COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE MAN?

 

Is Lee Anderson prepared to fight for conservative values?

 

The steady revival of Conservatism in Europe has not yet reached Britain’s sleepy shores. Italy now has firebrand – and the country’s first female – Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni. Her party’s name is taken from the first line of the Italian national anthem and her motto is ‘God, family, country’. Hungary has the bullish Viktor Orbán in charge, a man who has offered tax breaks for native Hungarians who have more children, won’t take in non-Ukrainian refugees, and is vocally opposed to anything ‘woke’ in the classroom. Jimmy Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats and Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s opposition party, Front National, both see the danger posed by the steady Islamisation of their countries. A welcome move to the political Right is taking place in Europe. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom…

Last year, Britain had three Prime Ministers in seven weeks, and the ruling Conservative Party are conservative in name only, adhering as they do to a high-tax-and spend, neo-Socialist agenda. They are also in turmoil, resigned to losing the next general election even though that is over 18 months away. The Prime Minister is a Hindu who used to work for Goldman-Sachs and has a personal fortune twice that of King Charles III. The government has no intention of stopping illegal immigration, is firmly opposed to Brexit (which still hasn’t happened de facto despite the British people voting in favour of it almost seven years ago), has not lifted nothing but a tokenistic finger against woke ideology and has produced the strange state of affairs whereby if you want to find a conservative, the last place you would bother looking is in the Conservative Party. With one possible exception.

Lee Anderson is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire. Once a Labour Party worker, he ‘crossed the floor’, as the English say, and defected to the Tories. There, he won his hometown seat at the next election. This in itself indicates loyalty and authenticity, as many MPs are ‘flown in’ to win safe seats in areas they have quite possibly never visited.

Anderson will be fiercely resisted by the political class as he is in it but not of it. An ex-miner from a coal-mining family, he has not gone through the approved rites of passage for the UK’s political class: PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford, the media, PR, banking and the law are the accepted apprenticeships for top-level political appointment.

Anderson is a fairly straightforward conservative with family and social values that are contemptuous of political bandwagons and fads. As a direct result of these views – heretical in the current toxic political atmosphere – the media have attacked him at every opportunity. You can gauge quite accurately how conservative a public figure is by how ferociously the media attack him or her. He believes in immediate repatriation for illegal immigrants, that food banks are neing abused by nurses who can afford their owen meals, and the death penalty. There is officially, in Westminster, a cat among the pigeons.

Anderson may not be the white knight who saves the Conservative Party, but his increasing profile may have a range of effects on his fellow Tories. Someone needs to galvanize a party which, in electoral terms, is a dead man walking.