Ali Renison: To win in the north, the Conservatives must deploy their northern MPs

Alli Renison works for Business for Britain but is writing in a personal capacity. Follow Allie on Twitter.

In the bible of campaigning, if such a thing yet exists, under the “breaking into new markets” section should be Rule 1: identify existing reserves before starting over from scratch. This is a modus operandi which the Conservatives would do well to remember in formulating their attack strategy for the campaign ahead of the 2015 election, particularly in the North.

Re-inventing the wheel policy-wise needs to be complemented by having the right people in place to communicate the message to a wider and often Tory-sceptical audience outside of Westminster and the South, but CCHQ shouldn’t just focus on 2015 as a benchmark for making progress. There are several ways to start making an impact in this area right now, and all they require is making better and more frequent use of resources which have been right under our noses all along.

The first suggestion would be for the Conservatives in government to take a long, hard look at the sort of representatives they are trotting out to defend the party and policy lines in the media. We all know that Newsnight and the Daily Politics would prefer to grill an Eton-bred minister to make the case for why the ‘bedroom tax’ is not a tax. It’s convenient for the narrative much of the press and certainly Labour want to convey, that the Tories are dominated by posh-sounding out-of-touch elites who know nothing about the plight of ‘the ordinary man’.

Allie Renison: Timing and motivation taint the EU’s Nobel Peace Prize award

Allie Renison works for Mark Reckless MP and the People's Pledge. Follow Allie on Twitter.

In a flurry of hyperbole, EU leaders accepted the institution’s Nobel Peace Prize today for “the advance of peace and reconciliation” amidst a renewed gnashing of teeth over one of the most controversial awardings in the Committee’s history – matched perhaps only by the designation of Barack Obama as recipient less than a year into his first term as US president. One by one, Brussels eurocrats regaled the assembled guests with stories of war and eventual peace in Europe and the strident words from the EU’s founding fathers Monnet and Adenauer which helped set the first round of treaties in motion. Herman van Rompuy made a characteristic Freudian slip in lauding the work of “Europe’s Founders” – a prescient reminder that Europhiles have taken the art of conflating our long-existent geographic reality with a political edifice artificially constructed to new heights. But it is this focus on the past that should illustrate the grievous error in judgement on the part of the Nobel committee, chaired ironically by the man who led Norway’s last failed drive for EU membership, Thorbjørn Jagland.

At some point in time, the EU probably deserved recognition for some of its “achievements”. Not for what it set out to achieve per se, but for some of its more reactive measures and moments. It is genuinely awe-inspiring to see how, little more than a decade on from the ravages of conflict in the Balkans, how much of a transformation the countries of South-Eastern Europe have undergone, and the EU has had more than steady hand in that rebuilding. For these still-developing nation-states, joining a club like the EU is the ultimate stamp to mark their rather speedy transition from embryonic to mature democracies. Though at times, the rush to satisfy all the tickmarks Brussels requires for entry to the club means some of these countries’ developments ring a bit hollow in substance even while gleaming on the surface. The EU as an expediting force in institution-building, sometimes before the country playing host to this non-organically generated architecture may be ready to digest it properly, is not always a force for good.

Allie Renison: Cameron jockeys for position in Brussels - and finally wins one

Allie Renison works for Mark Reckless MP and the People's Pledge. Follow Allie on Twitter.

Months after the Coalition took over the reins of government, the Chancellor was forced by the dire state of the economy left to them by Labour to issue an emergency budget. Only the NHS and international aid were ring-fenced from unavoidable cuts to public spending that had spiralled out of control. Much was made over the sparing of these two areas of expenditure, yet the fact that our vast contribution to the EU budget would not and arguably could not be reduced, garnered barely a mention. It was treated as an afterthought, as if it was an inevitable reality that what we sent to Brussels was a finite, immoveable feast, and that questioning this automatic transfer was a wasted, futile exercise.

But he who dares wins, and earlier this month the House of Commons struck a resounding note of unity to stand up to Brussels and the mandarins in Whitehall who say we have no choice but to give ever more to fund the project of European integration. The annual EU budget negotiations no longer present us with a chance to unilaterally force a rethink of proposals from the Commission and European Parliament. But we do still have a veto over the long-term financial perspectives that set the maximum ceilings for EU spending over seven year periods, known as the Multiannual Financial Framework. The opportunities for making use of these vetoes are now few and far between, thanks to the changes in voting rights to QMV in a number of policy areas that the Lisbon Treaty ushered in. The chance to effect change on how we fund the EU only comes around once every seven years. And the Prime Minister has after all committed to using such rare opportunities to ‘recalibrate’ Britain’s relationship with the EU.