Freesteel Blog » Hang the Republican Party

Hang the Republican Party

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 7:42 pm Written by:

The Republican Party has a front group in the UK called the Young Britons’ Foundation for indoctrinating young Tories with that unique American cocktail of views shared by, among others, Myron Ebell.

In fact one of Myron Ebell’s fellow employees at the Competitive Enterprise Institute is on their advisory panel and, like the CEI, they start their lies on the first line of their introduction paragraph:

Founded in 2003 as a non-partisan, not-for-profit research and training organisation, YBF combats bias in the education system and mainstream media, seeking to train and inform young politically charged activists.

The president of this entity of unknown legal standing is Daniel Hannan who toured round the United States last year during their national debate about reforming their cruelly dysfunctional healthcare system proclaiming that the nationalized health system in the UK was a disaster.

The fact is the NHS in the UK is so overwhelmingly popular (with good reason) that no party can get elected without promising to fully fund and protect it. That’s what the Conservative Party is at pains to promise. Therefore, having Daniel Hannan — who is very effective as setting Conservative Party policy at least on Europe — going round other countries saying that he is fundamentally opposed to its very existance is somewhat of an embarrassment.

It scares people. It should scare people. And having his strange cult organization putting out this Danger of a Hung Parliament leaflet in the last week of the General Election is shocking.

500,000 leaflets were mailed out to over 25 Libdem/Conservative marginal constituencies, and it’s not even certain that doing this was legal, as they are not registered with the Electoral Commission and have undoubtedly gone beyond the spending limits.

One can only hope that it was a political mis-calculation. A lot of people are in favour of having a hung parliament. Or, as others have put it, a balanced parliament or even, God forbid, a representative parliament — at least in terms of being closer to the proportion of votes cast.

The Conservative Party scares us, and the Labour Party is a total corruption. Two parties in coalition would mean that national policy had to be negotiated between them, more in the open, rather than sold out and stitched up within the closed inner workings of a single party’s hierarchy where there is too much vacuum to be filled with life-threatening ideology such as this.

Daniel has this week been blogging away on the Daily Telegraph’s website about his Contract with Britain, modelled precisely on Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America (deadly deregulation leading to short-term business profits and massive environmental and economic crises).

Incidentally, when BBC Radio had a nice chatty interview with the still very active Newt Gingrich last week, they threw a few soft-balls and made him sound like a kindly old gentleman.

I emailed the program (they’re always asking for feedback) with a criticism of this interview. I asked that given the ties between Gingrich’s Republican Party and our Conservative Party, wouldn’t it have been nice to hear his comments about
the latest Conservative Party manifesto and the way that protection of the National Health Service is front and central to the whole party policy?

The exchange got a little bit testy. I was told:

There are plenty of other programmes on the BBC and on R4 to make overt political comparisons between left / right – blue / red – but its not a position from which we start.

Had we asked Gingrich why his party is so very different from the British Conservative party, in my view, would have taken us over well worn territory.

We’ll have to agree to disagree.

But there aren’t. I have never heard of any case where a member of the US Republican Party is invited to comment on material produced by the UK Conservative Party.

Considering the polical connections between the two parties to the extent of direct interference in the electoral process, I think we should be told.

Meanwhile, here is a fine video by the YBF to put shivers up your spine.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>