Saturday 12 May 2012

Country First?

The Mandelson interview amounted to an announcement, obviously staged for the purpose. There is going to be a commitment to an In/Out referendum on the EU in the 2015 Labour manifesto.

But what if there is not one in the Conservative manifesto? That remains by far the most likely scenario. What would today's would be Enoch figures say in that 1974 situation?

Daniel Hannan, Simon Heffer, Richard Littlejohn, Peter Hitchens, Christopher Booker, Charles Moore, Kelvin MacKenzie, Trevor Kavanagh, Toby Young, Norman Tebbit and all the rest: over to you.

And over to UKIP, which promised to dissolve itself if the Conservatives made this commitment, but which insists, not without psephological justification, that it is not just a splinter group of that party.

No one in the present Cabinet, not even Iain Duncan Smith, has a record of actual Eurosceptical achievement to match that of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, the two hands of the Chancellor who kept the United Kingdom out of the euro.

6 comments:

  1. Hannan and Hitchens, at least, are very regular readers of yours, as I expect that you know. Hitchens could probably be persuaded over the next three years. But Hannan's half-Tory, half-Ukip position is complicated enough already.

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  2. Are they writing for the eagerly anticipated collection of responses to Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory? You'll pretend not to know this, but it is the talk of the town among everyone who matters. The only people on the outside of that are the outgoing coalition (not its Tory and Liberal enemies, who have read it and positively revere it) and the employees of the coalition's Murdoch parent company twiddling their thumbs until they are sent down for 20 years apiece. They are the past. You are the future.

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  3. Your supermarkets/countryside, fatherhood, policing/courts, banks/Europe, libel law, Lords reform, utilities/railways and boards/pay posts on the day of the Queen's Speech have all blown them away here at court.

    The same goes for several other ideas that you have floated on here. You are tremendously impressive and I am not the only person who thinks that.

    Keep up the good work, including below the line on Coffee House. Absolutely loving your correction of them over there on their idea for winning support in the North. Forget the North, outside London they don't even have any support in the South as of last Thursday.

    Everyone who is anyone knows that the Speccie boys are basically your mates, but you have moved beyond being a pet Lefty over there. Even they speak very highly of you as a political thinker and strategist. Your ideas for alliance with already existing local politicians in hard to reach areas for Labour are just amazing. You are a genius.

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  4. Stateleigh Holmes12 May 2012 at 20:46

    That's one way of putting it. Criticism of you on there is taken down. Do a bit of digging and the blogs editor turns out to be so pally with you that he is even your friend on Facebook. But nothing accounts for what you get away with saying on Telegraph Blogs against the editor of the site and even underneath his own posts. Nothing us lowly mortals can comprehend, anyway.

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