Cameron, Heseltine and the Conservatives

The three cup trick doesn't wash with the electorate any more.

Michael Heseltine very recently set up his own straw man- Conservatives need to stop hating public sector workers, he said. I reckon he did this at Mr Cameron's behest. It appears that Mr Cameron has made a list, which he is working his way down presently. The list is all the groups of people in Britain who pretty much don't ever vote Conservative. And he is, in the vernacular, 'reaching out' to those groups. So the little old Grannies who think the Tories want to privatise the NHS and take away most of their pension have heard from him, the yummy mummies who spend their idle hours cursing the capitalist economy and wishing for an eco-utopia have heard from him, and now, via the magic of a Heseltine intervention, Mr Cameron has the opportunity to reach out to the public servant- all 7 million of them.

Now, I'm sure they are entirely right in believing that those people 99% vote Labour. Various tranches of evidence all point to that. And Mr Cameron seems bent on reaching out in a generalised way to all the recalcitrant bits of Britain, to remind them of the existence of the Conservative party, and to let them know that there is now no discernable difference between them and New Labour. Why that would be of interest to them, I'm not really sure.

But my firm belief is that 'Potemkin Village' politics is no longer viable (if you're not sure what the Potemkin Villages were, look here ). The electorate have too much information about what is really going on, too much experience of deliberate obfuscation on the part of politicians who don't really want the public nosing around in their policies, and are too cynical about the political process to just give window dressing due respect.

What would be of interest to them would be occams razor. A conservative analysis of Britains situation, followed by policies that would transform the country into a conservative landscape rather than the current soft-soap socialist one. Sharp policies truthfully presented, by someone with the steel to make people believe they could actually bring them about. Like they have in Australia for instance; and Canada; and the US. Yes, as far as the Anglosphere is concerned Britain is very much the odd man out.

And thats where my primary proposition comes in: Britain needs an English political party; one that embodies the cardinal principles of governing in the conservative style, and is not afraid of its own history. David Cameron has accepted the grotesque misrepresentations of the Conservative party in the last 20 years as if they were accurate, and has gone into a kind of apologetic genuflection before the electorate. The sublimal messages are 'you were right to think of us as disgustingly greedy, pompous, venal, corrupt slayers of Britains traditional industries and its beautiful trade unions. We're sorry, very sorry, and we'll change out of all recognition as a consequence'.

The only trouble with that kind of obsequiousness is that it really puts off pretty much everybody. Traditional-minded conservatives will know that the lefty misrepresentations were utterly inaccurate, lefties would never leave the safe, cosy Labour nest for the cold ugly conservative one anyway, and most uncommitted observers will get a vague sense of unease at the slimy shifting about of this new tory boy.

The principles of conservative politics are being turned into successful policies all over the Anglo-Sphere, just not in Britain. Remember, all you geniuses of the Conservative party, the facts of life are conservative. When you disgard genuine conservative policies for trendy rubbish, you are putting your party and your country at risk.