POLITICS: More than slightly Foxed
For a brighter Conservative Future
Up and down the country, constituency and University Conservative Associations are ringing to the sounds of teddies being thrown from cots, bottles of milk being refused, and safety-scissors being plunged into unsuspecting backs. Yes, Conservative Future election time is upon us once again. In an unprecedented twist to the usual fuggy and indistinguishable rounds of bitching, rigging and in-fighting, this year for once sees the under-30's of the Conservative Party facing a starkly obvious choice as to the immediate future of their organisation.
The lines have been well-drawn over the course of the last year: poisonous Portilloite lefties seized control of the organisation through a majority on the National Executive, and rendered the excellent right-wing chairman, Justin Tomlinson, a lame duck for the entirety of his term. Thus upholding the fine CF/YC/NACG tradition that whenever a genuinely talented individual flukes it to being a Tory youth leader, his jealous peers will unite to ensure that this opportunity for the party is comprehensively wasted.
This year’s sour clique, comprising Krystal Miller (now Deputy Editor of the Bow Group, Director of Youth for Steve [‘what me, a Tory? Fuhgeddaboutit!’] Norris and candidates' list would-be), Henry Nelless, Richard Hilton and Ben Gold, then proceeded to run the organisation into the ground: they provided a solely London-centric emphasis; blocked any moves to make the CF executive open and accountable, or otherwise congenial to the lumpen-membership; spent the year trying to force the resignation of the Chairman and Deputy Chairman (Louise Hall); and repeatedly hampered plans for CF constituency campaigning days. All in all, another year has somehow managed to go by when the party’s youth wing, which should be cresting on anti-Labour sentiment, has instead been utterly screwed-up from within. It has been a shameful performance.
Perhaps the most frustrating single thing has been the strange, obsessive fascination of the baby Portilloites with their futile attempts to succeed within NUS (still a wholly Labour-hack dominated organisation). With this monumental waste of time and effort, no wonder that CF membership and activity has been in near-terminal decline for the last twelve months, if not longer. As the more ancient amongst you would well have cause to remark, do these joyless battles — about, for instance, the pointlessness of trying to weasel onto the periphery of the NUS exec simply for the sake of earning some CV points for some deeply odd people — have to be fought again and again and again? Apparently so: because we must never learn anything from past experience.
Despite this record of failure, however, our bitter little clique has had the effrontery to put forward a candidate for this year's CF chairmanship in the form of one James Holtum. Note the name. The alternative to this bunch of lefties is more clear-cut this year than ever before. Possibly in reaction to the direction in which Conservative Future has been moving, a number of decent, High Tory young Conservatives, believers in tradition — as well as the more immediate point that candidates lists should be merit-based rather than gender/ethnicity/sexuality-rigged — triumphantly non-PC, and proud scorners of 'Nasty Party' speeches, have, independently of each other, thrown their names into the election hat. I’m pleased to be able to point them out to you.
There doesn’t appear to be any "slate" or central organisation for these luminous right-wingers, but ERO is cheered by being able to reccommend to CF voters people like Andy Johnson, Jonathan Cordell, and James Mills — all of whom are running for the national executive — and, as candidate for the chairmanship, Paul Bristow. Although running on separate manifestos, these candidates represent an end to Conservative Future's Mayite arselicking, and an end to CF’s present obsession obsession with NUS and student-bureaucratic issues that renders the organisation unpalatable and utterly irrelevant to all those over the age of 21. It is instructive that just like the parent sickness, Portilloites in CF mistake PC institutions like the NUS for the concerns of the electorate, rather than seeing them for what they truly are: impediments to Toryism, through which attacking we could only but bring popularity to the party.
In addition, our brave band of brothers, our latter-day heroes at Thermopylae . . . sorry, I’m getting over-excited by the smell of manifesto websites in the morning, evidently stand for an open, accountable Conservative Future. You know, the sort of thing that clearly comprehends its purpose as a political organisation. That understands it exists to campaign and increase membership for the Conservative Party, as well as to provide a voice for the Party's youth. They’re, in short, the people who’ll run CF in the future interest of Conservatism.
This grouping offers the best, and most efficient means by which to end the fratricide currently diverting CF. It is by their doing at the youth tier what was done at the national tier in 2001, that the poison can be dealt with at source. Decisively elect these men and the division stops dead right here.
There is, though, a further reason why all of us should pay a continued interest in the party’s youth movements, whatever name they sail under. A decade ago and more, the last properly right wing NSD [National Student Director — elected youth job at CCO], one Iain Smedley, late of Clare College, Cambridge, identified the real reason to be bothered by the rot that was already clearly evident in both the then YCs, and the old NACG [National Association of Conservative Graduates]. The point to being bothered by the output, in terms of personnel, of the party’s formal youth structures is that this is the only known way to provide an alternative cadre, of maybe no more than half a dozen in a good year, of potential future Tory MPs. An alternative, that is, to relying upon the witless legions of Patten, Gummer and Bottomley sprogs who will otherwise ascend to the office as ineptly as their parents before them. It is precisely because the golden thread of inheritance was broken by electing the original, disastrously incompetent batch of Bottomleys, Gummers and Pattens, that it is imperative that we don’t let them replicate themselves. It is hard to think of anything worse for the future of the Tory party than any renewed ascendancy by the sort of people John Major made cabinet ministers. Hard, but not impossible. That worse thing would be any further sight or sound of the last-gasp Portilloism evident in the left wing slate for CF. Let's stop it now and save ourselves the bother ten years down the road.
—P.G.C.
StudentWatch, August 19, 2003 02:12 PM