The general-election campaign is getting underway now.  Birmingham Young Labour are beginning a massive push forward to win back our city and keep Birmingham constituencies red.  BULS must surely follow suit.  Every weekend and many evenings there are campaigning sessions taking place in various parts of the city.  If you want to get Sir Albert Bore’s emails about when and where these take place then drop me your email; tom_guise@hotmail.com

Here’s my early pitch for the election campaign theme song, lets hope head-office read this blog and take my advice.  Although if you believe the guys over on the radish then we at BULS are in constant contact with head office.

The EPP, the EU Party group for centre-right parties remains the largest group in the EU Parliament.  So you might immediately think it would be quite a good group to be a part of.  Not so for one little scamp, young David Cameron believes he’s better than the most influential group of MEPs in Europe.  He’s decided (a long time ago no less) to set-up his own little group.

Now, it’s important to keep this in context.  During the Tory 2005 leadership election, the front-runner was David Davis, a bit of a EU-sceptic.  Liam Fox was also doing well.  There was an EU-sceptic consensus if you like amongst all candidates (except Ken Clarke).  So Cameron was faced with the difficulty of looking like an inexperienced candidate in a field of people who shared similar core beliefs, not the most likely of winners.  There was no serious difference, thus Cameron had to reach out to the Euro-sceptic wing of his party in a new way.  He did this by pledging (I know he made a pledge!!) to leave the mainstream group and form a new euro-sceptic one.  Conservatives heap praise on the man for his brave and decisive decision but do not be fooled, it was an opportunistic and cynical ploy for Cameron to cease power of his party, and it shows the basis of any policy pledges he has made since, and will make in the future.  He is an opportunistic and pragmatic politician who will do anything to grab power.

I’ll let you judge for yourselves on the party’s he wishes to join with, it has within it the Czech Civic Democratic Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party.  Put them through Wikipedia and come up with your own view of how appropriate it is for them to be closely associated with one of our mainstream political parties.  Chris Patten acknowledges the move as a bad idea that will reduce Britain’s long-term influence in the EU, and an MEP in the South-East, Caroline Jackson stood down over the issue.

The move was a success, in terms that it won Cameron the leadership with much help from some ridiculously biased press coverage towards him.  Yet it must be held has his biggest mistake by all involved in the Tory party, and now he faces the battle of actually seeing if he can build the group.  You could be in for the treat of seeing his biggest U-turn yet, but one thing is for sure, we must continually monitor what this group gets up to and put the spotlight on it as much as possible.