The Tories are doomed

Is this why the oligarchs are deperate to attack the UK Liberal-Democrats and Charles Kennedy their anti-war leader? The oligarchs do not want the Liberal Democrats to replace David Cameron's pro-war Conservative Party as Britain's main opposition party.

The Conservatives (the Tories) do not look in a strong position and some of the wiser journalists think that they are doomed.

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The Tories are doomed.

By Peter Hitchens

14 December 2005
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1666735,00.html

...David Cameron's Conservative party is empty of oppositional ideas and organisationally hollow. The Grim Reaper gently escorts many thousands of Tories off the electoral roll each year. Few are replaced. Outside the tiny layer of professional political careerists typified by David Cameron, young Tories are rare and eccentric. There are now only 450 active associations, and nearly half of them have fewer than 100 members.

In Wales and Scotland Toryism is more a memory than a movement. In England the parliamentary boundaries are heavily biased against it... The tiny Tory "revival" of last May resulted mainly from Labour defections to the Liberal Democrats...

Labour and the Tories are like a pair of corpses, stiff with rigor mortis, propping each other up. They no longer represent the true divisions in British society, which is why Labour can win only 22% of the popular vote, and the Tories a mere 20%. It is astonishing to think that neither of the major parties opposed the Iraq war...

Had it not been for pressure and ridicule from conservative journalists, the Tory party would even now support identity cards and all the accompanying repressive rubbish pursued in the name of the "war on terror"...

The word that sums up the Cameron Tories is vacancy - a great sky-blue-pink gap where the government's adversary ought to be, an emptiness deliberately created so as to offend nobody but the thoughtful and independent of mind.


· Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday