European Parliamentarian and Daily Telegraph columnist, Daniel Hannan said last Friday at Washington’s Heritage Foundation, “there has to be some kind of rapprochement” between the Conservative Party and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and in private remarks, he said there could be a resolution between the two occurring sometime in May.
In recent months, the United Kingdom’s political establishment has been gripped by the rise of the Independent Eurosceptic party, documented in media accounts such as The Spectator, which ran a headline “David Cameron has lost the Countryside.” It was noted that a drop of 20% of people planning to vote conservative in UK rural areas, saw many of those voters headed to UKIP. There were also commensurate developments of normally traditional Tory donors such as Paul Sykes announcing they are now lining UKIP’s coffers.
Hannan’s remarks about the state of the insurgent UKIP and his relationship to UKIP leader Nigel Farage came in response to a query by Newsblaze while Hannan tours the United States promoting his new book. The book sold out that day, at the Washington Heritage Foundation think tank session entitled “Inventing Freedom: How the English Speaking peoples made the modern world.”
The South East England MEP began by saying “Nigel is a good friend of mine; he and I both represent the same region. It could be a recipe for a bad relationship but it isn’t”
Fracturing Of UK Center Right Benefits Labor
Hannan’s comments turned to a warning “I think the fracturing of the center right in the UK could be devastating, a similar thing happened in Canada in the 90’s; there were two right of center parties. They have the same electoral system you have and we have.” Hannan said the result of such a split is “It ruthlessly punishes that kind of division.”
“The risk is if the right of center Eurosceptic vote is split between two different parties, Labour will get in with a minority of the vote with a large majority in parliament. That’s the quirk of our electoral system.” Hannan remarked.
Then came an Olive branch “I think there needs to be some kind of rapprochement between UKIP and the conservative party.” Hannan said he considered the logic of the two coming together to be “overwhelming” and in private remarks to NewsBlaze afterwards, he said he thought it possible that such a deal could happen around May of next year.
“If we were all rational calculating machines we would have already done this … but human nature gets in the way; personal animosities get in the way.”
Hannan then took dead aim at UKIP by saying “if they were to prevent a deal and thereby put Labour back into government giving them the car keys all over again to trash it, to exhaust our treasury and our credit … that would reflect badly on all concerned.”
UKIP’s main platform challenging the Conservative Party has been the issue of having a referendum. Hannan continued by saying “My party will have a referendum, if we win, on leaving the European Union. The only way to get that referendum to happen so we can walk away from the European Union and rejoin the community of English speaking democracies, is to get people in the House of Commons who will go through the right lobbies when the moment comes.”
Again Hannan challenged UKIP by saying “If UKIP were to be the vehicle that prevented that outcome, all of us would be to blame.”
