Quentin Davies, former Director of Morgan Grenfell Bank, holder of numerous directorships in addition to his neglected parliamentary duties, has joined the Labour Party.
Davies, who had an undistinguished Foreign Office career ending as one of the FCO’s many hundred First Secretaries, should be right at home with New Labour. After all, under NULab the gap between the extremely rich, like Mr Davies, and both the poor and the middling, is greater than at any time in British history. Mr Davies is right – who needs the Conservatives when NuLab are the best friend unearned income ever had?
Secondly, Davies is a warmonger for whom the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead are not enough – he’s just itching to attack Iran. Doubtless some of his financial interests would benefit from the consequent massive profits to the weapons and oil sectors.
Here is “Genghis” Davies in the House of Commons on 21 February 2007:
Quentin Davies (Grantham & Stamford, Conservative)
Today’s news is extremely good. Does the Prime Minister accept that he deserves genuine credit for having kept his nerve and not withdrawn the troops prematurely, despite the strong pressures on him? We have got to the point today where we are making some real progress. On Iran, while of course diplomacy must be tried, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) is correct that we need to go for tougher sanctions, particularly if we can get them through the Security Council, would it not be utterly irresponsible not to recognise that there is a real possibility that the last thing the Iranians want or would accept is a strong, united and successful democratic Iraq on their borders, and the last thing that they will ever agree to do, whatever the pressures on them, is to give up their enrichment and their nuclear weapons programmes? Do we not seriously have to confront that unfortunate, hideous possibility and plan accordingly?
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2007-02-21b.261.0&s=iraq+speaker%3A10160#g276.2
The extraordinary thing is that such an odious, bigoted, violent, vastly wealthy warmonger can feel fully at home in the Labour Party. I think this strange weather might be caused by Keir Hardie spinning. David Cameron should cheer up – his party is better off without this dangerous nutter.
"The extraordinary thing is that such an odious, bigoted, violent, vastly wealthy warmonger can feel fully at home in the Labour Party"
Not the slightest extraordinary to me.
Granted, I suppose, this particular kind of odious bigot wasn't found in the Labour Party until recently. But the Labour Party has always been just as much a refuge for such scum as the Conservative Party. It's just that Labour Party bigotry was mostly class hatred and therefore regarded as acceptable in polite British circles.
Power attracts and worsens such people, and gives them opportunities to impose their viciousness on others.
"David Cameron should cheer up – his party is better off without this dangerous nutter."
This is very true, and perhaps in a less frivolous sense than you presumably intended it.
Surprising as it may seem, there is still a residual opposition to warmongering in the Conservative Party, and the departure of an MP of such openly warmongering sympaties can only help. Don't get me wrong, the Conservatives will always have a majority of authoritarian militarists. But there is also the liberal wing of the Conservative Party that opposes big government, and there is no bigger government than the military (of course, a lot of right wing people live in denial of this obvious truth, in the doomed hope of reconciling their liberalism with their militarism, but not all of them).
On conservatism and militarism, there's a good piece on antiwar.com from an American perspective today:
Conservatives Must Oppose Militarism and War
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/primeau.php?articleid…
America has a more recent tradition of conservative opposition to militarism than we do. It would be nice if it could be revived in both countries.
(Bear in mind the author of the linked piece is speaking American, not English – when he says "liberal" he means "socialist")