Not Fit For Purpose

Gerald Warner writes:

At least we now know one isolated fact about Tory policy, which is otherwise being kept as zealously under wraps as the new Dan Brown novel: David Cameron does not regard penal policy as having the slightest importance. We know that because he has just appointed the serial buffoon Alan Duncan, expelled from his shadow cabinet, to be shadow junior justice minister with responsibility for prisons.

So, a man who cannot be entrusted with negotiating pay and conditions for MPs is fit to carry responsibility for the prison service. It is just as well the country is not suffering any kind of crime wave, or increasing murder rate, or spiralling disorder, is it not? Just as well there are no problems relating to the prison estate or related aspects of law and order, so a duffer like Duncan can be left to get on with this trivial stuff.

What was wrong with the back benches as a destination for a man who has so richly merited relegation there? Is Dave temperamentally incapable of definitively sacking one of his cronies? It would appear so. What does that tell us about his suitability as a prime minister? And what kind of a man is it who says of his own humiliating demotion, as Duncan did: “This is a sensible decision”?

What sort of grovelling sycophancy induces a member of the political class to fawn on his leader even at such a moment? What happened to the carefully contrived hype of the urbane, outspoken, independent-minded Duncan, that he ends up behaving with the cringing complicity of the accused at a Stalinist show trial? Why does Duncan intend to stay in Parliament, in any case? We already know his view of the Commons, that “No one who has done anything in the outside world, or is capable of doing such a thing, will ever come into this place ever again, the way we are going?”

Why linger in so demeaning a place? Why applaud his own demotion? What are we to make of these Cameronian Tories? What prospect do they offer Britain? Many people have already reached the evident conclusion: a Cameron government will be the most unpopular, cliquey, self-regarding, principles-free reincarnation of Blairism that could be imagined in our worst nightmares. It will govern for one term, which will end in the final implosion of the two-party system. These are men of straw.

But why wait that long? Why not organise and elect this time candidates who really believe in national self-government, the only basis for international co-operation, and including the United Kingdom as greater than the sum of its parts? In local variation, historical consciousness, family life (founded on the marital union of one man and one woman), and the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West? In agriculture, manufacturing, and small business?

In close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, and all forms of art? In mass political participation within a constitutional framework? In respect for the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death? And in the constitutional and other ties among the Realms and Territories having the British monarch as Head of State (or other such constitutional links), the status of the English language and the rights of its speakers both throughout the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and the rights of British-descended communities throughout the world?

So not in, among so many other things, endless wars that are colossally expensive to taxpayers, massively disruptive of the moral and social order, and utterly calamitous to national defence both against the entrenchment of existing enemies and against the creation of new ones.