Has Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch folded on Net Zero? That’s what the Guardian would have us believe. The newspaper reports that Kemi did a “U-turn” during the recent hustings in Parliament and backed the green target.
Kemi Badenoch has backed the Government’s target of reaching Net Zero emissions by 2050 and vowed not to unpick current climate commitments in an apparent U-turn at the Tory leadership environment hustings.
The MP for Saffron Walden had previously likened the target to “unilateral economic disarmament” but under questioning from Alok Sharma, the COP26 President, at the hustings in Parliament on Monday she said she backed it.
All five remaining leadership candidates have now backed Net Zero.
The way this is reported sounds like a forced confession for the benefit of the alarmist faithful. You can hear some of what she said in the recent TV debate here (though not the interrogation in the Parliament hustings by the Grand Climate Inquisitor).
Kemi Badenoch was BY FAR the best on Net Zero.
— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) July 17, 2022
"If there are things in the plan that will make life difficult for ordinary people, I will change them"
"We have to do it in a way that is sustainable"#itvdebate pic.twitter.com/5xzazYAEvN
In case there was room for doubt, Mrs Badenoch subsequently clarified in an interview on TalkTV with Tom Newton Dunn that she would be prepared to delay the target.
Conservative Party leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has said she would be prepared to delay the U.K.’s target to hit Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050, as the U.K. experiences one of the hottest days on record. Speaking to TalkTV’s the News Desk, Badenoch said if she became Prime Minister, she would tackle climate change in a way “that doesn’t bankrupt our economy”.
The former Equalities Minister also told TalkTV that she did not believe that the Tory leadership contest had become nasty and said many of the candidates were friends but it was right that they were having disagreements in public. In the wide-ranging interview with Tom Newton Dunn, Badenoch also addressed the attention surrounding her views on the transgender debate; set out her stall for why she thinks she has proved so popular with Conservative members and shared her experience of being the only woman working on a building site with 300 men.
Kemi as the straight-talking, anti-woke, Net-Zero sceptical candidate (who also, I understand, opposed vaccine passports from within Government, though behind closed doors) is a breath of fresh air and clearly what the party needs to move forward on issues where the ‘orthodox’ position is increasingly at odds with public opinion and the needs of the country.
Among Tory members at least, Kemi is in tune with their priorities, with the Times reporting that Net Zero has dropped to the bottom of members’ priority list.
Conservative Party members care very little about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, polling shows.
Only 4% of those surveyed said that hitting the target of Net-Zero emissions by 2050 was one of their three priorities for the next Tory leader.
Members said the most pressing concern was winning the next election, followed by controlling immigration and helping families with the cost of living, a YouGov survey for the Times showed.
In April a poll for the think tank Onward found that 64% of all voters supported the Government’s plans to hit Net Zero. 9% were opposed.
In the YouGov poll, 56% of the Tory party members surveyed said that winning the next election was the most important issue. Hitting Net Zero came bottom of a list of ten policy areas, behind cutting personal taxes, increasing defence spending and strengthening Britain’s global standing.
Other polls show that Kemi would likely win among party members if she were to reach the final two – which, sadly, may just make MPs more determined to deny members the candidate they want and keep her out. If they do achieve that goal (as seems likely) then more fool them. And if it ends up being super-woke Penny Mordaunt instead, who plainly could never lead the Conservatives to election victory, then they have only themselves to blame.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The History curriculum seems to have been unanchored for years. My kids spent more time studying Native Americans, which was interesting but not overly relevant to their place in the world. The history of medicine, pretty dull, and needle making. They’d have preferred Kings & Queens, wars & battles.
Sorry, don’t give a flying fig what BBC “historian” David Olusoga thinks what should be taught in history lessons.
Completely irrelevant.
Stick to making your 2nd rate historical “documentaries” for your metropolitan elite friends to fawn over.
TLDR: What a load of shite!
“Britain’s relationship with history not fit for purpose”, say someone born in Nigeria.
The Just for Oil activists have been “bigged up” by millionaire F1 racing driver Sir Lewis Hamilton
” I love that people are fighting for the planet and we need more people like them”, he said without the slightest hint of irony, sarcasm or embarrassment.
Obviously, millionaire Knights of the realm who travel by private jet and make their money burning enough fuel in a few minutes that would last a normal bloke a year are the people with their finger on the pulse of the nation.
Unlike the person stuck on the motorway behind these sat down clowns getting their tea and cake from the coppers.
David, Sir Lewis…..any chance of just shutting the f*** up!?
Maybe a history lesson on post Independence Nigeria and the Biafra war of the 1960’s, when thousands of people starved due a blockade by the Nigerian government? What about the complicity of African tribal leaders who sold their captives into servitude to the Arab nations, other African nations and the transatlantic slave trade?
That’s the thing about Olusoga and his like though; the narrative they would wish to promote is more unbalanced and biased than the traditional one.
Love him or loathe him, a proper historian like David Starkey, (or the guy Neil Oliver had on GB News Saturday, apologies, forgot his name), would rightly explain that British history is much more nuanced and complicated than simply “empire bad”.
People like Olusoga for example will never mention the fact that in effectively ending the slave trade in the face of opposition from other colonial powers, Britain suffered a huge detriment in terms of lives and money.
That’s before you even get into the aspect of judging people’s actions and morals from the past in the context of the present. Zeitgeist is everything.
It isn’t as if there has only ever been the British Empire in history. Rome, Greece, Persian, Chinese, Dutch, French, etc.
I have visited Kenya twice, in the mid 1970s and the early 1990s. They were like two different countries. The first visit was to a prosperous country with improving infrastructure and a booming agricultural sector. The second visit had none of the above; everything was falling apart.
An editorial in ‘The Nation’ contrasted the states of repair in a number of ex British colonies, including Kenya, all of which had fallen into disrepair since independence was granted. In summary they asked if the British could come back.
“He argues that generations of pupils have been routinely brainwashed by teachers determined to ignore Britain’s ignoble past and exclusively focus on the virtuous episodes in our national story. This, of course, is an inaccurate characterisation.”
It’s not an “inaccurate characterisation.” It’s a massive lie.
I note that of the ten children in the picture (from the current remake of the Midwich Cuckoos, set in a small English village), maybe four of them are white. It’s utterly, utterly relentless.
To be in the correct proportion for the UK, at least 8 of them should be white.
I live near a rural primary school. All the pupils are white.
Your area must obviously be urgently decolonised by mass immigration of politically appropriate people of colour from distant countries!
:->
Don’t worry it’ll happen sooner rather than later!
History lessons should be about history. Not about teaching contemporary morals with the help of values judgements about episodes of the past selected because they lend themselves to the kind of value judgements one would like to make. Someone who’s talking about Britains ignoble past is no historian, just a contemporary wokeist singing the well known You’re either black or dreck! tune in front of a semi-historic scenery.
To address one of Olusoga’s actual points: He claims that British history teachers had failed
him (and – by extension – other black Britons) by teaching him a lot more about cotton mills in Lancashire than about the fate of the people who worked on the plantations this cotton came from. He then incorrectly states that these were living and dying in chains and tries to establish (by allusion) British historical guilt because the owners of these cotton mills profitted from operating them. That these were a tiny minority of the people associated with the cotton industry while majority were poor workers and their families living in conditions which were – at best – slightly better than those of the enslaved plantations workers in the American south is something he conveniently ignores.
The profited from it is classical wokery: The cotton mill owners of the 19th century didn’t source their raw material according to current standards for ethically acting businesses! That is, they didn’t chose to go out of business for not having any raw material to work with. Shame unto them! This kind of retrofitting the present onto the past is completely inappropriate for a historian.
His main argument is just nonsense: Cotton plantations in the southern states of the USA are not part of British history but part of American history. He again shows himself as died-in-the-wool (BLM) wokey here: According to him, it’s inappropriate that British history is taught in British schools, they should be teaching American history instead, in particular, the (fairly small) part of American history which the BLMists like most because it’s their very raison d’etre.
Well said!!
Thank you. But I think it’s actually pretty clumsy. But logically valid.
Of course school wills never teach the present day and historical evil of the Chinese Communist Party
Dr. Steve Mosher: ‘500 Million’ Chinese Killed By The ‘Totalitarian’ CCP
https://rumble.com/v1aujnk-dr.-steve-mosher-500-million-chinese-killed-by-the-totalitarian-ccp.html
Bannons War Room
Stand for Freedom – Yellow Boards By The Road
Tuesday 5th July 11am to 12pm
Yellow Boards
Junction B3408 London Rd &
John Nike Way, Binfield
Bracknell RG42 4FZ
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10.30am to 11.30am
make friends & keep sane
Wokingham
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Bracknell
South Hill Park, Rear Lawn, RG12 7PA
Henley
Mills Meadows (bandstand) RG9 1DS
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Too late Wesley.
If it isn’t wokery it is some other current left wing fad. its been goung on for decades. Even teachers and lecturers are frightened to raise a voice of complaint.
David Olusoga? Born in Lagos, Nigeria – I’ll take no lectures from him, he, they. When in Rome……..
Sorry never heard of either of these guys but I know which one I would prefer teaching generations of children in this country and no it’s not the BBC man. But then nothing good seems to come out of the BBC nowadays.
Good article Mr Smith keep up the good work you should join forces with Calvin Robinson also a fine educationalist with a sound mind.