The Ministry Of Truth

Her Majesty’s Opposition is supposed to fulfil two roles.  First, to oppose the platform offered by Her Majesty’s Government.  Second, to propose an alternative platform to that offered by Her Majesty’s Government.

PBD’s Tories are perfectly adequate at opposing Arri’s Army – every time a Minister pops up to say something, up pops a Shadow Minister – however inadequate, implausible or generally soggy – to say that they are wrong on every count.  I can’t fault them on that score.  But they offer no alternative in any sense of the word other than them simply not being Labour.

For many at the coming elections, Anyone But Labour will itself be enough of a reason to vote for PBD.  And it’s hard to argue otherwise these days: most are long past the point of being prepared to stick Polly Twatbee’s clothes peg on their nose yet again.

But, the Minister humbly contends, simply opposing the Government for the sake of attaining office oneself is not enough.  The Minister believes that politics matters and if you want the Minister’s vote you have to earn it by at least proposing something different, something substantial and something concrete.

A case is point is offered up today by Sir Simon Jenkins.  Jenkins remains one of the few Tories I can stomach, in part because he regularly offers up columns like today’s and in part because he doesn’t insist on his knighthood appearing in his byline.

Jenkins’ column sets out a well-argued critique of the disgraceful and immoral erosion of civil liberties perpetrated by the most sustainedly illiberal peacetime administration of the modern era.  Where Straw (barrister), Blunkett (teacher and letch), Clarke (management consultant and letch), Reid (drunkard [reformed] and letch [reformed]) and Smith (bad joke married to a letch) have salami sliced our civil liberties to the point where the former bosses of the Stasi are wondering where they went so badly wrong themselves, Jenkins points out that their measures are both draconian and – in practical terms – almost entirely chimerical.

He does not, though, offer an alternative platform other than to echo Father Ted’s, “Down with this sort of thing.”

But it is not, of course, for a Guardian columnist to write the Tory Party’s manifesto.

Nor, however, is it entirely unreasonable for us to expect the Eton Trifles to stand for something, to have given we proles an inkling – now at most one year out from the start of a General Election campaign – about how they propose to do things differently.

Would they scrap ID Cards?  Would they stop throwing money at the national NHS database everyone with half-an-inch of brain knows will fail?  Or would they instead quietly keep up their sleeve all the tools and powers that Jack, David, Charles, John and Jacqui have amassed, ready for use should the going get tough enough?  Who knows how far the imminent Tory administration will interfere needlessly in our lives?

Perhaps naively, I think civil liberties matter.  It should come as no surprise to anyone on a site called Minitrue to learn that the most influential book I have ever read was Nineteen Eighty-Four: there is no room in a civilised society for Thoughtcrime, whatever Wacky Jacqui is trying to achieve.

I come down firmly on the side of the argument that says ten guilty people should walk free in order to save one innocent person from incarceration.  When it comes to civil liberties, I am closer to the traditional Tory standpoint than on any other subject.

One problem, as Jenkins points out, is that today’s Tories can no longer claim to be libertarians.  Another is that the old standby chestnut of “the innocent have nothing to fear” is a proven sack of shit.

The Labour majority in my parliamentary constituency in 2005 was just 3,383.  The sitting MP is a joke-and-a-half, so wedded is he to the party line, but at least he puts himself about a bit.  I might not like him, but I know who he is.

I couldn’t tell you the Tory candidate’s name if he, she or it were sitting on my face right now, so I certainly couldn’t tell you what he, she or it stands for or believes in – despite the fact that this constituency has returned Conservative MPs far more regularly than it has returned Labour MPs.  That sorry state of affairs is replicated across the country.

And, I respectfully contend, the country deserves better.