Tribune Comment: DAVID CAMERON is a plausible enough fellow. Snake oil salesmen always are. But that doesn’t mean the medicine they are trying to sell you is efficacious.
As Cary Gee writes in his column on page 15 of this week’s Tribune, the Conservative Party leader can be personable and charming when he wants to be. Salesmen are – when they want to sell you something unpalatable.
The problem, though, is not Mr Cameron. It is his party.
Cary Gee may be right when he says that Mr Cameron does not have a racist bone in his body. The trouble is that many Tories do.
Last week, on this page, we remembered how, in his book Considerations on Representative Government, the philosopher, economist and Member of Parliament John Stuart Mill famously referred to the Conservatives as “the stupidest partyâ€. Well, the Tories are not just the stupid party. They are also – as Theresa May said at the Conservative Party conference at Bournemouth in 2002 – the nasty party.
Ms May, then chairwoman of the Conservative Party, admitted that some of her colleagues liked to “make political capital out of demonising minoritiesâ€.
Her admission may have come as something of a surprise – not least to many of those in the conference hall that day – but the substance of what she was saying was news to no one at all. Because the Tories are, and always have been, a racist party.
They usually like to dress it up, of course. Their preferred euphemism is immigration. But you have never had to be the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer to realise that, when a Conservative talks about immigration, he or she is really talking about race.
Because, until recently, when the Tories have tried to make eastern Europe a political issue, their targets were always the black faces of the new Commonwealth rather than the white faces of the old Empire.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Conservatives never complained about white immigration from Australia, South Africa or, as it was then, Rhodesia. They only ever moaned about immigration from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; from black Africa and the Caribbean.
To a Tory, immigration means race and a Conservative candidate can rarely resist playing the race card in a desperate and demeaning attempt to shore up the vote.
Which is why few people were surprised when Nigel Hastilow, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, made his racist remarks last week.
Mr Hastilow sparked a storm of criticism when he wrote in his column in the Wolverhampton Express and Star that Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood†speech had been proved right.
He wrote: “When you ask most people in the Black Country what the single biggest problem facing the country is, most say immigration. Many insist: ‘Enoch Powell was right.’ Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench for warning that uncontrolled immigration would change our country irrevocably. He was right. It has changed dramatically. They have more or less given up complaining about the way we roll out the red carpet for foreigners while leaving the locals to fend for themselves.â€
Now that’s the authentic voice of the Conservative Party: a nasty party. A racist party. A despicable party. No wonder Nye Bevan, in a speech at Manchester in 1948, said: “So far as I am concerned, they [the Tory Party] are lower than vermin.â€
Mr Hastilow resigned after an emergency meeting with Conservative Party bosses. He refused to apologise for his comments and was told he could not continue as a candidate.
But, tellingly, while Mr Hastilow said afterwards that he was sorry if he had embarrassed Mr Cameron he was unrepentant about his racist remarks. That’s the real face and the real voice of the Tories.
Mr Cameron may be a nice enough chap – if you like that sort of thing – but he is a nice face on a very nasty party. The Conservatives are not just the stupid party or the nasty party.
They are, as was proved yet again last week, a racist party.
