KEMI BADENOCH says a Conservative victory is within reach at the next election. We should take her seriously.
Badenoch will paint the Tories as an insurgent, anti-system party. She has already begun depicting the Labour government as one representing continuity with the past, accusing it of “repeating many of our mistakes and … doubling down on this broken system.”
This has been a winning formula for the Tories before. Boris Johnson’s 2019 majority was won through the pretence that, in being willing to break with the European Union when Labour wasn’t, he was the “change” candidate.
Multiple votes have shown disillusionment with a political and economic system that has steadily impoverished the majority and run down public services. Momentum has been with whatever looks like the anti-status quo option: in the Leave vote of 2016, in the Corbyn surge — the biggest swing to Labour in 70 years — of 2017, and in the “Get Brexit Done” election of 2019.
This summer’s vote was no exception, with both Establishment parties losing ground, to their lowest combined vote share since the second world war. Labour’s huge majority is built on sand: it won fewer votes than it did when disastrously routed in 2019.
Keir Starmer owes his premiership to the more dramatic collapse in the Conservative vote — and the bulk of that went to Reform UK, to whose voters Badenoch may well appeal. On July’s figures all Badenoch would have to do to defeat Labour is unite the right-wing vote: and things have only gone downhill for Labour since July.
So Badenoch could well be Britain’s next prime minister. How do we stop her?
First we must expose the class character of the right’s politics. The “insurgency” act is just an act: the economic approach of the Tory right, one of cutting taxes, spending and regulation of corporate activity, is simply a continuation of the policies of every British government since Margaret Thatcher’s.
Badenoch’s views do not reflect majority opinion. Most British people want action to address climate change, investment in public services and higher taxes on the richest. Badenoch opposes all of these and, like Reform UK, wants greater marketisation in the NHS — indeed, her remark that Britain is “not ready for changing the principle of free at the point of use, certainly not immediately” indicates her scepticism about the principle at the root of our National Health Service, one backed by the overwhelming majority.
On foreign policy, too, Badenoch represents an intensification of an unpopular existing approach. Her extreme pro-Israel stance is at odds with the majority of the public, who back an immediate ceasefire and a total arms embargo on the apartheid state.
The problem is that a right-wing Labour Party’s ability to call out these weaknesses is limited because it shares them.
Its plans for the NHS involve more use of the private sector too. It obsesses over keeping corporate and higher-band income taxes low, rather than confronting the rich and the crooks poisoning our waterways and charging extortionate energy bills. It facilitates Israel’s Gaza genocide.
It will fall to the radical left to lead the fight against the right. That means keeping up the pressure for peace and justice for Palestine, making that cause an issue no politician can avoid.
It means building the campaign for an alternative economic and political strategy — because if real change shifting wealth and power to the working class is on offer, voters are less likely to be seduced by the rhetoric of insurgency deployed to empower the powerful.
And because Labour must be made to deliver that change. If real incomes keep falling and services continue to deteriorate while an obscenely rich elite carry on lording it over us, then whoever is in government will be blamed.
To defeat the politics of Badenoch, we must defeat the politics of Starmer, too.
