Recently there has been a spate of articles
identifying what they see as the growing threat UKIP poses to the Conservative Party.
The Party, they argue, is haemorrhaging voters as traditional right wing voters,
alienated by a Coalition Government more willing to please the Lib Dems than
implement proper right-wing policies, jump ship to UKIP. Such views aren’t new.
A vociferous minority have long claimed that we apparently lost the elections
in 1997, 2001 and 2005 because we were somehow not right-wing enough.
This is a delusion. Elections are won on
the centre-ground, not the die-hard fringes. In a country that has repeatedly
elected centre-left governments it seems ridiculous to
claim that what the people of Britain really want is hard-core conservatism. Tony
Blair won three elections precisely because he seized the
centre-ground, crowding the Tories out. Policies such as ‘tough on crime, tough
on the causes of crime’ outflanked the Tories from the right, forcing them to
move to the unelectable fringes in a vain effort to provide a real alternative
to Labour’s policy on law and order.
To allow UKIP to draw us to the right would
do to the Conservative Party what the Tea Party movement did to the Republicans
in America. The witch hunt that brought down so many moderates for being ‘un-conservative’
left the GOP so divorced from reality that its pig-headed refusal to compromise
led to the world’s largest economy losing its triple-A credit rating. That was ludicrous: conservatism is meant to be about sound economic management.
Britain is still suffering from 13 years of
dire economic management. The British people deserve better. We have a duty to
present them with palatable centre-right policies they can trust to get the
economy back on track. Don’t let UKIP distract us from that.
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