I wanted to summarise what Kemi Badenoch is all about and why I think she is so dangerous, but during her party leadership campaign, she kept very quiet about what she thinks.
She did, however, publish the foreword to this:
In that foreword, she said (and I quote it in full):
The General Election of 2024 delivered the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen. This will have enormous consequences for our country, as will soon become apparent.
The Conservative Party made many mistakes. However, the lessons have not been learned and this new Parliament and the Labour Government will repeat and double down on some of the worst mistakes. We need to renew our thinking across the board. This starts with a renewal of the Conservative Party and Conservatism itself ready for the 2030s and beyond. This is why my campaign is called Renewal 2030.
Conservatism is in crisis, and we need to be serious about getting it back on track. The changes in UK politics crystallised by Brexit are part of a wider picture. There is a political realignment going on in almost every Western country, as this pamphlet sets out.
While the General Election result this year was disastrous for us, we need to consider a wider problem. Since 1992, the Conservative party has only won a majority when Brexit was on the ballot paper; in 2015, through a pledge to hold a referendum on the European Union and in 2019, to ‘Get Brexit Done'.
By 2029 we will have not won a majority without this issue in nearly four decades.
So, when people say we just need to deliver policy X or policy Y, and then everything will be fine again, they are kidding us and themselves. This is not just about policy. It is about a wider economic and cultural malaise that has set in across a complacent West that is living off the inheritance built by previous generations.
Politics is no longer about class in the old sense – increasingly, whether you are high income does not drive your voting patterns. Educated voters are moving left, and many private sector voters on average incomes are moving right. Brexit was a symptom of deeper currents across the West, not a cause of them, and we need to think more intelligently if we are to ride this wave of change and not be drowned by it. This voting shift is part of a series of wider changes.
In nearly every country, a new progressive ideology is on the rise. This ideology is based on the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals, or even democratic nation states.
This ideology is behind the rise of identity politics, the attacks on the democratic, sovereign nation state, and ever-more government via spending and regulation. It is driving the economic slowdown seen across the West and social polarisation in country after country. A new left, not based primarily on nationalisation and private sector trade unions, but ever increasing social and economic control.
A new class of people, a new and growing bureaucratic class, is driving these changes. More and more jobs are related not to providing goods and services in the marketplace, but are instead focused around administering government rules.
Often these jobs are in private sector bureaucracies, confounding the old split between the public and private sectors.
This pamphlet discusses some of them – and how there is a world of difference, for example, between a lawyer dealing with market contracts and one focused on compliance, human rights or environmental laws. Between the market-focused HR staff fixing pensions and finding the best talent and those dealing with the ever-expanding EDI sector or imposing ever tighter control over employees' lives, changes driven often by government rules. The growth of pointless degrees pushed by government so that a middle-class job requires a major millstone of debt, funding a growing university administrative class.
This pamphlet shows how certain sectors are growing much more quickly than the economy as a whole and how this is linked to expanding government.
The costs of an ever-expanding regulatory state then drives government to intervene to spend more money, without tackling the real issues that caused these problems.
We recently saw an excellent paper, Foundations, which built on the strong work by the group Britain Remade, listing the tens of thousands of pages of paperwork required to build infrastructure, holding back our economy. I met with this team as a Secretary of State and explained the challenges I faced were often with fellow Conservatives afraid to challenge the consensus.
Whenever you try to roll back the environmental laws, the diversity and social requirements, to trim the judicial reviews and the fake consultation processes, too many in our party are nowhere to be seen. This is thus not a process problem, but a political problem.
Too many in our party think that the bureaucratic class and their demands should not be confronted, and they are not prepared to make the trade-offs we need in order to get our economy moving again. Because we didn't even try to understand these issues and forces, we were unable to fight them. On issue after issue, we were dragged along with the current. We ended up losing sight of our principles and our values. The idea that we can hive off ideology and principles from managerial economics is false. They are all intertwined.
If you tell people they cannot cope with microaggressions, they are unlikely to take risks or become entrepreneurs. If you build a victimhood and complaint culture, then a well-paid job policing this culture becomes the goal for more and more talented people.
The rising social intolerance of the bureaucratic class helps them push their progressive agenda across the wider economy. Culture and economics are entwined.
If we start from the presumption that bureaucracy knows best, we will never be able to reform our economy – either the private sector or the public sector.
On top of this, the new progressive ideology sees the nation state, and related migration controls, as a purveyor of historic injustice, not the fundamental necessities that they are.
So we are uncomfortable with limiting migration on economic or cultural grounds, and the result is too many people coming here and placing strains on our economy and society.
We risk holding back our economy and tearing apart the fabric of our society. The progressive left's war on the nation state is a disaster for all of us and it must be ended.
As noted, these changes are driving affluent voters that make up this new bureaucratic class leftward. Meanwhile the old middle class, the entrepreneurs and the private sector businesses providing market goods and services are under siege from this new ideology. They are shrinking, and as they shrink, so does our political and economic base.
We need to rise to this new challenge - without simply retreating to a nostalgic reactionary agenda that says the past was inevitably better than the present.
We have seen already that the Labour Party has nothing new to offer but increasing the attempts to control ordinary people, to double down on a failed managerialism.
The purpose of this pamphlet is to start to set out a different analysis. In time, this will be turned into a book. There is so much to discuss here, and my colleagues and I do not have to agree with every single word to know that its underlying message must be heard for our country to thrive again in the future. And, if you agree too, join with us. This is not about one summer, but the work of years to come.
I want to lead our party's renewal as we face the challenges of the 21st century, and to defeat this new left and its new progressive ideology. We can't afford to try to build unity based on an empty shell, or think simplistic knee-jerk answers are the way forward.
Ultimately our principles of personal responsibility, citizenship, equality under the law, family and truth, are the principles of the British people. If we have the intellectual honesty to renew our party, I believe we can still turn the tide.
We may be outnumbered in Westminster but we are not outgunned. We may be late to the fight, but we will not cease until we have won.
I have copied this material, using a public interest defence for doing so.
There are many themes in here:
- The support for people I think to be far-right thinkers on race and society, like David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin
- Contempt for the power of the state to help the individual whilst espousing the power of the state to control the individual (although she would claim the exact opposite, I know)
- A belief in a small state
- A focus on migration
- A disbelief in climate change
- The promotion of market fundamentalism
- A mistrust of those suffering from mental health issues (as elaborated later in the report) because she believes in self-reliance
- A promotion of the supposedly Christian concept of the family
- Uniformity (as the opposite of the diversity of which she is so contemptuous)
- And much more.
My suggestion is simple. It is that we have to know this stuff because this is the direction in which she will be moving the Tories, and it is fundamentally dangerous to any reasonable concept of society.
The pamphlet is available here.
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“Kemi Badenoch Carries on Liz Truss’ Tufton Street Traditions” (Nov 2022)
https://bylinetimes.com/2022/11/14/kemi-badenoch-carries-on-liz-truss-tufton-street-traditions/
“The chair of tonight’s Badenoch event, the Cato Institute’s R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics, Ryan Bourne, is a graduate of this world – having worked as the head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and the head of economic research at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS),”
The Cato Institute and the IEA are funded by neoliberals whose aim is to destroy public service and to privatise them. These are dangerous aims for the vast majority of Britons.
There has been a lot written about Badenoch – much too much.
I agree that the word ‘dangerous’ is apt.
But in my view, the only other word needed – which occurred to me when reading the rhubarb that is quoted from her – is ‘liar’.
Kemi Badenoch – ‘Dangerous Liar’.
I used like the name Badenoch – it was the name given to the LNER P2 steam locomotive (later A2/2 rebuild) ‘The Wolf of Badenoch’. Later on, a British Rail Class 87 AC electric locomotive from the 1970’s got the name and I remember particularly fine run from Euston to Carlisle behind it, arriving 10 minutes early.
So not only will this really bad Badenoch destroy our future, she has already ruined my past.
Thanks Kemi.
Not as scary as project 2025 but going hell-for-leather down the same track.
The strongest defence has to be a proper debate on what governments actually provide for the people and calling out the rich/corporations who always benefit from government policies/intervention.
For example: the latest EU report on who actually benefits from the CAP.
However, in a country that has seen Grenfell, the state of UK water/power/transport, the PO fiasco and countless other disasters directly linked to this notion of small government / corporate excess, that there aren’t riots in the streets tell me the general public in the UK believes the neoliberal crap they’re fed daily.
Hi team
I beg to differ on the reason for lack of demonstrations. I have considered joining demonstrations but am genuinely concerned about the anti democratic measures taken by lawyers (injunctions) as well as our own legislation (don’t make too much noise) and how these might be used against me.
I am sure I am not alone in this.
By this morning Kemi Badenoch had not spoken to the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, Russell Finley since she won the Party election: according to Russell Finley – and he is unconcerned. Whatever Finley thinks, what the public can deduce is that the Scottish Conservatives can be taken for granted by Badenoch; and Scotland is not a matter of urgency, or even focus to the Conservatives. And that should worry everyone in Scotland.
I’m not surprised Russell Findlay is unconcerned by the absence of communication from Kemi Badenoch: the Conservatives have stated occasionally that they wish to concentrate all power in Westminster by disbanding the devolved assemblies. Given that, Findlay’s role is to do as he’s told by Westminster and to keep the other Conservative MSPs in line with Head Office policy. John S W is right in saying Scotland and its people are not a matter of focus to the Conservatives. Scotland is being treated by both Labour and Tory as a colony whose assets are ripe for exploitation, whose devolved assemblies’ legitimate decisions can easily be overruled by Westminster and whose people can be ignored as their views count for nothing due to the overwhelming numbers of English MPs and the ease with which Scottish Affairs committee posts in Westminster can be filled with non-Scottish MPs. We’ve seen it all before.
The privatisation of Scottish resources has resulted in diversion of huge cash flows outwith Scotland’s economy, while the overwhelming proportion of taxes raised in Scotland go straight to the UK Treasury, leaving the Scottish Government’s cash flow largely dependent on the Barnett Consequentials, which in turn have been significantly reduced due to Westminster’s ridiculously prolonged Austerity policy. Some folk may think the use of the word “colony” is unwarranted, but Scotland is supposedly in a political Union of Equals yet there is no mechanism to secede if its people so wish and all the while we’re witnessing a full-on policy of Extractionism by successive Westminster governments. If that’s not colonialism I don’t know what is; it certainly meets many of its definitions.
Much to agree with
Tories have never taken Scitland seriously. Though its not stopped the Borders voting Tory. But then it was the home of the Reivers!
Have to disagree Robin. The Tories, along with Labour, and the LibDems, take Scotland very seriously, in relation, as Ken has already stated, to stealing our valuable resources. Without our people, oil, gas, renewable electricity, and now our water, England would be in an even more sorry state, than it is at the moment.
From that perspective on the Tories I’d agree.
What struck me about this Badenoch ramble is her misidentification of the political centre with ‘the left’. It is the centre that is focused on mitigating the worst abuses of neoliberal capitalism through regulation – the ‘bureaucratic class’. The left’s focus is elsewhere: on the imminent danger of climate-ecological breakdown and the radical change to our economies and lifestyles this in fact means (which encompasses not just mitigating, but moving entirely away from the neoliberal embrace of huge multinational corporations and billionaires). Both climate breakdown and multinational capitalism (which are at bottom, of course, the same problem) seem to be entirely missing from Badenoch’s purview.
That misidentification of what constitutes the political left is entirely intentional. By characterising Starmer as extreme left (when he is anything but) she opens space to move even further to the right.
BadEnoch going full Trump again. Anyone who does not share views that now are way to the right of where even the Tories would have been say 20 years ago, is now ‘Far Left’, communist even. Of course it does not stand up to even a moments rational thought.
We can expect continued ranting from BadEnoch along these lines. Though I don’t think the British public will buy it in the same way the US has.
Small government doesn’t deal with the climate challenge that we are facing and last week hit Spain so tragically. Badenoch’s views cannot deliver what the Public expects the state to provide.
Precisely when the Spanish Government asked the EU for financial help! A small state would be unable to help in their word of thinking.
I confess I do not undertsand that comment
Well done for actually providing some sort of breakdown/summary of the foreword. I read it 3 times, and the conclusion I came to was it was it was gobbledegook.
It is pure garbled nonsense, written by someone who has never, ever been challenged on any of the points in it. It is written by someone without any critical abilities to think about society, and how it exists. None of the points alluded to, stand up to any sort of scrutiny. It is typical of someone who thinks they have some sort of important view that the world needs to hear.
There is, however, a serious point about this type of writing/thinking. It is designed purely to prevent any sort of intellectual challenge, due to the fact that evaluating and rebutting this sort of garbage, would consume a great deal of time and indeed many more words than it contains itself.
This is how the “new Right” presents itself, a tremendous amount of lies, untruths, and misinformation, spouted rapidly preventing serious discussion.
Once again, hats off for bothering to break it down however, I would simply say this is BS, written by a someone without the intellectual capacity to be anywhere near politics, and would bear this in mind when considering anything else they say/write
She thinks different from you, so what so do the majority of the electorate. The public will ultimately will decide if she is a capable leader or not. I don’t think mud slinging from the likes or you or Dawn Butler will change the outcome. If anything it strengthens her hand in the way it has for Reform.
I think a little punctuation would make your meaning somewhat clearer.
And mud slinging? I do not think pointing out she is a threat to a majority of people in this country is mud slinging. I think it is about protecting them from abuse.
Agree she is very dangerous.
“She thinks different from you, so what so do the majority of the electorate.” Really??
So the ‘majority’ of people are happy for public services to be further driven into the wall, and the NHS privatised?
The ‘majority’ people are happy for the world to burn at hotter and hotter temperatures (enabled by the billionaires funding the hard right – including Badenoch)?
The ‘majority’ of people are happy for vulnerable people to be discriminated against?
@David
If Richard is a “mud-slinger, and I I say “If” with heavy emphasis, he is an equal opportunity “mud-slinger”.
This blog is an “op-ed” with commentary and discussion encouraged.
You have offered no commentary or discussion on why you think Kemi Badenoch is correct.
If you do not like this blog, I suggest you investigate a USA site called “RightWingNutHouse”.
I think many here would be interested in your detail views as to why you think Kemi Badenoch is correct..
Until you can provide that snippet of information why waste your time attacking Richard?
🙂
BayTampaBay
Nice one sticking up for Richard.
Do you want the job full time?
I’m really busy at the moment.
PSR
🙂
Absolutely fascinating! (& v scary)
My initial reactions…
There’s a lot of quite open ideological deceit in the foreword and the pamphlet – an intent to hide their revulsion at various aspects of our society but undermining them nevertheless.
A realisation that the project to keep the rich, rich, and make them richer, has been rumbled by the non-rich, who are getting poorer and are beginning to realise why. Therefore new ways must be found of fooling them to continue to support the project on behalf of the rich.
If you don’t fit in (disability, diversity, disadvantage), tough. Your problem, not ours. We have prisons and pavements available.
It’s a v scary ideology, but the ideology will be kept out of sight. I expect to hear a lot more Conservatives complaining about “common sense”, “red tape”, “waste of money”, “armies of pen pushers telling us how to think”, and “left-wing nonsense”, with appeals to the “ordinary people of this country”, “decent British families” but less language about culture wars from Badenoch.
Personally, as a follower of Jesus, I DON’T think they will use Christianity v much in their rhetoric, because this isn’t America. Although they may use it in algorithmically targeted appeals to certain demographics, where Christianity is stronger, particularly black majority and charismatic pentecostal churchgoers. Such targeting is easily done nowadays, as Cambridge Analytica showed us, well tested in African elections over the last 15yrs. (Although current jailbird Tommy Robinson is waving a lot more crosses nowadays.)
I had my first “Badenoch” omnibus conversation yesterday, sharing lunch after a worship service. You’ve given me some great material!
Thanks
A warning form the North of Ireland. I have seen the exponential rise of the fundamentalist mega church circuit over the past 25 years. It began to really take off during the post Belfast Agreement years. There is a church in our local town funded, like many, by US fundamentalist money which has been accused of having more funds than the treasury passing through it. Collusion with local loyalist gangs are a given as is the political allegiance with extremist white supremacist British political Unionism. I have yet to ascertain what they think about this new UK Conservative leader. They are well organised, well funded, unpoliced charities. The central role played by the MAGA supporting DUP in recently delivering the hardest of Brexits should never be forgotten or minimised. The extreme political polarisation that has happened to politics in the US could very easily take fire in the UK from here.
I was surprised at the number of closed old Presbyterian churches I saw in Belfast last week, and the number of glossy new ones.
Maybe someone has asked already. but…Is the danger that a leader of a conservative party commits to ‘themes’ which promote fundamental-as-is conservatism, or something else?
Maybe that Starmer’s pretend-Labour plagiarists are accepting them wholesale and intent on consolidating said ‘fundamental conservatism’ yet deeper into the nation’s ‘soul’?
Or something else? Anyone?
I am not sure I quite follow the question. Sorry….
PAH, yes, sorry, Richard. I was trying to ask if the practice of a conservative party promoting conservatism should actually be considered ‘dangerous’? Isn’t a bigger/realer danger produced when their political opposition, i.e. Starmer’s Labour, plagiarise and implement conservative themes, positions and policies but present them as a political/ electoral alternative?
(You’re right, if I ‘d not known what I had meant to say, I’d have not ‘followed’ it either. You’re a kind man.)
🙂
There’s nothing like starting with a bare-faced untruth. The opening sentence, ‘The General Election of 2024 delivered the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen,’ demonstrates a fulsome ignorance of post-WW2 UK political history …. Or, is entirely intentional. The only good thing is that such politicking from the Right is entirely predictable. Will this get called out by the political commentariat? After all there is nothing like broadcasting that the Leader of the Opposition is either an ignoramus or purveyor of untruths, or both! I think I know the answer to my question.
It appears to be Tory policy to now call Labour ‘socialist’ all the time when they are no such thing
Calling Starmer/Reeves “Socialist” leaves the descriptions, “Communist/Trot/Marxist/extremist left/threat to national security” available for use against social Democrats. They’ve all been used against the left wing of Labour in the last few years. After all, they can hardly abuse Starmer by calling him a Tory wet! I’m sure being called a Socialist is upsetting enough for him and Reeves!
The idea that we have “the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen” is simply laughable.
Most of the current Labour MPs are so far to the centre/right that they would sit comfortably in Heath’s or Thatcher’s early Conservative party. The properly left wing Labour MPs of Attlee and Wilson even Callaghan would have no place here.
Thatcher said in 2002 that her greatest achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour. “We forced our opponents to change their minds.”
It seems to me that Labour today are little more than Tory “wets” of her era – indeed, often more right wing than that generation, most of whom lived through the Second war, and post-war austerity and rebuilding.
Do they have any of the ambition of their forebears, who created the welfare state? Or is it just managed decline because we can’t afford anything else without that phantom of “growth”?
“The General Election of 2024 delivered the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen. ”
Lie/Framing/performative (the panto season has started).
“The Conservative Party made many mistakes.” ………Yes – it became locked into a neo-liberal mindset -detached from reality & the mistakes followed.
“This is not just about policy. It is about a wider economic and cultural malaise that has set in across a complacent West that is living off the inheritance built by previous generations”… let me finish it for you.. said “inheritance” developed by Keynesian ideas and policy – that tories like you destroyed..
“Educated voters are moving left, and many private sector voters on average incomes are moving right”……so those with knowledge (educated) are moving left, the uneducated lap up Bad-Enoch’s narrative.
“In nearly every country, a new progressive ideology is on the rise. This ideology is based on the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups”…….circular reasoning – the emphasis by Bad-Enoch & her ilk on these areas drive their prominence.
“the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals, or even democratic nation states”……Baldwin 1920s – based on bureaucratic input funded the construction of the National Grid. (ditto Nuclear power in the 1950s – not Baldwin but the rationale holds) Bad Enoch does not even know her history.
“and ever-more government via spending and regulation”. Lie. Water/Sewage/Energy…… the policies that she support require more regulation … of privatised monopolies (a losing battle). Her argument is a combo of ignorance, ideology and double think.
“A new class of people, a new and growing bureaucratic class, is driving these changes” – true… they are the imbeciles that work for the big-4 insultancies – the new bureaucrats telling political imbeciles, like Bad Enoch, what to think/do…….& the same employed by the gov of which Bad Enoch was a part..
As for “bureaucracy and environmental laws”………remind me how many rivers are fit to swim in in the UK. Lie after lie, false narrative after false narrative. Tories – defunded the environmental agency – over a decade – = when she was in gov.
“I want to lead our party’s renewal as we face the challenges of the 21st century, and to defeat this new left and its new progressive ideology”……….with a few word changes it could have been out of Germany early 1930s.
“We can’t afford to …………think simplistic knee-jerk answers are the way forward” ….of the sort indulged in by the tories for 44 years? Sounds like chickens coming home to roost.
The woman is a cognitive dissonance impaired, deluded, ideological imbecile of the very worst sort. She is incapble of standing back and seeing the real world & instead as per all neo-libtards – distorts reality to fit her barmy views. The question is: why has she not been dismantled on the telly.
Thanks
On a tangent: I wish we could ban the word “progressive” from all political discussion. I know it has a precise economic/political meaning (as when used by Richard Murphy, no doubt!) but I doubt if it conveys much meaning at all to most people.
It is not a word I favour.
Anyone who starts off by saying
“The General Election of 2024 delivered the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen.”
clearly lacks all sense of history, and all political judgement, given the Tory Mk2/Single Transferable Party right wing ideology displayed by Starmer’s Faux-Labour/Nu-Nu-Labour/Likud-Labour administration, and so zero ability to foresee future developments.
So, past, present and future, all enveloped in a fog of misguided nonsense. But dangerous indeed, for the reasons Richard and others give.
Badenoch had a very bad experience in government with the Civil Service.
They constantly supplied data and evidence to inform decision making.
She, given her personality defects, could not deal with anything non ideological or managerial, and felt frustrated by her advisors. The inertia in government would have compounded that.
However, there is accidental truth in her peroration.
What she wrongly describes as bureaucracy, which includes everyday administration, is actually technocracy, quite a different beast.
Technocrats seek to reduce decisions to lovely and value free, numbers, from data they have selected.
This both reinforces their alleged expert status and allows them to evade responsibility for the human impacts of their decisions, because the numbers carry no ethical or social judgements.
Raising interest rates to achieve a notional 2% inflation target of dubious value, is a classic technocratic ruse. Deflation deliberately creates victims.
Technocracy tends to becomes self serving, rigid and protectionist.
It has been described since the days of Ancient Greece, but then Orwell and Huxley in the 20thC, closely followed by JK Galbraith.
Technocracy is very close to the conventional wisdom of an establishment where we have a specialised and often self serving praetorian elite who make and then impose their decisions upon the rest of us. They are the experts. We are know nothings.
Economists love to be thought of as being members of this elite, but have managed to separate the economics from the politics as being value neutral. That absolves them.
So, for entirely different reasons, I can interpret Badenoch’s pamphleteering, as holding some part truths. It won’t help her one little bit, because her free market doctrines don’t accept social responsibility.
“Technocrats seek to reduce decisions to lovely and value free, numbers”
Indeed they do. But numbers are not value-free. They reflect the values inherent in the way the sums relate (or not) to the complex systems they are supposed to model. Even in a purely technical context the fundamental concept of ‘efficiency’ depends on a value judgement as to what work is ‘useful’. In economic argument ‘efficiency’ too often seems to represent extractable value, which is entirely a process loss from the perspective of, for instance, obtaining a clean water supply.
Exactly.
It allows economists and banksters to avoid any consequential considerations – human or environmental.
We have to face up to the fact that Badenoch is a culture warrior supreme for the simple reason that so-called culture war is the only thing that conservatives currently have to bring to the political table.
This issue applies to all parties that have supped of the neoliberal brew. It will require all of us to arm ourselves with the answers to their open lies and subtle deceits, and be forthright in our denunciations
It will be interesting and instructive in equal measure to see how New New Labour responds.
Not sure what to think of this as much of it escapes me ( at my fairly advanced age, the concepts are unfamiliar.
However, as a Scot, despite being exiled to England for family reasons, one thing seems very clear to me and that us that Scotlabd should resign from this poisonous Union as soon as possible.
I believe we have the Consitutional arguments to leave but lack the will and the numbers to make progress with at endeavour but I see it as becoming more and more urgent if Scotland us not to be dragged gown by a failing neoliberal regime.
I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination even though I do enjoy reading Richard’s blogs everyday .
However I’m very interested in political history and what we have here from Badenoch is an attempt to supercharge the Tory Party and finding fault or blaming the country’s woes on the present consensus of what we’d reasonably expect in our workplace or any other of the gains we’ve gained in other walks of life .
Does this ring any bells ?
Well if you are as old as me it may well and we should be very wary .
If you had said in the 1970’s Trade Unions would be decimated , our Railways , Energy and Water would be privately owned and we’d have no coal or steel industry you would have struggled to be taken seriously .
Except what became Thatcherism actually began well before Thatcher was even Tory leader never mind Prime Minister , Keith Joseph was beavering away for years with his neoliberal thinking .
Today the people behind Badenoch could well be shielded from view because I don’t believe for one minute Badenoch came up with all that stuff in the document on her own .
She’s Keith Joseph’s Thatcher , we should be worried given how that played out for many of us in the 1980’s .
Most of what she’s written in that document seems to be the stuff of fantasy and it won’t ever be put in to practice
You share my worry.
This feels like it was written by Matthew Goodwin and David Goodhart.
Richard , these people would remove maternity and paternity pay , sickness benefits , holiday pay and whatever working rights we still enjoy within days of entering government .
What we consider as rights they see as obstacles to business .
Very dangerous people .
Don’t worry Andrew, neither is the writer of the article you responded to.
Like all recent political ‘leaders’ she looks fake to me. That quote looks ghost written – I find it hard to believe anyone could actually write such stuff and believe it.
Her husband Hamish stays well in the background but he seems to me to be someone to watch. He is a product of the Scottish Tory establishment, although he was born in the same hospital as Kemi in Wimbledon. For the past 14 years, Mr Badenoch has worked at Deutsche Bank and is currently the global head of “future of work and real estate transformation” according to LinkedIN. He previously worked at Barclays and read history at Cambridge from 1998 to 2001. In other words he’s a globalist through and through – like Theresa May’s husband Philip, whose Capital Group “helped millions of investors worldwide pursue their real-life goals”. Or Margaret Thatcher’s husband Denis, a director of Burmah Oil, deputy chairman of Attwoods, a director of Quinton Hazell and a consultant to Amec and CSX. is there a pattern there?
Globalists invest in whoever they think will do their bidding and serve their interests. That’s dangerous. And when Allison Pearson in the Telegraph writes “Badenoch is clever, principled and afraid of no one. Her force of character will eviscerate Labour” I’m inclined to believe the opposite.
Considerable overlap in views and values with Trumps Republicans. Ironic given Trump’s blatant misogyny and racism.
She lost me with her very first statement: “The General Election of 2024 delivered the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen.”
Pardon…?
[…] the many similarities to what Badenoch is […]