It is often said, because it is true, that what happens in North America politically and economically is a precursor to what will happen in Britain.

Conservatism is undergoing a global reawakening after two decades asleep to the scourge of “progressivism” and social democracy. In America this birthed the Tea Party movement, turning the Republican Party back into a grassroots organisation, in Canada the Canadian Alliance rose from nowhere to overtake and eventually dissolve the Progressive Conservative Party, which had forgotten its roots in the mire of power.

This is the choice the British Conservative Party faces: freedom or death, and the watershed for that decision is now.

With the defection of the first Conservative MP to UKIP this week in Douglas Carswell, political careerists and commentators have sensed change in the air, and are already shifting tack for fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of history.

The prominent Times political columnist Tim Montgomerie, once a strong supporter of Cameron and progressive policies like Same Sex Marriage, has launched a tirade this week against colleagues operating under the Conservative banner, but advocating social democracy.  

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— Tim Montgomerie (@TimMontgomerie) September 1, 2014

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@TimesRedBox (subscribe via http://t.co/HPhAW0LSuE) pic.twitter.com/mS2wYDDAzk

— Tim Montgomerie (@TimMontgomerie) September 1, 2014

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Since founding the website Conservative Home, Montgomerie began his career as a strong advocate of grassroots opinion, lost for the past few years as a metropolitan establishment fellow traveller, his reawakening as a defender of conservative principles and a voice of ordinary voters is both important and indicative of the great shift that is now occurring in Britain.

It is not impossible for the Conservative Party to win the next election, but it is extremely unlikely.

If we do not the significant compensation will be the opportunity to address and reverse the cancer that threatens to destroy the Conservative Party slowly but surely over the next decade. 

Candidates are already positioning themselves for the inevitable battle for the leadership of the Party in 2015, and the same exhausted ideas of Blair and Cameron will be repackaged by a continuity cabal that is too removed from reality to know that the game is up. 

There is some hope, however, that new candidates will now rise who recognise, as Montgomerie has, that the national mood has changed irreversibly. 

I wrote in April that “Londonism”, the tyranny of a liberal metropolitan class with no base in the rest of the country, was bound for collapse. Currently the Conservative Party is, and is seen as being, of that order rather than opposed to it. If that model is continued then only defeat and death awaits, if it is opposed from within there will not only be a great victory for conservative principles, but also for the Conservative Party.   

It is for this same reason that I founded the Conservative Grassroots organisation last year, and why the establishment are so terrified of it. Grassroots conservative members and voters have never swayed from their faith in conservatism, not only do they understand its value from life experience, but also its constancy, regardless of political parties. 

The process for the Canadian Alliance movement, the Tea Party and the UKIP/grassroots conservative uprising in Britain has followed the same well trodden path: First they are ignored, then they are laughed at, then they are fought, then they win. 

In Britain we are approaching the end of that path, whether the Conservative Party is part of that victory is the only question that remains.