Today’s newspapers are full of stories about a momentus new speech that Prime Minister David Cameron intends to make tomorrow in the hope of winning nationalistically minded ex-Tory voters back to the Conservative Party.

The speech is expected to propose restrictions on the rights of immigrants to access social housing, but no Bill introducing such changes has been put before Parliament and the forthcoming speech is not expected to provide a timetable for the immediate introduction of these proposed restrictions.

I predict that the restrictions will be promised as part of the Conservative manifesto at the next general election, an election that the Conservative Party are unlikely to win!

Furthermore, even if the Conservatives do win the next general election, it is unlikely that the proposed restrictions will be enacted without being watered down substantially, and most likely any new Conservative government will forget all about introducing these proposed restrictions when the time comes.

The aspect of this whole affair that seems to have escaped the attention of mainstream journalists is that David Cameron does not need to wait if he wishes to introduce urgently needed legislation – he is after all already the Prime Minister!

We should remember how when David Cameron became the leader of the Conservative Party, almost his first act was to introduce measures designed to increase the number of ethnic minority parliamentary candidates for his party.

Cameron wanted to “change the face of the Conservative Party by changing the faces of the Conservative Party”, we were told.

Not a great start for someone who now wishes to fool us into believing that he is serious about curbing immigration abuses?

We should remember how the Conservatives promised to reduce net immigration to the mere tens of thousands by 2015, and how they have so far made no appreciable progress in this direction.

We should also remember how David Cameron pledged that if he became Prime Minister, he would hold a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon, but then later reneged on that pledge and is now attempting to fool voters again into believing that he will hold a referendum on EU membership if re-elected at the next general election.

Today’s announcements are therefore just so much rhetoric – more Tory talk – but no Tory action!

More hollow Tory promises of things they have no real intention of ever doing, because if they did, they would do those things now, while they are in power.

By Max Musson © 2013

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