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August 27, 2024 - 7:00am
The Conservative leadership contest is finally showing signs of intelligent life. Until this weekend, the only candidate to have said anything of any great significance was Tom Tugendhat with his speech on public order following the riots. He has continued to attract attention, simply by moving beyond the bounds of content-free platitudes.
As if waking up to the danger of letting her most articulate rival dominate the conversation, Kemi Badenoch has now made her most significant intervention to date. Writing in the Sunday Times, she starts off with a painful truth for her party: “people voted us out more than they voted Labour in.” But what explains the failure of the Tories in government?
Badenoch blames the “political system […] bequeathed to us by Tony Blair”. By this she means the endless round of consultations, public inquiries, judicial activism, interfering quangos and legally-binding policy frameworks that stop governments — especially Conservative governments — from getting on with what they were elected to do.
Unlike Liz Truss, who blamed her downfall on the “deep state”, one might call Badenoch’s bugbear the “shallow state”. There’s nothing covert or conspiratorial going on here, but instead an all-too-familiar set of bureaucratic and legal constraints on ministerial action. The Tories never got anywhere because they were tied up in knots.
There’s no doubt that inertia and obstructionism are everyday frustrations in Whitehall. And yet there are three big holes in Badenoch’s argument.
Firstly, the constraints that governments impose upon themselves are sometimes there for a reason. Take the UK’s obligations as a member of Nato: it’s surely a good thing that the defence of the West is underpinned by Article 5, rather than at the discretion of ministers. The same applies to our Net Zero commitment to tackling climate change. This isn’t the “very definition of over-legislating” as Badenoch claims, but the clear steer that businesses need before making multi-decade, multi-billion-pound investments in new energy infrastructure.
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SubscribeI find the author’s defence of the Net Zero legislation baffling. Dictating ends where the means don’t exist as NZ does is indeed the “very definition of over legislating”. Good for Kemi Badenoch for saying this.
Regaining democratic control over the machinery of the state is a necessary project for the Tories and along with a commitment to end mass immigration may well see the Conservatives back in government next time.
“I find the author’s defence of the Net Zero legislation baffling.”
Utterly. It’s economic suicide, the off-shoring of manufacture to China, and the deliberate impoverishment and demoralisation of the working class.
Little Englander thinking. As if we had a massive impact on the rest of the world by decisions we make. Pathetic virtue signaling with a destructive sting.
I think people are down voting you by mistake.
You’re probably right. I suspect they downvoting Jeremy because they think he’s accusing me rather than the author of being a Little Englander.
Actually it’s the total opposite of “Little England” thinking. The term actually was coined to describe the complete oppositeof what most people appear to think it means.
To those who downvoted me might I suggest you Google where the term “Little Englander” first came about and who it referred to.
The original meaning of “Little Englander” is not really very relevant. What is relevant is the proposition being expressed by Jeremy in the present instance.
So basically a term coined to describe a specific ideology actually can mean the total opposite.
No wonder 1984 is seemingly considered a guide not a warning.
Perhaps we’re actually living in a world where The Mad Hatter actually is in control, the Dormouse heads our political parties, and Alice is still railing against the stupidity but being ignored.
The only answer to that is more legislation not less. Include carbon charges in import duties and net zero brings business back onshore and increases Britain’s clout as well as its climate change impact.
Kemi’s half way to saying drop the small state donkey. When the Tories do that they’ll be ready for government again.
Ha. Thought you’d all like that. You’ll love when it actually comes round.
There’s insufficient electrical energy of any source to reshore manufacturing. There’s barely enough to keep the lights on this winter. High availability generating capacity needed for year-round industrial production is rapidly shrinking, hidden by a growing reliance on very old French nuclear reactors that will themselves close in the next decade. UK industrial electricity prices are the 2nd highest in world. And there still isn’t an industrial-scale virgin steel plant anywhere in the world – electric arc furnaces are recyclimg plants unable to produce the highest grade steel needed for the advanced engineering needed to reshore manufacturing.
A carbon charge on imports will do nothing to make manufacturing inside the UK more feasible, let alone competitive. Instead a carbon charge will simply make foreign imports unaffordable. It will impoverish millions. But that’s the only option if you really believe the climate woo-woo – consumption of everything from glass to steel to plastic has to be reduced to barely zero.
First the loss of native production, then denied access to foreign production, material consumption will be reduced to levels not seen since before Victoria was on the throne. It’s the only way to achieve net zero and the government funded UK FIRES has clearly set out the plan and the timetable for this. It’s written there in black and white, the costs and consequences.
Thanks for dealing with the apologist for economic armageddon.
What Kemi’s not doing, and none of the potential candidates are, is imagining the world in 2029 and beyond. They are still fighting the last election. Progress to Net zero will be slower than many hope, and faster than some would like. The inheritance though in 2029 will be considerably different to now. For now she doesn’t need to imagine much at all. Half the Tory members won’t be around come 2029 or will be senile. Virtual signalling will be enough to win Tory leader but not come 2029 and a GE.
Kemis campaign is called Renewal 2030, with the objective of doing what you have set out.
She seems to me to be focusing on what is needed to be done at the moment – winning over enough MPs to go through the the member’s round and starting to put together a platform to win that contest. It would be crazy to be creating a 2029 manifesto when you are still in the first round of the leadership contest. Remember Starmer’s pitch to the membership was completely different to the election manifesto. Same thing here.
Element of that is fair. But Starmer’s campaign to become lab leader immediately recognised Brexit was done. What’s her equivalent?
I am sorry but was not Badenoch member of Tory cabinet which flooded country with low IQ immigrants?
The Blair legacy wasn’t just a number of everyday policies. It was an attempt to structurally lock in future governments to his vision of the just society. And as they say, scratch the surface of Tony Blair………..
The focus on government machinery ignores the most important aspect of Continuity Blairism – economic policy. It’s untouchable because Blairism was Continuity Thatcherism as far as economic policy was concerned. Even though it was the Austerity Blairism of the Cameron – Osborne – Clegg years that kept living standards down and let public services crumble – they dug themselves a hole too deep to get out of and fatally damaged the Tories’ electoral prospects in the process – so far none of the six leadership candidates have dared to open the economic policy box.
What “kept living standards down and let public services crumble” was the simultaneous introduction of mass immigration and the removal of housing costs as a criteria in interest rate policy which have combined to result in the largest upward transfer of wealth this country has ever witnessed as well as the almost complete exclusion of blue collar workers from the housing market. Both these policies were introduced in 2004.
Ignorant as well as factually flawed’ What mass immigration, when? It’s only since Brexit that’s begun to happen. EU Free Movement was always controllable by us and led to very little permanent migration.
Austerity resulted from not making shareholders take enough of a haircut in 2008. Quantitative easing was a half hearted attempt to make money supply a public utility, which was needed to keep up investment. Russia shows better now how to do that on a mixed economy.
Before 2008, Brown and the BoE between them kept up the money supply by attracting hot money with above average rates. A totally different approach was then needed, more like that of Alexander Hamilton two hundred years before.
So where did all that unearned property wealth you’ve been accumulating for the past twenty years come from? Since the nineties the Labour Party has been a corporatist scam. Don’t be part of it.
Blair didn’t do enough to move us away from neoliberal bedrock of economic policy, but he was much more successful at ameliorating the consequences because public services were in a much better position by time he came to end of his tenure.
As regards Tory Austerity, even the IMF (that bastion of Marxist thinking!) reported that it had gone too far in the UK and was counter-productive to growth. the sense left was much of Austerity was ‘political’ and not ‘economic’. The consequences are many of the problems we have now. cancelling things like SureStart and even things like the Migration Support Fund for areas where migration was higher, were ideologically driven
Government spending increased in real terms every year from 2010 onwards. As it has done, indeed, every year since WWII. It’s ludicrous to describe increases in spending as austerity.
The sheer desperation of praying in aid the views of the IMF – the IMF FFS – a superquango run by a corrupt French banker, is quite breathtaking, isn’t it?
Here’s what happened in plain language, JW. In 1997 Britain was in a pretty good place for the most part. There was little debt and a high degree of social mobility. Then your generation took over and began helping yourselves. By 2010 the debt was approaching 100% of GDP – even without considering the long term pension and other commitments that you made on your own behalf . Housing costs for blue collar workers had increased by more than 60%, completely wiping out any gains made in terms of rising incomes. Social mobility had become a thing of the past. Since then you’ve gone on getting richer, without doing anything at all to merit it, as the country gets poorer.
You need to stop the pseudo-intellectual waffle, passing the buck and looking for scapegoats and start paying back. The problem isn’t someone else.
Net Zero legislation was definitely “over legislating”. Just because it provided a “clear steer to business” doesnt mean it did not constrict other types of strategic investment.
Meso-Americans at the time of Columbus tackled climate change by decapitating hundreds of thousands of slaves and bouncing their heads down the steps of the massive ziggurats you can still see in Mexico. Our rulers’ response is barely any less futile.
On the other hand, you just proposed solution to quangos and overmanned (un)civil service and other taxpayer funded parasites.
You mean decapitate them and throw them off tall buildings? I wouldn’t go quite that far. 🙂
Although, contrary to the silly claims of the author of this piece, it did not provide a clear steer to business because ALL of the targets are unachievable and all of the costs are understated.
Consequently, the sentient business leader is spending time trying to figure out how long it will take to change course. Just the opposite of stability.
These are not “holes in her argument” they are merely additional constraints.
Conservatives simply haven’t had the courage to recognise our fundamental problem: a welfare state designed to provide a safety net for the working poor has become a gravy train for the middle class.
The roles of the state are security, legislation, regulation and arbitration. It must not become a provider (except where a natural monopoly exists) because the resulting conflict of interest leads inevitably to corruption such as that which we see now when a government quite blatantly rewards its clients at the expense of the poor, elderly and infirm.
Since 2004, when Blair opened the borders and Brown broke the link between housing costs and interest rate policy, pretty well all my acquaintances have become millionaires and multi-millionaires. None, or very little, of this wealth arises from productive economic activity. It comes from fiscal and monetary policy designed to attract the votes of the swing constituency middle class.
If we are not to follow the French down the road to social collapse we desperately need a politician willing to confront this situation head-on and make the case for radical decentralisation of the state and an economy based on enterprise, not rent-seeking.
Much in that last paragraph would agree with HB. Thomas Piketty could have almost written that. Chapeau.
Like Marx, Piketty correctly analyses the problem and then comes up with a quite laughably utopian solution, more religious wishful thinking than practical common sense, confirming the general historical truth that all the bad ideas that don’t come from Germany come from France.
I don’t think it was ever envisaged that the ‘middle class’ would benefit….until the started to be penalised for working hard, saving money for old age & giving to charity, when the opinion began to be formed that if they were able to do things as well as pay for school fees & healthcare by not spending as much on foreign holidays, bingo & smoking/ drinking as well as having more children than they could afford, then they could afford to pay for others to do these very things that they had forgone.
The rot on a lot of things, which are now deep structural problems with our country, definitely started with the war criminal Phoney Blair, but the Tories allowed it to become / actively made it worse under their 14 year watch. Dominic Cummings had ideas about tackling the issues Kemi mentions, but the opposition to them came as much from within a divided and useless Tory party as it did from outside.
Until I hear a Tory leadership candidate really spell out in unambiguous plain English what being Conservative really means then quite frankly I don’t have time for any of them.
There was the Heir to Blair.
The grim reality of recent British politics is clear enough:
1) Yes the Tory Party is bereft of both talent (and conservatives)….But (and its a big But)
2) even if the Party was led by lions, the Civil Service is dreadful, bloated, lazy, sinecured and stuffed to the brim with thick, group-thinking university sheep-dipped Lefties.
3) which is also why talented conservative-minded people generally steer well clear of it.
The current UK political landscape is (to coin a phrase) “hopeless but not serious”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Article 5 does NOT commit the signatories to take military action but only consider what action to take. In short it IS entirely up to the government to decide what to do.
Anyone who believes any US President will risk the USA to save anywhere in Europe is sadly mistaken.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was to protect the USA; it would have been Europe which would have been destroyed.
Bit odd some of that MC.
Your first point – well could say that about every international Treaty. US fundamental to Kosovo remember and intervened with strike force. Plus it’s the threat of deterrent that’s important. Europe represents $600b in trade so US got plenty of skin in the game quiet apart from protection of western values.
As regards Cuban crisis – you seem to forget Khrushchev had launchers and warheads primed already 90 miles from Florida and Russia ICBMs could hit US too. Europe would have not been alone.
The threat of deterrent is diminishing as US power evaporates, and the American people move to isolationism.
As for Cuba they were short range tactical nukes which were live…to protect Cuba from invasion. No longer range missiles were activated. And the USSR didn’t have enough usable ICBMs to cause much, if any, damage. There never was a “Missile gap”…far from.
But my point remains…Article 5 does NOT commit any signatory to use military force…or indeed anything at all.
I stopped reading when the author defended net zero. Anyone stupid or currupt enough to push that nonsense isnt worth my time
But the point was to identify that government has to step in at times
Agreed. You’d have to be stupid not to have read on to understand the context.
‘our Net Zero commitment to tackling climate change’
But this is government making it worse, much worse!
He didn’t defend Net Zero. He said, to be implemented, it needs a long term, well thought out, stable strategy to get big investors on board. Might be better to not be in the habit of stopping reading for a knee jerk reason, maybe?
Thankfully no practical politician listens to the type of advice offered here by Peter Franklin; whoever he is.
This argument fails at the first hurdle of a British Parliamentary democracy, you either accept that Parliament is sovereign or you don’t. Each of the points made by Franklin rest on the view that the civil service, or a quango or other NGO is sovereign. No one sensible who actually thinks this through agrees with that.
All in all, if you want to understand why the Tory’s are so loathed today it is the product of spending 14 years allowing themselves to be neutered and to simply act as the apologists and spokespeople for the public sector.
No Government should or can tie the hands of successive Government IF the will and the mandate is there to change things. The reason that the Tories failed to address the underlying structural problems is that a large proportion of them were not really Conservatives and would have voted against any attempt to make the necessary changes. And the Media would have been screaming the usual rubbish about them being Na zi and Fa sit and those who are Conservative were too frightened to do anything.Much easier to keep taking the money and let the next lot worry about it.
Agree wholly that the Tories need a brutally honest review of why, after 14 years in power, they were still stuck in the Blair-era institutional straitjacket.
It is simply not good enough to blame Blair for this: if anything, this makes Blair look clever and invincible.
Kemi has to win the leadership, she’s the one who can not only beat Starmer but who has the right ideas to see off the Reform threat and who actually understands how to fix a UK that hasn’t been this badly broken since the 1970s.
The ‘Reform threat’ is the only decent party left in the UK.
I agree, but being a decent party and being a major party with a shot at forming a government are two very different things.
Net-zero has no (proper) scientific basis and practically can never be attained. “Anthropogenic global warming” in an insignificant cause of climate change. The vain attempts to introduce net zero will cost billions and risk destroying much of our way of life. Nuclear power must be widely re-introduced/re-invigorated.
I think the author makes some good points. But I take issue with the idea that the Net Zero obligations are there for good reason. They are unachievable, will hurt the poor more than the rich and make no difference to global temperatures.
Basic problem with many commentators on here regarding housing is denial of reality.
There are enough houses being build for existing population of uk.
The imbalance is caused by mass immigration if unsuitable people.
Stop this and deport 2 million illegals already here and problem is solved.
If you wonder why no one in parliament is proposing it, just look at numbers of landlords on both benches.
You’re right. The reason we don’t tackle immigration in a sensible way is that it is just too profitable for some sections of society – and not just landlords.
“The same applies to our Net Zero commitment to tackling climate change.”
The Climate Scam makes Badenoch’s point perfectly.
Yes, the Tory ministers are simply lazy
The Tories end their 14-year rule blaming the previous administration for their inability to get things done. Even their supporters can’t be convinced by that.
I think you need to look at the Tories efforts to change things & who moved in to stop them at every opportunity. I think you will find it was the left wingers both in Parliament & without. Top of the outside list being the unions, frightened by the thought of losing their powerbase & a large number of top civil servants who leaked plans & could not accept that they were there to serve the Government not constrain it to their beliefs while ensuring their own gravy train get rolling along. Why was it never suggested that both they & MP’s were subject to the same rules as any other workers, particularly over pensions?
Drivel. “The same applies to our Net Zero commitment to tackling climate change. This isn’t the “very definition of over-legislating” as Badenoch claims, but the clear steer that businesses need before making multi-decade, multi-billion-pound investments in new energy infrastructure.” That would be the policy adopted after a 90 minute debate, with no vote, based on no technical, scientific analysis on it’s deliverability other than “the latest thing”. Is it evident to other subscribers that this once very interesting website has become bland, shallow and trivial (with some notable exceptions) since the rebrand a few months ago, and contemporaneous appointments of some blatantly partisan editors?
Regarding your last point: i wasn’t happy with the rebrand and suspect it happened because Unherd needed to widen it’s subscription base to remain viable. There’s still enough new and interesting content to keep me subscribing but i agree that something has been lost along the way.
Be careful. UnHerd is just about the only forum left where heterodox opinions can be freely expressed. We need to cherish it and defend it when the Starmtroopers try to close it down, which they will before too long.
“Just look at the 14-year failure of successive Tory governments to build enough houses. The main issue was not the planning system or Nimbyism, but rather the fact that big private-sector developers have no incentive to build at a rate that might bring down property prices.”
I’m sorry, but I disagree. Private sector developers want to build houses. That’s what they do. If you built enough houses, you wouldn’t need to mandate ‘affordable housing’ as there would be sufficient supply to enable people to buy.
The problem is the planning system, and NIMBYism. Oh, and a judicial review system that can – after 5 years(!) overturn permission to develop (Surrey County Council approved an oil gas development that was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2024 for permission granted in 2019. Apparently, the would be developers should have considered additional down stream impacts.). That’s why the still unbuilt tunnel under the Thames for the M25 extension has a 50,000 page environmental impact report. 50,000 pages. The Proust trilogy is 3000 pages. Imagine the cost, the time taken and the opportunity for objectors to find reasons for delay or further consideration.
The planning costs are not inconsiderable, either.
The Community Infrastructure Levy comes in at £18k per 1000ft2 house – a 3 bed semi. Planning and building control takes that to £20k. Then there’s the professional fees, the reports – roads, environmental impact. It’ll be £50k before you turn a spade.
And NIMBYism is real as well. That’s why the Tories lost Amersham to the Lib Dems in 2022. It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it, to say that you shouldn’t permit development until the infrastructure is in place? But why spend the money on infrastructure unless you know what the development is? Just an excuse to oppose development.
So, any Govt serious about development has to tackle the planning system, its costs and limit the scope of judicial review.
Actually, the real problem became the need to build more houses that the country has land for without it looking like a concrete jungle ‘from sea to shing sea’.
The author says builders have little incentive to build houses because prices are high.
How could anyone find this writer credible?
Franklin should take the time to read Article 5 of NATO. It does not provide an automatic commitment to arms.
Badenoch states the bleeding obvious. That most of us have known for years.
Hardly inspiring is it.
Its week 7 DL. Her essay of dysfunction in governance was spot on. Watch this space. More will follow.
Not sure if I should take it as a badge of honour (at least it was deemed worthy of quarantining regardless of actual content) that my last post has vanished into the purgatory which divides the comments and Room 101
Well said. What a juvenile ignorant article. The author has missed the entire revolution in governance since 1997 driven by permsnent unelected quangocracy, NMIs and the deliberate emasculatation of Executive and Parliamentary power to make us EU compliant. Bank of England? OBR? Supreme Court? Devolution? The judicial overreach triggered by human rights laws? Never mind the Soviet style insanity of the Bet Zero diktats. I recommend the author read up on Kemi’s article on the dysfunction of our governance and try harder.
And what motivates developers NOT to build? The expensive, uncertain, time consuming planning system FFS.
There is some truth to this argument regarding the lamentable performance of the previous conservative governments on achieving their supposed policy objectives.
However this has become a rather fashionable centre right evasion of the deep issues at play, the lamentable state of British governance, and the degree to which the direction of travel on many issues is indeed heavily influenced by institutional capture.
The particular point about Net Zero is particularly weak. Without even getting into whether any form of net zero policy is justified, only the United Kingdom in Germany have legally binding targets on net zero, rather than a general aspiration and guidance, perhaps changing procurement rules etc.
So what we then get is almost every decision at all by government being litigated. We have is a veto on a much needed new airport at Heathrow the exercise by a timely group of radical extreme activists. No one is it under any obligation whatsoever in taking section showing an analysis of costs versus benefits. In fact in that case the environmental.activists were eventually overruled by Court decision but not because the government had any stomach for the fight but because the Heathrow Airport owners did. Of course this show the government was pusillanimous but you could understand them giving up almost a will to live over this own endless litigation. And this at a time when China had built 50 new runways at major airports or something. This is ludicrous and paralyses the state from carrying out much needed investment. But of course no contextual information was legally relevant.
Judicial decisions are based on legal principles and do not consider the financial or economic consequences of their rulings, which is one reason among many why the rule of judges should be limited.
bs – they could have left ECHR any day of the week. The problem was not the bureaucracy. It was that the Tory party is full of global liberals, who have no vision and no desire for something different. It’s a simple as that. They are economic liberals. They are not conservative. They are the uniparty.
A military coup would be a better result: top man Roly Walker in charge, Old Harrovian, ex Foot Guards and SAS Commanding Officer…
Now here’s a thought – how about the Government concentrating on the things it ought to be doing, or have done, and declining to get involved in trying to shape social matters, to nudge people into some rare state of sainthood?
The Bonfire of the Quangos, the defunding of charities with a political axe to grind, holding local councils to their legal responsibilities. Disregarding global institutions and ‘laws’ (like so many other countries). Allowing people to make their own minds up over COVID and Net Zero. A hands off approach to matters that are no valid concern of the government, but a clear focus on justice, defence, and borders.
It would probably take 10 years (hat tip: Two Tier Keir) and a lot of cozy lobbyists and activist charities would be upset. What’s not to like?
A quango and a Govt funded Charity you’d close tmoro? Genuine question.
On holding Local Govt to legal responsibilities – this happens already but as you should know they aren’t given autonomy in local taxation. Essentially therefore what’s happened is central Govt has ‘outsourced’ any ‘blame’ for local services. That’s not on is it really, and furthermore the people who know what their local areas really need should be given more power to make those choices. It’s one of the reasons the UK economy so imbalanced North/South too. Central Govt invested far more in the South, the Tory South, or what was the Tory South.
The question should be put the other way around, name a government quango or Charity that you would keep? Ofcom?Ofgem? Tavistock Clinic, etc. No successes to point to from any of them.
Tavistock clinic isn’t a quango. Separate discussion.
I’d concur questions to answer from the Regulators. Are you suggesting no regulation though?
Begs the question given it was set up in 2008 why Tories had 14yrs and left untouched?
I might not junk myself but I would assess what funding it gets and how bloated it may have become
A quango to close – obviously the Climate Change Committee – you would have to search far and wide to find a more destructive bunch of rent seekers than that bunch of traitors.
Problem with your comment is it’s too partisan. The question was about ‘governance’ and how arms of Govt can self generate and become bloated. Whereas you just dislike the Climate change agenda. That’s a different issue.
I’m not talking about swinging an axe so much as gradual defunding and de-patronising. So my first act would be the defunding of the BBC and the sale of Channel 4. There are several ‘pure’ charities that deserve attention because of their politicisation like OXFAM, or the anti-smoking charities that are government operations at a remove. I rather expect that the Arts Councils councils could do with a good shake up, and ‘countryside commissions’ are just another layer of bureaucracy.
Of course you could set up a ‘Commission’ to investigate such matters… but that is how we have got into the present mess.
Re: BBC – there is probably a debate about what elements of the BBC might remain under licence fee and what elements perhaps shouldn’t.
All charities are ‘political’. They are pressure groups.
More generally I concur with a focus on making Quangos leaner if they do have a good ‘raison d’etre’.
Quango: Climate Change Committee.
Charity: Sistah Space.
It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, JW.
Hate not Hope. Sorry, I meant Hope not Hate- possibly one of the most corrupt ‘charities’ in existence.
You were right first time! Don’t tell me that thing receives public money?
It’s very shady but it appears so: https://youtu.be/ZCSCqR-3Ap8?si=9i6A_lOoMLqiWtHh
Builders do have every incentive to build as quickly as possible. It’s called capital efficiency. If you can acquire land, obtain planning permission, build and sell houses quickly your return on capital improves. The failure has been on successive governments to reform planning and the endless stream of objections and delays to development.
Builders do, developers don’t. The developer can make much more money by land banking and drip feeding supply into the market, keeping prices artificially high
They could if they were monopolists but mostly, they’re not. Force the price up and your competitors will step in.
It’s the agonising bureacracy that slows it all up
Big difference between the UK and much of Europe is the lack of small developers and self-builds. The planning regime here is so strict, only large developers have the resources to deal with the paperwork and potential delays due to bats and newts, or snooker needs assessments or whatever else gets in the way.
We need bats & newts. We don’t need mass immigration.
“our Net Zero commitment to tackling climate change” is supremely important. As is my own personal commitment to tackling mortality.
Blair himself lamented how difficult it was to get Whitehall to drive reforms and change. He thought it worked superbly in a crisis but too much inertia regarding driving his agenda. And yet ironically he’s blamed by some for 14yrs of Tory misrule because he was too successful in changing how Britain worked. Well if he was able to get it done then so the Tories should have been. They had much longer too. It’s a pathetic excuse.
Badenoch of course has to play to an audience that doesn’t want to hear the truth. That the neo-liberal policies their party have promulgated for 40yrs have left Britain poorer and more unequal. That Brexit was a total con. That the Right uses immigration to win votes but isn’t prepared to be honest in choices required to reduce it (legal). That Rwanda and ECHR withdrawal would have only made an marginal difference to illegal migration and damaged and cost the UK more in the process – that the issue must be tackled but the whole approach was wrong and too driven by slogans. That Austerity crushed growth and fell not on the people who had caused the Financial Crash. That increasingly the Tories just appealed to Boomers with property and pensions. That the Tories failed to fundamentally grasp what was going wrong with investment in the UK and especially our inability to grow world leading companies because of the poor investment culture. And that instead the Tories over-fixated on culture war stuff when people were crying out for them to recognise the growing inequality and unfairness. That the fixation on delivering tax cuts crippled the public realm. And that they were just poor at the art of Government.
She ain’t going to tell them that is she, but I reckon she’s smart enough to know it.
Neo-liberal policies that New Labour promoted through mass immigration and low interest rates.
Encouraged by a couple of civil servants funnily enough.
Brexit was the only thing the Tories did that wasn’t a con, and they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to only half do it.
This idolisation of Blair is downright weird. Are you related in some way?
Not to my knowledge HB, but haven’t taken family tree v far back – a hobby for retirement. Who knows, maybe we’ll be related? You need some luck.
I did meet him once when in the RN – 98. Much taller than most had thought.
when in the RN
Does that explain the authoritarian and elitist outlook?
“Much taller”. So what ? Is this how we measure our leaders now ?
You seem to ignore the plain fact that the Tories did, indeed, inherit an empty purse (Labour’s words) not a booming economy with both interest rates & inflation coming down. If there was a black hole it was based on policies that had were intended to apply WHEN THE MONEY WAS AVAILABLE FROM GROWTH IN THE ECONOMY TO FUND THEM rather than paying out ridiculous wage claims from their own backers.
What ‘left leaning charities?
https://youtu.be/2fUCWwADHf8?si=PqRA-fbf7qeSu51s