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Badenoch names every other reason for the Tories’ wipeout – except the right one

On Saturday 2 November, Kemi Badenoch became the latest leader of the Conservative Party – the sixth in the past decade. A day later on 3 November, she appeared in a notably less-than-hostile interview with the BBC‘s Laura Kuenssberg. A telling moment was when Kuenssberg asked Badenoch to identify the failures which led to the Tories’ historic loss in July. Badenoch’s response shows that the Tories are still in denial about where it all went wrong for them – namely the cost of living crisis.

It’s the economy, stupid

In one exchange, Kuenssberg lightly badgered Badenoch about what had gone wrong for the Tories. Badenoch tried to wriggle out of answering, but eventually identified two issues which led to their downfall:

  • Immigration.
  • Taxes.

We’re going to argue that she failed to mention the actual reason the Tories lost, and that’s the cost of living crisis. Just look at this polling from YouGov on the key issues for the public:

That red line at the top is the economy; the pink line below it is health; the purple line below that is immigration. And tax? The green line right at the bottom.

As of the most recent polling, you can see that the economy, health, and immigration have become essentially joint-first issues in public discourse. It’s clear, though, that since the cost of living crisis began in 2021, ‘the economy’ has been the key issue for people. And that makes sense. Because when ordinary people talk about ‘the economy’, they’re not taking about the FTSE 100; they’re talking about the economy as it effects them. This means the cost of shopping, the cost of a mortgage, the costs of day care, etc.

If you live in the UK, and you’re not a top 5% earner like Laura Kuenssberg, you know cost-of-living is the key issue, because that’s all anyone has talked about for the past three years. It also tracks directly to voting intention, with the Tories hitting 46% in May 2021 and that percentage steadily declining as people felt the pinch

We further think it’s the case that immigration is only such a big issue for the public because the Tories made it that way. They had no good answers to the cost of living crisis, so they needed something to distract from their failures.

While the number of people moving between countries has increased, the UK is far from facing collapse, as Southampton & Winchester Vistors Group highlights:

Is the UK under more pressure from asylum seekers and refugees than other countries?

No it is not, in spite of the picture painted by some of our politicians and media.

Out of 28 member states in the EU, the UK ranks ninth in terms of numbers of applications. In 2015, the UK received just fewer than 40 thousand asylum applications. Germany had over 400 thousand, ten times as many.

Today, for all sorts of reasons, refugee numbers are climbing. At the end of 2016, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had risen to 65.6 million, up 6.1 million from 2014. But the vast majority of refugees (88%) live in developing countries, not wealthy industrialized ones.

And because the UK gets relatively few asylum applicants, we host fewer refugees – less than 1% of the global total. Turkey by contrast hosts the largest number of refugees of any country: it is currently giving sanctuary to 2.5 million Syrian refugees, while Jordan and Lebanon host 1.7 million between them. By the end of 2016 the UK had resettled 5,706 Syrian refugees.

And as an island off the north of Europe, we are under much less pressure from migrants than, for example, Greece. In addition, under EU (but not UN) rules, asylum seekers should claim asylum in the first safe country they come to, and can be sent back to where they first entered.

If the Tories were serious about addressing the number of refugees, they’d focus on root causes such as endless wars in the Middle East (spurned by the UK and its allies) and climate change. Instead, they scream and shout at helpless people in tiny boats. It’s a move which backfired, galvanising the Reform Party, who accepted the Tory lie that immigration is ruining the country and promised to actually do something about it.

In that sense, immigration is a key reason why the Tories lost, but not for the reason Badenoch claims.

Badenoch: endless culture wars

Of course, there was more to criticise than just one response, with both Badenoch and Kuenssberg taking flack:

 

Many have said that Badenoch is likely to deliver endless culture wars and little else. One advocate of Badenoch is writer J.K. Rowling who has similarly become embroiled in the culture wars (this tweet references David Tennant’s recent criticisms of the new Tory leader’s stance on transgender people):

As people have pointed out, however, Badenoch’s rampant culture wars will target more than just transgender people:

People have also rightly pointed out that Badenoch’s endless culture wars likely aren’t going to resonate with people who have actual problems:

 

This is clear in the polling, with Badenoch even more unpopular than the historically unpopular Keir Starmer:

While far from the most pressing issue, some noted Badenoch’s terrible posture:

Her posture could be a case of the chair being too big for her; she could also have a severe case of ‘nerd neck‘ from all that hacking:

Bleak cost of living crisis Britain

The sad truth is that if the Tories could have maintained lethargic growth and low inflation they could have clung to power for five more years. With our billionaire-owned media and a middle class who care only about their house price, a great deal could have been swept under the rug.

Unfortunately for the Tories, the cost of living crisis affected everyone outside the wealthiest 5%, and kicked off a chain of events which made the Tories’ ousting inevitable. A fact they’re still painfully denying.

Featured image via the BBC

By The Canary

This post was originally published on Canary.