To say that I have been distinctly unimpressed by Kemi Badenoch’s leadership of the Conservative Party would be an understatement. At a time when the current awful Labour government is attacking farming, free speech, taxpayers and the security of the nation itself, Ms Badenoch has done little to hit the ball into these obviously open goals. She’s been prominent with online bullshit such as her spat with Reform over membership numbers but she’s been very light in setting out her stall showing the public what the Tories actually stand for.
To be somewhat fair to her she’s been handed a bit of a poison chalice. The Tories lost the 2024 election in large part because the Tories let down its core voters. The Tories were clearly associated in the public’s mind with the rise of DEI nonsense, climate lunacy, the capture of public sector organisations by the trans cult, open door immigration policies, the overreaction to Covid and much more. Labour did not win the 2024 election on their own merits and on the merits of their policies instead they ‘won’ by default because the voters chose not to back a Tory party that had let them down monstrously. People looked at Britain’s decimated industrial base, the towns and cities stuffed to the gills with unassimilable foreigners, the bloated public sector, the failed NHS, the wasteful and destructive net zero nonsense and chose not to vote for more of that. The problem for Britons is that Labour are all that and worse.
If the Tories are to be again a credible party of government and regain the trust of Britons then they have to have policies that the public can support and have confidence that the Tories will enact such policies once in government. One way that they can do that is to show that they are no longer part of what is being called the ‘uniparty’ on big issues such as climate, Islamisation, migration and culture.
There are small signs, green shoots if you want to put it like that, that Ms Badenoch is starting to realise that the Tories need to be different from the rest in order to attract voters from an increasingly pissed off British population. Ms Badenoch has chosen to come out, gingerly at first, against Net Zero with a new policy statement rejecting the idea that Britain can get to net zero carbon ‘emissions’ by 2050.
The Guardian which is commenting on this new development and Ms Badenoch’s new policy speech said:
Badenoch will insist in her speech that she believes climate change is happening, but will not say whether she believes human action is to blame.
“I’m certainly not debating whether climate change exists – it does,” she will say. “But it doesn’t look like the west is going to get remotely close to net zero by 2050.”
Ms Badenoch is correct the climate is changing but then it has always changed and not because of any input by humanity. Climate variations have created ice ages, desertification and mass extinctions long before humanity came down from the trees. The vast majority of such climate variations have been because of the angle of tilt of the earth, tectonic activity that changes the shape and make up of the continents, change brought by comets and meteorites hitting the planet and the effect of the huge amount of volcanic activity that the Earth has experienced especially in the millions of years prior to the evolution of humanity.
Whilst I’m pleased to see this change of attitude and new policy from the Tory leader it’s clear that she’s not a leader on this issue she’s a follower. Governments across the world are starting to realise the extent of the damage that net zero policies have done to their citizens and their economies and are starting to try to get off the net zero train before it smashes in to the proverbial buffers and destroys their nations.
Ms Badenoch badly needs a policy win that the public can support and which emphasises the difference between the Tories and the left wing blobocracy, both elected and unelected, that currently runs the United Kingdom. With this policy change she can show the public that the Tories have changed and that they are now more on the side of the ordinary Briton than they were before. If she can push this new policy forcefully and not cave in to that part of her party that are green tinged Liberal Democrats posing as Conservatives then it may well work out positively for both her and the party as a whole. The big question for me is have the Tories become so indelibly associated with destructive policies such as net zero, open borders, DEI and the failing policy of multiculturalism that the public refuse to believe that they really have changed? We will I’m afraid have to wait and see.
I’ve been quite a fan of Kemi since she first appeared on my radar during the Brexit campaign so l’m not really surprised to see her talking sense – even if it should have gone further and needed to be said earlier.
As you say, her biggest problem is her party, it’s record over the last decade or so and the people still in it who believe they did well (e. g. Priti’s defence of out of control legal immigration). She faces a mammoth task and l wish her luck with it.
Sadly, whatever she achieves the reaction is likely to be either ‘you caused the problem’, ‘why didn’t you do something when you were in power’ and/or ‘you’ve made promises and all the right noises before only to do the opposite. On steroids. Not once or twice but at every election since Brown’.
At 69 I see no way the Tories can recover their trashed reputation in my realistic lifetime even with the most favourable of winds. Sadly, since I don’t believe the country has that time to spare, l’ve concluded the only hope lays outside the 2 legacy parties.