News from the New Party

An exercise in futility

Peter Hitchens spills the beans on David Davis and his remarkable by-election campaign: 

What is David Davis really protesting about? He will never say this, so I will. He is sick of being the conservative window- dressing for a Left-liberal party. He has been, for two years, the prisoner of David Cameron.

He knows that Mr Cameron despises him. He is kept out of Mr Cameron’s inner circle because the Cameroons see him as a dinosaur.

He knows that his record as a critic of the EU, his record as a defender of English liberty, his genuine hatred of crime and disorder are being used by Mr Cameron to fool Tory voters.

Mr Cameron instinctively prefers the soppy approach on all these things. He would also much prefer to back Gordon Brown’s anti-British scheme to lock people up without trial for weeks on end.

Left-liberals, soft on real crime, are always rampant about grabbing more power for the State.

So, every time Mr Cameron succeeds, something inside Mr Davis dies. He sees a long future as a sort of Tory John Prescott, a human token left hanging about to reassure the dim loyalists, his influence diminishing with every point and vote Mr Cameron gains.

He is really standing against the Cameroon Unconservative Party. But they won’t be putting up a candidate against him either. What a pity. It would be interesting to see who would win.

Whether or not this is entirely true, it is nevertheless widely believed by supporters and critics alike.  It is barely credible that David Davis would have resigned to fight a by-election if he was happy with David Cameron's leadership on the issue of civil liberties and 42 days detention without charge.  The mere fact that this situation has arisen is an implicit challenge to David Cameron's authority.

It is evident that the Hitchens/Heffer tendency on the Tory right has swung behind David Davis in a big way, no doubt in the hope of a further "re-balancing" of the Conservative Party to the right.  At the same time, however, the Liberal Democrats are standing aside in order to give David Davis a clear run on the 42 days issue, and we hear now that at least one Labour MP (Bob Marshall-Andrews) is proposing to campaign for Davis.  Above and beyond this the BNP have also announced they are not standing, and polling information indicates that the Davis resignation has fulsome public support.

Let's recap: David Davis has the support of Tories who don't like David Cameron, Liberal Democrats who don't like 42 days detention, Bob Marshall-Andrews who doesn't like Gordon Brown, and a large number of private citizens who just don't like politicians.  This is, then, a campaign by a very disparate group of people with varying motivations and objectives, suddenly and unexpectedly united behind a single man on a single issue for the duration of a single by-election campaign.  And furthermore, the campaign is to support a man who has just resigned a senior and influential post in order to campaign for election to a position in which he will enjoy very much reduced influence.  If and when David Davis is returned to Westminster to sulk on the backbenches, what will all this have been for?

In short, this whole process is an entirely pointless exercise with no positive outcome in sight.  At best it presents an opportunity for a collective howl of anguish at the iniquities of our current political system and politicians generally.  As a single issue campaign on the issue of civil liberties, the Haltemprice and Howden by-election is an exercise in futility.

The reason for this is simple: like all single issue campaigns, the campaign for civil liberties in general draws together various individuals and groups who oppose the 42 days measure (for example) for tactical or strategic reasons of their own, many of which reasons will be mutually incompatible.  The Davis coalition will be so broad that it can encompass those who believe that Al Qaeda terrorists should be allowed to go about their business unmolested, and those who believe that all Muslims should be banished from the realm at the earliest opportunity.  In trying to say everything, the Davis campaign says nothing useful.  For the world we live in does not divide conveniently into a finite number of discrete single issues; trade-offs and compromises are inevitable.  Someone, somewhere, has to decide at what point the necessity to protect the public is outweighed by the imperative to avoid detaining for extended periods citizens who are innocent until proven guilty.  In our society, these decisions are rightly made by parliament, however flawed the decisions and the individuals who take them may be.

However popular David Davis may be as a result of his resignation last week, the process he has set in train is essentially a negative one: it is a vehicle for protest with nothing positive to say.  What David Davis and his Conservative supporters lack is a coherent analysis of the problem from which to derive solutions.  A contrived by-election called as a quasi-referendum will deliver no meaningful answers.  Instead we need comprehensive and thoughtful solutions to the problems caused by the impact of counter-terrorist activity on civil liberties.  If the existing political parties cannot provide these, then a new party must.