You are in:
- Archives » 2006 » May 2006
Sounds Alright
Sometimes support can come from unlikely quarters. Conservative "wet" Matthew Parris' column in the Sunday Times is meant to frighten readers away from David Cameron's New Tories, but it might just have the opposite effect.
Entitled "Welcome to Cameron's Europe-hating and Pentagon-loving party" it lists the ways in which the Tories aren't quite the jolly, BBC-friendly centrists Mr Cameron is keen to make them appear.
Tough talk on the war on terror, notably an essay in the Spectator warning that "walking away" from the assault launched on the west by fascist terrorists isn't an option. The rise of MP and columnist Michael Gove, so often scornful of appeasement, whether in Northern Ireland or the Middle East. The choice of William Hague as foreign secretary over two old-school Iraq wobblers. Hague, a former party leader himself, is a passionate Atlanticist and has compared the jihadi threat to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. He has also cast strong doubts on Britain's continuing membership of the European Convention on Human Rights.
All "pure Pentagon", writes Harris, but we'd disagree - there are plenty of ordinary Britons who see terrorists and their supporters celebrating the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the London bombs, who watched threatening protests against the Danish cartoons with horror and disgust, and who think that what Hague and his colleagues have written seems like fairly obvious truth.
And as for Europe, Parris adds that the New Tory frontbench displays a "visceral irritation with continental Europe."
As Cameron has said little about his position, Parris writes, the media has been happy to assume that the new Tory leader is "personally rather mellow" on foreign affairs. There's no reason to suspect this: On foreign issues, if on nothing else, Cameron and his team could be the most right-wing front bench in decades.
"I get no sense at all that Cameron is a Euro-moderate posing as a sceptic," he concludes, "I have sensed that, like his foreign and defence spokesmen, he is genuinely scornful, both of the ambitions and of the competence of the EU."
Sounds great - probably the best argument for supporting the Tories EURSOC has read to date. Where do we sign up?
