Johann Hari: Ignore the propaganda and spin – the Tory party hasn't changed
Cameron can tuck away his party on a poster, but not in parliament
David Cameron made his own face the apex of the Conservative Party’s first burst of electioneering. He stared out across Britain’s high streets and motorway overpasses with a giant airbrushed glower of concern, while the word ‘Conservative’ was tucked away on the posters in small letters, like a slightly embarrassing smell. There’s a reason for this: the reality of the Conservative Party today severely punctures Cameron’s central pitch – and he knows it.
Since he became leader, he has been telling us “the Conservative Party has changed”. But is it true? Let’s start with the issue that Cameron said was “terrific evidence” of a “different Conservative Party” – global warming. Until 2005, he had never mentioned the subject, except to mock wind farms as “giant bird-blenders” and to demand “a massive road-building programme” in defiance of all environmental sense. But then he abruptly announced he was the true champion of this cause and people should “vote blue to go green.” The influential website ConservativeHome thought the New Cameron didn’t speak for the Party, so last month they commissioned a poll of the candidates selected to fight the most winnable Tory seats. They were asked to rank nineteen issues facing Britain in order of importance – and global warming came at the very bottom. The soon-to-be Conservative MPs think radically altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere is less important than imprisoning even more people and reclaiming powers from Scotland.
But even this is misleading. The party doesn’t just accord a low priority to deal with this problem – most actively deny it exists. The Spectator’s political editor, James Forsyth, reports: “At Tory country-house gatherings, global warming scepticism has replaced Europe as the issue of the day.” Tim Montgomerie, the head of ConservativeHome and physical embodiment of the Tory id, says: “I’m confident the sceptics are going to win. It’s for Cameron to decide how he’s going to get out of this – he’s lost the battle already.” This has only grown over the past month, when a handful of the tens of thousands of scientists working on this issue have been shown to have made a few mistakes. The massed ranks of the Tory party have seized on this as “proof” that releasing massive amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere won’t cause the planet to get warmer. The true message is: vote blue, screw green.
How about opposing the stale old prejudices the Party used to marinate itself in? In his mid-twenties Cameron went on a week long “jolly” to white supremacist South Africa, breaking sanctions against the regime, paid for by a shadowy pro-Aparthied lobbying group. But he says he regrets that and the party now abhors racism. There’s a fascinating insight into whether this is true in the new book ‘True Blue: Strange Tales From A Tory Nation.’ For the past three years, the journalists Chris Horne and David Matthews have volunteered for the Conservative Party, to uncover what its activists really think. Matthews is a warm, charismatic – and black.
Everywhere he went, he was treated with suspicion and contempt. Horne writes: “The proportion of people who gave him a wide berth was around three quarters, and it was hard to escape the conclusion that this was because he was black?. The Tories we met seemed fantastically uncomfortable around David.” Even in the most liberal Tory surroundings, like inner London, there was a “constant, almost knee-jerk mild racism,” where they felt the need to obsessively talk about immigration and race in disparaging ways in his presence. At a typical Tory dinner they attended, Cecil Parkinson said of Africa: “God decided to create the most beautiful continent on earth – wide rivers, fertile land, and every kind of natural resource you can think of. An angel said to God – if you make a place like that then it will completely dominate the earth. And God said – wait until you see the people I am going to put in it.” The assembled party members loved it, and said they missed good old Ian Smith, the last white supremacist ruler of Rhodesia.
When they were campaigning against the Liberal Democrat Susan Kramer, they were repeatedly told to emphasize she was an “outsider” and a “foreigner.” Horne asked what it meant, and he was told: “She’s a Jewess, but we aren’t allowed to say that? So all we can say is that she got off the train from Hungary.”
Everywhere they went, the Party’s candidates and members said Cameron’s claims to have reformed are mere spin to win the election. For example, Ian Oakley, who was selected to be Tory candidate for Watford, bragged: “Last year it was all green this, and all green that? all that bollocks. People just want lots and lots and lots of cheap petrol. And we are going to give it to them.” The book alleges that he then said that he planned to make many trips to Israel where he would take a machine gun and a flame-thrower to destroy Palestinian villages. (He was later forced to resign, ove an unrelated matter.) Yes, there are some nutters in every party, but Horne and Matthews found similar reservoirs of prejudice everywhere they looked in Conservatism.
Indeed, any minor attempt to put meat on Cameron’s professed agenda is being met with projectile vomiting from the guts of the party. When Joanne Cash – a pregnant woman – was imposed on the constituency of Westminster North, there was a rebellion by the local party that forced Cash to resign. They said she wouldn’t be able to have a child and work at the same time. The local party agent Jonathan Fraser-Howells reportedly fumed to her: “It makes me sick seeing pregnant stomachs around.” (He denies saying it.) Cash was only reinstated with great effort, after the Cameroons realised what a biting PR disaster it was.
Next week, I’ll look at how two other forces – cash from the City, and evangelical Christians – are also distorting the Party’s agenda.
Of course, you might say that none of this matters. Cameron is the leader, and he is sincerely committed to a modernized agenda. But there’s two flaws with this argument. Cameron can tuck away the Tory Party on a poster, but he can’t tuck them away in parliament: they will be the source of his power. A leader can’t defy this Party’s core instincts for long, especially when he has (at best) a small majority. Every barking-right backbencher will have to be wooed and soothed and fed red meat to get legislation through. Cameron will be accountable to deeply retrograde forces – and they will demand policies that worsen poverty or global warming or prejudice.
Even more importantly, Cameron’s commitment to this agenda is shaky and superficial anyway. Remember: his reaction to the Great Crash was to tell the City “we must not let the left use this as an excuse to wreck an important part of the British and world economy” and to start preaching hardcore Thatcherite slash-and-trash economics. He told the Spectator: “If you want to know if I’m a Tory, ask John Redwood” – the global warming denying, market fundamentalist Vulcan who represents the ugliest fringe of the Major years. When he thought an election was looming, the Tory leader decided to make it a front-of-the-window policy to give a huge tax cut to the richest 3000 estates in Britain – a revelation of his priorities that should cause any claim he is “progressive” to be greeted with belly-laughs.
The evidence suggests that when he is faced with a challenge, Cameron rushes right back up the road to Damascus – into the loving arms of an unreformed right-wing party.
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http://www.greenexplorer.ovi.com/getins
They seem totally unable to look at the bigger picture and move beyond their discredited right wing dogma...sad when the future of the planet is at stake.
No-one has the time for a forensic analysis of this third-rate sixth-form essay, but one of his 'points' in particular cries out to be shot down in flames.
He says............."when a handful of the tens of thousands of scientists working on this issue [global-warming] have been shown to have made a few mistakes"........
For 'handful', let's correctly say about 31,000. And for 'a few mistakes', let's correctly say that a few mistakes actually equates to conscious distortion, manipulation, and cherry-picking of actual climate data.
And let's not forget the desperate attempts to silence those who question the IPCC's political dogma, and the illegal suppression of FOI act requests from anyone who asks to see the original data....most have which has spookily been 'lost' or 'erased' by the IPCC's sympathetic so-called 'scientists'.
Once again, Johann Hari has proved that he is consistently a far-left propagandist whose only audience is at least as far-left as he is. He may be happy with that, but if his ambition is to be regarded as a true journalist, he needs to drop his obviously far-leftist bent like a hot potato.
Cameron will be in a position even worse than Thatcher/Major where it will be economic suicide for the UK not to go along with the rest of the EU but knowing that his own colleagues will destroy him for doing so.
Tell me it is so, Mr Hari!
Callmedave has convinced me he is what he seems to be; the sort of leftist dummy who swallows the warmist scam, advocates all women/homosexual/black short-lists and thinks that our vibrant, super efficient public sector should be greatly enlarged. Your thoughtful and dispassionate musings give me some hope, however.
I think if this were an employment tribunal, this article could be used as evidence of 'constructive dismissal'.
2. There are some seriously dippy doo members of the Labour Party too. They think that talking mantras changes economies. It doesn't. It creates hot air. You need to take a really hard look at how much money your party wastes through promoting talking shops. And you need to express horror at the pointless waste of 85% of it.........
3. I want you to put in print a coherent strategy for how Britain is NOT going to go bankrupt. And if you can't you are not going to trash people who propose doing something about the ballooning deficit. I know, I know, you'll run Britain's deficit up until the election, then you'll slash and burn. What's so moral about that, Mr pie-in-the-sky self-important little scribbler??
4. Please continue highlighting the racist aspects of small minorities in the Tory party. I highlighted one in Cheadle a few years ago and suggested he shouldn't be allowed to stand for Parliament again after smearing his opponent disgracefully in the local media. I don't think he is.....
5. If you want to continue to be a journalist, I suggest you take a long hard education course in the realities of climate science. You are the most ignorant, self-important windbag in that field I read and I read a lot about that subject. The IPCC is a seriously corrupt organisation, the science has been hyped for scaremongering (a serious charge) and opponents belittled and attacked in a totalitarian manner. I hope you realise it is the same as calling you a poof, suggesting you be sent to be 'cured' and calling you a fat ignorant bastard if you open your mouth about the subject again..........
Are you intelligent enough to understand what I am saying?? I am saying that prejudice oozes from your core, it's just that YOUR prejudices are different to those of right wing Tories.
Yours are just as objectionable.
The reason most people don't put climate change on the top of their list of priorities is because WE ARE BANKRUPT. People are living with the threat of redundancy and losing their homes because the useless bunch of self-serving idiots purporting to be "socialist" got into power. PC initiatives and other such claptrap have done ZERO to deal with racism. In fact, the New Labour monster has created a culture where bashing the English (witness the Scots being broadcast on TV shouting about Scotland for the Scots) is OK. All that does is promote social division. (I'm married to a Scot and have never experienced any anti-English attitudes whenever I have visited, but I don't think the state broadcaster should be allowed to show this stuff without questioning the people who shout such things.)
I would like to point out that the Labour party hasn't changed either. When I was growing up, I used to ask adults why we didn't have a Labour government. "Oh my God," they'd say. "You can't have a Labour government. They can't be trusted with the economy". And you know what? They were right.
Why not vote for a change in the system where not voting for horseshit means you have to vote for bullshit?
Only the Lib Dems want to change the way politics works. The other two are just same old same old.
Now I am sure that you will simply label him racist and move on and perhaps 'New Labour' no longer need his vote but the point is that he genuinely feels betrayed and that he has no voice. He is a very intelligent man. He's never going to vote BNP or for any extremist party but one thing that he does know is that New Labour lied and changed.
"So the Tory party hasn't changed. Good, at least the voters will know what it stands for."
Yes - it stands for maintaining the privileges of the priveliged, as it always has done.
I'm sure this will do wonders to help your working class mate!
Drivel, what is it with you left wing journalists are you in a club because you all preach from the same
hymn sheet f**k the UK and its people we have an agenda for you to come and join us.
Does this paper have a death wish allowing this type of journalist to spew out his left wing crap.
So we have right-wing screw-the-world-I'm-alright-Jack reactionaries who will vote a vacuous party like Tories who have relied on public hatred of nuLab and substantial amounts of spin to try to secure power just to give Brown a slap in the kisser; the AGW deniers coming out from the wood piles again with their over-exaggerated claims of hoax and scandal regarding modelisation of complex adaptive systems (you try doing it better!) and the twists that have been put on this by those who abhor the idea of being accountable for our collective activities; and those who lay claim to privilege and amassing wealth by whatever means in bouts of selfish self-congratulation and desperately seek a party who will protect that embedded silver spoon.
The Tories have blood on their hands as do nuLab for the attack on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Tories have not challenged the growing surveillance of the nuLab state (nor have they made any promises about reversing such laws and violations of civil liberties), they can spin away their racism, sexism, and homophobia, but it is thinly veiled even amongst the more "progressive" Tory councillors, and as for any thoughts about helping those less privileged than themselves - no ways! rather let the market forces take care of them because it was their fault anyway. The Tory party is just as despicable in its own way as the nuLab turned out to be.
I do hope that PR is brought in, that the LibDems can get their act together to bring out a coherent set of policies and that the smaller more independent parties get a chance to raise their profiles. The Tories and nuLab both however need to be flushed like the excrement they stand for and, in the case of the Tories, seem to represent.
Evangelical Christians? Seriously? You're not thinking of America's Republican party by any chance?
As for cash from the City, I can't help feeling you've spiked your guns by writing so often about how the need for donations hamstrings every party - how do you plan to spin it as a uniquely Tory problem? Ah well, I'll just have to wait and see.
"Horne asked what it meant, and he was told: 'She’s a Jewess, but we aren’t allowed to say that.'"
Rather like the Labour candidates for constituencies with large Muslim populations who constantly referred to Michael Howard's being Jewish when he was Tory leader? Come to think of it, has Labour ever had a Jewish leader?
"a huge tax cut to the richest 3000 estates in Britain"
This is the oldest logical fallacy in the book - the rich pay the most tax (rightly as I'm sure you'd agree) so a tax cut benefits the rich most. Is that a reason not to cut taxes?
More generally, though, I can't help feeling that this article is a classic case of projection. Your own party (for such they clearly are, even before I have seen your next two articles in their service) got elected by calling itself "New Labour" and finding a dozen people for the front bench who spoke in sentences and didn't look too uncomfortable in a suit, but in reality 90% of them were still the same old class warriors who saw the tax system as a means to take revenge on anyone more successful than them - therefore you naturally imagine that any other party claiming to have changed must be playing the same trick.
"radically altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere"
"releasing massive amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere"
Cold, hard, scientific FACT:
Total human greenhouse gas contributions add up to LESS than 0.3% of the greenhouse effect.
Read that figure again, Johann - LESS than 0.3%!
Source: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/green
Now will you PLEASE stop BANGING ON and ON and ON about climate change and global warming?! You don't understand climate science; you don't know what you are talking about; you just spout lefty-greeny propaganda without checking your facts. And the FACTS are not on your side, they are on the side of the sceptics.
I don't like the colour of the Tories' politics any more than you do, Johann, but on this one issue they happen - perhaps quite accidentally, and for the wrong reasons - to be absolutely right; there are far more important issues to be focusing on the climate change.
That's better :o)
You cannot fight the record: if these vile, racist, anti-Semetic, anti-Scientific, homophobic, anti-environmental things were said, and reported, then there it is.
Labour may be pathetic. New Labour may be contemptible but you cannot imagine them this effluent flowing from their mouths.
No, one cannot imagine Labour saying those things. But then the Labour party are responsible for waging a war of cultural-genocide against the Brit'. English, Scot, Welsh and Irish voters (as far as I know), didn't write to their MPs asking - nah, (demanding), that Britain be turned into a non-cohesive, multicultural state that divides, breeds terrorist, and puts those who Built Britain out of work.
Perhaps you wrote Gordon with such a request, if so, I'll wager that you, were the only one.
Orchestrated cultural genocide is a very serious crime against any people. Labour are truly monsters. Other political parties who object, do so from conscience. Clearly, Labour lack a moral-centre. In a clinical sense, self-loathing Labour MPs who support the indigenous-culling of Brits' (via various methods of attrition) make Hitler's ambitions and aspirations appear amateur.
Savile row suits offer no disguise. Labour want the Brit' to die. Those who support the weapon of multiculturalism are used by Brown & Co for their weak-minded views moreover, their belief that preference is racism.
But my biggest problem is not Cameron, but his party. The Tory party are given no clues as to what they would do for someone like me. They don't seem to care much for students in higher education, they certainly have no solution to the problem of unemployment and I generally fear for our planet if we have a party governing that doesn't care for the issue of global warming.
He presumably confuses the word prejudice with those he defines by his own ill informed assumed baseless opinion or put another way his Prejudice.
And do remember Global Warming was so difficult to prove or move from theory to fact they now hum another tune based on a popular ditty by Vivaldi but renamed Climate Change.
I've read this sentence four times now, and I still cannot make head nor tail of it. Actually, anthropogenic climate change has been rather easy to demonstrate (proof is something for courts of law, not science - even gravity has not been proven, although nobody recently has floated off unaccounted for) and the evidence for this is already around us, without the need for models to develop future probability scenarios. What seems to be difficult is how the deniers respond to robust, repeatedly verified scientific evidence: rather than actually coming up with counter-evidence, rather than publishing alternative hypotheses and backing these up with peer reviewed research, rather than be truly sceptical such that, when faced with evidence to the contrary, shift their positions, would instead prefer to latch onto minor (really minor in the scope of the amount of work that has been going on since the 1980s) inconsistencies and errors (which happens in all domains and disciplines, even mathematics, engineering and certainly journalism and politics) and try to make a meal out of it.
So, snotcricket, was there something that you were trying to convey in the sentence I quoted, and if so, can you please be more specific because I really don't get it try as I might.
So we are all loonies are we.
Thanks for that.
Got any other gems ?