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There is no happy ending for Bobby J – politicalbetting.com
There is no happy ending for Bobby J – politicalbetting.com
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Kemi Badenoch received 53,806 votes
Robert Jenrick received 41,388 votes
There were 655 rejected ballots.
66,288 electors voted online and 29,621 electors voted by post.
That last stat is worrying enough by itself. 1/3rd of members so out of touch they can't use the internet OR alternatively so fiscally imprudent they'd pay for a stamp unnecessarily.
Given the comedies we will shortly see in the US over machine voting, I rather agree with it.
And I've been in IT since Noah needed to tabulate boarding....
Voting machines V pencil and paper in a poll booth is a different kettle of fish (and yes I'm looking forward to the comedies too).
1) Talking heads
2) Councillors
3) MPs, MSPs etc
4) Cabinet members
@BorisJohnson
Congratulations to Kemi on her outstanding victory
She brings a much needed zing and zap to the Conservative Party
This sleaze-ridden Labour government has no ideas or agenda beyond the old tax and spend socialism
They are far more vulnerable than the parliamentary maths might suggest
Kemi has exactly the right courage and clarity to expose Starmer’s failings
She is now ideally placed to flip them over and take the Tories to victory at the next election
I will be giving her my full support and call on all Conservatives to do the same
Mind you it has fallen a long way from when it was obvious that to get the Cullinan Diamond to the UK -
1) Send the dummy in a guarded safe.
2) Post the real thing. Second class.
I am no Tory but FWIW I'm pleased Kemi has won. Not sure she is up to being PM but I sense she has ideas and integrity that will make effective opposition (or at least more effective than Bobby J). I hope she can broaden out from so-called 'culture war' stuff and find other genuine conservative ideas relevant to 2024 to champion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemi_Badenoch
The price of course was ultimately catastrophic for the Tory Party itself, but the Brexit merry-go-round had gone on too long during that terrible 2017 to 2019 Parliament and it needed to be resolved.
Granted they got the 2022 leadership election wrong though. Both Truss and Sunak were poor candidates but yes, voting Loopy Liz over Rishi was a terrible decision.
It's the main point of interest in next year's local elections, but the early signs are that the public are cultivating an impressive capacity for forgiveness and forgetfulness in relation to the Tories.
The alternative universes populated by failed leadership candidates is a very alien country. To think we will never know how PM Rebecca Long-Bailey might have fared against LoO Robert Jenrick.
Potentially as interesting as the clash between Bryan Gould and Douglas Hurd in the 90s or Owen Smith versus Andrea Leadsom in the 2010s.
Yes indeed, who?
No it isn't. It's completely irrelevant.
If she has the right personality and above all the right policies it was the right choice. If not, not.
Her race and gender are totally unimportant.
I hadn't heard of this charity until a few months ago when we started planning this, but the Little Princess Trust does real hair wigs, for free, for children and young people who have lost their hair due to undergoing cancer treatments or other medical issues.
Our daughter has always had long hair, her favourite princess when she was little was Rapunzel, but today she got her hair cut short for the first time into a bob and she donated over 16 inches, over 40cm, of hair to the charity as well as doing some really good fundraising for it too.
I think this is a fantastic charity and a great thing she's done. I thought it might be nice to mention it here to help raise awareness in case in the future any other kids or grandkids of people here want to do something similar.
https://www.littleprincesses.org.uk/
https://conservativehome.com/2024/09/30/kemi-badenoch-conservatism-is-in-crisis-and-we-need-to-be-serious-about-getting-it-back-on-track/
and the more detailed
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/66e290977b0f17041797e6ae/66fb3a4aa6d5bf17f7481ed1_Conservatism in Crisis.pdf
from which the first link is taken, are essential reading on what kind of direction Kemi's Conservatives might take.
I'm an incredibly socially liberal, libertarian type, and still manage to find much to agree with in the above writings.
Rather than being part of the "PC gone mad" "common sense" anti-woke stuff Reform push, it's a much more comprehensive argument that society has become less liberal and tolerant as a result of ideological capture by left leaning bureaucracy - call it the blob, the nu10k, whatever. And that its view is more bureaucracy, more government, is always the solution, and that needs to be challenged.
Her argument seems to be more that the "bureaucratic class" is an assault on capitalism, rather than "woke ideology is destroying our children".
Cautiously optimistic that Kemi will surprise to the upside. With Starmer and Reeves pushing tax and spend, low growth, big government, on us all, we will need an effective opposition to challenge an ever encroaching state.
But I won't hold my breath.
The belief that if we have enough rules, enough quangos run by the Right Type Of People, furrowing their brows over enough metric tons of paper… that all that tricky nonsense out there in reality will fall in line. And the Universe will behave.
Besides Labour jacking up National Insurance is something I vehemently oppose.
I lent my vote to Labour at the last election as the only party who came close to suggesting serious planning reform but they've not done any whatsoever yet so they absolutely do not deserve to get it again until they follow through.
I am politically homeless still, but still consider myself right of centre, simply someone on the right who thinks deregulation is the solution and regrettably no political party currently meets that.
@KemiBadenoch
It is an honour and a privilege to have been elected to lead our great Conservative Party. A party that I love, that has given me so much.
I’d also like to pay tribute to
@RobertJenrick
who fought a great campaign. I have no doubt he will have a key role to play in our party for many years to come.
Thank you to all the members who have put their faith in me.
It is time to get down to business.
It is time to renew.
Will check in this evening to see if we've had some post-budget polls. Have a good afternoon PB 👍
Thing is, I think this is superficially very appealing (and I say that as a fairly hard leftist). But my only experience of the reality of this is in teaching, where one of the main sources of bureaucracy comes in through trying to prevent kids being abused, either at home or in school. Whilst the form-filling is time consuming and creates unproductive roles for administrators, I still think that is a better world than one in which child molesters are allowed to be with kids unsupervised.
To rephrase, how to do you remove the bureaucracy whilst keeping protections in place? Or do you accept less protection eg more kids being abused? Or is there another solution?
I realise I've just picked one aspect of bureaucracy, but there is also a wider question - which bits of paperwork for eg planning are the important ones? That's quite a hard, value-laden question to answer (not to say it shouldn't be asked, though).
If anyone would like to make a donation, please feel free to donate directly to the charity: https://www.littleprincesses.org.uk/donate-money
lol
Now, that's a view that people are welcome to agree or disagree with, but it's a long way off the toxic culture wars "trans illegal aliens are getting sex changes in our prisons" nonsense that's playing out in the US at the moment.
I like a small state, less bureaucracy, more liberalism and personal freedom. Reframing the left as the intolerant ones is interesting to me. My views aren't wholly incompatible with what is written in the link(s) above, so I'm going to be cautiously optimistic about Kemi, until she demonstrates otherwise.
Besides, KB has just finished a stint as Business Sec. What deregulation did she achieve in that time?
This ship goes down before too long
If Left is right then Right is Wrong
You better decide which side you're on
TRB
So you need a continual evolution of the process, with emphasis on ergonomics, function and simplicity. It should be quick, simple and easy To Do The Right Thing.
The Post Office enquiry presented us with a large number of upright apes of this form.
A test - suggest that an official needs “discretion” in the exercise of their duties. Do the people you are talking to react as if a tarantula the size of Border Terrier has strolled into the room?
But it's also expensive.
More broadly, I'm not sure 'evolution of process' is what Badenoch is proposing in the link, but rather a bonfire of process.
To the other people saying "without more paperwork you'll get another grenfell" I agree with Malmesbury's point that there were reams and reams of paperwork certifying the cladding as safe, when in fact it wasn't.
Processes need to be simplified and streamlined. That much I'm sure of. The 'process culture is a direct result of political ideology' is as others have noted more of a straw man, which is why I'll take a cautious, wait and see attitude to what Kemi's Conservatives come up with in opposition.
Labour's first 100 days and dire tax'n'spend, low-growth, anti-business budget has already shown us what the next five years are going to look like.
Oh, and Tottenham Hotspur FC for some reason.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/01/uk_councils_russia_ddos/
It's not even true, either.
I think the biggest problem is that the small state, high risk society is a million miles away from the Conservatives as they are now. For all the report's condescension towards Starmer, his government is more business-like than they are. I don't think this is actually true:
We are moving from the largely horizontal politics of the 1950s to 1980s, where those at the top in socio-economic terms vote right and those at the bottom vote left, to a vertical politics, where those in the bureaucratic class or supported by it, e.g. those on welfare or newly arrived migrants, vote left, and those in the market dominated classes vote right.
In the late 1970s a divided Labour Party and much of the British left (apart from Martin Jacques’ Marxism Today) misunderstood the forces unlocked by the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Her victory was complacently assumed to be transient, just another Conservative government passing through, and the consensus politics of the postwar order would be restored in due course...
...Something similar could be said of Donald Trump. When he first ran for the presidency as a Republican he was traduced, ridiculed and written off: part orange-faced game-show host, part Mafia Big Man. The American novelist Philip Roth called him the “boastful buffoon”. Trump is boastful and he is a buffoon. But he won in 2016 and may win again next week.
What does he know? What does he understand about the atavistic impulses and insecurities of America and the American people? Why has the Republican Party allowed itself to be captured by Trump and Trumpism? The Maga movement is not a passing phenomenon: like Thatcherism it has hardened into something permanent. It is a counter-hegemonic project. As my colleague Sohrab Ahmari writes in our cover story this week, “The Republicans – once the party of suburban affluence, of free markets and social conservatism – have morphed into a populist vehicle.” There is no turning back.
“No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today,” Roth said shortly before he died. “No one could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the USA, the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.”
But perhaps this outcome could have been imagined. After all, as John Gray has written, the word “populism” has no clear meaning but is “used by liberals to refer to political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies”.
The result of the 2024 US presidential election is likely to be decided in Pennsylvania where the polls have Trump and Kamala Harris deadlocked. Trump won the state in 2016 and Biden in 2020. In so many ways, Harris is the ideal candidate for Trump: the West Coast liberal-lawyer with a rictus smile and an undistinguished record as vice-president and an opaque policy platform. She smiles and laughs a lot, but you can see the panic in her eyes. For after Trump comes JD Vance, a true ideologue, and the pro-worker, anti-liberal American New Right.
But this isn't ideology - I also agree with you that Badenoch's attempt to make this a political argument rather than a technocratic argument bodes poorly for her ability to come up with effective solutions.
Let’s say you make a 70 page form into a 20 page form (the US takes things to an unhelpful extreme) that’s a serious reduction in time spent by the consumer.
If thoughtfully designed then it shouldnt result in a reduction in safeguarding in your example.
A friend had an old property that he didn’t need. He got the planning permission to turn it into 2 units and then gave it to a local charity for social housing.
The planning people made the charity redo all the expert reports - at a cost of thousands and a delay of months - because the LibDems on the council insisted that because they were addressed to my friend they were no longer valid and it wasn’t possible to assign the reports to the charity.
There are those who crave it- mostly the minority who can lose 90% and still rub along nicely, thank you. But even most capitalists happily trade upside for stability.
Which is the problem Buccaneering Brexiteers continue to trip over.
Agreed, but that's an issue of modernising process, not ideological deregulation. The two need to be separated and from what Badenoch has written I believe she is more interested in the ideological aspects of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgzP9Q1s4H4
Having said that, I'm in favour of reducing unnecessary bureaucracy. Deciding what you want to achieve - build better infrastructure, protect vulnerable people etc - then working out how you most effectively achieve that is a better approach in my view than saying, let's fill in more forms, or alternatively abolishing all governance entirely.
Having 70 pages of paperwork that nobody ever reads just makes work and worsens safeguarding as it serves no purpose.
Keeping notes short, to the point and succinct vastly improves safeguarding, cuts paperwork and means a better job is done.
Having a solution like CPOMS to log safeguarding concerns on where relevant issues can be recorded and actually dealt with is better than book sized forms nobody will pay any attention to.
Not that it'll do them the tiniest but of good in WSE, mind, but still.
As Bart says, a long way to go yet,mind.
Glad I backed her when she drifted out to third in the betting just before the final MP vote.
Good afternoon, everybody.
At the bank I work at, they have a legal obligation to monitor behaviour for insider trading. As part of this, the employees have to register all their personal bank accounts with the bank.
The new system remembers all your bank accounts from last year. So all you have to do it click “no change”, if you have nothing to add. The old system required you to type everything in, each time.
And when was the last time a party leader had a surname which was included in the name of a constituency? All I have so far is Lord Liverpool, which doesn't really count.
I don't want to go into too much detail about a film that's only just hit the cinemas in case it spoils it for other people, but I think your criticism there is a valid one. It *did* tonally shift a great deal in the second act, to the point you might think you were watching a three stooges movie.
I don't know if you've seen Tangerine (Sean Baker's 2015 low budget movie about two black trans sex workers on the streets of LA) but he certainly doesn't shy away from filming the seedier side of life. Whether that's exploitative or not I don't know. You could compare it to, say, Hustlers, a film about the same milieu written and directed by a woman, and argue that Baker's eye is more prurient. But it's hard to make a movie about strippers without, well, strip clubs. Compare it to the sanitised, 'Pretty Woman' Hollywood take. Should we try to sanitise sex work? I felt the gut-punch ending was the point Baker was trying to make. But I can also understand your point of view. Other reviewers have also noted it feels a bit exploitative in places.
I felt Anora was less pornographic than The Substance, where scenes in which women were hyper-sexualised and commodified (obviously, to make a feminist point about the male gaze) left me feeling genuinely uncomfortable.
Perhaps the biggest criticism of Anora is the way she's under-developed as a character and comes off as a bit of a stereotype. As you say, Mikey Madison's performance does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Anyway, that's about as much as I can say without turning this thread into an off topic spoiler fest!
Which rapidly becomes a battle with the department that collects the reports, collates the reports, reports on the reports.
https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1852715478461890626