As Tories go Justine Greening is on the decent end of the scale. That's why she quit Parliament. But she's still a Tory, and she just does not get what that party is really all about. There's evidence for that in The Observer this morning, where she says in an article clearly timed to coincide with the Tory party conference:
The Conservative party must decide if it is the party of privilege and chumocracy or the party of effort and reward. It cannot be both.
Prime ministers don't get to choose the crises that define them. But they do get to choose if those crises push them off their wider agenda.
For voters, levelling up is much more than government just making life less bad after Covid-19. That is simply not good enough. Levelling up is about making lives demonstrably better and, crucially, fair in terms of who has access to what opportunities in our country. It is about eradicating the chumocracy, not entrenching it.
It baffles me that Greening can have spent years in the Conservative Party, and risen to Cabinet rank, and not noticed that it was all about the chumocracy, of which she, as a lesbian woman, was never going to be a part.
The Conservative party has always been about who you know, rather than what you know.
It is always been about reinforcing privilege, including that of wealth.
And, if that is the case, then to believe that the Conservatives can now be anything else is to also believe that, somehow, they can be abolished, and then reformed as something entirely different, made up of wholly different people, none of whom believe in, or enjoy, the privilege that the party has always existed to promote. The problem is, that this would still leave those who are now the Conservatives in exactly the same place.
Greening is intensely useful to her party. She continues to suggest to some in the electorate that there is an impossible dream of a reasonable Conservative government. She does, however, face an insurmountable obstacle, which is that Johnson and his chums are determined to prove her wrong.
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Makes me think of the George Carlin line. “It’s a club and you’re not on it…”
Tory genius is making so many millions of people believe they might get a chance and would even like to be in the club, – like with buying council properties, shares in the 80s and putting up the buffoon as the mast head.
Sunak on borrowed time as you say…
Not being able to recognise a “Chumocracy and Dumocracy” party and politician the very essence of Britain’s post-war decline!
I for one am glad she joined the Tories.
Better than being another Blair-Right Labour MP and misleading and effectively taking loyal voters for granted because you’d rather appeal to swing voters instead.
And look where that got them?
I think Greening is one of those ‘real’ Tories who at least take their responsibilities seriously. People like Boris and far too many to mention in the Tory party are just U.S .style neo-libertarians pretending to be trad Tories.
We need to differentiate Tories and Conservatives
She is a Conservative
Johnson is a Tory – in Irish, a brigand
A little bit of background on the origin of the word ‘Tory’.
https://tanistry.net/blog/traidhe-english-tory-roots-in-gaelic-ireland#:~:text=The%20word%20%E2%80%9CTory%E2%80%9D%20is%20typically%20associated%20with%20a,%E2%80%9CT%C3%B3ra%C3%AD%E2%80%9D-the%20word%20for%20bandit%2Fbrigand-specifically%20referring%20to%20%E2%80%9Cpursued%20men.%E2%80%9D.
I wonder if many Tory MPs know?
I doubt it
Perhaps the current party and its leadership is a “chumocracy” (Eton and Oxford figure prominently) but arguably since Cameron it is not as meritocratic as the party of Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, or Michael Howard, and rather more like that of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home.
Back to the landed, agricultural, reactionary, protectionist, royalist, divine right, Jacobite, Roman Catholic Tories?
That said, there certainly is a monied, private school, Oxbridge slant of entrenched privilege. To put some numbers on it, less than 10% of children attend private school, and fewer than 10,000 undergraduates start at Oxbridge each year out of half a million new students at UK universities (less than 2%).
What matters is connections – not competence – as evidenced by Dido( is that really her name?) Harding as head of Virus Test and Trace operation
I think it’s Dodo really
She is “Diana Mary Harding, Baroness Harding of Winscombe”. https://members.parliament.uk/member/4324/contact
Following a link from a link from another post, I found a pointer to a book ‘Game of Mates’ about how the Australian chumocracy (of James, Clive, Julia, Malcolm, Bronwyn, Tony, Peter and so forth) rip off (putting it simply) Bruce and other ordinary Aussies…
Another country, another chumocracy, same pain…