Glad not to be Grayling

April 4, 2010 — simonashall

Close your mouth, Chris. No, close it. Before you say anything else.

Personally, I blame David Davis. When he went off on his strange flight of fancy over the 42 days detention extension, he prompted a flurry of activity to try and fill his place as Shadow Home Secretary. Davis is on the opposite side of the party to me but he’s an able, likeable man and possesses support from sections of the party that DC could do with right now. But his visible rejection of DC’s leadership and the shocking manner in which he chose to express it was a selfish act that debarred him from high office for the forseeable future.

While the shadow ministers in the treasury are a strong team and William Hague great in foreign affairs, we’ve struggled through Dominic Grieve and Chris Grayling to find someone of Davis’s stature to fill the role at the home office/justice department. My feeling is that Grayling has always been on the edge of his envelope as Shadow Home Secretary and his ill-judged and utterly stupid comments about the rights of Bed and Breakfast owners to turn away gay couples are indicative of this. It’s not the first time he’s opened his mouth without thinking and caused problems for the leadership.

I’m not going to argue about the moral rights and wrongs of the B&B issue because they are not the point. We have laws in place that mark the boundaries society has laid down. Occasionally they change and occasionally people get left behind but we all have to obey them. Chris Grayling knows this and suggesting that B&B owners ought to be able to turn anyone away is almost giving them carte blanche to break the law, which says quite rightly that businesses must offer services without prejudice to anyone.

I don’t believe faith groups - or anyone else - ought to be able to “opt out” of the law on grounds of “conviction”. The “I don’t need anyone to tell me what to think, I’ll do what I want” attitude is one of the root causes of so many problems in society – from the young people who won’t respect authority to the uber-wealthy who think that money will exempt them from accountability. Conservatives don’t support the anarchists at G10 meetings who want to opt out the legal framework capitalism lays down because of what they believe - nor should we support individuals who want to opt out of the European Convention of Human Rights because of their beliefs. The ECHR has a lot of nonsense in it – but not in this area.

Grayling was attempting to curry favour with the Daily Mail view that Christianity is being persecuted in Britain and offer succour to those people of faith who feel that they are being led along into a secular society that no longer recognises their values or gives them leaway to put their faith first. I have some sympathy with that view – but not where it impedes on the rights of others acting within the law. That Grayling doesn’t see a distinction here makes me believe that his intervention was ad hoc and not properly thought out.

To sack him now would be an over-reaction and would be interpreted by the right of the party as an attack by the leadership on free speech. But I sincerely hope that if we have a majority on May 7, DC will look elsewhere for his Home Secretary. I believe Iain Duncan Smith would be superb choice for the role if he feels able to. If not, Nick Herbert has impressed me greatly as Defra shadow and such a promotion would be entirely appropriate in my view.

Either way, gaffe-prone Grayling has got to go.

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Don’t bank on it

December 2, 2009 — admin

While people decry banking bonuses, they are ignoring the real threat posed to our financial advantage by the appointment of Michael Barnier as Commissioner for the Single Market. I’m furious that for the sake of having some nonentity like Baroness Ashton appointed to a puffed-up, non-elected position mandated by a treaty that most of Europe wants to bin but is being denied the right to vote on, Labour has thrown the City of London at the mercy of the Franco-German EU axis that wants to get rid of it.

The City of London has been a barrier to French and German dominance of Europe ever since the Napoleonic Wars – once again, Labour has failed to understand the historical context of modern events and only sees the city in narrow political terms. It is, they reason, a bastion of public school wealth creation, a means through which the country’s wealth is manipulated from those who have earned it to those who control the City and its markets.

Of course, the reality is that the City is the difference – the difference between the UK and every other nation in Europe. It is a global, worldwide, established and mature marketplace that is one of the few reasons why our strained and fading nation still merits any kind of recognition on the world stage (along with Trident and our geographical locus). By handing the regulation of such an important asset over to its opponents, Gordon Brown has plunged it into a fight for competitive survival – one I’m sure it will win – right at the very time it needs to be focussing on helping Britain recover from the recession he helped to plunge us into.

He doesn’t realise the damage that threatening the health of the City could have. Company headquarters, overseas investment and many, many jobs could be at risk if the City is strangled or seen to be under attack. The problem with Brown, as we saw at PMQs today, is that he is suddenly receiving some vaguely sensible advice. But he’s too arrogant to admit it’s not his own doing and is starting to believe that he himself has aquired a Midas touch.

Not so, as I’m sure many city managers would be happy to tell him. Not that Labour listens to the City now that its political money seems to be going elsewhere.

Posted in Economy, Europe, Labour. Tags: , , , , , , , . No Comments »

A Grand Evening

November 20, 2009 — admin
John Redwood addresses the Woking Conservative dinner

John Redwood addresses the Woking Conservative dinner

I have just got back from a superb Annual Grand Dinner for Woking Conservatives that was not only fantastically well-attended by councillors and party members alike but where there were some star turns too. Obviously none of them were on the record so it would be most remiss of me to report their words on here but it wouldn’t be much of post to talk about nothing so I’ll make some observations to which I’m sure none would object.

I’ll be honest, John Redwood (now added to blogroll) is a very able man but quite a bit to the right of me generally. His views on Europe are very well-documented and it’s no surprise that he kicked off his remarks on this subject. What I was pleasantly surprised at though was the time he took to speak about social issues; perhaps not something he is generally noted for. He spoke about the work Iain Duncan Smith (who spent this evening addressing Harlow Conservatives according to @halfon4harlow) has done and I think has a genuine committment towards opportunity and advancement for people. He’s not quite ready to join the Tory Reform Group yet, but I’ve seen another dimension to his hard-nosed image.

I sat on a table with Nirj Deva MEP and spoke to him and his political assistant at some length about Europe and European issues. I was pleased to discover that he is a big fan of Woking but also to understand a little more about the Conservative stance on the EU within the European group, which often gets overshadowed by Westminster debate. It would be unfair of me to recall the conversation in detail but needless to say the question of committing ourselves to a given position within or outside the current European “bloc” is a good deal more nuanced and sophisticated than perhaps I imagined.

And last of all, there was a very confident and concise speech from Jonathan Lord, who I saw address a large group for the first time since his selection. A few months ago, I said I would never work for a parliamentary candidate who was not local because I couldn’t see how they would know the area well enough to know its people. Apart from the fact that Jonathan is hardly an outsider anyway coming from Guildford, he has totally convinced me that not only is he working hard but enjoying it.

Apart from an engagement last night at Winston Churchill School, the Conservative Dinner tonight, he is at the Horsell and Woodham Branch coffee morning tomorrow morning followed by campaigning in the afternoon. He is getting every bit as stuck in as I hoped our candidate would – and I had pretty high expectations. Keep going Jonathan, you have really spurred on our enthusiasm with your infectious commitment, diligence and clear enjoyment of getting to know Woking and its people. As someone who went through that process myself abeit in a difference capacity seven years ago, I promise that both repay such an approach with interest.

Posted in Conservatives, Roll on 2010, Woking News and Mail. Tags: , , , , , , . No Comments »

Blair ditches project

November 19, 2009 — admin
Herman's not a German but he's supported by them

Herman's not a German but he's supported by them

It’s okay, panic over – Tony Blair will not become President of Europe and we can all sleep a little easier. I don’t imagine for a second that the “winning candidate” – and I use the term advisedly given that I don’t remember receiving a polling card for this particular “election” – is going to do a vastly better job. Herman van Rompuy seems like a unpleasantly devout federalist who talks about standardised taxation and exectly the sorts of things that will have people running to UKIP.

It reinforces my belief that the UK and the EU are increasingly incompatible in terms of their future direction. What pro-EU Conservatives and Liberal Democrats don’t seem to get is that the European ideal is a Franco-Germanic concept designed to ensure those nations’ national interests remain predominant. I don’t blame them for that – for 200 years Britain pursued often brutal foreign policy to ensure our national interests were enforced – but we are surfing over a waterfall if we don’t recognise where the EU path is leading us.

The most scary thing for me is not the single currency, tax regime, foreign policy etc – it is the idea of Mr Rompuy being “named” as the EU leader and “chosen” by other leaders. This is exactly the kind of thing that the Politburo used to announce through Pravda and identical to the way that the Chinese president is “elected”. For me, the worrying thing about the EU is that it is sucking up the democratic mandate further and further from the people it seeks to govern. I can’t accept that this makes Europe safer, more harmonious or prosperous.

Tony Blair as EU President would have been a dreadful thing precisely because he holds the sort of centralising, anti-democratic tendencies that would re-inforce this worrying trend. Voting by region every five years is not democracy – no-one should sit in the European Parliament unless they have been directly elected by voters and I’m still not sure why if the European Commission is necessary it cannot be chosen out of the parliament in the same way as the cabinet in Westminster.

A separate EU presidential election ought to occur if we are to have an EU president. But since the chairman or woman of the EC ought to wield sufficient power, I cannot accept that a president is necessary in addition.

There is so much waste, so much interference and so much anti-democratic instinct in Brussels that DC should ignore it altogether for six years. Then, two years into his second term, he should hold a full EU membership referendum – once Britain has built up her economic and social strength once again – to settle this question once and for all. A strong Britain needs Europe and vice-versa – but my view is that leaving the EU would make us focus on what we as a nation want to be in 2050 and beyond.

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Post-Wall Europe

November 9, 2009 — admin
The Berlin Wall two years before its destruction

The Berlin Wall two years before its destruction

My memories as an 11 year-old of the Berlin Wall crumbling 20 years ago today are a little hazy but such was the importance of the event that it is difficult for anyone to have forgotten those television images altogether. Four years later, my history teacher posited that in the future we would talk about “since the Wall” in much the same way that his generation spoke about “since the War“.

He believed that it was as important a historical event that would shape the future of Europe. To a certain extent he was right; it has paved the way for a unified Europe but a unified Europe is not what everyone wants and hasn’t had the impact on the world that many people thought it would.

If anything, much of Europe has reverted back to its pre-First World War nationalism – Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR are previously communist nations that are now footnotes in historical atlases. We have seen the rise of nationalism in Germany once again, borne out of the realisation that unification was not the emancipation of which many in the East had dreamed. Romania and Bulgaria remain very poor and propped up by EU investment. Albania harbours ethnic and religious conflicts that fed into the Serbian War of 1999.

To me, it seems that once more the victors have written the history books. The end of the Cold War was not, I think precipitated by the victory of capitalism over communism but by a victory of nationalism over empire. I don’t believe that East Germans wanted to be neo-liberal – they wanted to be Germans. Yugoslavs wanted to be Serbians, Croats and Bosnians and Czechs and Slovaks wanted their own nations, not puppet rule from Moscow.

Capitalism and the western standard of living was a bonus, sure; but if that was what eastern Europe had really wanted, would they not have worked to gain that first? Perhaps if they had been better supported by the other nations of Europe, the unified Europe would be a greater force than it has turned out to be.

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