, will socialist Labour win a fourth term? Or will the Tory chap with a wind turbine on his house blow away the current bunch? And what difference will it all make in the grander U.N.-sponsored global "I want to work with children and achieve world peace" scheme?
The Obama-esque question for Brits is surely "Are you ready for 'change'?" The simple answer is "No, not at all." Small chance when all three parties are Europhile shades of greenie liberals.
Should our erstwhile allies across the pond be so minded as to get excited about possible "change" in the U.K., with "Cameron Conservatives" ousting Gordon Brown's three-term Labourite socialists, then cool it. Musical chairs among like-minded children never made an impact on grown-up life, and musical chairs with political pygmies has much the same effect. Unless, of course, you are the one left out in the cold. But enough of Al Gore (with the "vanishing Arctic" having expanded in size by over 27 percent since 2007, he's on thin ice as it is).
If my U.S. friends want the inside straight on David Cameron's understanding of conservatism, they might like to know that his first significant act as the new Conservative Party leader was...to distance himself from all things Thatcherite (spine, intellect, hand-bagging, you get the picture). Which is, in effect, to distance oneself from core conservatism itself -- Thatcherism, as Thatcher herself states it, being merely the ability to communicate core conservative values in a popular way.
Cameron then made the environment the top of his agenda -- and duly changed the Party logo from a fiery torch (leading the way) to a (static) green tree, to make the point. Next, he made renewable energy central to his government's policy (he's consistent -- windy eco-rhetoric is high on his agenda) -- even though hydrocarbon fuels, as any knowledgeable energy insider will tell you, make up 87 percent of the world's energy mix and will continue to do for the next fifty years, even with a 50 percent rise in energy demand over that period. This, no matter what politicians may say. Next up, Mr. Cameron laid out his conservative credentials, stating (watch my lips), "No tax cuts".
So thrilled was the British populace with Cameron's policy of "no-change" from Labour's own policies then that even while New Labour was imploding at the polls, Cameron's Conservatives made little political headway. However, since then, Mr. Cameron has moved his policies -- and his popularity -- in the Right direction. Downgrading his environmental ambitions, he offered, among other traditionally conservative commitments, the possibility of tax cuts. Immediately, Cameron's Conservatives moved into poll position, so to speak, but given his obvious predilection for "flip-flopping" over political hurdles, not by much before a still lukewarm British public.
So now a clear winner at the next election seems unlikely, with a "hung Parliament" in the offing in May. (NB. Though a "hung Parliament" is precisely what many liberals would like to see, unfortunately, the liberals banned swinging gibbets in the 1960s -- and you can't have it both ways.)
For years now, U.K. commentators and politicians alike have been watching the decline in numbers voting, citing a "lack of interest in politics" as the reason. But it is not that Brits are uninterested in politics at all. Rather, it is that they are fed up that politicians no longer "represent" their views and are willing to toe the party line and make no fuss about the arrogation of sovereign powers to Brussels.
So why don't more vote for (as I do) for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which has vowed to take Britain out of Europe? Well, the fact is that the UKIP started from such a recent and low base -- while increasing their share of the vote at every election -- that many believe that it would be a "wasted vote," and so they vote for a major party on other issues, or they don't vote at all.
It is no surprise that socialist Labourite "centralizers" are happy to submit to centralizing EU socialist rule. And a vote for the Lib Dims is traditionally, as every Brit knows, a vote for the "don't knows" -- except on Europe membership, which, perversely, they do know that they are for. But Europe has always split the modern Conservative Party. Many genuine conservatives know well enough that the EU is an anti-democratic, wholly unaccountable, corrupt, monolithic tyranny. But many Cameron-style, liberal, "modernizer" conservatives do not.
Thus the Conservative Party division over Europe has been papered over, either with defectors (like me) sheltering under the UKIP banner, or plain keeping "shtoom" for the sake of "public unity." Last year, David Cameron ditched a "watch my lips" commitment to holding a Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (an EU Constitution by another name), reversing a pledge to hold it and revealing that he has no spine for a fight over EU membership -- particularly one he was likely to lose.
But ask Brits which of the 27 EU Commissioners they voted for, or how many Brits voted in the EU President...er, what's 'is name? And the answer is...er, none. So there it is. Britain remains stuck in the centralizing, socialist, de-democratizing mire that is the unelected Eurocracy. Not much point, then, in voting to stop the mass invasion of U.K. shores by European economic immigrants, when the EU has taken away real power over border controls. So why bother voting for any of the three major parties?
And just for good measure, if U.S. conservatives are under the misapprehension that David Cameron will in the future ally with them on a litany of issues, impelled by his grasp of conservative ideology, then think again. Just this week, Cameron has informed the Obama administration that he will side with them (read: join in bullying Israel) on Palestinian issues. And he shares Obama's green, if ludicrously crass, energy and environment objectives. So when you read about the British election and the Conservative vs. Labour vs. Liberal Democrats fight over coming weeks, just think of it as a kind of EU-sponsored "musical chairs."
In short, the coming British election is a total crock, being a "regional" affair only between shades of socializing liberals within an anti-democratic European Super-State. Worse still, in Britain, democracy -- real democracy -- is no longer even in play.
The most significant shortcoming of the fledgling super-state is that it is not, will not be, and indeed cannot be, democratic. Europe ... is a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure; only the scale of the final damage is in doubt.- Margaret Thatcher, Strategies for a Changing World
Peter C Glover is co-author of Energy and Climate Wars: How naive politicians, green ideologues and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate, to be published by Continuum, September, 2010. For more, go to petercglover.com.
