Tory implosion

comelately said:

The Tory Implosion is amusing, but I'm not sure the underlying 'common ground' hypothesis that you can use issues like Europe to coax the English population around a conservative-with-a-very-small-c-manifesto is completely bonkers.

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Think immigration and welfare have more traction than Europe (even though the former is linked), which never shows among lists of main voter concerns. All makes it even odder that so many of them are getting het up about gay marriage. It's like waving a flag saying 'We're fucking mad'.

craner said:

Isn't the basic Tory attitude to Europe that a common free trade area/community is alright, but unaccountable supranational economic and political union is not?

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That's the position of the Tory party, including its leader. But the majority of their backbenchers chose to effectively say they don't believe their leader and vote for a tut-tut motion against their govt's Queen's speech.

Isn't the Tory position on gay marriage that if you ditch the religious heterosexual basis of marriage, you might as well junk the whole institution as it becomes non-sensical (quite a good secularist argument, as it happens), which Tebbit was illustrating with some weak jokes?

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Tebbit's 'weak jokes' as you call them have actually been a fairly regular feature of this argument - he made them at length in his Telegraph interview the previous week (perhaps looking kindly on the daft old bugger they chose not to quote directly, so no one picked up on it till he said the same thing to Big Issue) and others have said similar. But it's been fun watching the party of individualism making the argument that their marriage is somehow weakened by the nature of other people's.

Really this is a bid to humiliate their leader. But of course you know that already and are just whiling away a grey Wednesday.

craner said:

But that's a by-product of the Thatcher contract, isn't it? Individualism vs. Tradition, Liberalism vs. Authoritarianism in one party and one person. That 'Thatcherism' never sat comfortably with the old Tory Party or even with Mrs. Thatcher herself. That's why it's more interesting than it would be otherwise. The fatal contraditions can be summed up in one personage: Rupert Murdoch. The Tories made divorce easier and unleashed a large wave of pornography and yet somehow sought to defend the traditional institution of marriage. You should take them more seriously.

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It may provide something interesting for you to chew over in your next Whither Red Toryism seminar, but I find it hard to separate these people from the party that passed section 28. Especially when Tebbit sits down to warn us all about the dangers of a lezzer queen, artificial insemination and gay mariage combining to put a three-headed alien metrosexual on the throne (and probably turning Buck Palace into the new Dalston while she's at it). I'd also take them much more seriously if they weren't busily shitting on that part of the social contract embodied by the welfare state. I think you're being too kind to them.

I haven't being close attention to parliamentary chicanery, I must admit, but if not that then what is the Backbench Eurosceptic argument? An Atlantic Alliance? The Commonwealth? Protection and isolationism? Autarky?

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But the point is they've taken Cameron's promise of a post-election referendum and said 'We don't believe you. Pass the bill now.' Even though the bill can't pass cos the Lib Dems won't let it and it wouldn't be binding on the next govt if they did. It's not just gesture politics, it's gesture politics to weaken their own leader.