A fine article giving some reasons for mild optimism. But... I'll argue that a fear of speaking the truth is a symptom rather than a cause.
In my opinion for the last few decades people have been seduced into believing that no-one should suffer. Wholesale tax changes are not on the agenda for fear of some people losing out. Laws are excruciatingly complicated to avoid 'unfairness' from the start. Free speech is under great threat for fear of 'someone' being offended.
Yet capitalism at its rawest form is fundamentally about winners and losers. People have forgotten that losers are as necessary as winners because the losers provide the raw material for the next winners. And as a consequence our national productivity is low for fear of there being losers.
This fear of there being losers spreads into the institutions who are paralysed at the thought of taking responsibility. The ECHR has become a regiment of administrators trying to retrospectively bolt on fairness to laws which were never intended to 'be fair'. The long winded planning permission process has grown to try and avoid someone, somewhere, being worse off. It's getting more and more difficult to actually use your own bank for all the anti-scam rules being put in place.
And so I welcome Kemi Badenoch being willing to speak the truth. At least we can then have a proper discussion about winners and losers.
I'll be hoping she doesn't use personal identity to push back when identity politics erupts, a concern based on past form. I'd like to see a more serious Conservative party now. One that I could imagine voting for.
Don't all politicians assert they are speaking the truth? And didn't Kemi have plenty of opportunities to speak out on important issues before being crowned? What has she had to say about Starmer's clampdown on free speech for example or his distorted sense of justice?
I'm not optimistic, because of the pressure she will now come under, but Kemi has certainlyin the past made some bold and factual speeches about for example trans ideology in a style unmatched by any of her colleagues.
As David says, we should give her the benefit of the doubt for the moment. She has been consistently outspoken ever since she set foot in the House of Commons; I don’t believe she is just putting on an act. Why would she? Why choose an act that will attract nothing but flak from the bien pensant liberal classes?
Whether she will be allowed by her party in Parliament to deliver is a separate question. We saw with Truss the willingness to reject a leader who dared to deviate from the orthodoxy. But I think Kemi is helped here by the parliamentary arithmetic. When Truss was PM the party had a large number of members, dominated by the orthodoxy, and had been in office for 14 years - how dare anyone rock the boat? Why rock the boat when can kicking had worked for so long, at least on terms of staying in office, if not for the public good?
The situation today is very different; the parliamentary party has been almost completely wiped out. Following the orthodoxy produced a disaster. There aren’t the number of MPs of the “wet” persuasion to stage another rebellion and the memory of what happened to public perception of the party last time will still be fresh in their minds. The party is now in opposition against a government which is proving to be far more left wing than it ever let on and this will play out very badly as time goes on.
I believe this is a 1975 style moment for renewal all over again. Will Kemi be the new saviour as we found one back then? Again, as David says, only time will tell, but this time I feel that we have a leader cut in a similar mould to the last saviour. I’m cautiously optimistic and have my fingers crossed. Indeed, I rejoined the party within an hour of Kemi being declared leader. It’s time to rally to the cause and do what it takes to support the renewal, not carp from the sidelines. If it fails, then we can resign then and say that at least we tried.
Here's an article in the Times from 2022 in which Badenoch talks about setting people free by telling the truth. It begins with a reference to "the success of the Covid vaccines".
Sure, but it’s important to separate out the endeavour to tell the truth from always being correct about everything. She may simply have believed what she wrote. I don’t think, much as we might wish it, that we can make politics a purity test.
Yes, but what I think may be going on is the extension of a current political trend, with concepts such as "democracy" being used as political rhetoric - rhetoric that's often used to get support for oppressive policies. The real test is time-honoured - the difference between words and deeds. Badenoch's track record and affiliations don't make me hopeful in that respect.
Montaigne - "If you don't know how to die, don't worry. Nature will tell you what to do, on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you, don't bother your head about it". Nailed 🤣🤣 I like Badenoch but worry about her WEF links. The WEF is Satan in the form of an Institution. Found the Montaigne quote in Harold Bloom's magnificent "The Western Canon", 1995, written in response to the first wave of the flood of critical resentment of said Canon that was - and now has - engulfed what now passes for academia.
Mandatory reading, it is brilliant, shd force you back to the classics, superb prose and very funny.
Isn't it sad that a politician is getting praise for saying she'll tell the truth? Shouldn't telling the truth, saying 'what is', be something which is so normal it doesn't need mentioning?
But then again, why should politicians lag behind all those fabulous 'thinkers' who've been teaching them (and our kids) for years that there are many truths, 'personal truths' which are all valid and mustn't be judged ... unless they don't fit the current, ideology-driven narrative.
I haven't watched the entire interview so I don't know for sure, but I think she's just trying to here make the point that since Tommy Robinson pled guilty (which he would have had to have done, since he undoubtedly is guilty of the offence in question) the wheels of justice are inevitably going to turn as they will. There is nothing unfair about this. It is how the criminal justice system works, whether one sympathises with Robinson's goals or not.
Except for the fact David that TR has not been jailed for a criminal offence, it’s a civil one i.e. breaching a court injunction not to show a film he made.
They have sent him to a high level prison where he will be in serious danger from inmates.
This is ALL wrong.
My main point was that Kemi Badenoch was underlining that UK does not have a two tier justice system - I do not concur.
Find me a politician who hasn't stated that he/she now wants to tell nothing but the truth and be a leader of all the people in his/her country to bring about 'unity'.
I am with you on the unity thing but I don’t think I can remember a politician in the UK taking charge of a political party and emphasising truth-telling as his or her main aim.
I actually think being tortured to death, or dying in prison from lack of care, is worse. No personal experience, obviously, I’m basing this on George Orwell in 1984 where he says ‘nothing is worse than physical pain’, on ‘Darkness at Noon’, on Bill Browder and his accounts of his friend/lawyer Magnitsky. The bravery of Navalny was that he faced worse than the simple ‘risk of dying’ when he returned to Russia. I don’t want to be a misery-guts, but being brave (and following Solzhenitsyn’s advice ‘if we only all simply told the truth’) is not like a Dr Pepper’s ad. We can’t minimise how extraordinarily hard it is to tell the truth (when all the world is lying and blaming it on you).
Sponsored by Gove, whom she met whilst working at the Spectator, part of the Spectator clique. She is the continuity candidate, trapped in the Blairite paradigm which Cameron embraced. Let’s look how well the Spectator clique has done for the Conservatives: Boris; Gove; Sunak (chief advisor and best man James Forsyth from the Spectator); Cummings (wife Mary Wakefield at the Spectator); now Badenoch. Nothing on reform to the Party, removing the imposition of ‘diverse’ candidates under Cameron’s reforms. Consequently the parliamentary party is out of touch with its base, hence 14 years of tone deaf policy, leading to electoral oblivion. Badenoch is part of the problem, not the solution.
The moment she tried to shut David Tennant down, as a straight white man, because she is a black woman, she lost me. I am a straight white man and completely disenfranchised, along with every other straight white man, by identity politics, for anyone who embraces that paradigm. Ideas stand on their merits, not on who says them. She is part of the problem not the solution.
The solution will come from someone who understands the issues elucidated so well in this Substack. Sadly Badenoch does not even acknowledge the ECHR is a problem, let alone speak the truth about the serious structural problems of which it is a part.
She supported every element of the Covid tyranny and in particular encouraged pregnant women to get jabbed.
She supports population replacement, which isn't surprising as she isn't one of us: not a drop of British blood, not brought up here, Nigerian citizenship.
Elected by the kind of people who would rather see their teenage granddaughters gang-raped by dinghy divers than be called racists.
"Elected by the kind of people who would rather see their teenage granddaughters gang-raped by dinghy divers than be called racists." - she wasn't elected by members of the Labour Party.
"She supports population replacement, which isn't surprising as she isn't one of us: not a drop of British blood, not brought up here, Nigerian citizenship." - all of which, she had no control over. You must be a huge supporter of David Cameron.
A fine article giving some reasons for mild optimism. But... I'll argue that a fear of speaking the truth is a symptom rather than a cause.
In my opinion for the last few decades people have been seduced into believing that no-one should suffer. Wholesale tax changes are not on the agenda for fear of some people losing out. Laws are excruciatingly complicated to avoid 'unfairness' from the start. Free speech is under great threat for fear of 'someone' being offended.
Yet capitalism at its rawest form is fundamentally about winners and losers. People have forgotten that losers are as necessary as winners because the losers provide the raw material for the next winners. And as a consequence our national productivity is low for fear of there being losers.
This fear of there being losers spreads into the institutions who are paralysed at the thought of taking responsibility. The ECHR has become a regiment of administrators trying to retrospectively bolt on fairness to laws which were never intended to 'be fair'. The long winded planning permission process has grown to try and avoid someone, somewhere, being worse off. It's getting more and more difficult to actually use your own bank for all the anti-scam rules being put in place.
And so I welcome Kemi Badenoch being willing to speak the truth. At least we can then have a proper discussion about winners and losers.
""I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
I'll be hoping she doesn't use personal identity to push back when identity politics erupts, a concern based on past form. I'd like to see a more serious Conservative party now. One that I could imagine voting for.
Agreed.
Don't all politicians assert they are speaking the truth? And didn't Kemi have plenty of opportunities to speak out on important issues before being crowned? What has she had to say about Starmer's clampdown on free speech for example or his distorted sense of justice?
I'm not optimistic, because of the pressure she will now come under, but Kemi has certainlyin the past made some bold and factual speeches about for example trans ideology in a style unmatched by any of her colleagues.
I’m sure I could dig out some quotes - but it might be worth looking up what she had to say in her various ministerial posts.
But will she walk the walk or, more specifically, be allowed to walk the walk?
I hope I’m wrong but, as no major Party Leader in Britain has done so on matters of real importance for at least 27 years, I’m deeply sceptical.
One thing’s for sure - we’ll find out.
As David says, we should give her the benefit of the doubt for the moment. She has been consistently outspoken ever since she set foot in the House of Commons; I don’t believe she is just putting on an act. Why would she? Why choose an act that will attract nothing but flak from the bien pensant liberal classes?
Whether she will be allowed by her party in Parliament to deliver is a separate question. We saw with Truss the willingness to reject a leader who dared to deviate from the orthodoxy. But I think Kemi is helped here by the parliamentary arithmetic. When Truss was PM the party had a large number of members, dominated by the orthodoxy, and had been in office for 14 years - how dare anyone rock the boat? Why rock the boat when can kicking had worked for so long, at least on terms of staying in office, if not for the public good?
The situation today is very different; the parliamentary party has been almost completely wiped out. Following the orthodoxy produced a disaster. There aren’t the number of MPs of the “wet” persuasion to stage another rebellion and the memory of what happened to public perception of the party last time will still be fresh in their minds. The party is now in opposition against a government which is proving to be far more left wing than it ever let on and this will play out very badly as time goes on.
I believe this is a 1975 style moment for renewal all over again. Will Kemi be the new saviour as we found one back then? Again, as David says, only time will tell, but this time I feel that we have a leader cut in a similar mould to the last saviour. I’m cautiously optimistic and have my fingers crossed. Indeed, I rejoined the party within an hour of Kemi being declared leader. It’s time to rally to the cause and do what it takes to support the renewal, not carp from the sidelines. If it fails, then we can resign then and say that at least we tried.
Well said.
Here's an article in the Times from 2022 in which Badenoch talks about setting people free by telling the truth. It begins with a reference to "the success of the Covid vaccines".
https://archive.ph/qSLon
Sure, but it’s important to separate out the endeavour to tell the truth from always being correct about everything. She may simply have believed what she wrote. I don’t think, much as we might wish it, that we can make politics a purity test.
Yes, but what I think may be going on is the extension of a current political trend, with concepts such as "democracy" being used as political rhetoric - rhetoric that's often used to get support for oppressive policies. The real test is time-honoured - the difference between words and deeds. Badenoch's track record and affiliations don't make me hopeful in that respect.
All we can do is hope.
Ahh ... so much that can be said about hope, including by Hannah Arendt. But let's leave it there.
„ The Covid vaccine is safe for pregnant women and their babies“
https://archive.is/f7yg9
I’m sanguine about that. She may have believed it at the time. Telling the truth doesn’t mean always being right about everything.
By 5 Jan 2022 there was more than enough evidence this was not true.
Montaigne - "If you don't know how to die, don't worry. Nature will tell you what to do, on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you, don't bother your head about it". Nailed 🤣🤣 I like Badenoch but worry about her WEF links. The WEF is Satan in the form of an Institution. Found the Montaigne quote in Harold Bloom's magnificent "The Western Canon", 1995, written in response to the first wave of the flood of critical resentment of said Canon that was - and now has - engulfed what now passes for academia.
Mandatory reading, it is brilliant, shd force you back to the classics, superb prose and very funny.
I have the complete Montaigne on my shelf to dip in and out of. The quote on my Substack profile is from a Montaigne essay in fact.
Yes. A man for all the ages, David. Those who think we are wiser than our predecessors could not be more mistaken.
As C.S. Lewis once said, 'there are worse things that can happen to a man than dying'.
Isn't it sad that a politician is getting praise for saying she'll tell the truth? Shouldn't telling the truth, saying 'what is', be something which is so normal it doesn't need mentioning?
But then again, why should politicians lag behind all those fabulous 'thinkers' who've been teaching them (and our kids) for years that there are many truths, 'personal truths' which are all valid and mustn't be judged ... unless they don't fit the current, ideology-driven narrative.
‘Speaking the truth’ eh?
https://x.com/daveatherton20/status/1853390470941979025?s=12
I haven't watched the entire interview so I don't know for sure, but I think she's just trying to here make the point that since Tommy Robinson pled guilty (which he would have had to have done, since he undoubtedly is guilty of the offence in question) the wheels of justice are inevitably going to turn as they will. There is nothing unfair about this. It is how the criminal justice system works, whether one sympathises with Robinson's goals or not.
Except for the fact David that TR has not been jailed for a criminal offence, it’s a civil one i.e. breaching a court injunction not to show a film he made.
They have sent him to a high level prison where he will be in serious danger from inmates.
This is ALL wrong.
My main point was that Kemi Badenoch was underlining that UK does not have a two tier justice system - I do not concur.
Find me a politician who hasn't stated that he/she now wants to tell nothing but the truth and be a leader of all the people in his/her country to bring about 'unity'.
And then find me one who actually did so.
I am with you on the unity thing but I don’t think I can remember a politician in the UK taking charge of a political party and emphasising truth-telling as his or her main aim.
I actually think being tortured to death, or dying in prison from lack of care, is worse. No personal experience, obviously, I’m basing this on George Orwell in 1984 where he says ‘nothing is worse than physical pain’, on ‘Darkness at Noon’, on Bill Browder and his accounts of his friend/lawyer Magnitsky. The bravery of Navalny was that he faced worse than the simple ‘risk of dying’ when he returned to Russia. I don’t want to be a misery-guts, but being brave (and following Solzhenitsyn’s advice ‘if we only all simply told the truth’) is not like a Dr Pepper’s ad. We can’t minimise how extraordinarily hard it is to tell the truth (when all the world is lying and blaming it on you).
Sure. But it’s a start!
Bravery today: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/11/03/iran-student-strips-in-protest-over-strict-hijab-dress-code/
At last, a cry for truth but will it win through? Hre's some truth about Britian's desperate decline:
https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/decrepit-britain-uk-budget-electricity?r=hhrlz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
The country is in serious trouble. I'm encouraged that this is at last really dawning on people.
Sponsored by Gove, whom she met whilst working at the Spectator, part of the Spectator clique. She is the continuity candidate, trapped in the Blairite paradigm which Cameron embraced. Let’s look how well the Spectator clique has done for the Conservatives: Boris; Gove; Sunak (chief advisor and best man James Forsyth from the Spectator); Cummings (wife Mary Wakefield at the Spectator); now Badenoch. Nothing on reform to the Party, removing the imposition of ‘diverse’ candidates under Cameron’s reforms. Consequently the parliamentary party is out of touch with its base, hence 14 years of tone deaf policy, leading to electoral oblivion. Badenoch is part of the problem, not the solution.
The moment she tried to shut David Tennant down, as a straight white man, because she is a black woman, she lost me. I am a straight white man and completely disenfranchised, along with every other straight white man, by identity politics, for anyone who embraces that paradigm. Ideas stand on their merits, not on who says them. She is part of the problem not the solution.
The solution will come from someone who understands the issues elucidated so well in this Substack. Sadly Badenoch does not even acknowledge the ECHR is a problem, let alone speak the truth about the serious structural problems of which it is a part.
She supported every element of the Covid tyranny and in particular encouraged pregnant women to get jabbed.
She supports population replacement, which isn't surprising as she isn't one of us: not a drop of British blood, not brought up here, Nigerian citizenship.
Elected by the kind of people who would rather see their teenage granddaughters gang-raped by dinghy divers than be called racists.
"Elected by the kind of people who would rather see their teenage granddaughters gang-raped by dinghy divers than be called racists." - she wasn't elected by members of the Labour Party.
"She supports population replacement, which isn't surprising as she isn't one of us: not a drop of British blood, not brought up here, Nigerian citizenship." - all of which, she had no control over. You must be a huge supporter of David Cameron.