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A credulity of Tories “David Cameron ditches referendum and backs away from EU bust-up” chuckles the Guardian… followed by “Eurosceptics welcome ‘never again’ rhetoric”.
So in effect Cameron is saying “yes I know I said we get a vote before… “iron clad” was the words I used… but if those mean old Euros want to grab even more power than all that stuff you are not going to get a vote on after all, we will have a referendum next time. Really, you can trust me”.
Of course the Eurosceptics are happy, because after all, if David Cameron promises something, you can be sure he will keep his “iron-clad” word, right? Amazing.
Never forget that the party of Winston Churchill was also the party of Neville Chamberlain.
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And the party of:
John Major and Edwina Currie (‘nuf said)
Keith Best (and his five alter egos who all applied for privatisation shares, despite his legal training)
Father of the year Jonathan Aitken (who got his teenage daughter to perjure herself in a libel trial)
Lord Archer (benefactor of a prostitute, victim of a terrible misunderstanding in a Canadian shop)
Douglas (no level killing field) Hurd, oppressor of the weak
Harold McMillian (who absolutely DID NOT hand over tens of thousands of people to be murdered by Stalin and Tito in 1945)
Well, at least your Conservatives can order dinner in French. Rôti de boeuf de la vieille Angleterre….
Vielle rather than ancienne is inadvertent but delicious.
A deviousness of Daves
A vagueness of Wills
A constipation of Clarkes
A beast of Heseltines
David Cameron is a self-serving lightweight with no frame of reference other than a drive to get his feet under the top table at Brussels. An elite, dinner party lefty.
I am still baffled that he was chosen Leader, as he has no identifiable leadership qualities. Or, indeed, personality other than standard issue OE, which is usually quite beguiling, but he doesn’t do it very well. He appears to be governed by effect, which is weak, rather than the strong, belief-driven leadership that draws followers.
O/T
The most important arms vote of 2009 was in Canada today.
LINK(Link)
Maybe they chose Cameron BECAUSE he doesn’t stand for anything, and thus won’t offend anybody with a moral code of their own. If he had rocksolid Christian principles, he’d offend Muslims and atheists, for instance. If you stand FOR something, that usually means you’re also AGAINST something else, which means lost votes.
And why do you need principles when you can just let the government run out of steam, and you can cruise into the government benches? Our Liberals here in Australia have finally learned how to shut up, so the Labor Government is getting in the news, and suffering for it. Maybe that is the program.
And maybe they chose David Cameron so that his initials (DC) would send a subliminal message of reassurance to the Americans, especially the inhabitants of Washington DC.
John_R – Care to give the background, but not too much – three terse sentences, say – for your gnomic post?
Not sure your final comment makes much sense.
For all that history has rightly not been kind to Chamberlain, no-one ever accused him of reneging on his commitments. If anything, he was too honourable.
My final comment makes a great deal of sence. You think Chamberlain was honourable???? I suspect few Czechs or Slovaks would agree with you. Chamberlain was an unprincipled fool who avoided the hard decisions until it was far far too late… it remains to be seen if the parallels with Cameron will be as catastrophic.
Nice timing for Cameron and his move… I just got a piece on him published over at Pajamas Media.
Perry, I think you are wrong about Chamberlin. Like most people at that time in Britain, he was afflicted with appeasementitis, where you believe good about everybody. After Munich, he started rearming, and Churchill benefited from that later. I don’t think he was any more foolish than the average Member of that time. He was wrong, but would Parliament have accepted someone like Churchill before the invasion of Poland?
Do they? Not the ones I’ve read so far.
Cameron’s new policy is pathetic. Absolutely worse than useless (because no doubt a fair few EUsceptics will fall for it… again). How many times have we heard “this far and no further” from the “Conservative” party over the last 25 years? There isn’t much further left to go now.
A constitutional court and a referendum guarantee? Like the ones that totally failed to stop the Lisbon Treaty’s erosion of sovereignty in Germany, the Czech republic and Ireland?
Hopeless. Utterly, completely, absolutely hopeless. And so to UKIP…
1, Arguably Munich gave Britain time to rearm against a German resurgence. The UK simply could not have stood up to Germany as early as Sept 1938. Whether this breather was deliberate or incidental is open to debate.
2, Who cares about the next treaty? Lisbon contains an escalator clause, so the Eurofraud can simply take on further responsability without refering to any member state parliament or creating a new treaty. We/you is stuffed.
Anyone want to join me on the sunny Gold Coast? We still have free speech here, and your vote still means something – at least until Copenhagen.
We have Rudd, admittedly, but we can still throw up a Howard.
Cameron, in addition to signing his own death warrant, has probably condemned us to another few years of Mad Mac MacBroon and company. The BBC is already on the case. ‘Five Live News’ had, as its top story this morning, a piece about the views of a French politician taken from an interview in The Guardian. They even got an actor to voice his opinions (example: “the Tories are autistic’ on Europe”). No mention, of course, of the fact that 638 of the 646 sitting MPs got elected last time on the promise of a referendum. Dark days ahead.
Ray:
Better five more years of Brown (or whoever Mandelson has in mind for the job) than ten or more of Cameron. The final destination is the same, Cameron might get us there a bit more slowly but he will have more time.
Antoinne
In (I think) Love etc, Julian Barnes has a character who believes we are all fated to be reincarnated as the people we meet in this life. I have met John Major! I have also met Edwina Currie; might I come back as her and…
I don’t feel well.
Apology Antoine.
Nuke Gray is quite right.
Let’s not forget the almost unprecedented welcome on the balcony at Buckingham Palace after Chamberlain came back with his “piece of paper”.
You really can’t blame the politicians at the time for appeasement. It was a policy desired by the British people who had seen what a war could do to their young men.
But Cameron is just a coward of the political class who isn’t looking out for us.
Wrong. When a so-called leader takes the craven but politically expedient option and moreover contemptuously throws a ‘far-away country’ (in central Europe, not South America) to the wolves without even building a political base for the coming storm, one most certainly can blame the people who brought things to that point.
And the surrendering to a political entity who has demonstrated time and again that they are duplicitous and insatiable is not expediency, it is stupidity (in that respect the parallel with the EU is stark). Appeasement was both cowardice and (above all) stupid. It did not work, as people like Churchill predicted, and the blame and opprobrium heaped upon Chamberlain is well deserved.
Not surprising really.
After all, this is the party that sided with Ted Heath rather than Enoch Powell back when Britain decided to join the EEC.
We do not need a constitutional court – Parliament is it.
We do not need a Sovereignty Act – Parliament should be protecting our constitution as it is and that constitution is written, just not codefied into a single document.
Parliament is still sovereign and no Parliament can bind a successive Parliament. We deposit our authority in Westminster and what they have done is lent it to Brussels largely without our continued consent. This relationship is one our MPs want for an easy life and refrain from letting us make that decision. There are no bad consequences for Dave promising to let us choose the direction Britain is to go in, yet he cannot bring himself to do even that.
The Lisbon Treaty is no more binding than any past treaty and the restrictions in it serve to restrict the minds of politicians and eurocrats. We must stop electing people with such pitiful minds as these that they run away from their duty to us as fast as they can.
Cameron is merely driftly, largely rudderless, in the political wind in which he finds himself.
His problem is this:
He cannot offer a referendum on Lisbon. It is done. There is nothing more to do. His failure to pin this blame squarely on Brown is lamentable, but the withdrawal of the promise (which was always predicated on the treaty not being finally ratified) is completely sensible.
BUT…. in order to make a sufficient fuss that we need to have a referendum on the EU, he has to fess up just how powerful the EU really is now and, by necessity, how powerless he is or would be once PM.
This is the elephant in the room. No Westminster politician wants to talk about it in real actual terms.
Cameron has shut the gate for sure. Alas the horse is now far, far over the hills… It is a pathetic rhetorical morsel to the Eurosceptics. It is vowing to fight on after signing the instrument of surrender and disarming the military.
It’s the Black Knight – “’tis only a flesh wound…”
PS. Cats, “throw up a Howard”? You must have had a heavy night!
PPS. Chamberlain was instrumental in getting Spitfire production going which was at first utterly shambolic. He of course resigned over the ill-conceived Norwegian debacle which was Churchill’s idea.
Sam Duncan writes: “Hopeless. Utterly, completely, absolutely hopeless …”.
I would add, utterly, utterly corrupt, for Cameron is buying his way to the top table in Brussels with our ancient, hard-fought-for and hard-won democracy, which was once a beacon to the world. No one expects honour or love of country from Labourites, but the Conservatives always stood for the values of Britain.
RAB,
The bloke is the pick of the Guardian classes? Don’t forget – John McCain was the pick of the New York Times.
What is the point of choosing people the enemy is relaxed about?
The only site that seems to accept Cameron’s stance is the “ConservativeHome” site, most others I have seen are against his whole attitude. I agree with Verity, conservatives were always about a love of the Country and liberty, without that, they are nothing. I do not understand what motivates such people to hate their, or rather our Country, is it just money? If he wins the election he will only be our Member of the EU council, dedicated to it’s advancement. As for his re-negotiation, utter nonsense, the EU doesn’t do that.
Two of the leading Conservative party spokesmen in the E.U. Parliament have already resigned in protest over Mr Cameron’s caving in to the E.U.
Although “Classic F.M.” reported that they had resigned over Mr Cameron’s “plans to repatriate powers from the E.U.” – totally false and showing just how vile the broadcast media (as a whole – not just the BBC) are.
In spite of his giving in the E.U. – French ministers (and so on) cursed Mr Cameron anyway (he had not given in enough as far as they were concerned).
Mr Cameron (and co) have managed to disgust everyone – both pro British people and pro E.U. people.