UKIP IF YOU WANT TO, THE TORY’S NOT FOR TURNING

Something is happening in the grass roots of the Conservative Party. Daily, committed Tory activists are defecting to UKIP. Maybe Twitter, the home of chattering party activists, is making this issue appear bigger than it would seem without social media, but the growing dissatisfaction with the Tory high command is palpable, and blind party loyalty can no longer be taken for granted.

I have sympathy with the defectors; I am not keen on the direction Cameron has taken our party in. I believe that we have moved too close to the dreaded centre ground of politics, shirking individualism for a bastardised, centre-right form of social democracy. Cameron raves about the NHS, his big government ‘Big Society’, the rich paying their fair share to government. He has slapped a nudge tax on alcohol to deter consumption, and there is talk of a new law allowing government to snoop into our digital lives. We ideological Conservatives, the grass roots, the regular voters, and the people keeping the party financially stable, cannot lend our support to these policies.

The high command justifies this shift in policy by saying it’s necessary to win elections. But politics isn’t about winning elections; it’s about ideology and vision. If we are willing to water down our ideology to get into power, we don’t deserve power. This ‘say and doing anything to win elections’ strategy is indicative of the ‘born to rule’ mentality that has caused the government to slip substantially in the polls. Ed Miliband is as unpopular as ever, but that doesn’t mean we can expect the public’s approval by being the lesser of the two evils.

So, when I say I understand the plight of those who choose to leave the party for UKIP, the home of disillusioned Thatcherites, I’m being honest. But, if, by defecting, your goal is to shift the party back to the individualist right (where it belongs), defecting is not the answer; it will actually make things worse.

The UK’s electoral system, First-Past-The-Post, creates a two party system. Here, just as in all other places where FPTP is used, the system reflects the left-right political divide of the electorate. You get major two parties: one for the left, and one for the right. Fringe parties are a just way for disaffected voters to feel like they are protesting against the dichotomy. They cannot, by virtue of the electoral system, have a meaningful impact on general election outcomes.

If you feel that your views are not adequately represented by the party leader, and the direction he has taken the party in, leaving the party is the very last thing you should do. Every right-wing defector shifts the party one step further to the left by making it easier for Cameron to get away with being a wet. The governing party will still be Labour or Conservative, but the Conservatives, as the right-wing option, will be slightly less right-wing. And by splitting the right-wing vote, you’re only going to improve the left’s electoral prospects.

A lot of the defectors say that the Conservative Party is no longer the party of Thatcher and that those who identify as Thatcherites are living a lie by continuing to vote Tory. This is hogwash. Ted Heath was much further to the left of the party than Cameron is. Had Maggie left to join a fringe party because of Heath, the 80s would have been a very different decade.

The Conservative Party is the country’s generic right-wing party. It is the gold standard of right-wing values. It won’t always reflect a specific brand of ring-wing values, but it will always be right-wing in one way or another. UKIP, on the other hand, cannot be certain of this. Nigel Farage is a libertarian and, under his leadership, the party will remain as such. But what happens when he steps down? Their central policy of withdrawing from the EU can be taken up by the left or the right. Paul Nuttall, UKIP’s deputy chairman, certainly expressed some worryingly statist economic views when he appeared on Question Time a few weeks ago.

My advice to any Conservatives thinking about defecting is to hold your ground. Cameron is not an individualist, a libertarian or a Thatcherite, but he is better than the alternative – Labour. By staying in the party and making our voices heard, we can limit the extent to which Cameron can get away with centre-groundism and we can vote on the next leader.

But I don’t want to be overly negative about Cameron and the current government. They are implementing a lot of important reforms which we can be proud of. Michael Gove’s free schools and education reforms are necessary to stem the tide of educational decline, Ian Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms are sensible and much needed, the NHS is being opened up to competition and we are slowly getting to grips with runaway government spending. This is a Conservative government, albeit an imperfect one.

We need to back the government where it is getting things right, and we need to kick and scream where it is strays from what we consider true Conservatism. Change from within is achievable; defecting is the loser’s way out.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS

We’re in a bit of a constitutional pickle. Tony Blair desecrated and subverted the House of Lords by reforming it into a retiring home for party cronies. So the coalition, seeking to fix Blair’s hatchet job, plans to partially elect the chamber. I can’t help but think this will fail to improve the current situation, and may in fact, by opening Pandora’s Box, create far more problems than it solves.

Democratisation of the House of Lords seems, superficially, to be a rather good idea. Aren’t we all committed to democracy in the 21st Century? How can Britain go around chastising foreign nations for refusing to embrace democracy while half of our own legislature is itself unaccountable to the dictatorship of the majority of the electorate?

I side with Churchill on this issue: “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”. He was absolutely spot on. For the majority of history, individuals have been subject to the caprice of overlords. This was obviously not optimal. However, democracy is far from an ideal solution. I see electing our dictators as a step up from autocracy, but by no means a solution to the problem of governance. When individuals are freed to decide their lives for themselves, their individual talents and abilities flourish and the world prospers. This is how the trade facilitated by globalism has managed to pull more out of poverty than foreign aid ever has and ever will. Free individuals to serve one another and we all do better. But the state, under the control and caprice of the majority’s cronies, acts as a dead weight on the interactions of individuals and holds us back from realising our full potential as human beings in a global society.

This brings me to our present situation and the proposals for reform. Currently, we have a mix of spiritual peers (representing the major religions) and temporal peers (life and hereditary peers) filling up the benches in the Lords. They get to hold the government to account by scrutinising, amending and rejected legislation. They cannot stop the government from passing its legislation as, via the Parliament Acts, the best they can do is delay a bill for a year from the date it entered the House. This has the left-liberals and progressives up in arms. It is totally archaic, they say, to have people other than self-serving politicians with no understanding of the real world passing legislation! As an aside, these are the very same people who drool over the prospect of handing over more legislative authority to the unelected EU Commission! Yet, they demand that we elect the members of the Lords.

Electing the Lords is a terrible idea. First of all, the Lords, although imperfect, is a mix of religions, ethnicities, classes and intellectuals. They actually understand and reflect the real world. Why would we want to replace the likes of Lord Sugar, a successful businessman and Labour peer, who only the other day warned London *against* voting for Ken Livingstone in the mayoral elections, with a bottom-kissing politician interested only in his re-election either to the Lords or the Commons? I despise career politicians, I do not think we should be increasing their numbers!

Another serious issue is the primacy of the Commons. Our government is formed from its elected members and they get to set the legislative agenda. Proponents of reform suggest that there would be no issue with which chamber is supreme, but how can this be true? If we use proportional representation to elect the members of the Lords, on what basis can MPs sitting in the Commons assert their dominance? They will have less democratic legitimacy! If the Lords are elected using a more democratic electoral system, it is they who should form the government, with the Commons doing the scrutiny. Do we really want to open up this can of constitutional worms? I think once we do, it will be difficult to get the lid back on.

Reform is essential. The Lords cannot continue as a chamber of unelected, geriatric party cronies, but democratisation is not the answer. Ideally, we would return to the system of heredities as, pragmatically speaking, it outperformed the current set-up, but I feel that to be unpalatable in the 21st century. We need some more innovative proposals for reform to choose from, such as appointment using a cross-party panel, or, more radically, why don’t we hand appointment power to the monarch? It would certainly give the institution some modern constitutional relevance.

I hope something comes along to allow Cameron and co to kick the current plans into the long grass. We do not need an elected House of Lords, it will create more headaches than it soothes.

THE REAL CHE GUEVARA

and he’s not the bloke most lefties like to think he is

http://tinyurl.com/cwrc9r3

CUTEST DOG RESCUE VIDEO EVER

WARNING: MALES MAY SUFFER ACUTE LOSS OF MASCULINITY AFTER WATCHING THIS VIDEO

SOMETHING EVERYONE OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT THE GREAT DEPRESSION

America is always the focal point of any discussion of the 30s Great Depression. How Britain faired is rarely ever considered, and there’s a good reason for that.

We didn’t really have a Great Depression. Our experience was certainly not comparable to the US’.

Why the gulf of difference?

Both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations intervened in the US economy to galvanise it when the recession first hit. The UK did little other than cut public spending.

By 1934 the UK had recovered and was growing annually at a rate of 4%. The USA was still mired in depression.

You’d think that would’ve taught the world once and for all that governments shouldn’t intervene in a recession. Unfortunately, the left is so utterly blinkered by its dogma that it prefers to simply cover up the successes that don’t chime with its ideology while continuing to promote its own “cures”, knowing full well that they won’t yield desirable outcomes.

The motto of the Italian Fascist Party was: Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato which translates into “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”. It would appear that the Left shares this sentiment as it is happy, even eager, to promote harmful statist policies on the basis that they allow the state to exert a stronger grip and influence on the lives and interactions of its citizens.

WILL RED MEAT KILL YOU?

Yesterday, the findings of a couple of scientific studies generated some emotive news headlines suggesting that eating red meat daily could cut short your life and put you at risk of contracting serious illnesses such as cancer and heart disease.

Luckily, regular red meat consumers such as myself have nothing to fear. The media was doing what it always does — hyping up nothing.

The studies did indeed show a correlation between people who ate red meat regularly and shorter lifespans.

But…and it’s a big but:

1) correlation is not causation. Just because one thing happens alongside something else doesn’t mean it is an example of cause and effect. You often find greater numbers of police in dangerous areas but that does not mean that more police make an area dangerous!

2) The study was done by asking people to fill in a questionnaire every four years describing, in detail, what they had eaten in the interim. Most people can barely remember what they ate a couple of days ago, never mind 4 years ago!

3) While the study found that even unprocessed red meat correlated with premature death, for some reason hamburgers, the most processed of processed meats, was contained within the category of unprocessed meat! I’m sure that eating hamburgers daily will indeed cut short your life but that says nothing of the health benefits of unprocessed red meat!

4) The study tried to control for variables but a) did not control for sugar intake (which anyone on a low carb paleo/primal diet will know instinctively is important for health) and b) found in general that those who eat red meat regularly are also more likely to be overweight, live a sedentary life, smoke and drink. This is to be expected. If society is told red meat is bad, then the few who ignore this will probably be those who don’t really pay much attention to whether they’re living a healthy lifestyle. What is criminal, however, is signalling out red meat as the main contributor to early death rather than going for the more sensible message: smoking, alcohol consumption, laziness and possibly red meat, cumulatively, may lead to an early death.

In short, this is just another substandard study which tells us nothing about the health benefits or detriments of red meat. Just like my steak, it should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.

SHERRY

This is a photograph of our late doggy Sherry, who was put to sleep just over 2 years ago. She was a little beaut and we miss her every day x