Cameron: an apology (Photo: Rii Schroer)
In the latest Spectator I have written an open letter to my old university mate David Cameron. Here is a companion piece: the letter I’d like to see him write to the nation, having at last recognised the gravity of the crisis we’re in.
He won’t write it, of course.
Dear Britain,
If you realised just how totally stuffed we are you wouldn’t waste time getting to the end of this letter. You’d already be outside Number 10 with pitchforks demanding my head on a spike – and you’d be quite right to do so, for I have failed you. My cabinet has failed you. My Coalition government has failed you. And it’s no good our trying to blame the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown administrations for having failed you even more. We are where we are – and where we are is about as dire a place as Britain has ever found itself in in its entire existence.
That includes, let me assure you, even the darkest days of the Second World War. Back then, however bad things might get, we were cushioned by an empire, by America, by a sense of unity and purpose, by a national character defined by resilience, self-reliance, patriotism, decency and an absolute determination – even unto death – never to surrender to tyranny in any form.
Today, none of this applies. Our empire is gone; the US – read Mark Steyn’s brilliant After America – is now owned by China; our national character has been diluted by waves of unchecked immigration and by the sapping of moral and intellectual purpose which comes with decades of ingrained “progressivism”. As for tyranny we’ve already long since surrendered to it. It’s called the EU – and the fact that it has a caring, sharing, equality-loving, nurturing, “communitarian” face does not make it any less dangerous or anti-democratic than the kind of regimes that Louis XIV or Napoleon or Hitler or Stalin were trying to impose on Europe’s once-sovereign peoples. It just makes it more subtle, and sly, and ultimately more effective, that’s all.
Some people will laugh at me for telling you this. They’ll say that I’ve lost my head; that I’m panicking you needlessly. Oh really? And which one of the problems facing us, would you say, was overstated: the fact that the European economy is on the verge of collapse; that Britain currently has a £4.8 trillion debt, which it is nowhere close even to beginning to shave off; that our best ally, America, is in worse shape than we are thanks, not least, to the reckless spending of President Obama; that one in five children have parents who have never been in work; that, thanks to our abysmal, dumbed down, low-expectation schooling we have two generations without literacy, numeracy, or even the beginnings of an understanding of what it might involve to pursue a career which doesn’t depend either on crime or state handouts; that we can no longer afford an effective military; that our police force is so hamstrung by political correctness it is incapable of protecting people or property; that our political class is so utterly remote and ineffectual that voters can scarcely see any point in going to the ballot box any more, for wherever they place the X it won’t make the blindest bit of difference. First came Blair; now you’ve got the Heir To Blair. Nothing has changed; nothing will change until a politician of principle stands up and says: “Enough is enough.”
And that’s why I’m writing this letter to you now. I want, first, to apologise for the disaster I have been since “winning” – or rather “not quite losing” – the last General Election for reasons which were almost entirely the fault of myself and my political advisers.
We took the view – the cowardly, defeatist and wrong view, I now admit – that Britain had grown so irredeemably socialised under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that the only way a Conservative administration could ever regain power was by offering still more of the same (only with a green-tinged blue rosette instead of a red one, to give the punters the illusion they had some kind of democratic choice). The problem with adopting this attitude of “managed decline” – as my ideological soulmate Ted Heath found in the 1970s; and I’m finding now – is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So what’s to be done? The good news that what needs to be done is very, very simple: the exact opposite of what got into us this mess in the first place. And what got us here, is excessive taxation, regulation, and government spending. We need to remember that there are only two kinds of government money: the kind it rips off from taxpayers in the productive sector of the economy; and the kind it borrows at rates of interest which mean it either has to borrow still more money or take still more money off the taxpayer. Either way the result is the same: an economy in which it becomes increasingly difficult for entrepreneurs, traders, small businessmen – the backbone of an economy – to go about their work. If they can’t go about their work then the economy cannot grow. And if the economy cannot grow, the government will need to take still more money from the taxpayer, or borrow still more money (at possibly even higher rates of interest) merely to maintain its current spending levels. The inevitable result is a spiral of decline.
But while the good news is that the remedy is very simple, the bad news is that it will be extremely hard to apply. One of the main reasons for this is the nature of the political class: whether on the Left or what currently passes for the “centre-Right”, its instincts are much the same – always to ask “what more can the Government do to help?” This is the wrong question, for the answer is always the same: more stifling bureaucracy; more parasite-like layers of administration; more regulation; more spending of money that the government simply does not have.
The other main reason is you, the British people. Far too many of you, for far too long have got far too used to the idea that government’s job is to wipe your backsides for you. And it’s not. Not from now on, at any rate. For one thing we can’t afford the paper. For another thing we can’t afford the staff to do something which most of you are perfectly capable of doing for yourselves. It’s a scandalous waste of other people’s money – taxpayer’s money – and the very last thing we need if we’re even to begin to hope to compete in a global economy against places like India and China and Brazil where the work force are perfectly capable of putting in 12 hour days and wiping their own backsides without any expectation that the state’s role is to do their dirty work for them.
That’s why I’m writing to you now to tell you like it is. What I’m hoping is that I’m straight with you, you’ll be straight with me in return. You’ll never again take the soft, easy, head-in-the-sand path of voting for which ever political party offers to bribe you the most with money it doesn’t have. You’ll vote for the one which acknowledges the scale of the problem facing us all and which has the courage and the will to deal with it.
That political party ought, by rights, to be the Conservatives. And perhaps – before I embarked on my misguided quest to “detoxify the brand” – it would have been. But as you may have noticed recently this is no longer case. We have a Justice Secretary more interested in the rights of criminals than law-abiding citizens; we have a Home Secretary who believes that policing should primarily serve the interests of Britain’s senior police officers rather than the citizens they’re supposed to protect; we have a Foreign Secretary – formerly a principled Eurosceptic – who has since done a Portillo and decided that his post-politics employment prospects are better served by selling British interests down the river at every turn, for that way a comfy future on the Euro gravy train lies.
And if you think the Conservative wets in my cabinet are a liability, imagine what it’s like having to govern with Liberal Democrats. We have an Energy and Climate Change Secretary whose primary purpose is to bomb our economy back to the age of the wattle and daub and the coracle; we have a Business Secretary who loathes business; we have a Deputy Prime Minister who doesn’t know what he wants except that it has to be the opposite of whatever Conservatives want otherwise he’ll get torn to pieces by his own party.
This is no way to run a country. It is especially no way to run a country on the brink of a precipice. That is why today I’m going to offer you a clear political choice. I’m scrapping the Coalition, because 2013 is far, far too late to start out on the rescue package which needs to be initiated now. Instead, I’m going to stake my political career and the future of Britain by calling an immediate general election.
After that it’s up to you: liberty or the soft, enervating tyranny of the Left; growth or stagnation; future or no future; jobs or no jobs for your children and grandchildren. You choose.
crownarmourer says:
Tom Forrester-Paton says:
theunbrainwashed says:
aurelian says:
i_was_ferret says:
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kurt janson says:
The Chinese couldn’t even employ you in one of their factories because you are no good at anything but writing drivel.
Communism brought 70 years of undemocratic militarist cruelty, and created a minority rule by a dedicated, passionate “elite” of true believers who would not accept they were wrong until they bankrupt themselves. Having lived through one socialist dictatorship, Václav Klaus, the second President of the Czech Republic, and former Czech Prime Minister and Finance Minister, warned of another in the December 2003 European Journal:
“The creeping unification of Europe … since the time of Jacques Delors [has been] managed by the bureaucrats from Brussels behind the back of the continent’s population, behind the back of the citizens of individual member states.”
The European Union is undemocratic in its basic construction: in Britain, all mainstream parties have been pro-European Union. Therefore, the electorate has not given any democratic referendum or effective choice on the issue of EC membership. Like the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, it is effectively a one party shambles masquerading as democracy. The question of the existence of the EU is not on the agenda, so if even if you are elected a Member of the European Parliament, you are just in the position of the greasy pole climbers of the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact elite. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European Union was formed on 1 January 1995, but its roots go back to the European Coal and Steel Community formed on 23 July 1952. The analogy to the Soviet Union may sound absurd because of the lack of a military threat, but its dictatorial controls and money-squandering inefficiency are both precisely analogous to the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic officialdom.
Since the European court in Strasbourg was created in 1959, it has passed 418 judgements that have reduced British parliamentary control, of which over 100 have been outright overturning of U. K. court rulings and these have mostly resulted from the passing of the 1998 signing of the European Convention on Human Rights. Its latest injustice, masquerading as a human right, is the “right” of convicted prisoners to vote; allowing criminal politicians get the votes they need from felons!
Why should Nick Clegg emulate them, if he wants to win the next election?
The Lib Dems have no future trying to be yet another clone of the anti-democratic pro-EUSSR liars. Britain is not just paying interest on its debts, it’s also paying out £48,000,000 a day to the European Union. Compliance with European Union regulations (some 75% of Britain’s laws are now made in Brussels by the European Union) is also expensive for all U. K. businesses, the legal system, prisons, and other Government departments.
Other European Union member states generally hate Britain politically (with good reason in some respects, seeing Britain’s political system and its recent history) and try to vote against Britain whenever possible. Germany pays 22,200 million Euroes (MEs) into the EU budget, and takes out only 12,200 MEs. However, it is still worthwhile for Germany to be in the EU, because Germany has a 70,800 ME trade surplus with the EU. The same goes for France and Italy.
Britain, however, is in the opposite situation, with a 49,400 ME trade deficit with the EU (all of these data are for 2010, annualized from the October 2010 monthly figures). Britain doesn’t therefore benefit from trading with other EU countries: it loses out by doing so. If the interdependence of trade with the EU was helping Britain, it would have a trade surplus with the EU like Germany does, not a trade deficit with the EU. We import more from Europe than we sell to Europe.
Quite apart from this financial, legal, and trade drawback to the European Union for Britain, we have the problem of unemployment, with the Government in 2004 falsely forecasting an influx of 13,000 migrants from new European Union members, when the figure was actually about a million. This is great when there are a shortage of workers, but it is bad news when unemployment is high and taxes for those employed has to rise still higher to provide for the increased benefits payouts.
Finally, we have the extravagance of the European Union’s 137 new embassies worldwide costing £5.8 billion and employing an army of 7,000 people, including 46 lucky staff who will be located in Barbados (don’t worry, there will be lots of inspections of the Barbados EU embassy by happy officials flying over from Brussels to keep up the efficiency).
The new London EU embassy at 32 Smith Square cost £20,000,000 to buy and £5,600,000 to renovate with a wood-decked roof terrace, and with all 68 staff provided with an £800 Herman Miller Mirra office chair accompanied by an Italian £400 Artemide designer lamp. The EU is so inefficient financially that its accounts were last signed off by auditors 16 years ago. Prime Minister Blair’s “spin-doctor”, Lord Mandelson, was paid a basic salary (excluding the generous expenses) of £182,500 in his final year as European Commissioner for Trade. Because of this EU wastage and the public’s perceived cover-up over the Iraq War, the increasing financial cutbacks will return us to a 1930s Great Depression where the flexible deterrent security needed for emerging threats from countries like Iran will both economically and politically incorrect. The Soviet Union was crushed by economic failure, inefficiency, and manipulated oil prices. The same fate awaits backers of the European Union.
“Immigration is already completely out of control in this country with more than 500,000 people arriving here every year. The new EU law will wreck the coalition’s plans to reform the bloated, unsustainable welfare system. In the teeth of vociferous opposition from the Left and sentimental protests from pressure groups Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is trying to push through changes that will restrict entitlements to social security, encourage more people into work and reduce the mammoth £200billion annual cost of welfare, by far the biggest single item of Government expenditure. But all his efforts will be shot to pieces by an EU measure that will drastically drive up the claimant count, promote idleness and further undermine social cohesion.
“The same mandarins told us, when the eight former Soviet nations joined the EU, that just 13,000 migrants from Eastern Europe would come here. The total has been well over one million. Moreover the political elite has presented mass immigration as a vehicle for prosperity. In truth it has just brought higher taxes, economic decline, falling wages and social breakdown.”
then please recognise that you’re the one abusing science with your self-aggrandising pomp. Maybe that explains why you just spend your time as a troll, instead of engaging in genuine scientific discussions? If you don’t want to discuss science, please don’t attack those who do. Cheers!