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Not a fan then

Badenoch spouts economic and social nonsense on demand without, apparently, having the slightest comprehension of the drivel that falls out of her mouth.

She makes claims about herself – including that she is working class because she spent a few days working at McDonalds when she was 16 – that are obviously absurd.

And like Suella Braverman before her, the attitude that she displays towards migration appears to me to be based on deep prejudices.

Makes the rest of us like her more of course.

43 thoughts on “Not a fan then”

  1. Spud says that pointing to Zimbabwe as an example of what happens when you print money is not valid and explains…..

    “What happened in Zimbabwe? Go back to 1980 and Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe declared UDI…Sanctions were imposed upon the left-wing government that was put into place in Zimbabwe, and the world turned its back on the place.”

    UDI was of course Smith and Rhodesia in 1965.

    And initially at least Mugabe had the backing of the World Bank/IMF and was welcomed into the international community.

    With such a firm grasp of history, how can we doubt that Spud has learnt its lessons?

  2. She’s a good bet. Engineering degree, understands IT, can’t be accused of racism or sexism, Brexiteer, opposed Johnson, fiercely ambitious, understands the difference between good and bad migrants.

    A good start, but she needs to mature and move a lot further to the right before I’d back her.

  3. Andrew C

    It’s a classic post – Venezuela, Weimar and Zimbabwe apparently prove MMT is true.

    To me it is pure Snake oil, and now being found out to be. I think anyone with any economic understanding can see that it’s pure nonsense.

  4. What I find quite amusing is that it could easily be applied to him:

    Badenoch spouts economic and social nonsense on demand without, apparently, having the slightest comprehension of the drivel that falls out of her mouth.

    The sheer number of absurdities coming out of Murphy’s mouth is without parallel even on X. He evinces zero understanding of economics or politics and while having a completely unjustified assessment of his own expertise he has no ability to tolerate even the most minute levels of criticism.

    She makes claims about herself – including that she is working class because she spent a few days working at McDonalds when she was 16 – that are obviously absurd.

    Almost as absurd as someone with almost no background in economics claiming to be an expert on a topic which his output proves he knows almost nothing about. Someone who opines on geopolitical issues with a naivete that would make a fifteen year old cringe and whose blatant anti-Englishness and anti-semitism, as well as his envy of anyone who has more resources than he does render his utterances utterly worthless in the main.

    And like Suella Braverman before her, the attitude that she displays towards migration appears to me to be based on deep prejudices.

    Almost as prejudiced as someone who dismissed the earlier riots this year as motivated entirely by malice or who said that any level of immigration is desirable without limit.

    ‘Mote and beam, Sir’ to quote the late Peter Cook.

  5. What I find quite amusing is that it could easily be applied to him:

    Badenoch spouts economic and social nonsense on demand without, apparently, having the slightest comprehension of the drivel that falls out of her mouth.

    Projection, pure and simple. Everything he accuses his opponents of being, is true for himself.

    A good start, but she needs to mature and move a lot further to the right before I’d back her.

    I don’t know. Can’t see Labour lasting more than one term at this rate, so if she wins the leadership then she might be ready by a 2028/2029 election. If Labour don’t self-destruct before then.

    It’s still going to be a very different landscape by then, especially if Reform flowers into a hydra threatening both Labour and the Conservatives. Then it will depend upon what moves Kemi makes towards compromise with Reform.

    Long way to go though yet.

    Vote Reform!

  6. If she loses it will prove that the Tories are misogynist racists. If she wins it’ll prove she’s a coconut.

    Them’s my predictions.

    P.S. I don’t know much about her but I have two objections. (i) She didn’t spend her formative years in the UK which I’d expect to be a bit of a handicap. (ii) I can’t bear the prospect of her surname being perpetually mispronounced.

    Likewise I have two things against Jenrick. (i) I don’t like the cut of his jib. (ii) He’s a lawyer.

    If I had a vote I’d vote for the one who was pro-Brexit which I gather is Kemi.

  7. “Engineering degree, understands IT”

    First job, three years at Logica.

    Personally, I’m not finding that particularly convincing.

  8. Badenoch.

    Want my prediction? The LibDems in the PCP and CCHQ wanted Cleverly as the business-as-usual continuity candidate and were trying to gerrymander Jenrick as his opposition, knowing that his anti-immigration and ECHR epiphany is bogus. Campaign right, govern left, as usual. But they blew their tactical voting and Kemi slipped through instead.

    Disaster? Not necessarily. There’s nearly 5 years before Starmer (or the Growler, or whoever’s PM by then) has to call a GE. That’s plenty of time to encourage Kemi to be robustly right-wing, claim she’s turned the Tories into unelectable swivel-eyed loons, and replace her about 18 months out with a Centrist Dad.

    Nige, of course, knows this, and will be planning in anticipation of it. My money’s on Nige, although he’s getting on a bit and really must start looking for a credible successor. It ain’t TIce.

  9. @dearieme

    I like coconuts. All of my swarthy friends are culturally white, with a bit of exotic seasoning. Just like Thomas Sowell, in fact.

    One of the reasons I like Badenoch is that she’s read and digested Sowell.

  10. @DMcD “Personally, I’m not finding that particularly convincing.”

    By the standards of the House of Commons it’s worth a Nobel Prize.

  11. She went on to run the digital side of The Spectator. And they are one of the few who has really got that whole thing right….

  12. “She makes claims about herself – including that she is working class because she spent a few days working at McDonalds when she was 16 – that are obviously absurd.”

    That’s not what she said. And it was a bit cack-handed of her, but the point was that McDonalds opened her eyes to how the other half lives. And as a middle class boy who worked in a factory and doing Saturday jobs in shops, I get it.

  13. This is what Diversity has done to London:

    They rob you visibly, with no repercussions’ – the unstoppable rise of phone theft

    London used to be an English city, but now it’s a Diverse shithole where the police can’t maintain order and don’t want to anyway:

    Jenny Tian, 29, a comedian from Australia, had been in London for two weeks when she saw a group of guys in ski masks on a street in east London. “I thought to myself: ‘They’re probably on their way to rob a home, they’re not going to bother me.’” It was 5pm, still broad daylight, and she had her phone out, trying to find a venue on Google Maps. “You know when you’re turning yourself into a human compass, pivoting around, trying to work out where it’s sending you? I looked very lost, I guess.” The next thing she heard was the sound of running, then a whoosh of air, and her phone was gone

    Have you ever seen a gang of Diverse Enrichers and thought “it’s ok, they’re probably going to rob somebody else”?

    No, because you are not an NPC.

    Maybe you think the job of the police is to arrest thieves, but here’s a nice policeman to explain that, nah, they can’t be arsed:

    That the capital is the centre is no surprise, says Dep Supt Saj Hussain, the Metropolitan police’s lead officer for phone theft. “It’s the largest metropolis, it’s the area that most people come to visit both nationally and internationally. It’s got a lot of footfall, especially tourists. We have some of the best transport networks in the world in London. The Elizabeth line has been wonderful for me to commute, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity for those that have been committing thefts elsewhere to come into London, which is a more lucrative market. It’s the opportunists’ capital of the nation. You can’t change that.”

    Seriously, if you tolerate this, you deserve what you get:

    It sounds weird only because urban legend says the opposite: the TalkTV presenter Mike Graham wrote that he reported a phone theft in person to a police officer, who replied that his own phone had been snatched the week before while he was in uniform, and the best thing to do was fill in an online form.

    Anyway, it doesn’t matter which grifter they put in charge of the Con Party, none of this is sustainable. The British state can no longer enforce laws in its own capital, but thinks it can still enforce its will on Russia, China, and the rest of the world. They’re going to be very surprised when they find out.

  14. Sadly when it comes to immigration we have no data to decide what makes sense, so its easy to accuse someone of prejudice, personally I just assume that the Danish data is approximately true for us.

  15. Problem is, I’m so jaded now that I don’t believe any of them.

    Sure, Badenoch and Jenrick make the nicest noises right now but so what? The leader will have to dial it down to keep peace with their wets and that’s assuming they mean it in the first place.

  16. “With such a firm grasp of history, how can we doubt that Spud has learnt its lessons?”

    I wonder if he could beat Lammy’s score on Mastermind.

    “Likewise I have two things against Jenrick. (i) I don’t like the cut of his jib. (ii) He’s a lawyer.”

    As noted elswhere today, he claims to be a lawyer. I wouldn’t vote for a lawyer-politician either, not because of his claimed profession, but because he’s a liar.

    Then again, that goes for most of them. If you’re on £91,346 plus expenses, you’re not “working class”, matey, even if you were fixing drains back in June. Which none of you were.

  17. Steve,

    Meanwhile, Detective Watanabe in Tokyo:

    ““It’s the largest metropolis, it’s the area that most people come to visit both nationally and internationally. It’s got a lot of footfall, especially tourists. We have some of the best transport networks in the world in Tokyo. The trains has been wonderful for me to commute. We also get the odd criminal, but we deal with them sharpish. You come to Tokyo, you can almost certainly leave your laptop in a cafe and go for a pee and it’ll be there when you return”.

    You absolutely can change this, because English society didn’t used to be like this. We got soft sentencing, low IQ immigrants and a massive rise in boys without fathers. That was all about policy, and it’s all fixable.
    You just need people with the intellect to understand where the problem lies and the will to do what is necessary. Not someone who shits themselves when the BBC interviews them, or the Guardian calls them a fascist. You need someone who hates these people with a passion, doesn’t want to be any part of their club.

    The answers are:-
    1) end this idea that single motherhood or shagging unsuitable men and living on the dole is OK. Remove the financial support and they’ll find boring men who are good fathers instead.
    2) Prosecute theft, littering and criminal damage harshly. Caution for first crime, community service for second, jail after that. You aren’t going to nick bikes and pay fines as a cost of doing business. You go to jail, with ever increasing sentences.

    It’s why Reform are the only answer for me. I think Kemi’s probably the best of the bunch of the Conservatives, but she’s not saying anything she’s actually going to do about the things she talks about. And as Norman says, the rest of the party are a load of piss weak SDP supporters.

    And the way things are going, I think 2 elections, we might have a Reform PM. The decline of the Labour vote since the election hasn’t shifted to the Conservatives. The Greens are up a tiny bit, Reform are up 3%. Con vs Reform is now 24%/18%.

  18. WB- immigration is like a cold, and the Tories are full blown AIDS.

    It’s easy to fight off a cold, unless you have AIDS.

  19. Bloke in North Dorset

    She went on to run the digital side of The Spectator. And they are one of the few who has really got that whole thing right….

    And as Fraser Nelson tells it, when she was pregnant and about to go on maternity leave she told them as the Spectator was a small business and couldn’t really afford to to keep the job open she would waive her rights and that Nelson should hire someone new.

    Principled

  20. ” I think Kemi’s probably the best of the bunch of the Conservatives, but she’s not saying anything she’s actually going to do about the things she talks about.”

    And anyway, even if she wanted to do the things she talks about, the rest of the Tory MPs wouldn’t vote for her to do them. Or at least a good half of them wouldn’t. So she’d be hamstrung from day one. Thats why Reform is the only game in town. At least all the people standing for it agree with its policies and would vote for them to be enacted if they made it to power. You can’t say that about the Parliamentary Conservative Party.

  21. The Conservative party is stuffed full of brainless net zero fellow travellers. So even if Badenoch scraps net zero no robust alternative will be proposed. A few N Sea fields will be reluctantly approved and our dependence on the good will of tyrannies such as Qatar will continue.

    Reform have the right idea. Let loose the oil cos to drill baby drill. Even frack, if the locals can be brought on side. (They will, once their gas bills are calculated according to their distance from the well head.)

    But Reform are still pussyfooting around the CO2 scam, and after all the BS that has gone on with fracking I doubt many companies will be prepared to take on the risk of regulatory change. So I’m not optimistic.

    Diversity – of home produced energy – is our strength. Reliance on LPG and EU inter-connectors
    is our weakness.

  22. Just to follow up my earlier comment…

    I see Guido is already reporting stories of Tory wets thinking of ousting the winner of this contest within 2 years.

    It’s not possible to be too cynical about these bastards, is it?

  23. Geoffers: Nope. Of course that’s what they’re planning. I could have predicted it back in July: let “the right” have its fun right now because doesn’t really matter and it’ll look good to have someone properly arguing at PMQs, regroup, then take it back over before the next election. You can read these buggers like a book.

    I hate to say it because my family has deep roots in the Tories, but there’s no saving that party. It’s like the EU: I think most of we Leave voters had a moment of revelation where we realised that there is no “reform from within”; it has its agenda, and it will not be swayed. You either accept its ambition for A Country Called “Europe”, or you get out. That’s how I feel about the Conservative and Unionist Party now. It has abandoned almost everything that it stood for just a generation ago, and the people now in charge have no intention of allowing it to return to that.

    So we get out and start from scratch.

  24. @Sam Duncan
    Two of my best friends (married to each other), Conservative Party members since student days, just recapitulated this argument. The one not born in this country sides with you and says that the Conservative Party needs to be burnt to the ground

  25. Can GoodEnoch take over CCHQ? Maybe return power to local associations? Withdraw the whip from from the dripping one nation Heathites? Allow some right of centre candidates to be selected. Her focus shouldn’t be about shadowing the Government but building a grassroots centre-right party ready for the next GE.

  26. Her focus shouldn’t be about shadowing the Government but building a grassroots centre-right party ready for the next GE

    Yes, I’m sure Olukemi Adegoke cares deeply about the English people and will get right on that.

  27. @Western Bloke – “We got soft sentencing”

    Not like the old days, when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep, or transported to Australia. Perhaps we should compare the crime rates over history to see the effects of these punishments.

    @Bloke in North Dorset – “Principled”

    Yes, but I’m never sure if that is a good thing. Principles may make a politician do the right thing even when it is against their interests, but it may equally make then do the wrong thing even when it is against their interests.

    @Jim – “At least all the people standing for it agree with its policies”

    We cannot possibly tell that. Talk is cheap, and especially cheap when you know your party has no power so no prospect of being able to do anything.

  28. I wish I had the same confidence in Reform as rest of you have. I’m sorry, I just don’t see the killer instinct necessary to overcome the left. UKIP didn’t have it, why should Reform?

  29. The Reform Party is ideologically syncretic, just as UKIP was in the old days. That means those who follow it because they want more benefits and council houses (but fewer Muslims) aren’t going to be happy when they come up against the kind of activist who wishes to burn the government to the ground. No doubt the surfeit of prejudices displayed on both sides overlap to some degree, but this communitarian populist/libertarian individualist divide looks here to stay – and doesn’t seem like a recipe for perpetual agreement on policy.

  30. >She makes claims about herself – including that she is working class because she spent a few days working at McDonalds when she was 16 – that are obviously absurd.

    Like Kamal Harris does. But I’m sure he’d say it was (D)ifferent if he knew.

  31. dearieme said:
    “Jenrick. … I don’t like the cut of his jib”

    I’ve been trying to work out what I don’t like about him, and that’s about the best way of putting it. Can’t put my finger on why, but he just doesn’t seem quite right. A cut-price Portillo perhaps?

    Badenoch just doesn’t seem up to it; there seems to be an air of Nadine about her.

  32. The only one who seems to have any genuine Conservative principles is Suella, and she – like the lovely Miriam Cates, is onto plums in the Con Party.

    The basic problem in British politics is: they don’t work for you. We thought this lack of sovereignty (the electorate kept pressing the button for net immigration “in the tens of thousands” and “bonfire of the quangos” and”lawn order”, but nothing was happening apart from the Blairite Consensus now being delivered by a Con government) would be cured by Brexit.

    The repatriation of sovereignty should have meant our votes mattered again, but the Cons have conspired with the Libs and the Labs to ensure they don’t. Cause they very proudly don’t work for us, that is made clear at every creepy Davos summit where they piously vow to reduce our standard of living.

    The bizarre financial relationship between Lord Alli (fabulous he) and our oleaginous prime minister is just rubbing the faces of us proles in the power dynamics at play here. Rich men don’t buy you clothes without expecting some action in return, that has been clear since Pretty Woman (1990).

    Our best and brightest political leaders are very cheaply bought, and they use the power of government to menace us, our livelihoods, and our way of life. This seems unreasonable to me.

  33. Bloke in Spain,

    “I wish I had the same confidence in Reform as rest of you have. I’m sorry, I just don’t see the killer instinct necessary to overcome the left. UKIP didn’t have it, why should Reform?”

    What do you mean? UKIP were a scrappy little operation running on a shoestring, full of the most committed volunteers of any party, that managed to do enough damage to the Conservatives to force a referendum. Which was won. Nige should have retired to his peerage. But instead, the government was useless and he almost single-handedly made the boats and immigration a political issue, all the time being called a racist, and in 6 years, Reform have gone from nothing to being the party with the 3rd largest share of the vote.

    Defeating the left is not hard. The Conservatives just didn’t do it. They didn’t even just leave things alone that would have hurt the left (like freezing the license fee).

  34. I’ve had a fascinating time with Richard Murphy over this on his strange little blog. One that has ended with Murphy, predictably, running away from debate by using his practised “offensive and wasting my time” excuse to block me.

    In analysing the two remaining Tory candidates he chose to describe Kemi Badenoch’s views on immigration as being motivated by her “deep prejudice”. Notice, he pointed to her views on immigration ; not her views on a subset of immigration such as asylum seekers. No, immigration. And he didn’t say “deep prejudice, as with all Tories” and he didn’t refer to Robert Jenrick like that, even though Jenrick has said much more about immigration than she has. No, he, a white man in his (late) 60s, chose to describe the black woman, the Nigerian immigrant, as having a “deep prejudice”.

    Now I think he wrote without thinking; I think he often does. I offered him the option of holding his hand up and acknowledging that, of correcting himself. Not our Spud though, oh no! Instead he engages in ad hominem attack on me. I am apparently a misogynist (go figure). He explains that her prejudice is against refugees, that’s all. He is entitled to say what he said about a black woman. And anyway, he didn’t call her a racist; he called her a prejudiced bigot.

    I did try to tell him I am delighted to know he doesn’t believe it is racist for a white man to attack a black woman or indeed anyone of any race in this way; I now look forward to reading his views on the Rotherham grooming scandal. I tried to ask him why he thinks being a prejudiced bigot is different from and somehow better than being a racist. I tried to ask him how he thinks her prejudice towards refugees, but not apparently immigrants, could inform this Nigerian immigrant’s views on all immigration. Most of all, I asked him what evidence he could adduce for this “deep prejudice” that he alleges.

    Spud does not want to engage in this discussion any more. I am not at all surprised.

  35. @Battery Chicken – “Shouldn’t we be rubbing the left’s nose in diversity?”

    Having Kemi Badenoch as Conservative party leader would certainly be amusing on those grounds. I think the Labour party is the only current UK party with elected MPs which has not elected a female leader. They have had Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman (twice) as acting leader, but somehow could not bring themselves to elect either of them or any other woman. With Thatcher, May, and Truss before her, this would be the fourth woman to be elected party leader. It would also mean that the Conservatives would have chosen both Asian and black leaders, while Labour stuck to the outdated white male choices.

  36. Charles said:
    “I think the Labour party is the only current UK party with elected MPs which has not elected a female leader”

    We should repeatedly remind their members that both Labour and the LibDems have elected more knights as leaders than women.

    (The SNP is on one of each)

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