Roger Helmer M.E.P has surpassed himself. This year he has shown grotesque, open and public disloyalty to the Party leadership. He has written an offensive blog piece, stating that “homophobia…describes something which simply does not exist. “Homophobia” is merely a propaganda device designed to denigrate and stigmatise those holding conventional opinions” Just when you thought things could not get any worse, he publishes an article on Conservative Home that is breathtaking in its absurdity and nastiness. Astonishing is its declared intent to see Conservatives reduced to an inward looking, dogmatic rump, characterised by a small-minded failure to come to terms with modern Britain, resulting in what would become permanent opposition. Why on Earth does he want to reduce our great party to that?
Mr Helmer gazes across to the Atlantic, where “Republicans are reacting against wets and liberals and leftists standing as Republican candidates.” He points out that a bunch of zealots on the Republican National Committee would like to set an ideological litmus test for GOP candidates. He proposes a similar ideological litmus test for Tories in the UK. In doing so, he ignores the historical diversity and pragmatism of our views and advocates turning a Party on the verge of regaining power into an intellectually pure rump.
What he fails to point out is that the act of outrageous self absorption by Repuplicans in New York’s 23rd District, to which he refers, led to the Democrats capturing the seat for the first time since the Civil War. Many long serving and loyal Republicans are facing being driven out of the Party by the doctrinal purity brigade – marching round the GOP like the Bennites in the early 80s on trucker’s speed. As the Telegraph noted, “Senator John McCain of Arizona, the party’s presidential candidate last year, would almost certainly fail the test, along with at least 40 other Republicans in Congress.” Do we really want the same thing to happen here? I think not.
We have recaptured our electoral verve as a Party because we have recognised that elections are won on the middle ground, where the majority of the British people are. We have recovered our verve because we understand that the British people dislike ideological zealots and prefer pragmatism and ‘what works’. Helmer seems to want to throw away our electoral advances for the sake of purity. He wants everybody in the party to have the same views as him. That is absurd and dangerous.
Helmer’s politics truly is the politics of ‘no compromise with the electorate’ and a stubborn failure to come to terms with the modern world. It is the politics of the smug purity of a special interest group, rather than the realistic pragmatism of a successful political party.
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And your politics is what? To offer the UK public yet another authoritarian left-leaning patrician clique who believe in ever higher taxes (except for themselves) and ever more intrusion (“social justice”) in people’s lives?