Sunday 2 May 2010

Do The Right Thing

Peter Hitchens writes:

Many of you are going to hate me for what I am about to say. I regret this. Perhaps the fact that I am going to do it anyway will convince some of you that I am deadly serious, and prefer unpopularity to doing the wrong thing.

It is one of the most important and urgent tasks I have ever undertaken. I warned, 13 years ago, against New Labour. I warned, seven years ago, against the Iraq War. I was right (as I usually am – full list on application). But in those cases I might as well have tried to halt a tsunami with a feather duster. The country had gone into a sort of craze, and believed what it wanted to believe.

This time, I think and hope that what I say might actually have some effect on an unusually close Election. And it is this. Please do not vote Tory. It will have the opposite result to the one you intend. I don’t care who else you vote for (apart from the BNP, which no decent person can support). But I beg and plead with you not to fall for the shimmering, greasy, cynical fraud which is the Cameron project. You will hate yourself for it in time if you do.

The obvious thing is not necessarily the right one. A little knowledge can save us from making bad mistakes. If you feed a big meal to a starving man, which might seem the kind thing to do, you are likely to kill him. Aeroplanes take off into the wind, not, as might seem more sen-sible, with the wind behind them. If your car engine overheats, you should turn the heater up, not down.

It’s the same here. You may want to ‘Get Gordon Brown out’. So do I. And he’s done for anyway. But do you really want to put in a man who agrees with Gordon Brown on almost every major issue, and is so confident of his liberalism that he doesn’t even try to keep it secret? No muttered remarks in the car about ‘bigotry’ for him. He has said openly that he regards the conservative-minded people of this country as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’ – and nobody made him apologise for it afterwards. If you now endorse the Cameron Tory Party, you will destroy all real hope of change for the better.

I assume here that my readers mostly agree with me about what this country needs. It needs its independence back, so it can make its own laws and control its own coasts and territorial seas, its armed forces, its foreign policy – like a proper nation.

It needs to regain control of its borders and end the mass immigration which is neither necessary nor good. It needs to stop the destruction of the married family and the undermining of adult authority. It needs to use the law to restrain the grotesque abuse of alcohol and the dangerous spread of drugs. It needs to restore the idea that crime and disorder should be prevented by a police force patrolling on foot – and where that fails, the criminals should be punished in austere and disciplined prisons. It needs schools which teach proper subjects in orderly and peaceful classrooms. It needs to shrink and reform a grotesque, unjust welfare state which rewards sloth and neglects the truly poor.

It needs – urgently – to defeat the politically correct fundamentalist zealots, who sneer ‘Bigot!’ at anyone who dares defend the reasonable beliefs and opinions which were normal a generation ago. Some of you may also agree with me that it needs to reassert its debt and its allegiance to the Christian religion, on which our unique civilisation of orderly freedom is based.

David Cameron pretends skilfully to agree with these positions because he knows that is what you think. But he does not really agree with you or me. He is himself deeply politically correct (he has just sacked a parliamentary candidate for having the ‘wrong’ opinions about homosexuality, a fact a grovelling media have not publicised).

His supposed ‘Euroscepticism’ is bluster which collapses when it comes into contact with reality, as over the Lisbon Treaty. On Thursday night he ‘guaranteed’ he wouldn’t enter the Euro. He once also ‘guaranteed’ a referendum on Lisbon, a commitment he slithered out of as soon as it became difficult. These ‘guarantees’ fly from his lips whenever he needs to please a crowd, but they are less valuable than Greek Junk Bonds.

His alleged support for marriage (dragged out of him under pressure) is a token and a gimmick, as convincing and genuine as a supermarket price-cut. His pose as the foe of immigration is profoundly dishonest. He knows that, as long as we stay inside the EU, much immigration to this country is beyond his power to control.

Readers of this column over the past few years will have seen the many detailed instances of Mr Cameron’s duplicity that I have provided. And, because there is not space for them all here, I have compiled a full charge sheet against Mr Cameron and his party, in which I show his true aims and opinions, and those of his colleagues. It can be found above. He is truly what he once said he was – the Heir to Blair.

If he wins, he will – as the first Tory leader to win an Election in 18 years – have the power to crush all his critics in the Tory Party. He will be able to say that political correctness, green zealotry, a pro-EU position and a willingness to spend as much as Labour on the NHS have won the day. He will claim (falsely) that ‘Right-wing’ policies lost the last three Elections. Those Tory MPs who agree with you and me will be cowed and silenced for good. The power will lie with the A-list smart set, modish, rich metropolitan liberals hungry for office at all costs who would have been (and who in the case of one of the older ones actually was) in New Labour 13 years ago.

And then where will you have to turn for help as the PC, pro-EU bulldozer trundles across our landscape destroying what is good and familiar and replacing it with a country whose inhabi¬tants increasingly cannot recognise it as their own? The Liberal Democrats? They agree with David. The Labour Party under exciting, new, Blairite Mr Miliband, heir to a Marxist dynasty?

He agrees with David, too. You will look from bench to bench in the House of Commons and see nothing but the people whose ideas have wrecked a great country in half a century, and who still won’t admit they’re wrong. This system is only propped up by state funding and dodgy millionaires. The surge to the Liberal Democrats – because of who they are not rather than because of what they are – shows a great hunger for something genuinely different. The expenses scandal has broken many old allegiances for good. That process would actually be ended by the election of a Tory government, committed to the policies of New Labour and headed by a man who happens to be one of the greediest expense claimers of all, and who made you pay the mortgage interest on a large country house he didn’t really need.

We have the power to cast aside the discredited parties and politicians who have so utterly let us down and to make new ones which actually speak for us, and which do not despise us as fruitcakes or bigots. Five years from now we could throw the liberal elite into the sea, if we tried. But the first stage in that rebellion must be the failure of David Cameron to rescue the wretched anti-British Blair project and wrap it in a blue dress.

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