Why Badenoch is dangerous

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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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