Letters From A Tory

BBC News website, 22nd April 2008: Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev has carried out a major cabinet reshuffle as the EU steps up scrutiny of his administration.  He sacked the ministers of defence, agriculture and health, and named a new interior minister to replace Rumen Petkov who resigned last week.  The EU has urged Bulgaria, a new member state, to take swift action to tackle corruption and organised crime. …Bulgaria is worried that the EU will cut aid if a report due out in July on its efforts to stamp out corruption is critical.

Telegraph, 23rd April 2008: Members of the European Parliament voted yesterday to cover up a report showing widespread abuse of allowances worth £125 million every year. They also threw out demands from a public information watchdog for scrutiny of generous pension perks. In a series of votes, MEPs approved plans to eventually stop putting family members or suspect companies on their staff payroll. But the proposals do not have legal force and will be buried in a general long-term review of allowances, expected to take place over the next year. “Don’t hold your breath, things have a way of disappearing like this,” said a parliamentary official. 

In February, The Daily Telegraph revealed the existence of a secret internal audit by the European Parliament that found endemic irregularities with staff allowances, which are worth £160,000 a year to each MEP.  …Many MEPs use the public funds, meant for parliamentary assistants, to legally employ close relatives or to divert the payments to family-owned companies with little or no scrutiny of the work carried out.  The parliament rejected calls, supported by the European Ombudsman, for the names of 407 MEPs who receive a second voluntary pension to be published.  Officials have suggested that “a significant number” of MEPs illegally pay their personal contributions from their office allowances.

Dear Iain Dale,

There is no doubt in my mind that David Cameron has indeed been avoiding the issue of the European Union as much as humanly possible, which is why your article should resonate loudly with many Conservative voters.

UKIP are mostly an irrelevance to British politics in the minds of many voters as they are a single-issue party, but when you pull together all the Conservative votes they have chipped away at for many years, all of a sudden they pose a threat.  I agree that they should not be taken lightly and must be overpowered from a tactical point of view if the Conservatives are to have any chance of a working majority in the next parliament.

So why is David Cameron still desperate to avoid talking about EU membership?  I think the answer is very simple.  He is all too aware that any definitive statement on the issue will cause a backlash, however small, from his own party.  Any sense of tension or anger within the Conservatives is likely to be amplified a hundred fold by Labour - giving them a brief respite from the carnage of their recent media coverage.  It is also conceivable that Cameron will wait until next year, with the prospect of an election looming, before he boldly makes a decision on the issue.  In the meantime, I’m sure he is happy to let Labour implode before bringing out the big guns to finish them off in late 2008/early 2009.

One can only wonder how vocal you will be on the EU when you are selected as the Conservative candidate for Maidstone….

Yours respectfully,

A.Tory

Dear David Miliband,

Yet again your feeble understanding of geographical boundaries makes you look rather stupid.  To suggest that the EU should include Russia is contentious; to suggest that the EU should include the Middle East and North Africa is absolutely unbelievable.

I seem to remember writing you a letter not so long ago about the fact that Turkey is not in Europe and has little in common with European values, history and attitudes.  Obviously you haven’t checked a map since then, because the very notion that Africa and the Middle East should be inside the European - yes, that’s the EUROPEAN - Union leaves me almost speechless.  To say that enlargement is “our most powerful tool” to promoting stability makes me think that you see expanding the EU thousands of miles outside Europe as a way of helping bring peace to the world and let everyone live in harmony with one another.  Are you out of your mind?!?!  Jesus christ, where do you get these ideas?  Do you honestly think the EU and the Middle East can develop ’shared values’?  Have you not seen the chaos that wildly different cultures living inside the UK is currently fuelling?!?!

And it gets worse.  “[The EU] is not and is not going to become a superstate. But neither is it destined to become a superpower.”  Wrong to the former and wrong to the latter.  It is going to become a superstate and it is going to become the biggest market in the world - which is why I would never want the UK to leave the EU trading area even if we renegotiate our political links to other European nations.

I really am struggling to control my temper so I’m going to stop writing this letter before I explode.  The EU is already stretched very thinly.  If you think that you can bring about world peace by drawing artificial borders around countries, you are living in a dreamworld.  I’m an atheist myself, but god help us all if you remain Foreign Secretary for much longer.

A.Tory

Dear Tony Blair,

Let this letter be a stern warning to you - I don’t like you, this country doesn’t like you, we will never forgive you for the mess you left this country in.

If you even think about trying to get yourself into a position where you can drag Britain even further into the joke of an organisation that is EU, you will face a serious backlash from the British people.  Gordon Brown is already lying to us and undermining our trust in him thanks to his incompetence and deceitful actions (did he learn that from you?) but I am strongly urging you to stay out of the EU for fear of making other European leaders think that we actually like them and are happy with the EU as it stands.  There is no doubt that economically, socially and politically, the EU is heaping misery on this country - in part, thanks to your desperation to pull us deeper and deeper into further integration - and if you get involved, you’ll only make things worse for this country.

On behalf of the British people, please stay away from the EU.  You’ll only make things worse for this country - just like old times.

With watchful observance,

A.Tory

Dear David Miliband,

I wasn’t exactly surprised by your appointment to the Cabinet under a Brown leadership, after your late decision not to challenge him in the leadership election.  What did surprise me was that you were given such a senior position, despite your lack of political experience and complete anonymity as far as international relations goes.  Your article in the Telegraph this morning trying to convince us that Turkey is crucial to the EU does nothing but expose your ignorance in terms of international politics.

Let me remind you of a few things about Turkey.  Firstly, it’s not in Europe.  Perhaps you weren’t paying attention in your Geography lessons at school, but on consulting my atlas I am convinced that there is no justification for including Turkey on geographical grounds because IT IS NOT IN EUROPE.  Secondly, for all your talk about the wonderful democracy in Turkey (don’t ask me where you got that idea from) you declined to mention their disgraceful human rights record, including the frequent use of torture by the authorities, and the complete absence of freedom of speech and freedom of expression - both of which are fundamental values in European countries.  Why the hell would we want that type of government to be part of Europe?

Your arguments promoting Turkey joining the EU are baseless and somehow seem to focus around Al-Qaeda and Islam, which didn’t make any sense.  Let’s talk human rights and freedom of speech instead.

I await your response to those issues.

A.Tory