Meet this week’s biggest fake – and it’s not Beyoncé
HIOW 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 timehonoured 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? N 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 ‘rene- gotiation’ 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.
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.
People 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 i mmigration 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.