Cameron is a sham…

If the Conservative party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. No commercial organisation or product so completely fails to fulfil the claims made on its packaging.

The Conservative party claims to stand for national independence, tradition, law and order, rigorous education, low taxation and light regulation, strong armed forces, the family and marriage. Its very name commits it to the defence of the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Under the leadership of David Cameron the party claims to be both rejuvenated and to have discovered a new form of conservatism somehow acceptable to modern Britain. But open the tin, and what do we find?

Let us take national independence. This is the party which enthusiastically took Britain into the Common Market, campaigned for it to stay in the Common Market, negotiated the Single Market and the Single European Act and the Treaty of Maastricht, repeatedly giving away chunks of independence. It is the party which, after two years posing as ‘sceptical’ and dishonestly promising a referendum on the issue, last November accepted the European Constitution as a fait accompli. Any alert observer had known for years that the promise could not be kept without a fundamental challenge to Britain’s membership of the EU. It is hard to believe that Mr Cameron did not know this, or that he did not know his promises of safeguards against further EU advances were meaningless and politically illiterate. As for tradition, the Tories have failed utterly to defend the House of Lords against Labour efforts to abolish the hereditary peerage and replace the House of Lords with a chamber of whipped party placemen.