NIGEL Farage, we heard from a ‘senior Conservative’, is not a fit and proper person to be anywhere near government as the Tory Party stingingly rebuffed Farage’s offer of a non-aggression pact at the next General Election. This highly controversial judgment on the one politician in the UK who dispassionate commentators see has been vindicated by events makes the party look worried and desperate.
It stands in the tradition of responses to the UKIP and TBP challenge to UK membership of the EU, one of insult rather than evidenced rational argument. David Cameron famously called Leavers ‘swivel-eyed loons’.
This febrile Conservative insult to Farage however opens up the question of the persons not fit and proper to be near government. Those who are now raging and wrecking our Parliamentary mode of government, in order to close it down in favour of rule by Brussels, seem to be fitting the job specification far more closely than Farage. Destroying the government’s executive right to control Parliamentary business and indeed to negotiate with a foreign power thereby, does raise questions as to their fitness to be anywhere near government, notably the rogue Speaker.
It cannot be repeated enough that the Tory (now former) rebel MPs all voted to have a referendum, for their party manifesto, for Article 50 and for the procedure to displace Mrs May and bring in Boris Johnson. Yet they have acted with the opposition to lay low the government. They are, however, still deemed very fit and proper by party grandees mortally offended at the 21’s expulsion from the party. Lord Hague for example said that this was egregious and wrong. It was in fact utterly just, fair and necessary.
His outrage at much-needed discipline betrays the culture of the party, its high opinion of itself, disdain for the public and lack of democracy at its soul.
In the Thatcher era it reconnected with Mondeo Man, the non-rich middle and the blue collar populus who are the motor of the country; they trusted her and she them. With this she overthrew its patrician entitled tradition in favour of Christian mores and social assumptions. Geoffrey Howe indulged EU inroads into British governance and savaged Thatcher, the ‘entryist’ daughter of a Methodist grocer. Lord Hague’s reaction to the sacking of the 21 enemies of the Conservative government shows a similar mentality – of party first way above national interest, in fact identifying the national interest with the Conservative Party as the paramount allegiance. In fact its new (Cameron and May) entitlement managerialism chimes very well with the technocracy of the EU governance. Democracy is a nice word, but not to be taken too seriously.
Robert Colvile’s analysis of David Cameron’s ill-advised expression of fear and loathing towards MPs who were ‘disloyal’ to him and the party reported yesterday on TCW captures this mentality in Cameron. A ‘eurosceptic’, but not one that entailed any action like leaving the EU, far from it. He was astonished at the vote to Leave and shattered by it. Now he too wants the 21 enemies of the government back in the fold. A ‘party before country’ Conservative and Euroholic – identities now entwined now, and Parliamentary sovereignty as secondary.
Farage is fit and proper for the reason that he is a threat to the Conservative Party Masonic Lodge. He relates to the public and offers them a party to voice their views and concerns. That makes him a ‘populist’ and bad in the eyes of the three mainstream parties, the SNP and its monocultural ideology, and the Welsh Nationalists – who are, er, not populist! Their nationalism bewilderingly gets a very easy ride from the MSM. Never mind the SNP MPs wearing symbolic white roses at the start of this Parliament in a display of hostility to the English.
Now it is Prime Minister Johnson’s turn to be vilified in a way hitherto unknown in UK politics, not just on the grounds of his personal sexual morality but his allegedly unstable character and propensity to ‘choke’. David Cameron has joined in, though the allegation of Brexit/NHS lies was quashed by a court.
So who is the more fit and proper person to be in government, Cameron or Johnson: the entitlement politician seeking to virtue signal on behalf the latest fad, or Johnson the fallible man attempting to implement the referendum and offending Tory masonry?
Fit and proper persons should be judged by political honesty and integrity, by commitment to democracy and the will of the people which is translated into sovereignty and national welfare. We have to judge who have been lying to us, and who telling the truth and acting on our behalf? And we will give our trust to one who would secure our independence to continue to exercise that judgment.
