The Conservatives have a new leader: Kemi Badenoch. But let’s be clear – after that catastrophic July election, they’re facing a mountain to climb and a revolution to reverse. Still, there’s reason for hope. Conservatives navigated this terrain before and emerged victorious, argues David Starkey in the Spectator. Here’s an excerpt:
In 2002, Margaret Thatcher was asked to name her greatest achievement. “Tony Blair and New Labour,” she replied. “We forced our opponents to change their minds”.
Unfortunately, Thatcher was only half right – and it turns out she had only half won the battle. New Labour did indeed accept (or at least pretend to accept) Thatcher’s free market economics and her consequent denationalisation of the economy and defanging of the trade unions. But the hydra of the Left was not slain. Instead, it changed its line of attack – and the Tories fell into the trap.
Between 1997 and 2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown launched a series of guerrilla raids on the British constitution. The individual steps – devolution for Scotland (1997) and later for Wales; the independence of the Bank of England (1998); the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into Common Law (1998); the setting up of the Supreme Court and the demotion of the lord chancellorship by the Constitutional Reform Act (2005) and the Equality Act (2010) – appear haphazard and piecemeal. But their cumulative effect was radical, even revolutionary. These changes undermined the central principle of the British constitution: the supremacy of the unitary Crown-in-Parliament over all the functions of state: legislative, executive and judicial. Blair’s reforms weakened that key principles. And now we are all paying the price. …
The result, and probably sooner than later, will be a crisis, as when Britain was forced to go to the International Monetary Fund in 1976, or the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in 1979. The Conservative Party, as it was when Margaret Thatcher was in charge in 1979, must be ready. But the remedy needs to be be different this time, because the situation is different. This means invocation of Thatcherism or Thatcherite free-market economics is not what we want now.
Instead, we need to look back to the earlier, greater crisis of the so-called Puritan Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century. This was a real revolution which anticipated much of the New Labour revolution by stealth. A self-appointed and self-righteous elite seized power in the name of liberty. But they became increasingly authoritarian. They aimed to cut off our history with the king’s head. They used military rule to impose a ‘purified’ form of Christianity and reform popular behaviour and customs. And they engaged in constant constitutional experimentation.
Finally, the English had enough and did that most conservative of things. They reversed a revolution of their own volition and without foreign intervention. There was a great repeal of the acts of the revolutionary years and a restoration of the King, the Church of England and the ancient parliamentary constitution.
We must find the courage to do the same: to carry out our own Restoration, repeal the vandalism of the New Labour years and restore the popular sovereignty we previously enjoyed.
Worth reading in full.
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After 5 years of Starmer handing control of our country to the UN/WHO/WEF/IPCC, Reeves wrecking our economy with extortionate taxes and Mad Miliband destroying what little industry we have left due to the world’s highest energy prices and Zimbabwean blackouts, there won’t be anything left to rebuild.
The Tories, rotten from within, can’t do it.
Whoever grabs the mantle must enact a Great Repeal of all Blair’s policies. The fact not one of these was rolled by back in 14yrs says it all.
100% agree. The Tories are not the answer.
Badenoch won’t make any difference either, it’s just the same snake with a different head.
That is not her real name. Born in Nigeria. Very English apparently. Knows all about the history of England. Really.
You are wrong there. She was born here as her mother hopped over to abuse our NHS and then went back home to Nigeria. Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke went to school in her homeland and then went to college in the US so has no formative years in this country.
Adegoke is her family name. A Nigerian born here to a medical tourist mother so she could get Kemi a Brit-pass. Welfare, welfare, welfare.
End birthright citizenship.
Wonder how she is with her Cockney rhyming slang!
Since the media are always calling Tommy Robinson “real name Steven Yaxley-Lennon”, then we can do the same to Kemi Badenoch “real name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke”
Keir Starmer – real name unprintable.
Exactly.You can take the Tory Party out of the gutter but you can’t take the gutter out of the Tory Party.
Yes. New pail same old (being polite) contents.
There is a parallel here with Kamala Harris. All ills caused by the Biden-Harris regime were nothing to do with her, she insists. Instead she’ll now do all the things she didn’t do before, because “We can’t continue with what has happened over the last four years”.
You mean the Torah party. Now led by the gap toothed Nigerian. What. A. Joke. The Convict party. Remeber the Medical Nazism of Rona? Few do apparently.
I have my doubts too. But at least she will annoy Labour because she sticks out of the “black = oppressed victim” narrative.
They’re already saying she’s not properly black.
Because only the white nihilist madleft know what opinions blacks ought to have. I suppose it’s a kind of ideological imperialism.
She’s a white supremacist apparently. She must be friends with Ron Stallworth of the KKK.
Because the madleft own all blacks apparently. Do not comply and you’re not black.
They didn’t just fail (refuse) to roll any back ….. they extended them.
Actually a Great Repeal going back to 1973 when the cancerous EEC legislation started its metastasis in the UK, replacing perfectly functional, existing, pertinent legislation and introducing a cascade of legislation we didn’t and don’t need or want.
The Covid vaccine is safe for pregnant women and their babies
Yes, that was really bad.
No honest person should ever make a statement about any drug, medication being “absolutely safe”, especially not in pregnancy. Hey, even paracetamol comes with a long list of warnings.
And most definitely not about a vaccine whose long term effects could not have been known in any way, since long term is by definition long term, i.e. several years or decades.
And most definitely not about pregnancy where any side effects may mean a lifetime of ill health or disability.
So yes, that statement was not just ordinarily irresponsible, it was criminally irresponsible.
[Badenoch’s] statement … was criminally irresponsible
And it’s also an indication that she’s completely integrated into the globalists.
Very well put. There’s not really any going back from what she said. Not fit to lead.
I seem to recall her voting FOR the continuation of the tyranny at every possible opportunity.
I have some respect for her other ideas and predicted some time ago that she would become Tory leader. But no-one should be under any illusion – nothing is going to change under her leadership.
Yes, she voted for it all, as did the all the leadership and the majority of backbenchers from all parties.
She seems OKish in some respects and seems to mean well – some of what she says seems genuine, but…
I would add to the list of repeals above by adding a bill to separate government from NGOs. That would spell out no NGO involvement in any government agency, and no funding of NGOs by government. It is the job of elected government to govern, not to delegate their responsibilities to organisations often set up and initially funded by philanthropists with their own agenda..
Tommy Robinson update.
ADMIN POST.
Important update.
Tommy has had a visit from his daughters today, despite the turmoil he’s facing, he remains in good spirits and was overjoyed to see his girls.
Tomorrow, HMP Woodhill have said they’ll have an organized routine of exercise and visits.
You can continue to send letters, cards etc, prison number: A2084CG
With Tommy being locked up again this Christmas, he’s unable to work and provide at this special time of year, which hurts him more than anything.
You can support his children here;
givesendgo.com/tommy-robinson…
Thank you so much for that update on Tommy.
I remember that video of him surprising his young son after his release from long imprisonment last time. The way the little boy ran to his beloved dad and jumped up into his waiting arms was just heartwrenching.
Bedenoch – Protege of Satan’s favourite, Gove and the WEF. Traitor, liar, self-serving globalist shill and destroyer of worlds. Yeah, she’s got my vote.
Thanks for telling the truth!
This is crazytalk. I don’t know if it’s irrational excuberance or sheer terror of reality or utter naivete. There is only one lesson of our time and that is that there are no mechanisms within the system to bring about redemptive change because the very levers of the system are corrupted. They have been predatory for a long time but it feels a bit different when the tyranny exerted elsewhere comes home. It is deeper even that deep corporate capture. Long term rot and destruction of the culture. A hollowing out of everything beautiful and valuable.Visitors from overseas remark how much this country has changed recently. People are nastier, less healthy. There is no coming back from this. Even something like the ‘strength through joy’ program of the Germans in the 1930s wouldn’t help as you can’t breathe life into a corpse.
Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
there’s a political system
I dreamt in a lullaby
But I do not think Kemi Badenoch is going to lead us down the Yellow Brick Road to Eldorado.
Until the mass of people rise up and say NO to that which is, there seems little chance of significant change. I currently see little chance of the mass of the UK population rising up to challenge anything very much.
What the author overlooks is that the revolution started with ousting the old order by chopping the king’s head off, and transitioning to the new order via a period of republicanism. He further overlooks the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James II was given the elbow.
None of this was achieved by voting.
I like that: ‘A Second Restoration’. Catchy.
Or possibly a New Reformation.
With so many in the Parliamentary party against her, any move to change direction will lead to resistance and her removal. With 30 per cent of members not voting there appears to be a large number of unhappy bunnies outside Parliament as well.
Badenock was against leaving the ECHR and many of her backbenchers think the same way. There is a large bloick of rejoiners/LibDems on the Tory benches so trouble ahead, I think.
With a brand and a team so badly stained from the past 14 years it is hard to see a turn-around.
This is a conversation from 25 years ago and would’ve looked naive even then. If you can’t up your game to see the nature of reality in the present then you will be utterly useless in the future. You will be discarded like an old tissue. It is not a pleasant frequency to tune into but you still have to listen to it. By your stripes you are healed.
Is David Starkey’s advancing years catching up with him if can’t identify Olukemi as another product of the Uniparty that may well be an operation run by the CIA according to a Jo Nova post. Perhaps when Olukemi was in the US she was recruited by them to continue the good work of screwing up countries around the World.
He said he supported Jenrick’s candidacy. I doubt if he’s fooled by the LibCONs Puppet.
Starkey has proven to be a huge disappointment.
“How Kemi Badenoch’s Tories Can Rebuild Britain”
She and they cannot rebuild Britain. In fact, given the appallingly poor quality of the current crop polishing their arses in the H of C it is clear that if we distilled the combined intelligence of the lot of them it still wouldn’t be enough. Furthermore, and crucially there is simply not enough political will to complete the task. Sit there, keep gob shut and it’s £90k plus expenses, thank you very much.
Ain’t life grand?
When David Starkey says ‘ the English…reversed the laws of the puritan era’ he means the aristocrats in Parliament did that. The ordinary people, like so often in our history, were kind of onlookers. They may have complained and kicked off a few times against puritan excesses, and this may have reached the ears of the parliamentary class, but the little people had no real say. A bit like today, perhaps.
However, I utterly agree with David Starkey’s assessment. The tories must declare that they will overturn all Bliar and Browne’s foul constitutional damage, and that they will also repeal various acts imposed by this disgusting communist government. That will put business and international partners on notice that they should be careful doing any business with the Lab-Comms
They may promise to overturn Blair’s constitutional damage if that’s what will pull in the credulous voter but they will not deliver on the promise. That is for the birds.
I’m so looking forward to Badenoch and the LibCONs announcing to Scotland and Wales that they’re reversing the devolution destruction Blair/Brown concocted.
Oh, and telling the EU and their puppet in Eire that Northern Ireland is British; will be governed by British laws and they can eff off.
But we all know they wouldn’t dare. Instead they will do what the last Not-a-Conservative-Government did and Keir-Ching! is doing …… break up England into something approximating the Kingdoms of Alfred the Great’s time and tell us how lucky we are now we’ve got devolution as well …… and never mind that we didn’t want it.
If they started acting like true Conservatives (i.e. something along Reform’s lines) that might help, but I fear that will not happen.
The “independence” of the Bank of England was enthusiastically supported by the Conservatives.
And the ECHR was not incorporated into common law in 1998. It was incorporated into Statutory Law by an Act of Parliament. It already had a place in common law (which is law set by precedent in the Courts). And British citizens even before that could take a case to the European Court of Human Rights – the Human Rights Act of 1998 simply made the ECHR part of British statutory law, so that the British courts were obliged to follow it.
Here’s an idea: End the resentful democracy whose main occupation is inflicting just and appropriate damage on its own population for their inexcusable wrongness. This is, after all, mainly two things:
Don’t fight an eternal defensive war against everything you detest while becoming ever more bitter and cynical about the possibilities of accomplishing something meaninful by not trying. Instead, fight for something you want¹ and try to take those others on board because this increases the chance of winning.
¹ Nota bene: Not absence of something, ie, “ambitious target to make Britain smoke free. make Brits not buy more underwear than a sensible person should ever want to have, decarbonize the planet in order to … yadda, yadda, yadda … as that’s just what the resentful democracy is all about.
If there’s nothing positive you want achieve, go home and stop being in the way.
“We must find the courage to do the same: to carry out our own Restoration…”
Reality check. In the 17th Century there was no welfare state with the population grown dependent on it, and about 40% either directly in its employ or no job and entirely funded by it.
That thing about not biting the hand that feeds.
I shall believe in a popular revolution the day the Great Unwashed demand the NHS be abolished and the State be stripped of its monopoly on medical care, education and other public services so they can instead be provided in the competitive, private sector as once they were before the State progressively nationalised them since the start of the 20th Century.
So if the Not-A-Conservative Party wants to save the Nation, that’s the start point – a manifesto commitment to restore the societal framework and relationship between State and citizen of the 17th Century – and they must start the job of persuading an infantilised, State-dependent population that they are big boys and (nothing in between) girls able to look after themselves now without nanny.
I won’t hold my breath.