How strange that Beyoncé Knowles gets into trouble for pretending to sing The Star Spangled Banner at President Obama’s inauguration, but David Cameron is lavishly praised for faking an entire policy on live TV.
Why do the remnants of the Tory media, not to mention Tory loyalists and voters, swoon repeatedly into Mr Slippery’s unreliable arms? Time and again he dumps them rudely on the floor. Time and again they come simpering back like besotted suitors.
I know that it is usually hopeless to try to explain to the lovestruck that their beloved’s greasy smile hides a cheating heart. But I will try, by the time-honoured method of straight questions and straight answers.
Does Mr Cameron want Britain to leave the EU? No. He has repeatedly said he doesn’t want us to, and he has never said he does.
If he fails to win any serious concessions from the EU in his promised talks, will he urge that we leave? Not a chance. The EU apparatus knows this, so why should they give him anything in these discussions?
IN THAT case, what is the point of the planned negotiations? To provide the illusion of change when no real change is possible, short of this country leaving the EU. The EU does not give up powers that it has taken, any more than a crocodile gives up its lunch.
Will there be any serious rules to stop the promised referendum being rigged, as the last one was in 1975? No. The great bulk of the press, the entire BBC and the front benches of all three Establishment parties will campaign for us to stay in, cheered on by whoever is in the White House at the time.
So even if this dubious vote is held, is there a serious chance of a vote to leave? No.
In the remote event of us voting to leave, will Parliament obey the will of the people? Most unlikely. It will not be legally obliged to do so, and there is no majority of MPs for departure. Far more likely is another ‘renegotiation’ followed by a rerun of the vote to make sure we get the ‘right’ result. If you doubt this, look at what has happened when other EU countries have voted the ‘wrong’ way.
As it happens, these questions are largely irrelevant, as the Conservative Party will not win the 2015 Election, so Mr Cameron will not have his negotiations or his referendum.
Not very convincing: 'David Cameron is lavishly praised for faking an entire policy on live TV'Mr Cameron, and many Tories, have deluded themselves into thinking they won in 2010, but in fact they lost. And that was under much more favourable conditions than will exist in 2015. The country was in the grip of a strange frenzy of hate against Gordon Brown. A surge in support for the Liberal Democrats drew off a large slice of the Labour vote.
More from Peter Hitchens... PETER HITCHENS: We set Syria ablaze... Now we're hurling in explosives 01/06/13 The horrific killing of a soldier in London does not deserve the attention it is still getting 25/05/13 The Great Innocence Robbery: The awful abuse of girls in Oxford is just the latest consequence 19/05/13 Wondering how they ignored a kidnapper in Ohio? Well we're ignoring something MUCH bigger 11/05/13 PETER HITCHENS: Fruitcakes and closet racists? Cameron's talking about YOU! 04/05/13 PETER HITCHENS: Fanatical fools trying to blow us all up? They're the least of our problems... 27/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: What 'decriminalise' really means is: we're giving junkies a drug den next door to you 21/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: Let's remember Maggie for what she really was... a tragic failure 14/04/13 PETER HITCHENS: Miliband shoots at a footballing fascist - and scores an own goal 06/04/13 VIEW FULL ARCHIVEPeople believed that the Tories had a serious policy to cure the economy. Many convinced themselves that Mr Cameron was, secretly, a conservative – nobody can believe that now, surely? Even then, the Tories lost.
Mr Cameron (and his chief adviser on these matters, that six-cylinder, supercharged Europhile Lord Heseltine) know that this country’s slow subjugation by the EU, the loss of its independence, its borders, its laws and its traditions, is not at risk.
They hug themselves to sleep with the thought that, even if they do actually have to keep their promise, the resulting vote to stay in will close down the issue for 30 years to come.
This referendum pledge is such a blatant attempt to fend off UKIP that surely even the dimmest voter can see through it.
UKIP voters, in any case, are actually far more worried about mass immigration than they are about the EU. As well they might be, since the current Government is actively continuing New Labour’s policy of ‘rubbing the Right’s nose in diversity’ by permitting immense, unrestricted, revolutionary migration.
This – the next stage is the unstoppable arrival of who knows how many Bulgarians and Romanians – is in fact a direct result of our EU membership and could be halted only by our leaving.
Yet our national understanding of this issue is still so poor that most people won’t know that when it happens. And so we struggle on, dragged ever deeper into an unfriendly empire we don’t even understand.
Britain is a friend to the terroristsPeople who want a new Afghanistan War in North Africa should volunteer for it, and then they can come home from it in coffins, rather than other people’s sons, fathers and husbands.
But I note they’re also complaining that the BBC calls the Mali terrorists ‘militants’, rather than terrorists. This is bad, but even worse, it seems to me, is the way the BBC calls Islamist fanatic murderers in Syria ‘activists’, because Mr Slippery (and the BBC) want us to join that war on their side.
I hate all terrorists. But our Government doesn’t, and nor do the Americans, who rage so noisily about their ‘war on terror’. They renamed the IRA ‘paramilitaries’, and put them in government. And they put other terrorists in power in Libya, so that we now have to advise British subjects to flee for their lives from ‘liberated’ Benghazi.
This is all obvious nonsense, yet nobody points it out.
You can always tell British governments have run out of ideas about law and order when you start hearing suggestions that the American police chief Bill Bratton should be brought in to fight crime. The whole point is that American police methods are banned by British liberal laws, especially the codes of practice of the (Tory) Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, and our old friend the Human Rights Act. By the way, may I just gloat here about the official confession, on Thursday, that police crime figures may not be entirely accurate? Of course they’re not. They’re ruthlessly fiddled and wholly misleading, as readers of this column know in detail. As for the National Crime Survey, it’s a glorified opinion poll that leaves out large chunks of the population.Even if you believe Fawlty Towers was funny (and a vast but silent multitude never did), you don’t have to think it right to transmit repeats of it in which two rather foul and prejudiced expressions are used.
Political Correctness succeeds precisely because too many conservative people can’t see that words such as these are just sheer bad manners, and shouldn’t be on the TV any more than the F-word should be.
The same goes for the name of the dog in the film The Dam Busters. You may argue that it was once all right to use such words, and we will never settle that. But it is quite wrong to use them now.
More... If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens click here
