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Phillips, heal thyself
When David Cameron in December 2005 re-tooled the Tory party leadership into what looked like the staff of a children’s tv program, the question was, could the Tories get any more lost? The answer, says Melanie Phillips, is yes. Having decided that being soft and cuddly and not mean and nasty was the way to win the hearts of British voters, the Conservative are discovering to their horror that Prime Minister Brown has taken over conservative issues such as crime. So the Tories, in a panic, are now lurching back to the right to follow him. But their credibility, since they have long since given up any principles, is gone. Unfortunately, even as Phillips does a good job of taking apart the clueless Tories, she remains mired in her own spectacular cluelessness. Thus she lectures the Tories for having accepted the idea that immigration “had tarred the Tories as the nasty party—prejudiced, racist, mean-spirited”:
The route back to power, they believed, was to persuade voters that the Tories had changed from nasty to nice. And the way to do that was to embrace the agenda of the Left which was marked by generosity of spirit and an optimistic view of the world. So immigration would never be discussed.I did a double-take when I read that last sentence. Phillips criticizes the Tories for refusing to discuss the immigration problem, even as she, in her myriad warnings about the mortal threat that Islam poses to Britain, virtually never mentions Muslim immigration into Britain, and has never called for the reduction of Muslim immigration into Britain by even one immigrant per year. Hey, Melanie, before scoring the Tories on their pathetic contradictions, how about straightening out your own?
In this connection, Jeff in England’s great Dylan take-off, “Revisions of Melanie,” is as relevant as ever. Email entry |