Neverwhere by (Neil Gaiman) Kemi Badenoch, dreaming of a land where anyone might care what the Conservatives might come up with anytime soon.
Even as an enthusiastic A-level History student I found Kemi kicking off with 1780s Manchester a little bit too historical. Badenoch managed to tie this back, in the context of Thursday’s murderous attack on the Heaton Park synagogue, to the arrival of Jewish immigrants in Manchester, although a not-even-terribly keen history of 18th century Britain would caution that the establishment of just 14 Jewish families in Manchester was enough to set off some fairly rabid anti-Semitism in the local press. The history of prejudice is sadly as long as the history of settlement, but this did not form the basis of the leader’s speech!
However, there was then some amusing word bingo:
“Serious Change”
“Politics done properly”
“Credible plans rooted in Conservative values”
all sounded good.
However, Conservative car-crash denialism soon bubbled up with a frankly bizarre self-justification based on having delivered BREXIT: ““We gave the British people a choice on our membership of the EU and we implemented that decision” which seemed to misjudge the mood of the country and, more worryingly, even the conference hall, while rather underplaying the difficulteies that that implementation threw up. Similarly, on immigration “the policy mistake of letting the bureaucrats decide the immigration system…” seemed to attempt an enormous blame-shift even when this was followed by a more straight-forward acknowledgement of Conservative failure “ Let’s be honest: that happened on our watch. Yes, we tried, but put simply we didn’t achieve enough.” Perhaps understandably “the tone” still hasn’t found any consistent delivery yet.
Tellingly reluctant and half-hearted applause to an obvious immigration policy applause line “Our human rights lawyer Prime Minister and his good friend the Attorney General, an Attorney General who likened those of us questioning our ECHR membership to Nazis, will never fix this problem” suggested that the Conservative leader is still a long way adrift of finding natural Tory enthusiasm for her new broom.
However, the most impressive section of the speech came with the (admirably brief) summary of five policy objectives that a free country in control of its destiny had to be able to deliver:
1) deporting foreign criminals and those who are here illegally
2) stopping veterans being harassed through the courts
3) putting British citizens first for social housing and public services
4) ensuring protests don’t intimidate people
5) stopping red tape choking off economic growth.
The UK’s current inability to fulfill any of these policy objectives served as justification (ignoring the apparent arrival of Lord Wolfson’s 200-page report on the matter) for, Kemi Badenoch conversion to the cause of leaving the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act, even with the caveat of more work being required to make withdrawal compatible with the Good Friday Agreement.
Badenoch went on a minor rant against “identity politics” which sounded more compelling than it ever could have done from Sunak, let alone Johnson or Cameron. Bizarrely, however, this was undone within minutes by the next speaker, the eternally lightweight Chris Philp, saying that he would always defend British identity. Maybe I got Philp wrong, but in my defence he does seem to be interviewing for a job as a CBeebies presenter.
All in all a strangely upsetting speech: content not bad, delivery much better than expected and included all the necessary lines on the economy, anti-Semitism and migration. But the whole performance just felt low energy and, in the end, rather tragic. It was all perfectly OK, but I just don’t think that anyone is listening yet and it feels very much as though it’s might not be worth anyone’s effort to even try to listen until well after the next election – which may then render this worthy attempt as reasonable recovery entirely moot. Shades of William Hague but with less beer and banter.
The mootness only emphasised by the most recent polling from findoutnow on 1st October showing Reform on 34%, Labour on 19% and the poor old Conservatives on just 15%.
So, the Conservatives have adopted Reform’s policy on leaving the ECHR and arrived at spookily similar migrant deportation targets (Conservatives go for 150,000 per annum, Reform’s target is set at 600,000 over the course of the next Parliament.) The Conservatives already announced they would repeal the Climate Change Act and remove NetZero targets, matching Reform too. The problem is that now the Conservatives seem to have no policies of their own and in the absence of compellingly different policies why would anyone be bothered.
The sense of the Hall basically seemed to be:
“Perfectly OK, but really who cares?”
“I think it is a death wish for the Conservatives to essentially make them the same as Reform and making them indistinguishable.” Dominic Grieve.
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