Carswell Defects To UKIP

"[The Tory] Parliamentary majority was slashed from a healthy 100 to a - by comparison - fairly feebly twenty. If the truth be told, John Major and the rest of us were relieved to achieve even that result. It was a workable majority, or so the PM thought. The debates on the Maastricht Treaty would prove otherwise. With a majority of 100 a rebellion would have been futile. But with twenty, a group of determined backbenchers can change government policies. The government can no longer allow itself the luxury of doing just as it likes"

Teresa Gorman MP, "The Bastards".

In news that has seemingly come out of the 'blue', Douglas Carswell has defected to UKIP. In some ways this is not really surprising. His political views have increasingly been at odds with the party he represents. It maybe more a factor that the party has left him not that he has left the party. As we remember he is one of the few Tory MPs to vote against EU measures.

However we also remember that Carswell has not been entirely consistent in EU views, often clearly putting his party first above his 'principles'. He has backed Cameron when it is readily apparent that Cameron is not only a Europhile but has no intention of being a Prime Minister that leads the UK out of the EU. Despite Cameron's clear deception on the issue Carswell noted in January 2014 he was wrong to rebel against the party line:

“What is it we now want, guys? We’re going to face a reckoning with the electorate in just over a year’s time. We’re two points behind the Labour Party. We can do this – we really can do this. If we lack discipline, we’re going to have five or six appalling years in opposition to dwell on it”

The Spectator concludes as a result of the interview:

Here’s a sneak preview of what was supposed to be a debate about the wisdom of rebelling – but ended up being Carswell explaining why he believes his colleagues should now stop defying the government, and support the PM.

And this was the same man who in 2012 that claimed (my emphasis):

One of the reasons I backed David Cameron to be party leader early on in his leadership campaign was because I wanted to see a different kind of Conservatism. I still do – and I’d vote for him to deliver it if there was a leadership contest tomorrow. 

Even though there is obvious evidence that Cameron is not...

...a secret patriot waiting for the chance to rip off his expensive tailoring and reveal his inner Thatcher. He is exactly what he looks like, an unprincipled chancer with limited skills in public relations".

So with this in mind we have a couple of observations or more accurately a number of questions regarding Carswell's motives.

The first is why defect? As it currently stands (and currently is the operative word) the Tories are the only party in a position to possibly win the next General Election who offers an in/out referendum on membership of the EU. Labour have chosen not to unless there's a new Treaty and the Lib Dems... well they, to no-one's surprise, have no intention of doing so.

As we have noted on here before Cameron has categorically promised a referendum in 2017 and one in circumstances which are most favourable to the "outers":

Thus the EU is in a mess, Cameron has been shown up publicly that he cannot deliver on reform or influence and he almost certainly cannot recommend an "in" vote in 2017. Add to that his general incompetence and it's difficult to envisage a better framework for the 'outers' to win a referendum. The chances of winning a referendum has improved significantly.

Understandably there is much scepticism of Cameron's promises given the "cast iron" one over Lisbon - which turned out to be one of Cameron's greatest mistakes and which more than likely cost him the 2010 election.

However political reality suggests that he won't have much choice to attempt to try the same again. Poll ratings, Labour bias in the electoral system and Labour's superior ability to manipulate the postal vote means if the Tories do win the next election any majority they gain will be relatively small in number.

With this in mind we refer to Teresa Gorman's quote above that a small majority gives the backbenchers far more power over the government - "the government can no longer allow itself the luxury of doing just as it likes". Nothing illustrates this better than the constant rebellions over current coalition government policies such as the EU rebellions over an EU referendum.

In other words, with a small majority the political reality would be that Cameron will be forced to hold a referendum on terms which will be the most favourable possible for the 'out' camp. This is reflected in the fact that Cameron only promised an EU referendum precisely because he is "unprincipled chancer". He will do what ever his party tells him particularly with a small majority.

Of course we are under no illusions of the Tory track record on the EU or that party positions might change in the meantime, but as it stands:

• A vote for Labour is EU membership
  
  
• A vote for UKIP is EU membership by virtue of they can't possibly get enough MPs based on current poll ratings
  
  
• A vote for Lib Dems is EU membership
   
• A vote for Tories is a possible referendum we can win.

We wonder therefore why Carswell has jumped ship, just under a year away from a General Election, when statistically a Tory win might give him the EU exit he craves?

We appreciate that we're in the middle of silly season and crucially the news is understandably being dominated by the appalling deficiency of Rotherham Council and Police. So why would Carswell defect when he maybe unable to guarantee dominate coverage to ensure Cameron is fully embarrassed? The answer may lie in the fact that the Tory party conference is taking place towards the end of September which is four weeks away. If the by-election is moved quickly it will occur just in time for the result to be the main discussion point at the Tory conference.

In addition intriguingly via a by-election Carswell might ensure that by winning he would become the first elected UKIP MP - UKIP defections have occurred before of course but not with an electoral mandate. Carswell winning a by-election would pose a problem for Farage, if not a threat. For a man who has made UKIP his own party it could be that the first elected UKIP MP would not be himself - "let's make history" Farage's latest email says:

Last night I was selected by local party members to stand as UKIP's Thanet South candidate for the upcoming general election.

With recent polling showing that UKIP can win the Thanet South seat in May, I look forward to the forthcoming campaign where we can set out a positive vision, for a free and independent Britain outside of the EU.

Farage calls 'Carswell's' move "brave" but we wonder whether that for Farage himself this is a "be careful what you wish for" moment. Another question is where does this leave Daniel Hannan, who co-authored the Plan. Hannan seems reluctant to make the same jump.

Perhaps rather cynically we might consider if this is attempt of a coup d'etat of UKIP by the Tory party just before an election. Its consequences mean there will be splits in the eurosceptic camp - to the convenience of the establishment. A Labour government in 2015 will result in 5 more years of EU membership.

There is no ulterior motive on this blog, apart for campaigning for EU exit. We make no suggestions apart from the fact that as it currently stands Carswell's defection actually makes EU exit less likely not more, and he is not a man to be entirely trusted. Split parties do not win elections.

The ultimate question is what do Eurosceptics want? Destruction of the Tory party or EU exit?

Tony Benn

"no [MP] has the legal or moral authority to hand over powers borrowed from the electors to people who would no longer be accountable to them" Tony Benn

Within the space of a week, we lose another left-wing Eurosceptic, this time the passing of Tony Benn. I had the privilege of seeing him speak when I attended Parliament during the Maastricht debates and so in his memory I reproduce one of them here. It still resonates 23 years later:

We are discussing whether the British people are to be allowed to elect those who make the laws under the which they are governed. The argument is nothing to do with whether we should get more maternity leave from Madame Papandreou than from Madame Thatcher. That is not the issue.

I recognise that, when the members of the three Front Benches agree, I am in a minority. My next job therefore is to explain to the people of Chesterfield what we have decided. I will say first, "My dear constituents, in future you will be governed by people whom you do not elect and cannot remove. I am sorry about it. They may give you better creches and shorter working hours but you cannot remove them."

I know that it sounds negative but I have always thought it positive to say that the important thing about democracy is that we can remove without bloodshed the people who govern us. We can get rid of a Callaghan, a Wilson or even a right hon. Lady by internal processes. We can get rid of the right hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major). But that cannot be done in the structure that is proposed. Even if one likes the policies of the people in Europe, one cannot get rid of them.

Secondly, we say to my favourite friends, the Chartists and suffragettes, "All your struggles to get control of the ballot box were a waste of time. We shall be run in future by a few white persons, as in 1832." The instrument, I might add, is the Royal Prerogative of treaty making. For the first time since 1649 the Crown makes the laws--advised, I admit, by the Prime Minister.

We must ask what will happen when people realise what we have done. We have had a marvellous debate about Europe, but none of us has discussed our relationship with the people who sent us here. Hon. Members have expressed views on Albania and the Baltic states. I have been dazzled by the knowledge of the continent of which we are all part. No one has spoken about how he or she got here and what we were sent here to do.

If people lose the power to sack their Government, one of several things happens. First, people may just slope off. Apathy could destroy democracy. When the turnout drops below 50 per cent., we are in danger.

The second thing that people can do is to riot. Riot is an old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong. It is difficult for an elected person to admit it, but the riot at Strangeways produced some prison reforms. Riot has historically played a much larger part in British politics than we are ever allowed to know.

Thirdly, nationalism can arise. Instead of blaming the treaty of Rome, people say, "It is those Germans," or, "It is the French." Nationalism is built out of frustration that people feel when they cannot get their way through the ballot box. With nationalism comes repression. I hope that it is not pessimistic--in my view it is not--to say that democracy hangs by a thread in every country of the world. Unless we can offer people a peaceful route to the resolution of injustices through the ballot box, they will not listen to a House that has blocked off that route.

There are many alternatives open to us. One hon. Member said that he was young and had not fought in the war. He looked at a new Europe. But there have been five Europes this century. There was the one run by the King, the Kaiser and the Tsar--they were all cousins, so that was very comfortable. They were all Queen Victoria's grandsons, and there was no nonsense about human rights when Queen Victoria's grandsons repressed people. Then there was the Russian revolution. Then there was the inter-war period. Then there was the Anglo-Soviet alliance.

Then there was the cold war. Now we have a Boris Yeltsin who has joined the Monday Club. There have been many Europes. This is not the only Europe on offer.
I understand that my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) is a democratic federalist, as is my hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire, North-East (Mr. Barnes). They want an American-type constitution for Europe. It could be that our laws would hang on which way the Albanian members voted. I could not complain about that, because that is democracy, but it is unworkable. It is like trying to get an elephant to dance through a minefield, but it would be democratic.

Another way would be to have a looser, wider Europe. I have an idea for a Commonwealth of Europe. I am introducing a Bill on the subject. Europe would be rather like the British Commonwealth. We would work by consent with people. Or we could accept this ghastly proposal, which is clumsy, secretive, centralised, bureaucratic and divisive. That is how I regard the treaty of Rome. I was born a European and I will die one, but I have never put my alliance behind the treaty of Rome. I object to it. I hate being called an anti-European. How can one be anti-European when one is born in Europe? It is like saying that one is anti-British if one does not agree with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. What a lot of nonsense it is.

I ask myself why the House is ready to contemplate abandoning its duties, as I fear it is. I was elected 41 years ago this month. This Chamber has lost confidence in democracy. It believes that it must be governed by someone else. It is afraid to use the powers entrusted to it by its constituents. It has traded power for status. One gets asked to go on the telly if one is a Member of Parliament. The Chamber does not want to use its power. It has accepted the role of a spectator and joined what Bagehot called the dignified part of the constitution, leaving the Crown, under the control of the Prime Minister, to be the Executive part.

If democracy is destroyed in Britain, it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights.

Therefore, there is only one answer. If people are determined to submit themselves to Jacques Delors, Madam Papandreou and the Council of Ministers, we must tell the people what is planned. If people vote for that, they will all have capitulated. Julius Caesar said, "We are just merging our sovereignty." So did William the Conqueror. It is not possible to support the Government's motion. I have told the Chief Whip that I cannot support the Labour amendment.

I invite the House to vote against the Government's motion and not to support a motion which purports to take us faster into a Community which cannot reflect the aspirations of those who put us here. That is not a nationalist argument, nor is it about sovereignty. It is a democratic argument, and it should be decisive in a democratic Chamber.

The Great Deception Continues

One of the main themes of our membership of the European Union is that it has been based on a gargantuan lie. Our entry was a lie, arguments for our continuing membership are generally lies and a referendum campaign for our exit will be shrouded in lies.

The problem with deception though as is widely acknowledged that the only person you end up deceiving is yourself. With this in mind I turn to Norman Tebbit's latest column in the Telegraph. In some quarters he appears to be viewed as a so-called "sound Tory" - for example he's highly critical of Cameron and is seemingly a supporter of Ukip:

How I wish that someone in the No10 circle could understand that there might be a better approach to winning the election than a mud-slinging exercise to expose the real or imaginary personal shortcomings of Mr Farage and just hoping that Labour will passively surrender.

Yet further down the article, in response to comments on his blog, he writes this rather revealing paragraph:

As usual Amos 47 banged on about the Single European Act. As I have explained before, that was designed to make a reality of the single market. Until then any member state could veto any action to open its markets to other members, notably against British exporter of services such as insurance and banking. It also gave us a chance to undo foolish decisions by our predecessors in Government.

And therein lies the classic deception - or self-denial - of a Tory, depending on how you view it. The SEA was not a single market treaty but instead part of a process to further integrate the member states into the EU, a clue given explicitly in its title.

Its origins lie with Altiero Spinelli who in 1984 via his Draft Treaty establishing the European Union proposed a massive and bold leap forward in European integration. So bold was this leap forward that for tactical reasons it was decided to split the draft into two separate treaties which happened 5 years apart. Thus it became the SEA (part 1) and Maastricht (part 2). One can see for example Article 3 from the original 1984 draft:

The citizens of the Member States shall ipso facto be citizens of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be dependent upon citizenship of a Member State; it may not be independently acquired or forfeited. Citizens of the Union shall take part in the political life of the Union in the forms laid down by this Treaty, enjoy the rights granted to them by the legal system of the Union and be subject to its laws. 

 ...which then went on to appear in Maastricht. Even some Tory MPs subsequently acknowledged the significance of the SEA and regretted its passing through Parliament. Peter Tapsell said: "We didn't give it the attention we should have done."

The second assertion by Tebbit is the implication that the abolition of the veto was a benefit, giving the then Tory government the chance to "undo foolish decisions of the past" created by vetoes. One is staggered by his naivety if he believes that. Abolishing the veto is the holy grail of EU integration as it transforms an intergovernmental organisation into a supranational one. Jean Monnet abhorred the right of veto. The SEA lead to the biggest-ever number of "competences" on which national vetoes would be abolished - it was a treaty precisely because it involved so much surrender of powers to Brussels.

Thus Tebbit's comment that it was designed to make "a reality of the single market" is a lack of candidness that fails to acknowledge that the EU is not an economic project but a political project disguised as an economic one. A lack of candidness that has lead to the collapse of the Tory party as illustrated by this article in the same paper:

....the party's own MPs openly admit [membership figures] could be lower than 100,000, around half Labour’s membership. Speak to those in the party outside Westminster, and they will tell you the branches out in the country are withering, and this could cost David Cameron an outright majority at the next election.

A collapse of the Tories, or indeed of any credible alternative, leads to a vacuum - one that inevitably gets filled which, as Political Betting starkly shows via this graph, leads to a rise of the others:

Mrs Thatcher eventually acknowledged the deception and real intent of the SEA - albeit too late, how revealing that a party that is so intent on admiring her can't bring themselves to do the same.

Battlelines Drawn?

"The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again" George Santayana

For part of this afternoon, I've been reading the two-day debate in Parliament in 1991 which took place before the [EU] Intergovernmental Conference to produce what would become known as the 'Maastricht' treaty. It's fascinating stuff which often beggars belief - the same old arguments but more importantly the utter arrogance. It is a goldmine of quotes (some of which I'll add to my sidebar later). Here are just a few examples:

[Douglas] Hurd: Norway has not yet made a decision on whether she wants to enter the Community. She held a referendum that went the wrong way, but my hon. Friend is right in thinking that Norway may find an opportunity to reconsider. I do not yet know. 

And:

Mr. Cash : [Mr. Kaufman] said that, when he went to the European Parliament in 1987, he was, to say the least, a reluctant European. Could he explain how, in the following five or six years, he has made such a massive transformation? Is it because he is hoping that there will be a socialist Europe?

 And:

Mr. Edward Heath: Today we must welcome the fact that the three major parties in this country all agree about the importance of the Community... It is in the interests of our businesses to have a single currency. Imagine what would happen if the rest of the Community had a single currency, and we were the only country without it. What would happen to our business men and our investment? The consequences would be unthinkable.

And: 

Rev. Ian Paisley: I also took part in the vote in the House in 1972. It comes ill from the lips of  [Mr. Heath] to say that he had a mandate to do what he did. I remember the cursing and threats--I saw one hon. Member being hammered over the head with an Order Paper. There was certainly no democracy in the House when it took that vital vote to go into Europe. Every hon. Member who took part in the debate knows that perfectly well. 

In just two days of debate, the sham of our so-called representative democracy was laid bare 21 years ago. Ted Heath correctly points out all three major parties agree with our membership. We were taken in on a lie, our continuing membership is based on lies, if not the complete truth - yet those in Parliament 'decide' that is in our interests regardless - that it believes that we must be governed by someone else - MP's giving power away lent to them temporarily by the voters.

As such, as Witterings from Witney consistently argues we now live in a form elected dictatorship - a view shared by Thatcher in the above debate:

Now, it looks to me as if three parties will be for a single currency and for sacrificing a great deal of the work that it has previously been the right of Parliament to do. How are the people to make their views known in this absence of choice? That was the particular point. My right hon. Friend will remember that our right hon. Friend the noble Lord Hailsham, made an interesting speech on elective dictatorship.

It's with this in mind that I refer to Cameron's article in the Telegraph (published Sunday) yet again promising a referendum (we've been here before) despite ruling out an in/out one a couple of days ago:

The Prime Minister uses an article in The Sunday Telegraph to say that Britain is in danger of getting swamped by EU legislation and bureaucracy which he would like to see scrapped. He makes clear for the first time that changes will need the “full-hearted support of the British people” down the line and adds: “For me the two words 'Europe’ and 'referendum’ can go together.” 

 'Real change' he calls it, but:

Mr Cameron argues that an in or out referendum is not the right choice because the “vast majority of the British people” wants changes to the current relationship with the EU.

Today was Armed Forces day, an opportunity to thank those who gave their lives trying to defend a system which meant that future generations could change their government without having to do the same. Cameron is one of many that is an example of how that sacrifice was betrayed.

The consequence of which are the rules of the game no longer apply, as Autonomous Mind writes

Dear reader, if you want power then it has to be taken back.  Our servants have made themselves our masters.  They will not give power away.  Rejecting these people is not enough, we have to defeat them.  The game has to be played differently.  The rules of the game no longer apply.

Cameron, Parliament nor the main parties are any longer the future - we have to defeat all of them.

It Was Twenty Years Ago...Yesterday

I didn't get time to blog, but yesterday marked 20 years since the 1992 election when the Tories won their last ever majority. The election itself was notable for many reasons; the War of Jennifer's Ear, the infamous Sun front page and Major campaigning on his soap box. And as the picture above illustrates (shamelessly nicked from political betting) the exit polls got the predictions spectacularly wrong.

1992 also marked the terminal decline of the Tory party as divisions, particularly over Europe, wreaked havoc from which they have never recovered. Diehard party members and supporters departed en masse, donations and subscriptions collapsed between 1992 and 1997. Labour's win in 1997 was less to do with Tories switching sides but that they stayed at home instead.

On a personal note, I remember 1992 well. It was the first election I ever stayed up all night to watch - I missed out being able to vote in it by just 2 months. It also marked the beginning of my journey of eurosceptisim, as the next 18 months left their mark on our country in the form of Maastricht and the ERM crisis.

20 years on and still they can't win an election. Couldn't happen to nicer chaps. Bastards.