Conservative Foreign Policy - no comments

Nick Cohen on Tory attitudes to Europe and the rest of the world:

[...] Anti-conservatism may no longer stir the left, but opposition to Europe burns as brightly as ever on the right. The Tories are committed to pulling out of the European political bloc which includes Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right parties, ordinarily Cameron's natural allies, and heading off with the chauvinist parties of Russia and eastern Europe.

Far from standing up to Putin, the Conservatives tried to help a Putin stooge take over the Council of Europe, which oversees the European Court of Human Rights, of all things. Mainstream European conservatives were as loud in their condemnations of Cameron as mainstream socialists. Caroline Jackson, one of the few Conservative members of the European Parliament who wants to work with Britain's allies, wrote in the Financial Times that her Tory colleagues 'now have a bad reputation [rapidly getting worse] for crass and offensive behaviour'

[...]

A Cameron government will tear up the complex web of alliances and understandings through which Britain exercises her influence. It is about time journalists asked him what he intends to put in their place.

Rather depressing: (a) because Labour's foreign policy, internationalism, record of involvement with developing countries, and of condemning human rights abuses, since 1997, has been a good one - certainly a proud one by British standards; (b) a failure (perhaps) to sell that to the electorate, coupled with our national insularity and hypocrisy, means the Tory Party's stance is unlikely to cost them any votes. Far from it.