Kemi Badenoch through to next round

[InTheCanteen]

If you have a Conservative MP and want to protect the rights of women and safeguard children please email them TONIGHT and ask them to support Kemi.

Penny Mordaunt still the bookies favourite (and they aren't often wrong) but we need to let everyone know how dangerous it will be for this woman to become PM; I don't believe she has changed her mind for one moment.

@Blossomtoes

That’s true, but it’s because the cost of living is a national crisis. You would complain louder if she told everyone to get on their bikes.

It doesn’t matter why. What you said is demonstrably untrue.

"After all we've done for you people!" That story (and the one about the slap) was shocking and very telling. It exactly sums up that attitude - how dare you, a black woman, think for yourself!

She is great. I am a bit of a fan. Sad that we don't get to have her as PM - I would have been proud!

It’s not demonstrably untrue. Conservatives don’t generally want to borrow money. They obviously know (sometimes) that it’s a political necessity.

@Blossomtoes It's not untrue. And that's a bit rich coming from someone who outright refuses to back up any of their arguments with facts or reason.

“If it was benign as you are implying why bother saying it?“

What if policies related to ‘family values’ were positive? What if they included, for instance, helping people to have a place to live at a younger age, and better, cheaper childcare, so people could afford families in the first place? What if it meant food for poor, pregnant mothers and free training in a skill for when they could work? What if it meant more money so a parent could look after a young child for longer, or laws to support a parent working part-time? As a political ‘family values’ could mean anything.

This argument started because Kemi Badenoch apparently mentioned ‘family values’. You may be right that this must mean she has policies that have a negative outcome for women and children. But in that case please tell me what her negative ‘family’ policies are? I don’t know what they are.

That was a reply to Miffee.

"The reason that successive governments have pushed stay at home parents to go back to work is really quite simple, GDP. A parent who stays at home does not contribute to GDP. Whereas a parent who goes to work and pays all they earn to someone else to look after their children does contribute to GDP."

The relationships board is full of women who stayed at home to raise their kids and have found themselves at a real financial disadvantage for doing so. They are often trapped in relationships, screwed over by partners who no longer value them.

Oh, right, so she doesn't believe in supporting hard working families whose members are employed by the government, do family values not apply to them?

I get what some people are ‘scared’ of. They look ahead and anticipate someone like Badenoch outlawing abortion, making it harder to get divorced (in many states in the US you can’t get a divorce while pregnant), incentivising people to have more children, etc.

But we have to look at what people say they will do. It’s unhealthy to project our fears on to others and predict extreme situations.

But she has campaigned against the Chancellor writing off billions of pounds in fraud, in fact she resigned from government when that came to light.

Which I suppose is why government borrowing has dropped year on year for each of the last 12 years...

Borrowing is high but public demand for pandemic response was also high

Sunak and Johnson spent a lot so I can see why some conservatives want to move away from that.

I still think Sunak is better placed to clean up the mess created during that time due to prioritising inflation

We’re also free of Johnson inspired handouts where back accounts are topped up as an unsuccessful bribe against impact of partygate

Bank..

Of course it’s untrue. If you haven’t got the money to pay for tax cuts but you do it anyway it’s spending public money we don’t have. What else could it possibly be?

But again, if Johnson and Sunak had let businesses and families go to the wall, everyone would be calling them Nazis for that as well. The fact that they didn’t (and actually provided an enormous amount of help) is evidence that they are a middle of the road sort of government.

True

They have been to me a high spend government, but with reason ie pandemic

Without that factor likely more middle of the road - Johnson anyway

I thought we were talking about Badenoch’s proposals for future taxation? It’s because of the debt incurred by pandemic spending that we can’t afford future tax cuts, otherwise known as spending public money we don’t have.

I thought the government's covid response was pretty dumb, tbh - closing down the economy and borrowing heavily was a predictably bad idea. However, they weren't the only government who went for this approach, and we might not have avoided a recession even if they'd done things differently. As far as public spending goes, they seem way more willing to do that than traditionally tories have been. I get the impression that Kemi is not so keen on that kind of spending, and I understand that.

If it were up to me, I'd re-nationalise gas and electricity, and get rid of the focus on renewables in favour of extending nuclear power. We ought to be energy self-sufficient in this country. I'd like to see politicians brave enough to take that on, or at least to seriously discuss some different ways forward. We are being seriously screwed on energy prices.

I wonder what effect Kemi's u-turn on net zero might have had on the vote? I have a feeling she should have stuck to her guns on that.

@Blossomtoes

What a politician will do in an emergency isn’t an indication of their beliefs.

Anyway, this is largely a derailment. Badenoch is a traditionalist. I don’t agree with her on everything. I don’t find her remotely ‘scary’.

Which U turn? She did a 180 yesterday and then reverted to her original position this morning.

It's evidence that they'd made a decision to implement a lockdown.

Lockdown inherently requires lots of people to be paid to stay at home. People who would otherwise need to be in public spaces to earn the income necessary to survive. Not necessarily all of them, hence the excluded 3 million, but enough of them. And the money they are given needs to be sufficient to keep them happy enough at home.

It was an extraordinary decision in extraordinary circumstances and I'm not sure it's evidence of anything other than them feeling politically they didn't have a lot of choice.

@ApplesandBunions

It’s a feature of centre ground governments that they do what is politically expedient or practically necessary even when the actions conflict with their personal ideological leanings, or produce policy shifts and contradictions. Extremists don’t do that, they follow their ideologies no matter how bad the resulting outcomes.

Weeeell, it depends what ability they have to enforce their ideologies. But I do think that fundamentally, Johnson in particular is a populist before he's anything. And Sunak at least went along with it. It would've taken much more political skill than either of them possess to convincingly make the case against significant restrictions in the UK by late March 2020.

@ApplesandBunions

Johnson is a populist, but he’s a moderate and fairly liberal one.