Only by calming down shall EU rebels get what they want, or have any colleagues left to share it

Nik Darlington 9.54am

Yesterday on these pages, Giles questioned whether the Tory party truly wants to resist the UKIP surge, or whether the Tory party in fact embraced it. This morning on ConHome, Paul Goodman questions whether Tory MPs even want to win the next election.

For some “lunatics”, to paraphrase Mr Soames commenting yesterday, this is not wide of the mark. The MP for Ketting, Philip Hollobone (majority 9,094), is insisting on parliamentary time to debate a referendum bill and “if it ends the coalition, so be it”.

That would, in all likelihood, end the Tory party’s tenure in office. It would not, in all likelihood, end Mr Hollobone’s tenure in the House of Commons.

There are however many hard-working, bright colleagues who would be sacrificed at the alter of Mr Hollobone’s (and others’) capricious whim.

To recap, John Baron (Basildon & Billericay: majority 12,398) posited a motion criticising the Queen’s Speech for not including an EU Referendum Bill. Coalition with the Liberal Democrats precludes this, however David Cameron has since announced the independent publication of a draft bill that is presumed will be taken on by the first name out of the hat for private members bills.

Mr Baron and supporters - including Peter Bone (Wellingborough: majority 11,787) and the reinstated Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire: majority 15,152) - have extracted this significant concession. Yet they press on. And on. Today’s Times (£) cartoon puts this best.

Has the Prime Minister handled this badly? Of course he has. Should a doomed stand be made against the muddled, undemocratic ranks of the Labour party, the Lib Dems, Greens and the rest? Yes, it should.

Europe is a salient issue for voters and the British people deserve a say on EU membership, pending the Prime Minister’s negotiations. For what it is worth, looking at the status quo, on balance I would vote to stay in; but it would be a close call.

It would not take much to convince me otherwise. The ‘out’ lobby has a war chest of momentum, funding and evidence. The ‘in’ lobby does not. In fact, I fear supporters of EU membership have at worst largely forgotten why they support it, and at best are relying on out-dated evidence.

Nevertheless, Europe is not the most salient issue for voters. It does not even come close. The crucial consideration in this sordid episode is that the Conservative party is being poisoned by myopia, desperation, and fears the wrong enemy.

Lance the boil. Have the debate about a referendum bill. Expose opposing parties. Be done with it.

Demonstrate to voters what this Conservative-led Government has achieved in the realms of welfare reform, schools and immigration; ram home the paucity of Labour’s alternative; press on with vital reforms to healthcare; and continue the hard but necessary work of rebuilding Britain’s economy.

Only by doing so shall the Conservative party have a hope of winning in 2015. Only be doing so shall there be a chance for an EU referendum. And only by doing so shall those MPs in safe seats who yearn for that referendum, have any colleagues left to ensure it.

Follow Nik on Twitter @NikDarlington

Some lessons from Eastleigh for the Tory party

Giles Marshall 7.37am

That the Liberal Democrats won at all is a minor triumph and let no-one tell you otherwise.

This is a party mired in a truly demeaning scandal, whose media operation looked utterly out of shape and whose leader was subject to the sort of scrutiny usually reserved for pariahs and criminals.

Add to this the fact that Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems enjoy the support of not a single major media outlet, but can count on the active hostility of all of them, and this really does start to look like an extraordinary triumph.

No leader since John Major has received quite such a pasting from the right-wing press, and even then some papers maintained a veneer of regard for the party Major was leading.

No such exceptionalism exists for Nick Clegg. Any triumph he gains, any achievement he chalks up, is and always shall be done in the face of an extraordinary hostility from the media.

So how did the Liberal Democrats win in Eastleigh?  I can offer two reasons.  Number one – their organisation on the ground is excellent.  They have a large number of councillors and activists in Eastleigh and they used feet on the ground to considerable effect.  In the age of big media and social network politics, localism still counts and a motivated ground force can still make the difference.  This is what can rescue the Lib Dems from oblivion in any general election.

Number two – they faced the split opposition of the right, and herein lies a serious problem for the Tories. Eastleigh was a Conservative seat not so very long ago, held by a middle-ground Tory of cautiously pro-European opinions who tragically was subject to personal demons.

In this by-election, conscious of the UKIP threat, the local party fielded Maria Hutchings, who has forthright views on immigration, is a determined Eurosceptic and would have been no Cameron patsy if elected to Parliament. She is the dream candidate for the Tory right.

And she lost. Not marginally. She lost substantially, coming in third behind the party whose image she tried to emulate and whose implicit endorsement she tried to achieve.  

The Tory party will try to garner all sorts of lessons from this defeat and most of them will be wrong. The one thing that should stand out is the reality that the right-wing vote in this country is too small to permit of two competing parties. It is arguably too small to permit of even one successful party.

The Tory party’s split identity is becoming ever more harmful, but that is nothing to the rump it will become if the lesson drawn from Eastleigh is voters desire a more unvarnished brand of Tory rightism.

It seems the party will never be right-wing and Eurosceptic enough to appease UKIP supporters without alienating the crucial centrist vote that all parties need to sustain themselves in government. This is a simple matter of electoral arithmetic.

As for UKIP, they should enjoy their triumph. They didn’t win, but they scored their best by-election result to date.

However, it isn’t quite as great a triumph as Nigel Farage is trumpeting. At a time when both governing parties are massively unpopular, this party of protest failed to wrest a seat from them.

In their heyday, the Social Democratic Party – a party of protest that sought to extract voters from the Labour Party in much the same way as UKIP does from the Tories – managed to pull off extraordinary by-election victories in both Conservative and Labour seats. They did it when the governing Tories were pursuing unpopular economic measures. And they never managed to translate their extraordinary by-election success into general election success, descending into third party misery each time.  

UKIP’s achievement is weaker than the old SDP’s. If Farage’s lot can’t win a seat like Eastleigh in a by-election, with protest votes aplenty, then they shan’t win anything in a general election.

Eastleigh has produced a victor, whatever the gloom that the national pundits may be pronouncing for all parties. That victor, to the dismay of Conservatives, is their coalition partner. It will keep the coalition going, but it offers no hope to the dominant party.

Follow Giles on Twitter @gilesmarshall

If you’re in Eastleigh and you’re reading this, do something worthwhile and VOTE HUTCHINGS today

Craig Barrett 11.02am

Another Thursday, another by-election. Following the resignation in disgrace of Chris Huhne, voters are today going to the polls in a constituency that has been a tightly fought battleground between the Tories and the Lib Dems since the previous by-election, in 1994. A Lib Dem majority of fewer than 4,000 votes belies a seat where the Lib Dems have a very active party machine and hold all of the local council seats.

Needless to say, all parties in contention have thrown everything at it.  UKIP’s sole spokesman, Nigel Farage, declined to stand again in the seat which he fought in 1994, presumably thinking that he couldn’t win and to fail to win once again would be a humiliation too far.

The Labour party has John O’Farrell, former joke-writer for Gordon Brown, who has been roundly criticised for his comments lamenting the fact that the IRA failed to murder Lady Thatcher in Brighton in 1984.

The Lib Dems have selected a local councillor, Mike Thornton, who, in best Liberal Democrat tradition, has voted in favour of housing developments which his leaflets suggests he opposes.

Our candidate, Maria Hutchings, is a working mother with four kids, a genuine local campaigner whose campaign has been masterminded by the energetic, relentless, indomitable Michael Fabricant, whose endless stream of tweeted photographs shows the entire Parliamentary party (and their cousins and their aunts, not to mention their dogs) has visited the constituency to ensure that Maria’s message of being a local campaigner who can be trusted has been strongly made to every voter. I haven’t been down myself but my reading of her message is that she has sound Conservative views and will be a hard-worker for her constituents. The race appears to be too close to call.

My suspicion is that the biggest winner out of all of this will be SouthWest Trains.  Nevertheless, if you’re in Eastleigh and you are reading this, do something worthwhile today: VOTE HUTCHINGS.

Follow Craig on Twitter @mrsteeduk

We should all be unsettled by the reaction towards opponents of equal marriage

Nik Darlington 10.44am

Looking down the voting list from last night prompts some sadness. They are not what Downing Street might describe as ‘the usual suspects’. Neither are they the types deserving of the subsequent vitriol.

What is done, is done. There is a majority for this in the country; there is a majority for this in Parliament. To make this a partisan issue is as disappointing as it is dull. Move on.

Enough has been said on both sides of the debate about rights and wrongs. It shall do nobody any good to dredge over what are now old coals.

Instead, there are some brief observations to make about the reporting of last night’s historic parliamentary vote.

First of all, the nature of the ‘rebellion’. Broadcasters, broadsheets and tabloids are (unsurprisingly) focusing on the scale of Tory dissent, yet giving scant regard to the 22 Labour MPs who voted against, the 16 Labour MPs who abstained, the 4 Liberal Democrat MPs who voted against, and the 7 Liberal Democrats who abstained. Parliament’s vote as a whole reflects most national polling on the issue.

Though wrong to assume unthinkingly, it may well turn out to be the case that the Conservative party emerges from this difficult (and arguably ill-timed) culture war worse than it entered. So be it, one could say, for ultimately it was the right thing to do.

Nevertheless, should the Conservative party be scarred by this episode, that shall in no small part be thanks to the simultaneously superficial and spasmodic manner of its communication by the press.

Take various references across television and print to Tory MPs’ “failure” to back same-sex marriage. How is it itself a failure? I do not count myself among their number, but the many opponents of same-sex marriage (for whatever reason), not to mention opponents of this particular piece of legislation, would consider their vote a “success” rather than a “failure”.

Broadcasters - bound to impartiality by statute - ought to feel especially guilty about making such a partial editorial judgement. Indeed report that a multitude of MPs from all sides of the House of Commons “failed” to stop the Bill’s progression. That is a statement of pure and simple fact.

Yet do not presume yourself the arbiter of right or wrong. This has been a profoundly difficult situation for many people with variously strong religious, social and cultural beliefs. Nor presume to judge that those people have “failed”, have come up short, are somehow not quite as morally or intellectually vigorous as those in favour.

Time advances, opinions change, but not all at once. That is life; and there is no failure in that.

Follow Nik on Twitter @NikDarlington

There really is no credible reason to deny same-sex couples the right to marry

Nik Darlington 10.32am

The Prime Minister is right to say that society is made stronger by people’s commitment to each other. It should matter little whether those people are husband and wife, husband and husband, or wife and wife (admittedly, the same-sex marriage lexicon needs some work).

I was uncertain about the logic or need for the Government’s opening up the debate earlier this year. Few people were insisting on it, fewer still would place it highly on a list of public policy priorities in the midst of economic pain.

Yet now that the question has been put - i.e. should same-sex couples be allowed to marry? - there is no conceivable way that I could disagree, as a Christian and a citizen (the two aren’t incompatible, mind).

Several Conservative MPs cavil at the thought. One has been quoted as saying the policy would unnecessarily split the party. Considering this caucus consists of many who persist in splitting the party over other issues, not least the European Union, that’s a bit rich.

In a cogent and moving article today in the Times (£), Tim Montgomerie writes:

“Every Tory MP needs to think about how they want their vote on same-sex marriage to be remembered. Young people think homosexuality is as natural as ginger hair, skin colour or left-handedness. Tory MPs should think about the day that their children and grandchildren ask how they voted.”

It’s been a while now since I was a schoolboy so maybe the ‘gay’ taunts that we would all chuck about are relics of the past. That aside, Montgomerie’s point is apt, however uncomfortably direct for some.

Many conservationist Tories (and non-political conservationists for that matter) will quite rightly insist on our not putting that Tesco megastore there, or that new ring road here, for the sake of future generations. As will environmentalists proclaim the precautionary principle.

So however guilt-inducing Montgomerie’s call to arms might be, the teleological line of argument is correct. There is no longer a convincing case (was there ever really?) for civil society to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to marry.

That this is a ‘civil’ matter is fundamental. Part of me had hoped that following the public consultation, the Government would hold firm on its ban on religious groups offering to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies. Now it seems that they will be allowed to, should they so choose (the Quakers and some Jewish synaogogues have indicated they will). My fear is this will open up legal problems for the churches - such as the Church of England - that do not opt in. The Government, however, seems sure of its legal position and we should hope this is indeed the case.

Opponents within and without the Conservative party claim the Government has no mandate for the policy. Taking 2010 election manifestos into account, those opponents have a point. Nonetheless, the forming of a coalition has oft muddied those waters already and shall continue to do so for the duration of this Parliament.

Moreover, while opinion polling is nebulous (depends on how you ask the question), there does appear to be a broad acceptance of the policy in the country. This after one of the most extensive and lengthy public consultation processes in history (something many opponents that I’ve come across have for some reason remained unaware of).

Above all, if Members of Parliament are not our democratic representatives, what are they? Put the matter to a free vote and, as Sir John Major said over the weekend (£), “the Labour party will vote for it, the Liberals will vote for it, huge numbers of Tories will vote for it.”

You can conceivably wonder why the question was put at this point in time. Yet now it’s been asked, why on Earth not?

Follow Nik on Twitter @NikDarlington

Why would the Tories form a pact with a party that’s largely B-rate, erratic and berserk?

Craig Barrett 3.59pm

This whole hoo-hah over an electoral pact with UKIP is a pile of old nonsense. The Conservative party does not need a pact with them; it needs to tackle them head on and dispose of them (like our other opponents).

First of all, UKIP has zero MPs and thus zero influence.  In order to make any jot of difference to this country’s relationship with the EU, they would need to defeat all three hundred or so of our MPs and cobble together the rest from the Liberal Democrats and the Labour party.  We can conclude safely enough that this is not going to happen. One of David Cameron’s failings is in taking a line to the electorate and sticking to it, but this is one he must be clear on: UKIP is a wasted protest vote that will make no dent on the electoral map.

Secondly, there is no sensible evidence whatsoever that shows UKIP takes more votes from the Tories than it does from other political parties.  I have said it before and I’ll say it again: UKIP is a home for the disaffected.  It is a franchise organisation of people in search of somewhere to go because their views no longer fit in the mainstream. That or they’ve been de-selected.  If their activists didn’t have UKIP, they’d soon find somewhere else from where to campaign.

Thirdly, UKIP is a vanity organisation with merely one recognisable face – when have you seen anyone else represent UKIP on Question Time?  So much for their current claim to be the third party. Its leader and former Tory activist, Nigel Farage, is clever and charismatic but ultimately powerless. Moreover, he is lazy, preferring to make blue-moon grandstanding speeches attacking Herman van Rompuy than turn up to work on a regular basis.  He has one of the worst attendance records of any MEP.

Fourthly, a pact with UKIP would be a golden gift to our opponents because it permits them to paint the Conservative party as irascibly right-wing.  The Liberal Democrats might be utterly wrong about Europe but that shall not stop them representing their Europhilia as “standing up for Britain in Europe”, and our alliance with UKIP as a coalition of the frothing mad.

What’s more, has anyone ever bothered to read UKIP’s policies (or those that exist)? They are ludicrous, with even more fantastical views on fiscal power than the Labour party.

Britain would be better off out of the EU because it is an enormous black hole for our cash, propping up increasingly inefficient foreign countries and a bureaucracy that revels in excess (Chateau Angelus for a summit meeting, anyone?).  Yet we are where we are.  In Europe, for the moment at least.

Elections are won from the centre ground, not on the fringes, but that should not stop Mr Cameron from adopting a sensible yet firm European policy and above all getting the very best deal for Britain. That is largely his goal and was certainly the write up he has received following last week’s EU budget negotiations.  Evidently, the very best hope of a good deal from Europe is to re-elect a Conservative government.  If UKIP were serious about our position in Europe, that is what they would campaign for.

Voting for UKIP, on the other hand, can only ensure the election of pro-EU MPs.  What is allowing UKIP to gain an apparent foothold in the country at large is not their people, performance or policies, which are largely B-rate, erratic and berserk; it is a perception that the Conservative party is drifting without a coherent European policy.

Fix that and there’s no need even to entertain something so abhorrent as an electoral pact with UKIP.

Follow Craig on Twitter @mrsteeduk

Tory ex-minister Stephen Dorrell tells sceptics that the Coalition remains uniquely placed to face Britain’s challenges

Nik Darlington 9.59am

This evening in Parliament, Stephen Dorrell, chairman of the Health Select Committee and TRG patron, will give a speech billed as a robust case for the Coalition.

Mr Dorrell will invoke the memory of Benjamin Disraeli, the great nineteenth century Tory prime minister and novelist, as he argues that the Coalition is treading a similar ‘One Nation’ path. Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation Labour’, on the other hand, which we covered on these pages, cannot achieve the same breadth. Moreover, he isn’t the first Labour party leader to try.

“So attractive is Disraeli’s combination of humanity and purpose that Ed Miliband is the second Labour leader in 20 years to attempt to cloak himself in Disraeli’s clothes. Like Tony Blair before him, Miliband is attracted to the slogan “One Nation” but, also like Blair, he faces the problem that his party cannot reconcile Disraeli’s aspiration with its own inherited prejudices.

“As David Cameron puts it – “There is such a thing as society; it’s just not the same thing as the state”. When Ed Miliband can repeat those words to his party conference and receive a standing ovation he will have earned the right to speak of One Nation”.

Mr Dorrell will remind Tories that Disraeli had a vision for a broad-based Conservative party, not narrowly defined nor narrowly represented.

“Disraeli was not interested in creating an instrument for the complacent defence of self interest; he sought to maintain the trust of the traditionalists while reaching beyond them to embrace a changing world.

“Our challenge is, as it always is, to do exactly the same. That is why David Cameron was so right to lead the Conservative Party into coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, and why the record and programme of the Coalition Government are so deserving of the support of all Conservatives.”

It is on economic policy that the Coalition is strongest and most pertinent. The economy is the reason for its creation and will be the benchmark of its success.

“The Coalition exists because none of its members believe, like the two Eds, that the solution to excessive debt is more borrowing. The electorate took a decisive step away from that approach in 2010, and the Coalition has agreed a deficit reduction programme which commands the confidence of the financial markets in part because its broad political base enhances its credibility.

“The two Eds continue to argue that we need to borrow more ….  but the fact of the Coalition has made it impossible for them to win that argument”.

The Coalition also offers a prime opportunity for radical and broad public services reform of the sort that one party alone might struggle to achieve. Tony Blair struggled to enact necessary public sector reforms at a time of boom; it is something of a miracle that the Coalition is managing to reform the likes of health, welfare, education and justice (including the police) at a time of bust and recovery.

“Public services need to be open to disruptive new ideas. Closed systems are too easily convinced of their own excellence; mediocrity goes unrecognised and shibboleths go unchallenged. We need to encourage challenge in a system which instinctively distrusts newcomers.

“But if we are to maintain public confidence during this process we need to demonstrate both nationally and locally that changes are being implemented in order to improve the quality of service delivered – not simply to save money. It is a task to which the Coalition is singularly well-suited”.

Moreover, contrary to general perception and media speculation, Europe is a subject that the Coalition is uniquely “well placed to address” - a passage that ConservativeHome not-very-shockingly omitted from their own preview of the speech.

“In other words I believe the European argument has changed fundamentally over the last decade. Our partners have decided to create an economic union and we have chosen not to be part of it. It is a decision made. On both sides. Job done.

“It will be for our grandchildren to decide whether we were right; they will write the history, not us. Our job is to make our decision work.

“And that is where the role of the Coalition is so important”.

Stephen Dorrell will conclude by saying that the Coalition between David Cameron’s Conservative party and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats has managed to tackle tough political issues that other governments ducked, fudged or got wrong. What is more, the spirit in which the Coalition was formed should outlive it.

“[Disraeli] built the Conservative Party as a permanent coalition between the landed interest and the Victorian cities. His coalition was further broadened when Chamberlain made Birmingham a Conservative slogan.

“That coalition held office for two thirds of the twentieth century, but towards the end of the century it ignored Disraeli’s challenge and retreated into its comfort zone.

“In 2010, David Cameron challenged both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to leave their comfort zones and face the realities of office in a Coalition that has the right to speak for the majority its compatriots. In doing so the Coalition has demonstrated both its ability and its willingness to face issues which other governments have regarded as too hot to handle.

“The Coalition Agreement is David Cameron’s answer to Disraeli’s challenge.  The issue for the future is simple.  The Coalition Agreement comes to an end. Disraeli’s challenge does not.”

Previewing the speech, Tim Crockford, chairman of the Tory Reform Group, had this to say:

“In the days after the 2010 election, the TRG was the first Conservative group to call for a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats. As a Party, we must continue to support the Coalition as it carries out these essential reforms.

“The Coalition with the Liberal Democrats has evolved into a stable government enabling it to carry out its One Nation programme. David Cameron has moved the Conservative Party out of its comfort zone. Our One Nation values hold wide public appeal. We must continue to occupy the centre ground of British politics: that is where we win elections.”

Tories and Lib Dems should reaffirm their commitment to coalition, not drift increasingly apart

Nik Darlington 1.48pm

Well that was a pretty petty, squabbly piece of PMQs earlier. So instead of talking about it here, this is a heads-up for a speech being given next week by the chairman of the Health Select Committee, Stephen Dorrell.

Mr Dorrell, a former Cabinet minister and a patron of the TRG, will be making a concerted and forthright case for the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition.

First we were told that the coalition would fall apart within weeks; then we were told that the Lib Dems would not support strong policies to reduce the deficit; now the sirens are saying the Lib Dems will topple the coalition prior to polling day.

There has certainly been a growing apart. Cabinet ministers of the two parties have certainly taken on a renewed air of partisanship. Today, Nick Clegg makes a speech in the City of London claiming that his party has been reining in the Tories’ anti-business policies on immigration, energy and Europe (there’s undoubtedly truth in the first point, quite a bit in the second, and possibly so on the third). It is only the latest in a series of efforts at ‘differentiation’.

Like the fog sitting over central London of late, there is also something of a fog over the memories of many Tories (including MPs). The Conservative party did not win the 2010 General Election. Gordon Brown’s Labour party most definitely lost it. The Liberal Democrats most definitely did not win it. Yet nor did anyone else.

The Coalition, to give it a grand capital ‘C’, was the best solution to the muddled outcome given the dire straits the country was - and to some extent still is - in.

It still is the best solution. Not only that, it is the only solution. Remarkably too, it has been a historically stable solution. The most significant rebellions of this Parliament so far have been within the Conservative party itself, not the governing parties as a whole.