ROME, February 13, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – “Conservative Party backbenchers in revolt…” “Cabinet ministers rebel…” “Rebel alliance of Tory councils oppose PM’s plans…” “Prime Minister faces opposition from within…”
In the last few months, a distinct pattern has emerged among the UK’s newspaper headlines about David Cameron’s increasingly rocky coalition government. The issues are widely varying, but all seem to have a thread running through them: Britain’s naturally conservative population (outside London) and his own party, are rumbling against their leader’s determination to forward the same socialistic, sexually libertarian and anti-Britain programs that many had hoped were voted out with the last, hated government.
Most recently the program includes “gay marriage,” explicit “sex education,” unlimited abortion and free contraceptives for the kids, combined with ever-tighter government control of business that this week has featured possible mandated quotas for women in all British boardrooms. From Cameron’s adoption of the homosexualist agenda to kow-towing to the European Court of Human Rights, the prime minister’s image is that of a “hollow man,” who talks the conservative line but delivers the old Labour Party’s socialist agenda.
It is an adage of the British Parliamentary system that it abhors a coalition, and while the Liberal Democrats are pushing for more concessions to the left, Cameron’s own party is demanding a return to more traditional Tory priorities. The Financial Times this week reported that the “massed ranks” of Conservative MPs turned against and forced the government to take a “tougher line” on previous policies on Europe and subsidies for inefficient environmental projects like wind power turbines.
“Cameron’s mission to ‘detoxify’ the Conservative brand is in danger of going into reverse,” the FT reported, “with one-third of his parliamentary party actively lobbying the prime minister to revert to a more red-blooded strain of Conservatism.”
Senior Tory party commentator and former policy advisor Gerald Warner told LifeSiteNews.com that the observation is valid. There was, he said, “fury” in the House of Commons last week when it became clear that the government was going to obey a European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling that Britain was not allowed to deport one of the world’s most wanted Islamist terrorists to face charges in Jordan.
The ECHR ruled that Abu Qatada, Osama Bin Laden’s closest collaborator in Europe, must be allowed to stay in Britain, where courts have declared him a “grave danger” to public security. But this latest ruling is only the highest profile case of a series in which the British government has wrung its collective hands instead of standing up to what is increasingly being seen as rule by a foreign, unelected and unaccountable power.
Gerald Warner said that social conservatives are “disgusted” by Cameron’s determination to promote civil partnerships to full homosexual “marriage” against the “furious resistance of almost all Christian denominations except the Quakers.”
“Everything I wrote about this hollow man is becoming more evident,” Warner said. The Coalition government on a broad array of issues, “does not look too healthy.”
Social conservatives, initially hopeful for a Tory government, have been disappointed. Last week, Cameron’s government defended implanting nine year-old girls with hormonal contraceptives without their parents’ knowledge. The Anglican archbishop of York said he received “racial” attacks in emails for having dared to oppose the government’s “gay marriage” plans. And while Cameron has done nothing to curtail “social” abortions, statistics are showing record numbers of women are now having “selective reductions” – that is, aborting one or more of the multiple children they are carrying during pregnancy.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reported that a “rebel alliance” of 18 “mainly Tory” local councils is banding together to launch a legal challenge against the government plans, in the midst of an economic crisis, to spend £34 billion on high-speed rail. In addition, Cameron is facing ever more vocal opposition to a proposed health care reform bill, with three unnamed Cabinet Ministers demanding that it be changed or dropped entirely, being quoted Friday on the influential Conservative Home website.
Across the Channel, as the European Union sinks deeper into the Euro’s financial quagmire, its demands for Britain – which never joined the Euro – for billions more in bailout cash are being greeted with ever more hostility in Westminster. Perhaps most telling is the continuing demand for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU. Cameron’s promises of a referendum were quashed by pressure from his strongly pro-Europe Liberal Democrat coalition partners, but he may have underestimated how much the promise meant to voters and his party.
This week, a cross-party citizens’ pro-democracy group is staging a series of mini-referendums in Essex. The People’s Pledge group says they are planning ten similar votes across Britain in 2012. At the end of January, one of the more prominent “rebellion” headlines came from MPs responding to the People’s Pledge announcing it had collected 100,000 signatures demanding a national vote on Europe.
On Wednesday, the government was blasted in the House of Lords for handing over billions to bail out the EU. Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP) said the only solution is for Britain to leave the EU entirely. “Did we not send £10.2 billion in net cash to the European Union for it to waste last year? … Why do we need any of the 75,000 fat Eurocrats in Brussels, who have little to do but strangle our economy with their endless regulations and waste our money which could be better spent at home?”
In most countries conservatism is a philosophy opposed to greater government interference in private and family life, but Cameron’s new brand of Conservatism has not hesitated to impose itself, in the grandest leftist “nanny state” tradition, into the most intimate areas of life.
The government was recently criticized for launching a “happiness” project that Cameron said would boost public morale. The Office of National Statistics admitted this week to a total £8 million budget for the “Measuring National Well-being” survey – to be sent randomly to 200,000 households, asking Britons questions like “How happy did you feel yesterday? How anxious did you feel yesterday? How satisfied are you with your life nowadays?”
Following the infamous “English Riots” last summer, Cameron, again quoting the “Broken Britain” slogan, pledged to implement unnamed “programs” intended to “turn around the lives of the 120,000 most troubled families,” that his government had identified as the source of the problem. Perhaps as part of that task, last week, Anne Milton, undersecretary of state for health, revealed that the government plans to start watering down the country’s beer to combat “binge drinking.”
Warner, who served John Major’s Conservative government as a policy advisor on Scotland, told LSN: “There is now a demand for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and renounce the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court. There is also a major Tory rebellion brewing if Cameron/Osborne attempt to contribute to the IMF’s bailout fund for eurozone countries.”
“Cameron’s decision to force through the High Speed Rail link – a classic Blairite vanity project – at a cost of £32billion, means many Tory MPs in middle England face the loss of their seats. My guess is it will eventually be abandoned, but only after a prodigious amount of money has been wasted on it.”
“This government is a disaster – and certainly not Conservative. Slowly but surely, as each rebellion larger than its predecessor shows, Cameron is losing control of his Party. He cannot lose it soon enough, in the view of true Tories,” Warner concluded.