More on the
other Tory leadership election!
I was interested to hear that the Conservative MEPs have brought forward their AGM so as to elect or re-elect their own leader on the same day as the result is announced of the Cameron vs Davies election for the overall party leadership.
This is a clever move by Tim Kirkhope. Assuming he's re-elected, he will be able to say to Cameron that he, too, has a fresh mandate - to stay in the EPP in the European Parliament. Cameron's pledge to take them out does not have the support of the majority of Conservative MEPs, and opposition is growing now they realise that, in all likelihood, they will be sitting in near-isolation on the benches of the independents next to Jean-Marie Le Pen, Alessandra Mussolini and Robert Kilroy-Silk.
I have also caught sight of a publication by the “Bruge Group” – one of various Europhobe Conservative organisations, written by Lee Rotherham, who it misleadingly describes as having been on the Convention that drafted the EU constitution – but he was most certainly not.
Lee Rotherham’s pamphlet gives the impression that he views continental Christian Democrats as a bunch of leftists. He also argues that the European People’s Party is neither European or popular on some rather curious grounds:
• He says that it is not European because “its Christian Democrat tenets do not belong to the Conservative parties of Europe” (Hey? Does one have to be Conservative to be European?)
• That it is not popular because it “is a top down construct that rejects the will of the people as expressed in referenda” (A “top down construct”? That’s a bit rich coming from the Conservative party which, perhaps more than any other party in Europe, was built historically from the top down and even today has only limited democratic structures. Most Christian Democrat parties are in fact member based organisations that do actually give their own members the right to elect their leaders. As to the EPP not respecting democracy, this too seems puzzling.
All political parties win some and lose some – Lee Rotherham himself will not have been happy with the outcome of most national referendums on the European Union as the overwhelming majority of the twenty or so held over the years in different countries, including Britain, have been positive. That the EPP is unhappy with the referendum results in France and the Netherlands whilst happy with the recent results in Spain and Luxembourg can scarcely be construed as the EPP behaving in an undemocratic way.
Anyway, these minor rantings from the Tory fringes are neither here nor there: the key question is whether the Tories will actually tear themselves away from their centre-right allies in the European Parliament and march off to the fringes. The Socialist Group in the European Parliament is hoping for the latter.
Labels: Conservatives, EPP, Kirkhope