Friday 31 July 2009

Tories will win, but don't expect a Conservative government

This was roughly the title of Simon Heffer's piece in the Telegraph on Wednesday pointing out the moral vacuum at the top of Cameron's Tories whose only principle is say whatever will get us elected and don't say anything that will damage this amoral position. Heffer notes the 'teenagers around Mr Cameron' who are afraid of being identified with what used to be the Tories core vote which Heffer thinks may go to UKIP candidates if they are standing in the constituency. This is good news but I think Mr Heffer is being a little naive on two fronts.

First, the Cameron Tories are well of this danger and UKIP will find they are faced with a hostile media at the General Election compared with the benign media treatment they got at the Europeans and it wont matter how much Farage shouts BNP, BNP!

Second, by election time, the penny may well have dropped with the electorate that voting for UKIP does not produce an effective Eurosceptic party in Brussels! UKIP have got themselves allied to some very nasty, racist, Fasscist parties in Brussels to form an EU sanctioned group and hence get more EU lolly, bigger offices, limos etc so Farage's BNP chant not only wont work but will raise questions about his new found friends in Europe like the Liga Nord.

The other weakness the Tories will exploit in the UKIP eurosceptic credentials is the position of Marta Andreasen. She is in fact the embodiment of Monnet's dream of a European nation and represents an avowedly withdrawalist party! A woman of cosmopolitan descent, living in Spain, representing a UK region on record as being an EU reformist! Further, the lady's interests seem to lie in Brussels committees and not in the UK. In Heffer's phrase talking about the Heath government, we are watching 'an orgy of managerialism' by UKIP and we all know where that ended for the Tories.

All in all things may be getting more difficult for Nigel. General elections matter to the electorate whereas Euroelections send the electorate to sleep!

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