Birmingham: Let the show commence

 

 

AMONG BRUMMIES & GRUMPIES

I arrived in Birmingham a short while ago and immediately became involved in some altercations with fellow Tories. These were people that should be expelled as they vent rhetoric scripted by Ukip's propaganda ministry or numpties under the influence of some dodgy tea served by a certain Sarah Palin.

The truth of the matter is - and the point of the confrontation - that David Cameron in the past few days has shifted considerably to the centre and mainstream of the Conservative Party, abandoning his flip-flops and LibDems accommodating stance of the recent past.

When Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt thought aloud over an idea to cut the limit of time elapsed in a pregnancy to allow for an abortion from 24 weeks to 12 weeks, he got the cheers from the extreme right and religious freaks, but triggered a welcome, quick and robust rebuke from the PM. The chastising of Hunt came within 30 minutes of Mr Hunt's public statement and amounted to a public dressing-down, just shy of outright dismissal from the cabinet. Some Party members I encountered promise to heckle Cameron when he addresses the conference on Wednesday.

Equally important is the shift of the PM from appeasing to LibDem demands. The "mansion tax" - a darling plot of Clegg - is dead in the water after close consultations between Cameron and the Chancellor George Osborne. And the murmur in the halls of #30 is that tax cuts may be announced on Tuesday.

Mr Cameron has listened to the voices of reason and decided to take the EU and all its dreadful excesses to task head on. The annual budget increases of the EU must not exceed 0.3%, while the unelected EU Commission wants 5.5 - 6.5% hikes. Britain will block any effort over the 0.3% threshold, a key demand from economists working for the Conservative Party.

The case of Abu Hamza and his cohorts has convinced the PM that a fast-track legal discourse has to be introduced, regardless of EU interventions. The five terrorists, facing 100 years in prison in the US, managed to drag the extradition over a period of 8 years, not the least because of the previous (Labour) regime and the active assistance from European entities. This will have to change.

The British electorate will have the opportunity by 2016 to vote on eurozone membership and over Britain's position within the EU. There is a 75-80 percent majority against eurozone membership now, a level consistent over the past 10 years. Major components of the EU Treaty will need to be renegotiated, "with the same flexibility the EU has shown to allow past breaches of treaties which has provoked the current financial catastrophe in Europe," as I have pointed out previously.

Britain's future economic and political fortunes are not embedded in Europe but in the Americas and Asia, and that shift needs to be enshrined in government policies.

The PM is under pressure to deal with the urgent need for more airport capacities in London. The Mayor has pushed for an additional runway at Heathrow or construction of an additional airport in the Thames Estuary, dubbed "Boris Island." Cameron will not be able to maintain his phlegmatic neglect of the issue for much longer.