The Stupid Party

Peter Hitchens writes:

As this is the one thousandth posting here since this modest forum began, I thought I would choose as its subject the most important problem before us – the need to reform our dead and damaging major political parties. It won’t interest the cannabis lobby (nothing interests them except the Freedom to Fry) or the anti-theist faction, (who somehow think they are cleverer than Albert Einstein) but they have had quite enough red meat lately.

As I write, I have half an eye on Prime Minister’s Questions, and so far have seen no sign of anything resembling politics in these tedious and futile exchanges. Minor technical disagreements about benefits and health, and populist anti-banker stage rage are all we get, plus pathetic planted questions from government backbenchers who want jobs.

Yet several matters of enormous importance need to be discussed. The first, of course, is the Prime Minister’s wholly predictable capitulation to the European Union. There is supposed to be a large ‘Eurosceptic’ faction among Tory MPs. The Prime Minister is not just their opponent, but their enemy, and he has just proved it quite spectacularly, an act made all the worse because he pretended to be one of them. Why are they silent? Why, when the subject came up for debate on Tuesday, did they hang back from full-blooded wrath, leaving all the Parliamentary sketchwriters to say –rightly - that Mr Cameron got away with it?

What are they for? Why, having been so completely misled, will they not now rebel? If not now, when. It is all very well acting pleased and credulous when mr Cameron stages his fake triumph. That could be explained tactically – though it seemed to me that the ‘Eurosceptics’ looked all too genuinely taken in at the time. They were shamed by Dennis Skinner, a proper Labour MP recently childishly mocked by Mr Cameron. As a ‘dinosaur’. I do not agree with Mr Skinner about anything, but he has the sense to know that EU rule means that his voice and vote will count for nothing, as everything important will be decided elsewhere.

He also knows where to stick the rhetorical razor-blade in the rhetorical potato, saying: ‘There’s a word for it, it’s called appeasement, and if this meeting had been held in Munich you would have been coming back waving a piece of paper.’ As I noted in a posting here on 17th December, there are parallels between Mr Chamberlain’s ridiculous welcome on his return from Munich, and the true nature of the supposed ‘veto’. But if the Tory Party were any use, they would have been making them.

Yet millions still support this appalling useless party. People still write to me moaning about how awful the government is and, when I ask them how they voted last May, they drone, like hypnotised beings, ‘I voted Tory – we had to get Gordon Brown out’. Well, as it happens –and as I point out to these ridiculous, easily-led ninnies - they now have Gordon Brown with an Etonian accent. And while Mr Brown and Ed Balls can truly claim to have saved the Pound from Anthony Blair’s plan to join the Euro, who can be sure that Mr Cameron would have done the same, or can be trusted with the currency now? I might add that Mr Brown would never have dared to devastate the armed forces as Mr Cameron’s government has done. Our military decline under this supposed patriot is as bad as the days when the Dutch sailed up the Medway. It is not just that the defence cuts are huge. It is that they have been wielded carelessly and without thought.

I also do get the occasional letter from people (some of them at the notorious Bruges Group meeting at the October 2009 Tory conference, where supposed ‘right-wingers’ received my ‘Don’t Vote Tory’ message with chilly scorn) who now regret having saved the Tory party when they could have destroyed it. Most of these had apparently persuaded themselves that Mr Cameron had a secret agenda which he would reveal once he had won. What a silly, almost childish notion. Its present-day equivalent is the fantasy that Mr Cameron is being prevented from acting as he wishes by Nicholas Clegg. Many of the same people also believe the alternative legend, in which Mr Clegg is the cringing servant of a bullying Mr Cameron.

Neither of these nursery fantasies is true. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg grew up in similar worlds and have similar attitudes towards almost everything important. The differences between them are superficial and far less significant than the deep similarities. Mr Cameron may like to use Mr Clegg as an excuse for doing what he wants to do anyway, as there will always be people stupid enough to believe this in his own party, who are thereby pacified. And Mr Clegg may like to claim that he has forced a wayward, reactionary Tory Party to come to its senses, as there will always be people stupid enough to believe it in his own party, who are thereby pacified.

This sterile arrangement, by which one party pretends to be two (and at times three) means that serious, bruising, educational and adversarial debate on the national plight never takes place in Parliament, and is increasingly excluded from media which must depend to some extent on the state of Parliament, if they are to have any influence. So not only the EU, but the real crisis of welfare and marriage, the real crisis of education, the real problems of drugs, and the true nature of the Middle East, particularly the ‘Arab Spring’, the rise of Turkey, the Libyan failure and the coming crisis in Syria, remain undiscussed, or discussed so ignorantly that it would have been better to keep quiet.

I failed completely to achieve any change with my ‘Don’t Vote Tory’ campaign. There is now a great danger that the dead parties will be nationalised and made permanent through state funding, a terrible thought for anyone concerned with free debate. How are we to obtain reform of the parties, and to get parties that actually care about what the people care about?