Wintonsweek Will New Labour Be Replaced By Blue Labour? Repeating the fatuous, infantile mantra - "faster, wider and deeper" - the ludicrous David Cameron made his first major speech advocating change for change’s sake, and apologising for being a Tory. It really is a major disaster for Conservatives that this inexperienced motor-mouth finds himself at the helm. Not satisfied with exasperating his core supporters by denying grammar schools and coming out against root and branch reform of the failing NHS, he insults the United Kingdom Independence Party as loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists. Doesn’t this fool know that a massive section of the core Conservative support thinks UKIP is right in wanting out of the European Union, and actually votes for it in European elections? I know, I did. But the greatest tragedy is that just when the country finds itself increasingly aware of the degree of malignity, corruption and incompetence of the Blair regime, when the middle classes would be responding to calls for smaller taxes, less bureaucracy, and some sensible suggestions on getting the dead hand of government out of healthcare and education, the Conservatives are offering apologetic Labour Lite – lets call it Blue Labour, not New Labour. The trouble is that the likes of the in execrable Francis Maude and hand-wringer in chief Oliver Letwin (he repeated the childish “faster, wider, deeper” in a BBC Radio 4 interview before Cameron’s speech, They obviously love the phrase and have been rehearsing saying it) are so blinded by their lust to win elections and the trappings of power, they’ve forgotten that the Tory party stands for certain principles. It is unfortunate for them if the country at large rejects these principles – lower taxes, smaller government, more freedom to spend our own money on education and health – to name but a few. But why be in politics at all if you have to bend your principles so much to get the limo that your policies end up hardly different from Labour? My career doesn’t depend on Conservative Party success, so I’m determined to fight for proper conservative policies. If the county is too dim-witted to see where Labour is taking us, you just have to shrug your shoulders and accept it, not concoct some Blue Labour sham. The IRA is a broad church! My award for the most inappropriate metaphor of the week goes to a certain Kevin Toolis, who said in a BBC Radio 4 Today Programme interview after the IRA assassination of some bog-trotting turncoat, that the Irish “republican movement is a broad church”! That’s right Toolis, described by the BBC web site as a writer with a long-term interest in the republican movement, thinks that this collection of violent, vengeful merciless murderers, and Marxist deniers of any religion, which has just killed in cold blood, is a broad “church”. I might have been spitting out my cornflakes as the egregious Toolis said this, but the interviewer apparently didn’t find this amazing at all and didn’t react. I thought I’d find out more about Toolis’s interest in republicanism, so I googled him. Turns out that Toolis is a rabid anti-American, and serial apologist and fellow traveller for murderers like Shin Fane IRA’s Adams and McGuinness. Toolis writes poisonous diatribes for the Observer, the New Statesman and Daily Mirror, and in one of his articles he imagines the day when Gerry Adams is the Teashop of All Ireland. Beware of BBC weasel words. Miles Not Kilometres The BBC is a constant source of aggravation for its incompetent, biased and prurient news reporting. This week it has been doing its best to spread panic in the land over bird flu. The Sunday Times Simon Jenkins, in a spectacular direct hit in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s John Humphrys, put in much better than I. But there is another maybe more sinister aspect to its reporting. Why did the BBC constantly talk about the exclusion zone around the Scottish port town of Cellardyke in kilometres? Even if the so-called Scottish Executive decided to do this, surely the BBC has a duty to translate to the accepted measurement in this country. It must have known many people would object. I phoned myself on the night the story broke. Why would the BBC seek to impose an alien measure when it only has to look out the window to see that all measurements are in miles? Neil Winton – April 10, 2006 Top