About 2 months ago I wrote "Labour hasn't done anything to curb Jack Straw's sub-racist ravings about refugees and travellers - but the Tories would make such evil the centre of national policy".
And now they prove me right. Widdicombe and Vague announced their great policy ideas for the 2001 General Election.
Something about injecting some free-market discipline into the economy?
No.
Maybe some of that libertarianism they are always bleating about when they think one of those dirty intellectuals might be listening?
No.
A decision to discipline the racist bigots who infest their own party?
Come off it.
No, none of that.
They think the issue that most deserves their time is immigration and refugees. They think there is nothing worthier of their time and effort than keeping the wogs out. Their latest idea? Anyone who comes looking for asylum, anyone that they think might one day ask for refuge, anyone stupid enough to think that Tory Britain might be a better bet than tyranny and poverty, any fool who is misled into thinking this island a safe haven, they are to be greeted by being put straight into a concentration camp. Banged up for as long as it takes to put them on the next boat to anywhere.
They are proposing the imprisonment of innocent people, without trial, for the crime of not being British. This policy is evil. Supporting it is a sin. They are willing to put men, women and children in concentration camps just to win a few racist votes. They do not deserve to win a single seat.
About a week later...
And now another party political broadcast, this time about schools. Not one word about education, not one word about the real problems facing schools (*) all they do is make a Reefer Madness /Blackboard Jungle film about how evil teenagers are and how society is doomed if they aren't kept under lock and key for the hours of daylight.
There have always been at least two sides to the Tories. In order to keep in with business they have to pay lip service to free trade, and so must make libertarian noises to their rich supporters. But they also need the deferential vote, the simple nationalists, and unthinking royalists, the cap-touchers, and petty racists, and the blue-rinsed vampires who drool over the floor at every hang-em and flog-em speech at conference. So they have to appeal to the authoritarian side in their supporters and to do that they have to appeal to fear - fear of immigrants and fear of their own children.
One law for them and one for us, literally, that is the Tory message and always has been. They have to keep the deferential, racist, nationalist, authoritarian, wing of the party in the same camp as the free-market big-business pretend-to-be-libertarian wing, and the only way to do that is two-faced, blatant, self-contradictory, dishonest, lying, propaganda. (*) In a way its good, it means there has never been a serious fascist movement in Britain because the kind of people who would have been blackshirts in other European countries are Tories here. Just so long as they never again get enough votes to ever run anything more important than Buckinghamshire drains.
(*) (there are two main ones problems facing our schools - firstly, teachers aren't paid enough to buy a house so anyone interested in raising their own family gets out of teaching as soon as they can; and secondly OFSTED and the Curriculum bureacracy (two words I've never been able to spell there - but this is a rant and rants don't get speelchucked). Increasing London weighting by 3-6000 quid a year depending on seniority will fix the first in London (& perhaps should be extended to half a dozen areas in England - obvious candidates being Oxford and Brighton). The other is harder to solve, but I'm sure the teachers of England (and this isan English problem) can think of something...
(*) Which is why Portillo is so popular in that party right now, and Redwood is toast. One of them has a fascist heart and a libertarian head, the other one has a fascist head and a libertarian heart. The trouble is working out which.