Olukemi (Kemi) Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch is the latest and quite possibly the worst Conservative party leader to date, although I have to accept there is considerable competition for that embarrassing title. Thick and proud of it, supremely overconfident and arrogant, utterly devoid of empathy and clueless about how ordinary people live their lives. You may have heard her banging on about the perils of migration, even though her own parents ensured that they were in England, not their native Nigeria, so their daughter could be born here gain a British passport. Still, one rule for the establishment elite and another for the rest of us. Now, vying for last place in the opinion polls with the Monster Raving Loony Party, Ms Badenoch has launched her programme for government. Spoiler alert: it’s the same programme that all but wrecked this country when the Tories were last in power from 2010 to 2024.
It is blindingly obvious that she is going down the same path started by David Cameron’s Conservative hardline, austerity-heavy government from 2010 to 2015, in which the Liberal Democrats, to their eternal shame, took jobs. She wants to slash public spending, get rid of frontline public sector workers, reduce benefits for the sick and disabled and end them for the mentally ill, end the asylum hotel scandal (their words), end green subsidies and slash overseas aid to the bone. On the face of it, you might think these are admirable aims until you consider the consequences, which we know there will be because there were when the Tories tried this from 2010.
We have been here before so many times but, in the words of the great Loyd Grossman, let’s look at the evidence:
- They say they will slash back office roles and not the frontline. Well, who does the back office work that still has to be done? The Tories tried this one before and I’ll give you some examples of what happened. Back office roles were cut in the police service. This had the direct effect of removing officers from the frontline to carry out the essential work that needs to be done in order to prosecute criminals. Immigration officer numbers were cut drastically and tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers were put in hotels BY THE CONSERVATIVES until their claims could be processed, which now can take years.
- Slashing overseas aid means that more countries collapse and guess what? Thousands, maybe even millions, escape to try to find a better life. Guess where some of them end up?
- The Tories have said for many years, mental illness is not an illness at all. They all but destroyed mental health treatment on the NHS and now they are pledging to destroy it again, just as Labour is putting it back together again.
- The climate emergency is real. Climate change is a fact, there is no scientific debate about it. But Badenoch wants to drill drill drill for more oil and gas. The green revolution will create good, well-paid new jobs. The next Tory government are effectively promising to put people in these new jobs on the scrapheap.
I could go on, but what’s the point? Everyone bar the hard of thinking will surely understand the old saying which, sadly, did not come from Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results“. There is a heavy price to be paid for austerity and as we found from the Tory/Lib Dem government onwards, it is the poor, the sick and the vulnerable who will pay it. Those who will benefit from cuts to the public service will be benefit fraudsters, people smugglers and essential wrong ‘uns of all shades. There may be some financial ‘savings’ but the cost to human life will be catastrophic.
We complain, rightly, at the poor state of our public services and we know that in order to make them fit for purpose, they must be adequately funded and staffed. Yet Badenoch pretends that we can have it all, by way of lower taxes and better services, all at the same time. Both the rightward drifting Tories and Farage’s private company Reform UK Ltd believe in slash and burn. In their ideal world, particularly Reform UK Ltd, the public sector would be all but scrapped, including the NHS. Is that what we really, really want?
Austerity has given us pared back public services, record levels of poverty, a broken immigration system, a near broken courts system, record NHS waiting lists, made infinitely worse by the Brexit no one seems capable of speaking of.
David Cameron remains this country’s worst PM because of the Brexit he accidentally delivered, but Badenoch has the potential to be just as bad, maybe even worse. Today, she is announcing plans to take us back to the 2010s when her party undid virtually all the good work of the last Labour government. Frankly, she is an idiot and anyone who votes for a re-run of the austerity years is, too.
