Kevin Maguire argues that the Conservative Party veering further to the right, and into Reform UK territory, is an act of blind panic that could cost the Conversative Party even more votes
Deluded Kemi Badenoch’s woeful Nigel Farage tribute act will crash her leadership and the ailing Conservative Party.
Driving further to the right, veering into Reform lanes, is blind panic that will potentially cost the Tories even more votes rather than wooing back lost millions. US-style paramilitary storm troopers swooping on neighbourhoods to impose mass deportations is a poisonous threat from the Tory tiny Trump when Americans are in uproar over wrongful arrests, detentions and deportations of their fellow citizens.
More than half of Britons, 52%, and many Tory voters, 42%, think it would be “very bad” if our government was more like the one being run by Trump so she is misreading the country.
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Badenoch is guilty of another mistake in banking on vowing to scrap the UK landmark Human Rights Act and joining Russia and Belarus, Europe’s two dictatorships, in pulling out of a European Convention on Human Rights that was inspired by Winston Churchill.
Opposing the convention is an ideological test on the right of British politics where it is falsely painted as benefitting only migrants. It conveniently overlooks that the Rwanda plan was ruled unlawful by the UK Supreme Court not Strasbourg and, for example, fewer than 1% of foreign national offenders successfully appealing against deportation win on human rights grounds.
We should celebrate an act and convention that protects us all by guaranteeing free speech and fair trials, rights of workers, women and the disabled and helped Hillsborough families win the justice denied them for far too long. TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak smartly summed up the Tory stupidity.
He observed the so-called party of law and order wants to recklessly shred international laws the UK wrote in order now to chase Reform’s tail. Once the EU was branded the source of all Britain’s problems. Now it is the ECHR. Voters won’t be fooled again.
Or take the environment, Badenoch suddenly shouting she would scrap measures to avoid catastrophic climate change, including targets introduced by the Tories when she was Business Secretary.
The born again populist is striking another unpopular stance when YouGov pollsters found 57% of voters think Britain is doing the right thing, or should be taking tougher action, and only 20% believe that we are doing too much.
In thrashing around and posing as Farage without the beery charm, Badenoch is losing any grip on reality. Only days ago she claimed Northern Ireland had voted for Brexit when that corner of the UK wanted to stay by 56% to 44% in the 2016 election. Was that a slip, ignorance or a plunging politician inventing alternative facts because she cannot face the truth?
Labour would benefit from a Tory revival that enticed Conservative defectors back from Reform but there is little prospect of one when Badenoch is a Farage mini-me without a vision of her own. The Liberal Democrats, Greens and, when launched, Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party have reasons to be optimistic whereas the Tories are lost, marooned, devoid of hope.
What was Europe’s most successful right-wing electoral machine for centuries is knackered. The wrong question is surely being asked if Badenoch is their answer.