The Progressive

Tories bring their nasty party friends to Manchester

Not content with breaking bread with nasty Euro-extremists in Brussels, it seems that the Tories have invited their strange new bedfellows to attend their Conference in Manchester today, according to the Guardian.
 
David Cameron’s decision to leave the mainstream European centre-right MEP grouping and join up with a ragtag of racists and homophobes - just because they ‘anti-federalist’ has caused much consternation - not just in Labour circles.
 
Rabbi Barry Marcus of London’s Central Synagogue said: “David Cameron has been making overtures to the Jewish community. We need to say: ‘why are you associated with people like this?’ the ideal thing would be to make a statement dissociating himself and the Tories from people like this.”
 
Foreign Secretary David Miliband laid into the Tories at Labour’s conference last week, saying that he was sickened by the fact that ‘not a single Tory batter an eyelid’ at their new racist and homophobic colleagues.
 
With breathtaking chutzpah, Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague has written to Miliband, asking for an apology. Yet, as the Observer’s foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont, made clear in today’s Guardian, Miliband was bang to rights in his criticism of the Latvian the ‘For Fatherland and Freedom’ party’s Waffen-SS annual commemoration march.
 
As Beaumont says: "It is precisely this that the Tories have ignored for the convenience of their political alliances in Europe. They have ignored the real history of the Latvian legion, an organisation that included enthusiastic Nazis culpable in the murder of the country's Jews."
 
If these nasty dregs of the European right do turn up to party with the new friends, the UK Conservatives, in Manchester, I hope they’ll get a rousing reception from local anti-racist, BME, LGBT and faith groups.
 
No wonder, in a little-noticed piece of news on Friday, it emerged that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat CDU party in Germany, has downgraded relations with the Conservatives. Joint policy groups have been scrapped and an annual meeting has been cancelled.
 
It seems David Cameron and Hague are willing to lose influence in Europe, rather than lose face with the Eurosceptics in their own party.
 
Beyond the simple distaste of Cameron's extremely unwelcome bedfellows, beyond the "schoolboy politics" of the Tories, as Miliband called it which marginalises the Tories in Europe, there's perhaps an even more fundamental point about judgment here.
 
David Cameron had the chance to say no to the Eurosceptic extremists in his party. He had the chance to be a major force in the EPP, the biggest MEP group in Brussels - to stay in the centre-right mainstream with Merkel and Sarkozy. But he flunked it.
 
Truth is, Cameron’s new model Tories are just like the old lot. They don’t want to be in the European mainstream, despite what the past weeks and months have taught us about the interdependency of economies, about the need for co-ordinated action to tackle the world’s problems.
 
What does it say about Cameron’s judgment? I’m ashamed of a British political party with these racists and extremists. If he can’t call this one right, surely he can’t be trusted with the future of the economy and our public services.
 
He certainly can’t be trusted to ensure that Britain stays at the heart of Europe, rather than flirting with extremism on the fringes.
 
Mike Katz is a vice-chair of the Jewish Labour Movement

New Conservatives, old danger

From being in the thick of it at Labour Party conference I've gone to being an arm chair observer of the Conservative's conference. Probably a good thing too seeing as the weather (if no one else) has abandoned the Conservatives. But there's no sense of drama. Everything important is happening elsewhere.

Cameron has just made his statement to the Tory faithful in light of Congress' slapdown vote. It is interesting stuff. Very calm but earnest, it must ache having to look that serious and not crack a front-page smile.

God he's slick. Patiently he takes his time to set up the 'people think' points that always end up pointing to an implicit conclusion - "you're better off with the Conservatives". But seriously, "people get nervous when they hear about the fall of capitalism"?! Ha! Only if you're still waiting on a bonus...I just don't see it: people are worried about their savings, their mortgages, their jobs, etc but that doesn't point to a definite ideological anchor.

But that's the Cameron danger. He says "we mustn't let anger cloud our judgment" and that thinly veiled code of "I'm not going to stand here and hammer business, executive pay...don't be silly" sounds vaguely credible. Listen to him, it is incredible. Yesterday Osbourne says that they'll be tough on business, earlier BoJo says they wouldn't. Now Cameron is saying both at the same time!!

After all the rhetorical fluff, and yet his main point of action is to support the Government. Well there you go. Problem sorted. No wonder 36% (Daily Politics poll) think that GB and Darling are better in the crisis, six points up on the Tory duo.

The statement is professional but there's just so much in the background - spending cuts, no action on over zealous bonuses, or billionaire non-doms like Lord Ashcroft.

It may not work as a slogan but everything about this conference smells of New Conservatives, old danger.

Vincenzo Rampulla

The Tories betray their vote-winning instincts

David Cameron's pronouncement that he was 'proud' to support Labour's civil partnership legislation in his address to Tory conference today was met with some rather stony faces in Bournemouth. And his assertion that the NHS was among the 'greatest political achievements in the 20th century' was also given a less than enthusiastic reception by the assembled party faithful. Still, they gave thunderous applause to his crackpot idea of repealing the human rights act and introducing a British bill of rights, a suggestion that was widely derided in the comment pages on its first airing in June. Good to see the Tories can still spot a vote-winning policy when they see one.

You can't hide behind Dave for long

Has anyone noticed how scared the Tories are of, well, other Tories? I doubt it took much focus group work for them to figure out the only Tory that doesn’t scare the pants off the public is their fresh-faced leader.

Therefore Cameron is ubiquitous at this year’s Conference. He made the opening speech on Sunday. Today he went on every media outlet that would have him – morning TV, the Today programme, and Radio Five Live (and they’re just the one’s I happened to hear as I flicked through the channels). And tomorrow he delivers speech number two, his leader’s speech.

You won’t even find that many Tories on the main Tory Conference platform this year. Old Tory stalwarts have been wheeled off to the sidelines to make way for activists, ‘new’ businesspeople and campaigners. You don’t even have to be a Conservative to make it onto this year’s platform, just fill one simple criterion – don’t look like a Tory.

What does this tell us? That the Tory leadership know what we all know - there is only one Tory with public appeal, and that’s because he’s good at saying nothing.

It also tells us that they are weak. All their eggs are being piled into one basket. So let’s get going and expose this weakness by shining a light on their lack of policy, lack of credible moderates, and lack of understanding of the challenges facing Britain in a modern, globalised, world.

Jeanette's orange book is sounding a bit blue

Novelist Jeanette Winterson seems a little confused as to why she agreed to address the Tory conference today. On  her website  she explains: 'Because they have asked me, and because I will talk to anyone who will listen.'

Fair enough. But she also condemns 'this crap government and its low-grade response to the environment', and praises the Conservatives for 'putting the environment on the main stage at their conference in October, instead of in some crummy cubicle where only three people can sit down'.

Crummy cubicle? No-one told Environment Secretary David Miliband, who delivered a speech on the environment on the main stage in Manchester last week.

Winterson also describes Tony Blair as 'a mad tyrant like all those other twentieth century Taurean tyrants – Hitler and Stalin to name but two'. One wonders whether a writer of lesbian fiction who called the government "crap" would still be alive after nine years under either of those regimes.

It is all a far cry from my days as a volunteer helper in a Leftie bookshop, when Winterton single-handedly kept our collective afloat. Paperback copies of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which had just been on telly, sold more than all the Anarchist pamphlets, Marxist tracts and Nicaraguan women's poetry put together.

The Tories' Mr Double Talk

Last night, the Tory party conference heard from Senator John McCain, the frontrunner for the Republican party's presidential nomination in 2008.

McCain's presence in Bournemouth is no doubt a boon for David Cameron. It indicates that the prospects of a Tory government are being taken seriously again by Britain's closest ally. At the same time, though, the senator is one of the few figures on the American right whose attendance appears to threaten in no way Cameron's carefully constructed liberal edifice. Just imagine how images of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld or even Condoleza Rice embracing the Tory leader would have played on yesterday's evening news or in this morning's newspapers.

For while McCain is a self-professed 'conservative Republican' who describes Ronald Reagan simply as 'my hero', he's managed to carve out a reputation for himself as the Democrats' favourite Republican, a man whose references to his belief in 'big tent' conservatism are designed to stand in stark contrast to the current occupant of the Oval Office. Indeed, ever since they first came to blows when both contested the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain has shown barely disguised contempt for the president, lashing out during that campaign at Bush's most loyal supporters in the religious right as 'agents of intolerance' and 'an evil influence over the Republican party'.

For much of Bush's time in office, McCain's relationship with the president has appeared little better. They have clashed repeatedly on issues ranging from campaign finance reform (Bush was eventually forced to sign the legislation that now bears the senator's name), to the Kyoto treaty and stem-cell research (McCain supports both). McCain has attacked Bush's tax cuts for further enriching the wealthiest 10 per cent of Americans; criticised the administration's handling of the Iraq war (though a strong supporter, he has openly ridiculed, and called for the resignation of, Rumsfeld); opposed amending the constitution to ban gay marriage; and, most recently, led the charge against the US' treatment of alleged terror suspects, demanding that legislation be passed to explicitly ban torture.

But McCain's politics have always been more complex than many liberals (and some conservatives) care to admit, a fact that's becoming more obvious as the senator gears up to run in 2008. For the senator, it appears, is not only intent on capturing the support of the substantial number of Republican primary voters who remain enamoured with Bush, he's also, as Ari Berman writes in this week's New Statesman, furiously wooing some of the president's top operatives, political consultants and, indeed, best friends.

Campaigning for Bush's re-election in 2004, the senator now proclaims, was  'one of the proudest moments of my life'. McCain has also moved to heal his feud with the religious right. Earlier in the year, he delivered the commencement address at the Revd Jerry Falwell's evangelical Liberty College. Falwell, as Paul Harris reported in his Obsever profile of McCain earlier this year, has said Jews won't go to heaven unless they accept Christ and described the prophet Mohammed as a terrorist. McCain, long an opponent of abortion, has now come out in favour of South Dakota's new draconian law that will virtually ban it, as well as joining Bush in supporting the teaching of the creationist Intelligent Design theory alongside evolution in schools. The senator has also given strong backing to Bush's Supreme Court nominees. And, last weekend, as Andrew Sullivan's Sunday Times column detailed in yesterday's Sunday Times, McCain's long-standing opposition to the torture of terror suspects began to crumble. With the White House convinced that the mid-term elections can only be won by talking tough on terror, the senator caved into pressure and struck a deal which gives the president legislative authority to decide what to do with terror suspects and authorises the training of an elite squad of CIA 'coercive interrogators'.

Not for nothing, as Berman reports, did the comedian and chat-show host Jon Stewart ask McCain recently, 'Are you going into crazy base world [courting hard-core Republicans]?'. Having attempted to dodge the question, the senator finally responded 'I'm afraid so'. McCain's response offered a glimpse of the famous blunt honesty that led him to christen his 2000 campaign bus the 'Straight Talk Express'. Democrats, however, claim that the senator's 2008 bid might better be described as the 'Double Talk Express'. A fitting star, indeed, for David Cameron's opening day in Bournemouth.