Thanks for nothing, Boris

Less than 8 weeks - that's all it's taken for the Mayor of London to disappoint the thousands of activists who campaigned for him and the millions of Londoners who voted for him. Conservative Home and Iain Dale both report on the craven appeasement exhibited by Boris Johnson to the race lobby in the way that he's chosen to treat James McGrath. Responding to typically provocative comments from Darcus Howe in which he said that Johnson's victory "might just trigger off a mass exodus of olden Caribbean migrants back to our homelands", McGrath was reported to have replied: "Well, let them go if they don't like it here". McGrath resigned (or, "resigned", as it should be reported) to save Boris from embarrassment.

For how much longer are we going to allow the left to shut down debate by accusing anyone who disagrees with their warped worldview of being a racist, homophobe or discriminatory bigot? The tactics they adopt (as brilliantly argued by Jonah Goldberg in his new book, Liberal Fascism) are precisely the same tactics adopted by totalitarians in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy: denigrate your opponents and close down debate.

I'm not sure I even see what's so wrong with McGrath's response anyway. If immigrants who chose to move to Britain don't like here then they are indeed free to leave - former Labour MP Bernie Grant shared Enoch Powell's view that they should even be incentivised to leave by having their airfares paid for them but I don't remember Grant being decried as a racist. If someone chooses to make Britain their home, they should integrate into British society - not live in a cultural ghetto or seek to impose their values on the host community. If they subsequently decide they don't like it here, it is surely simply a statement of fact that they are free to leave? My mother, who emigrated to Britain from Ireland in the 1960s, chose to return to Ireland in the 1990s, decided she didn't like it back there and return back to Britain within 2 years.

No doubt my stalkers and those who have legitimate differences of opinion with me will be quick to cry "Fulham Homes for Fulham People" at me - a reference to a leaflet put out in my ward when I was a councillor and which resulted in a politically-motivated complaint to the Commission for Racial Equality by left-wing housing officers at the Town Hall. Simply shouting "racist" is enough in the eyes of left-wingers to determine that the accused is, in fact, a card-carrying Klansman. In my case, of course, The Guardian fails to report (a) that the leaflet was pre-approved before publication by the local Conservative Association; (b) that it was published and delivered without my prior knowledge; (c) that one of the families we were struggling to rehouse was actually black; or (d) that the CRE found no case to answer. But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a smear. The complaint to the CRE - and the report of the story in The Guardian - had the desired effect both at the time (1999) and since then. For whenever I dare to discuss issues of race, immigration, political correctness, Islamism or the need to move away from the cultural apartheid of multiculturalism, you can pretty much guarantee that a leftist will prove my point for me, cite "Fulham Homes" as proof of my supposed racism and demand that I be treated as a pariah and my views ignored.*

Boris Johnson has done us all a grave disservice. He had the chance - only 8 weeks into a 4 year term - to stand up to leftist bullies who are waging the culture war with a ferocity that would make a Blitzkrieg commander blush. He showed that he is too weak to do so. He should not be surprised if conservatives who feel badly let down fail to come to his aid when he next finds himself in trouble.

UPDATE: When I was National Chairman of Conservative Future, I did a live interview on BBC Radio 4 with Anna Ford on Today. She asked me a question along the lines of "well, isn't the problem with young conservatives that you're all racists?" or some such similar question. My response was: "what a stupid question" and then to return to my message. Don't you hate the BBC?

* Come on leftists: that's your cue to launch a coordinated attack on me. Don't disappoint me now!

Maude the Fraud

The Conservatives' capacity for scoring own goals knows no limits. With a double digit lead in the polls, one might have thought that our MPs would be all pulling in the same direction, working tirelessly to propel the party back to power. Not so Francis Maude. 

Yet again, in today's Daily Telegraph, he repeats the falsehood that the last two elections were lost simply because the Tories promised tax cuts and therefore the electoral calculation is simple: promising tax cuts = inevitable electoral defeat. Putting aside the fact that Maude missed out mentioning the tax cuts promised in 1997 (which are also blamed on the party's landslide defeat that year too), the very notion that a promise of tax cuts per se renders the Tories unelectable is the most arrant piece of dishonest nonsense. One wonders how Maude can sit on the Tory benches. He was, after all, elected time after time on a manifesto where tax cuts were promised and I seem to remember they were popular in 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992. The reason tax cut promises didn't work in 1997, 2001 or 2005 is that, as Lynton Crosby said, you cannot fatten a calf on market day. 

What makes Maude's hamfisted intervention worse is that it comes at the very time that poll after poll shows that voters recognize, albeit perhaps belatedly, that their taxes are too high and that the government is wasting taxpayers' money. So much for modernising and being on the side of the voters. So much for social justice: if you want to do something socially just, cut the taxes of the power by increasing the nil rate band to, say, £10,000. While this would benefit everyone who pays income tax, it would be of particularly benefit to the most poor. A socially just tax cut. 

Maude is showing that he is nothing more than an egotistical hypocrite. If he believed so much in the notion of women or ethnic minorities entering parliament, he should stand aside in Horsham and allow such a candidate to be selected in his stead. If he is repulsed as much as he seems to be by Tory activists, their beliefs and the values of those millions of people who will vote Tory come what may, maybe he should go elsewhere and ply his trade. If he believes we should pay more tax, he should send in a cheque to HM Paymaster General and I be they will cash it!

The success of Project Cameron - and the reason many of us on the so-called free-market right are happier now than we were last summer - is that the offering to voters and party activists is more balanced than it was a year ago. I do not doubt that much of the sometimes painful process of modernisation advocated in Cameron's first year as leader was necessary to decontaminate the Tory brand and to ensure that the voters would actually listen to what the party had to say - rather than simply refusing to listen to what Maude's ally, Theresa May, said was "the nasty party". 

But as I said in a well-received piece on Conservative Home last October, a key lesson for the party after it had narrowly avoided the catastrophe of an early election last autumn was for the leadership to avoid picking needless fights with the party's activists or the free-marketeers in the party. Given that the principal reason the party recovered in the polls during the party conference in October was because of the party's explicit promises to cut stamp duty and inheritance tax, one wonders how Maude could have got it so wrong yet again. In fact, one wonders whether his real goal is to destabilize the current leadership in the hope that he and his allies can try once again to capture the party's leadership so they can take their self-styled modernization programme even further. 

Francis Maude is anything but a modernizer or a radical. He is not showing leadership. He is trying to learn the lessons of defeat in 1997 and to apply them to 2008. That is a foolish as trying to campaign in 1997 on a manifesto that was right in 1986. 

By choosing this moment to pick a fight with the free-marketeers in the party, he has picked the wrong moment. Only the most pig-headed, out-of-touch and conceited fool would now deny that voters want their taxes reduced. It must be nice to know you will receive a fat cat pension, paid for by the taxpayer, when you do finally leave the House of Commons. But for millions of us, the current economic situation is desperate. We are heavily overtaxed, over-regulated and over-governed. 

If Francis Maude honestly cannot see that to be the case, then perhaps the members of Horsham Conservative Association need to persuade him to do so - or they should find a real Tory to stand in his stead at the next election, instead of being represented by someone who sees his sole goal in politics to appease the BBC and The Guardian and who has long ago given up the fight. 

Whither courage?

To coincide with his accession to the job he has coveted for decades, Gordon Brown published a book about courageous statesmen - a laughable piece of hubris given his subsequent weaknesses and vacillations since wimping out of calling an election.

Now we learn that any pretence at courage has been replaced by a Chamberlainesque move towards appeasement of the Taliban. In a move that will only anger the White House - and which will do little to bring a lasting peace to Afghanistan - Brown has announced he intends to enter talks with the Taliban. If them, why not Al Qaeda, Gordon? And if talks are such a good idea, why have we sacrificed so many lives to defend freedom and to promote human rights and democracy for Afghan citizens who lived under the brutal Islamofascist tyranny of the Taliban?

This government has shown it does not understand or value our armed forces. Brown has also shown that he does not have the stomach for the fight. The half-hearted effort at funding our armed forces, coupled with lukewarm support by the Prime Minister and our part-time Defence Secretary, shows that Brown does indeed exhibit the character of a British wartime leader - not Churchill, however. Chamberlain.

Brown is a coward: but then that's surely no surprise to any of us, is it?

Today's Zeroes are...the Democrats

Today’s Zeroes are…the Democrats, for already trying to undermine General David Petraeus’ credibility even before he delivers his report on the Iraq war next week.

Illinois US Senator Richard Durbin, more commonly and properly known as Dick, refers to it as “Bush report” and says that he expects it to say that the surge is working.



The US Senate Majority Leader, and prominent Mormon, Harry Reid, and the botox-filled Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, also refer to Petraeus’ report as the “Bush report”.

The Democrats are more interested in playing politics with the Iraq war than supporting American troops fighting the Jihadists. They are unfit for leadership.