It Only Encourages Them

Peter Hitchens is far more right than wrong:

I plan to have a good, long lunch in France on General Election day, and I'll try not to get back to the UK province of the EU empire till the whole awful business is over. On Euro-Election day, the nonsense may be harder to avoid - perhaps it's time to visit the Isle of Man, which (bet you didn't know this ) is not in the European Union - or one of the Channel Islands, likewise by some historical quirk spared the rule of Brussels and Luxembourg.

Once again I'm tediously assailed by critics who misunderstand my very clear advice on voting, or claim that I 'never say what we should do.' My advice on voting is extraordinarily simple, and in my view impossible to misunderstand, unless you actively desire to misunderstand it. It is this: ‘Don't vote Tory, ever, under any circumstances.’ Let me repeat it, slowly, for added clarity:

‘Don't.....vote....Tory....ever....under....any....circumstances.’

Is that clear now? It's all I ask. If anyone wants to vote, or not vote, for any other party (with the important exception below), to spoil his ballot, to write rude things on it, or any other lawful action, that's of no interest to me. The crucial over-riding thing is that we take this one golden opportunity to sack the most useless opposition in history, an opportunity that will not come again for years.

However we vote, we cannot sack the government, for it will be the same. But we can sack the opposition, and so create the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for creating a party that would undo much of the wrong that has been done to this country by the Left.

Currently I need to couple this with a strong supplementary piece of counsel: ’Don't vote for the BNP,’ as there seem to be some people who think that they can safely lend their votes to this unpleasant, bigoted, race-obsessed rabble, or who imagine that the logic of my position somehow leads me to covert support for this disreputable movement. Let me leave no doubt about this.

As to my allegedly 'never saying what we should do', this is both specifically and generally false. The word 'never' means exactly that, and those who use it cannot then run for cover when I point out that I have written things elsewhere, or before this date, which address this very issue. If they can't be bothered to take the very simple actions needed to research my position, then they have no right to use the word 'never.' One such article was called ‘What is wrong and how to begin to put some of it right,’ (which I was able to locate in less than a minute via a neat little search engine called 'Google' which perhaps these critics haven't heard of) and set out - briefly - a number of measures which need to be taken to begin the recapture of this country from its enemies. My broader view is clearly implicit in dozens of articles, and in three substantial books which I have published during the last ten years.

But, as I then pointed out, this is all fantasy as long as the appalling ‘Conservative Party’ occupies the political space which is needed for the development of a proper conservative party. And at the next election, the voters will have the unprecedented (and unrepeatable) chance to destroy that party. It is, in fact, the only power they will possess at the next election, for in terms of policy all three significant British Parties (as well as the various nationalists) are committed to the elite consensus which has got us into the current mess. And if the Tory Party manages to win, or even to form a government, it will be another 15 or 20 years, by which time many of us will be dead or decrepit, before it will be so vulnerable again. A fourth consecutive defeat would actually drive a stake through its heart. Why any proper conservative person would wish to miss such an opportunity, given the Tory party's long, long record of treachery and surrender, I have no idea.

The crucial thing to understand here is an obvious fact which is so obvious that most people manage to miss it throughout their lives. It is this: that the people do not elect MPs; the existing political parties select them and the people, in their habitual tribal groups, obediently confirm that selection. No 'positive' vote for any party can alter this rigged arrangement at the next election, or any other election. A widespread refusal by conservatives to vote Tory could, however, express a rejection of David Cameron's imposition of left-liberal policies on the Tory Party and so liberate the real conservatives among Tory MPs from the liberal-left prison in which they toil, and create the conditions for a split among Tory MPs, the defection of the Cameroons to New Labour or the Liberal Democrats (where they belong) and the formation of a properly conservative party to fill the gap. There could then be an election in which, for the first time in modern history, the people were able to choose between serious, opposed parties on the great issues which divide us, from mass immigration to the proper punishment of criminals.

But as long as we continue to vote Tory in any numbers we licence David Cameron and his socially liberal, economically socialist circle to decide who shall sit at Westminster on behalf of the conservative people of Britain. There is no mechanism in the ‘Conservative Party’ for ordinary members to have any influence over policy. Increasingly, local associations must choose candidates deemed acceptable to HQ (especially since the sacking of Howard Flight by Michael Howard).

This is also why new parties, however noble they may be, are a futile waste of time and effort. Deprived of either tribal vote, they will always fail whatever their merits. To launch a new conservative party in this country, you would have to detach all or much of the Tory tribal vote from the Tory Party. This is the absolute minimum necessary condition for change. No new party can arise until there is a vacancy. Such a vacancy can only arise if one of the great parties collapses and splits.

Labour cannot be destroyed by the coming election (indeed, many of its leading figures long for defeat, so they can be spared having to do the washing-up and floor-mopping and clearing up of broken crockery and empty bottles after the great debauch they have caused, and so they can go off and get rich in the private sector or the Quangocracy). But the Tories can be destroyed. And, not least because of their pitiful and ineffectual performance in opposition since 1997, they deserve to be.