Desperate times call for desperate Tories

The editor of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomerie, has penned a desperate appeal for eurosceptics to stay with the Conservative & European Unionist Party.

Reconnecting with the grassroots, apparently

In his article he points out that 81 Tory MPs voted for a referendum on EU membership and suggests that this is the political event of 2011.  Just 81 out of 305 Tory MPs voted for a referendum, the other 224 voted against our national interest and the wishes of the majority of the electorate.  Wee Willy Vague himself said that the EU was undermining our sovereignty and that we need a law to stop them doing it but he and the rest of the europhile Tory leadership pulled out all the stops to make sure that we didn't get a say in our membership.  Just  a quarter of Tory MPs defied the whips and we are supposed to vote for a pro-EU, illiberal, high tax, big state Conservative Party on the strength of the record of 81 MPs in one vote?  You're having a laugh Montgomerie!

Montgomerie also thinks that under the rabidly europhile leadership of Martin Callanan, the Tory MEP group in the EU Parliament has reconnected with the grassroots.  This group of MEPs has voted for EU regulation of the City of London, for EU control of national budgets, for EU supervision of banks and for the EU arrest warrant amongst others.  Whose grassroots have they reconnected with?  Certainly not their own.

Once again we are told that UKIP are splitting the Tory vote and preventing euroscepticism from triumphing but UKIP is the eurosceptic party, not the Tories.  It is the Tories that are splitting the UKIP vote and preventing true eurosceptics from entering government, not the other way round.

Tim Montgomerie is way off the mark as usual - a party propaganda merchant through and through.  Roger Helmer made the right decision in joining UKIP, as did all the other Tories (and there are a lot of them, especially in the last year or two) that have defected to UKIP.  There is more to UKIP than opposing the EU and more behind the high profile Tory defections of the likes of Roger Helmer, Stuart Wheeler, the Lords Hesketh, Pearson and de Broke and Viscount Monckton than the continued Tory betrayals over the EU.

UKIP is attracting supporters from all parties and both ends of the political spectrum, not because they oppose the EU but because they believe in UKIP.