British Conservative Party's Tribute to Margaret Thatcher

The British Conservative Party has released a video tribute to Margaret Thatcher that will launch its party conference in Manchester tomorrow.   May this fitting tribute, entitled "Our Maggie", inspire them, their party leadership and freedom lovers throughout the world.

‘I Stand By My Statement Absolutely’: Scottish Candidate Sacked by Conservatives for Opposing Gay Agenda

It is a sad portent for the future of Britain when, even within the Conservative Party, Christians of principle and character cannot seek public office. At the national level, Britons are offered little choice and less hope.

From LifeSiteNews
By Hilary White

Being sacked by the UK’s Conservative party as their candidate for the Ayshire and Arran riding in Scotland has not led Philip Lardner to back away from his stand supporting traditional Christian moral values, nor has it stopped him from running in the riding as an independent, even though he says it may cost him his job.

Lardner told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) today that since being dropped by the party yesterday for defending traditional Christian views on homosexuality he has been threatened by homosexualist activists and placed on “cautionary suspension” by his employers.

But even in the face of possible loss of his livelihood, Lardner remains adamant. “Absolutely I stand by my statement absolutely,” he told LSN.

Lardner, a primary school teacher who has also expressed his skepticism about the “climate change” political craze, fell foul of the party just days before the May 6th general election after writing on his campaign website of his support for the rights of parents and teachers not to be forced to teach children that homosexuality is normal and acceptable.

“The vast majority of my local membership of the Tory party have been resolute on support for my opinion,” he said. “And you might be interested to know, this includes a member whose own daughter is a lesbian.”

Conservative party leader David Cameron has said about the decision to axe Lardner, “I couldn’t have acted quicker – decisive action in minutes of finding out about this.” A Tory spokesman said Lardner’s views were “deeply offensive and unacceptable.”

But Lardner told LSN, “I’m definitely still running. My name is on the ballot.”

All this, he said “shows what happens when you stand up for free speech,” against the “politically correct bullies” in and out of the Conservative party.

His sacking, he told LSN, is an indication of deep problems in the UK’s Conservative party. Lardner noted Cameron’s habit of presenting himself as a Christian “when it suits him,” but said, “If I’m unsuitable as a candidate for holding [traditional Christian] views, then what of the majority of the membership who are Christians?”

“I think David Cameron must make clear whether or not he wants Christians to vote for the Conservative party. By suspending me, he has effectively said there is no place for Christians in the party. Does he or does he not want the vote of Christians who share my views?”

Lardner’s comments have been removed from the Tory party campaign website, but they have been retrieved by the homosexualist news website PinkNews.

Lardner had written: “I will always support the rights of homosexuals to be treated within concepts of (common-sense) equality and respect, and defend their rights to choose to live the way they want in private, but I will not accept that their behaviour is 'normal' or encourage children to indulge in it.”

He went on to question the government’s attempts to force churches to accept homosexuals as ministers, an example of the same “equalities” ideology that has also created legal conflicts for Christian teachers, nurses, policemen and schools. “Why should Christian churches be forced by the Government to employ homosexuals as ‘ministers’ against all that the Bible teaches? They are being forced by the Government to betray their mission,” Lardner wrote.

“Christians (and most of the population) believe homosexuality to be somewhere between ‘unfortunate’ and simply ‘wrong’ and they should not be penalised for politely saying so — good manners count too, of course. The current ‘law’ is wrong and must be overturned in the interests of freedom as well as Christian values.”

Lardner indicated little surprise at the response to these comments, saying, “I thought there would be a reaction, but I did it to inform of my local constituents of my opinion.” The point of making the comments was “openness and transparency,” he said.

Nevertheless, running as an independent is going to be difficult, Lardner said, although he added that he is confident that he has the support of constituents.

“Ideally if I had the funding I’d put out a letter explaining what has happened.” At the moment he says is hoping that those who “believe in the same values I’ve expressed” will come forward with offers of financial help. “I’m confident that the people of Arran will back me,” he added.

Lardner, a member of the Tories since the mid-1980s, said that with its “modernizing” program and recently acquired dedication to the homosexualist agenda, the Tory party has cut itself off from the majority of its own membership and from the general voting public.

“It’s my party,” Lardner said, “and my local members’ party as much as it’s David Cameron’s party. The Conservative party is one of the most important social institutions of the United Kingdom. It has contributed hugely to the success and development of the United Kingdom. One or two people shouldn’t be allowed to highjack that from the party’s roots.”

The problem the Conservative party is facing, he said, is that it “does not respect the public and the public’s views.”

With even the homosexualist movement admitting that the homosexual population constitutes only between 3 and 10 per cent of the voting public, Lardner is not the only one questioning the emphasis the Conservative Party has placed on the movement’s ideologies.

James Delingpole, a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, wrote recently, “But gays aren’t normal. Some of my best friends are gay and I don’t think any of them would describe their sexual preferences as ‘normal’.”

Delingpole wrote that the sacking of Lardner by the Tories is a bad sign for the party.

“Conservatism is a broad and tolerant church – and that ought to include toleration of the mild intolerance of free citizens like Lardner…. [W]hen the Conservative party starts playing the game of ‘offence-taking’, ‘victimhood,’ ‘minority grievance’ and so on, it is doing so on terms entirely dictated by the false values of the liberal-Left.”

Tim Montgomerie of the blog Conservative Home said, “I see no evidence for hatefulness in Mr. Lardner’s remarks, even though I disagree with his choice of words.

“Although he’s probably wrong to say ‘most of the population’ share his views, they are shared by many conservative Christians and people of other faiths. His suspension by the Scottish Conservative Party seems a disproportionate response.”

To contact the Conservative Party
Scottish Conservative Central Office
83 Princes Street
Edinburgh EH2 2ER
info@scottishconservatives.com
Phone: 0131 247 6890
Fax: 0131 247 6891

To contact Philip Lardner:
philiplardner@aol.com

Read related LSN coverage:
British Party Leaders Bash Pope Benedict in Televised Debate
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/apr/10042704.html

UK Tories Publish “Rainbow List” of Gay Candidates
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/mar/10031002.html

Only Hope for a More Conservative Britain is a Tory Loss: Conservative Insider
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/mar/10032901.html

British Tories will Institute Gay ‘Marriage’ and Adoption: Gay Frontbencher
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10021908.html

Contempt, Apathy and Lies - Why Britain is Crying Out For Our Own 'Pitbull With Lipstick'

From The Daily Mail
By Melanie Phillips

Across the Atlantic, Americans have been convulsed by the overnight sensation of Sarah Palin.

At a stroke, this hockeymom 'pitbull with lipstick' has galvanised John McCain's presidential ticket and given the Obama Democrats their biggest and maybe insuperable problem.

But her significance does not stop there.

Scroll down for more

Britain needs its own 'pitbull with lipstick' like U.S. vice-president nominee Sarah Palin

Despite obvious differences between the U.S. and the UK, her triumph carries important lessons for British politics, too.

Palin's storming of the political citadel is the victory of the outsider, the little person who takes on the establishment - and wins.

In Britain and America - as in other parts of the Western world, too - an enormous gulf now yawns between leaders and led.

People have concluded that politicians of all parties seem to inhabit a world apart, governed by self-interest, cynicism, corruption, incompetence, deep contempt for the electorate and an incorrigible instinct to deceive them.

Politicians know this. Which is why they all purport to stand on a platform of 'change'.

But change from what to what, precisely?

Unless there's a clear answer, 'change' becomes a pointless soundbite which risks creating an impression of yet more political sleight of hand.

This is the trap into which Barack Obama has fallen.

Yes, he has amazing gifts of charisma and oratory; along with his youth and black ancestry, this all helps create the impression that he is an outsider and embodies a fresh start.

But, on closer inspection, he looks suspiciously like yet more of the same old same old. The way he changes his political message to fit the audience he is addressing sits ill with his pitch to represent a new politics of integrity.

And his voting record and positions on social issues place him firmly among the Left-wing elite which has waged such devastating war upon the West's moral values.

By contrast, Palin has a very strong sense of right and wrong rooted in her evangelical Christian faith. Perversely, this damns her in the eyes of the Left as the 'hard Right'.

This is clearly absurd: she is a working mother of five who has shown herself as capable of felling Big Oil and other political cartels against the public interest as shooting moose.

Will David Cameron look for a British 'pitbull with lipstick'?

Moreover, her real achievement is to do what the Left assumed was utterly impossible: she makes social conservatism seem attractive.

Not only is she young, attractive, clever, witty and feisty; her love for her Down's Syndrome baby embodies hope for the future.

As for her pregnant 17-year-old daughter's proposed shotgun wedding, the priority there is the welfare of the unborn child.

By contrast, the 'right to choose' feminist Left, which also thinks all women have a right to deprive a baby of its father, appears not just callous and selfish, but even downright murderous.

Which is why so-called 'progressives' on both sides of the Atlantic have gone into paroxysms of rage and panic over Sarah Palin.

For she has taken the supposed characteristics of the Left - youth, dynamism, change, excitement and social conscience - and presented them as conservative virtues.

Since the Left habitually shores up its own position by demonising conservatives as nasty, backward-looking, mean-spirited, lifedenying, prejudiced, stupid and boring, it recognises her as a mortal threat - not just to Obama but to its whole political platform.

Accordingly, it is frenziedly hurling smears and allegations at her. And maybe she will eventually fall apart under the pressure.

But if she survives this witch-hunt, her crucial role will be to energise McCain's core vote.

Because - and here's where British Tories should be paying close attention - McCain is not popular with truly conservative Republicans.

His self-styled mission has been to detoxify the lethally unpopular Republican brand.

He seemed well placed to do so because his opinions crossed party lines and made him attractive to the centre ground. (Sound familiar?)

The problem was that in doing so he alienated core Republicans.

His views on man-made climate change (he believes in it), abortion (he's a bit iffy) or immigration (he's for it) made his core voters suspect he was a Democrat in drag.

As a result, the danger was that they would not turn out for him on election day. And exactly the same danger is lurking for David Cameron. If conservatively-minded voters want to turf Labour out but have no enthusiasm for the Tories, the risk is they will simply stay at home.

Like McCain and Obama, Cameron too has grasped the public's anti-establishment mood.

But he made the error of assuming that the reactionary old order to be overturned was conservatism, while change, hope and progress resided on the Left.

But this is a caricature which, although an article of faith among the media, bears scant relation to reality.

It is the Left which upholds the miserable social and educational status quo which causes such misery and harm to so many at the bottom of the heap.

It is the Left which preaches despair by believing that nothing can be done to stop social ills such as crime, drug addiction or teenage pregnancy.

Instead, it sets up vast infrastructures at public expense to mitigate their worst effects - which has the effect of entrenching and deepening those very social ills.

By contrast, any hope of real change for the better lies in the restoration of this country's tradition of morality rooted in Christian religious conscience, exemplified by the Tories' Social Justice Commission.

To his credit, Cameron seems to realise this. Hence his support for marriage and his endorsement of the Commission's work. But the message is still too equivocal.

For sure God, guns and abortion do not play out in Britain as they do in America. But Middle Britain is nevertheless desperate for a champion which it does not yet recognise in the Tory Party.

Middle Britain mourns that its country is being transformed by mass immigration; it is demonised for saying so.

It is aghast that it no longer governs itself but is becoming a province of Euroland; it is scorned as xenophobic for saying so.

It is furious that Britain subsidises feckless behaviour through welfare benefits; it is attacked as heartless for saying so. It is alarmed that the gay rights agenda is making a mockery of family life; it is vilified as homophobic for saying so. And so on.

The Tories are inching towards parts of this agenda. But unable to rid themselves of the fixation that only the socially liberal Left is attractive, they give out mixed or ambiguous messages - which leave people confused or suspicious that Cameron is just another slippery politician.

And, in today's world where issues no longer matter as much as personality, that's lethal.

Despite their very different opinions, McCain and Palin score because they are both mavericks - known to be true to themselves.

What the Cameroons have yet to grasp is that it was not so much conservative measures that the British public rejected, but Tory men.

There are millions who long for a conservative defence of Britain and its values by a leader they respect and admire.

Sarah Palin may well turn out to be Middle America's revenge on its elites.

Middle Britain is watching - and hoping that it will now be hunting season against the moose of the British Left, too.

Reasserting Authentic Conservative Principles

The First Congress at Prayer.

Those feeling demoralized by the political choices confronting the American electorate would be well-served to read President Eisenhower's Farewell Address and the following article by John Laughland, recently published by The Brussels Journal.

Even as conservatives survey the rubble and wreckage that the Bush Administration has made of the once-dominant conservative movement in the United States, we are being urged farther down a desolate road of accommodation and compromise. We are told to accept what we are offered because the alternative candidate will be so much worse. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and compromise with evil is both morally wrong and will only further diminish "the shining city upon a hill."

It will be a long and difficult struggle to rebuild a political movement founded on belief in God-given "unalienable rights," liberty, limited government, and constitutionalism. However, when a wrong turn has been taken we do not get to our destination by continuing down the same road, but by turning back and correcting our mistake.

What Henry Kissinger calls the "new international architecture" is under construction. Conservatives may feel overwhelmed and tired, our tools are worn out, but we must resist it, knowing that we have what the totalitarians and secular internationalists do not, the power of Truth and a vision of a truly Christian civilization.

What I Believe: Washington as Dangerous as Brussels

By John Laughland

Ten years ago, I was vehemently pro-American. Like many British Conservatives (I use the capital ‘C’ deliberately, to denote supporters of The Conservative Party), I regarded the United States as almost the ideal society. More importantly, and also like many Conservatives, I regarded any questioning of the Anglo-American alliance as a taboo which was broken only by those whose views were dangerously and irredeemably left-wing. I believed that the main threat to my values came from the quasi-socialist political tradition of the European continent (a subject on which I wrote a book) and that the “Atlantic community” was the right response to, and defence from, that threat.

Now, ten years on, I have become completely the opposite. I am a consistent critic of American (and British) foreign policy and I have long since despaired of the Eurosceptic movement in Britain, especially on the Right, which excoriates France for an allegedly servile attitude towards Germany while at the same time demanding that Britain behave with the same servility towards Washington. British Tories say they defend British sovereignty against Brussels but they see nothing wrong in having Britain’s foreign and defence policy subjected entirely to America’s. Indeed, any suggestion that Britain should have an independent military policy, for instance by not belonging to NATO, is regarded as the wildest heresy.

The change, for me, began with the bombing of Iraq in December 1998 and was completed by the Kosovo war in 1999. I opposed both operations, partly out of a revulsion for militarism but mainly because the latter war was patently incompatible with the doctrine of national sovereignty. (Indeed, it was deliberately intended to be so.) I quickly came to the conclusion that Washington wanted to create a supra-national New World Order as dangerous for the freedom of nations as the equally supra-national super-structure being set up in Brussels.

I also had the opportunity, through my membership of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (now defunct), to observe political developments throughout the post-Communist world from 1998 onwards. I saw how American political operatives, from the Left and the Right, worked to ensure the victory at elections of their favoured politicians, often at the expense of the popular will and often thereby bringing back to power old Communists or people involved in organised crime. Whether these operations were conducted by the left-wing National Democratic Institute or the right-wing International Republican Institute, they pursued the same policy of doing down patriotic politicians keen to protect their countries’ interests and instead brought to power those who were only too ready to sell them out, usually to American corporate interests. That they pursued the same policies is no surprise: both NDI and IRI and funded by the same government body, the National Endowment for Democracy, which must now count as one of the most professional “regime change” agencies in the history of the world.

It was of course Bill Clinton who fought the Kosovo war. But the same policy of aggressive foreign policy has been continued, and massively amplified, by George W. Bush. Where Clinton invoked the (bogus) claims of universal human rights for his wars, Bush invoked U.N. Security Council Resolutions (as his father had done in 1990) to justify his drive for absolute American hegemony in the name of an international system based on a complete confusion between international relations and policing – the “war on terror”. These plans have been amply laid out by politicians on the Left and Right in America, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Paul Wolfowitz. But, just as each French president is worse than his predecessor, so the Clinton years now seen like a golden age.

Have I changed or has the world? To be sure, I have partly changed. Many of my political friends now are on the Left. My book on the Milosevic trial was published by a very left-wing publisher (Pluto Press, the former publishing house of the Socialist Workers’ Party) and the preface was written by the notoriously left-wing former US Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, who has embraced every anti-American cause from the Sandinistas to Saddam Hussein. Ten years ago, this would not have happened.

But the change in me is not that I have become left-wing. It is that I have ceased to think (I hope) in terms of taboos. Much of what passes for thought on the Right in Britain is in fact nothing other than the searching out of intellectual tram-lines on which to base one’s views. Opinions are severely hedged around with taboos. If someone is critical of America, for instance, he must be a Marxist. Having defended a number of deeply unpopular causes (especially that of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic) I believe that I can say that my thinking is taboo-free and that I instead analyse matters not tribally but instead on the basis of the facts.

The facts, as I see them, is that the cause of conservatism has been decisively abandoned by the Right in Britain, America and elsewhere. The Right in those countries is simply in favour of big business and turbo-capitalism which, as Chesterton said, is simply a way of centralising power (and capital) on a par with Communism. In America, the link to the arms industry is particularly worrying, since of course the arms industry entertains a particularly close relationship with the state. The Right in America under George Bush has become statist both in the sense that it believes in ever greater defence spending, and also in the fact that it bases American national identity on the country’s military in a way reminiscent of Germany-Prussia in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Even more profoundly, I am convinced that the neo-conservatism which unites both Bush and Clinton (including Hillary) is a revolutionary creed which has nothing whatever to do with conservatism. I have argued this view at length in The Spectator and The American Conservative. To put it briefly, neo-conservatism is a profoundly revolutionary ideology which betrays all the characteristics I, as a Catholic and a conservative, hate most. It is militaristic and millenarian; it is moralistic and Manichean; it is revolutionary and ruthless. Not only does it have its roots in Trostkyism (Irving Kristol boasted in 1983 that he was still proud of having joined the Fourth International, two years after Trotsky founded it); it remains an overtly revolutionary force with all the potential for wreaking havoc which many other revolutionary movements in history have displayed. Until that ideology is destroyed, until the stranglehold which the military-industrial complex has over the political class in America, and until a counter-weight to American hegemony emerges which permits the re-emergence of a multi-polar world order and the balance of power, the world will never be at peace.

Sweden Discovers School Choice Works

Sometimes revolutions occur in the most unlikely places. In this column in The Spectator, "Fraser Nelson reports on the radical Swedish system of independent state schools, financed by vouchers, that has transformed the country’s education performance and is now inspiring the Conservative party’s dramatic blueprint for British schools: to set them free."