Thanks for bothering to even read the pamphlet and dissect it for us!
I’m also fairly ‘neoliberal and centrist’ I think. I’m definitely a Dad. I’m also an ex-CEO of a marketing agency, used to wading through meaningless bullshit. It seems to me that if Kemi had been a client of mine back in the day, we’d be having a difficult conversation.
Even as an entrepreneur - the most valued item in her stated flock - I wouldn’t recognise her language.
I think I recognise her intent though…it’s to dress something up that doesn’t maybe sound so great and far-reaching in its monosyllabic form, in an attempt to prove she really has something different to offer.
She’s trying to appeal to a bunch of intellectuals who maybe read about ‘free-market conservatism’ in Oxford, before getting their PPE, doing a gap year in Africa and then heading straight for the corridors of Westminster.
That’s not enough voters to get her into No 10. The Tory membership might. Not because they understand what the feck she’s going on about, but because they don’t know what they stand for either.
And what's most interesting about those intellectuals on the right you describe (accurately, I might add) is that they are convinced that they are the ones who are truly in touch with the common man.
Yep, but don’t they all Nick? I feel just as patronised by those on the other side who think they know ‘the working man’ better than I do! I’m a Centrist Cynic for a reason, I guess.
“As a child you may get better treatment or equipment at school…”.
As a mother of an autistic child I can say from experience that that is bollocks
Each child is entitled by law to an education. Conservatives put so much pressure on Councils to find money in their meagre budgets that they’ve reduced these kids to a figure on a spreadsheet. They could actually save money in the long term by supporting them properly in the right school at the start of their life whether it’s mainstream or a special school (which trust me being more expensive the Councils bend over backwards to avoid) and with access to training for teachers but by squeezing them through the system as cheaply as possible they’re actually denying them an education that they need that more able pupils take for granted.
I really find Badenoch utterly contemptible. She obviously has no clue about the reality and doesn’t care. I can see her bent over her little computer making up her latest nonsense to further her career and as a Mum who he’s even been to court and won to get what my child is entitled to I could quite cheerfully kick her up the arse.
Your second paragraph seems to presuppose that the ideas are her own . Her words might be, but I think she's being fed a lot by Tufton St. She's their replacement for Truss, The Useful Idiot That Failed.
If she’s decided to sell these ideas it really doesn’t matter to me whether she invented them first or Tufton street did. The minute she becomes the mouthpiece she owns them. The Culture Wars didn’t start with her but no matter whether it’s Truss or her, at the end of the day I still have to navigate the chaos. It’s like she is saying “well, autistics get too much support”. Thats a fundamental and deliberate misinterpretation. Disabled people have needs, they are assessed, they receive support commensurate with their needs so they can become a fully functioning member of society. That’s how it is supposed to work. How it actually works is, they have needs, the Council delay assessing them due to funding cuts, they resist anything but the absolute minimum support possible in many cases.
What protected my son was me taking the Council to court. The Law. If only I could take her to court. One whiff of evidence to test her nonsense.
Good article. there has always been weird contradictions at the heart of Conservatives' beliefs - they profess to believe in autonomy, except where autonomy extends to smoking weed, they profess to believe in rewarding individual effort and industry and then expect us to defer to the royals and they dislike monopolies, except when it comes to arms contracts. The harder right also loathed the EU but seem quite happy with the subordination that comes from NATO membership, and whilst crowing about Brexit refuse to countenance the idea that Scotland could have a constitutional route and right to leaving the UK. As I say, full of unresolved contradictions
There are parallels to the Republican party in the US, where I am. It's the tension between the desire for a smaller, less complex national government and the lure of a powerful central government able to enforce RightThink. The 2 groups form an uneasy alliance to fight a progressive movement that wants a large complex national government to deal with large complex problems outside the reach of the Invisible hand, and enforce the wrong kind of RightThink. As long as the 2 groups have common cause, there will be contradictions.
I wonder if this bit "The problem now is that profits are no longer linked to market capitalism but to fulfilling bureaucratic class whims.” is a reference to some of the provisions in the US inflation reduction act, which had manufacturing subsidies that were dependent on the companies meeting certain conditions like union recognition. It suggests to me US think-tank input into the whole thing, since there is obviously no equivalent here. It might even explain the bit that has really upset people - maybe in the US autistic kids do genuinely get some assistance, unlike the Kafka-esque nightmare we face here. So it suggests a Boris Johnson like attitude of just copying someone else's homework without actually reading it.
This is a great point, which I thought about getting into but refrained in the end, mostly due to space concerns. A lot of this stuff flows from American think tanks, with the issue being that Britain is in fact quite different to the US in important ways, and trying to pretend that anything that works with a right-wing audience in America will automatically fly here will get you into loads of trouble.
Nick, the idea of a bureaucratic or managerial class emerging to dominate societies goes back to Trotskyist Marxists in the 1930s and 40s. This mangled version of it ignores one key component of the original diagnosis - the rise of the managerial class WITHIN giant, monopolistic, capitalist corporations. I wrote about it a few years back (see link).
The invention of a managerial structure to manage society goes back to the days of yonder, 100,000 y ago or more. From our viewpoint of now we classify this as religion. But religion then and now is nothing more or less than the desire to govern with the goal to unite the adherents into a capital producing entity. Where the top of the hierarchy enjoy the fruits that the base produces.
Does some of this go straight to their ongoing misreading of the Brexit result? That it meant that everything they stand on magically became " the will of the people" forever? That their social conservatism wouldn't actually need its own bureaucrats, because once the country is freed from the "tyranny"of that progressive ideology , the things they want to see- reduced immigration etc- would somehow happen naturally on a tide of this people's will?
Thanks for bothering to even read the pamphlet and dissect it for us!
I’m also fairly ‘neoliberal and centrist’ I think. I’m definitely a Dad. I’m also an ex-CEO of a marketing agency, used to wading through meaningless bullshit. It seems to me that if Kemi had been a client of mine back in the day, we’d be having a difficult conversation.
Even as an entrepreneur - the most valued item in her stated flock - I wouldn’t recognise her language.
I think I recognise her intent though…it’s to dress something up that doesn’t maybe sound so great and far-reaching in its monosyllabic form, in an attempt to prove she really has something different to offer.
She’s trying to appeal to a bunch of intellectuals who maybe read about ‘free-market conservatism’ in Oxford, before getting their PPE, doing a gap year in Africa and then heading straight for the corridors of Westminster.
That’s not enough voters to get her into No 10. The Tory membership might. Not because they understand what the feck she’s going on about, but because they don’t know what they stand for either.
But let’s see…
And what's most interesting about those intellectuals on the right you describe (accurately, I might add) is that they are convinced that they are the ones who are truly in touch with the common man.
Yep, but don’t they all Nick? I feel just as patronised by those on the other side who think they know ‘the working man’ better than I do! I’m a Centrist Cynic for a reason, I guess.
“As a child you may get better treatment or equipment at school…”.
As a mother of an autistic child I can say from experience that that is bollocks
Each child is entitled by law to an education. Conservatives put so much pressure on Councils to find money in their meagre budgets that they’ve reduced these kids to a figure on a spreadsheet. They could actually save money in the long term by supporting them properly in the right school at the start of their life whether it’s mainstream or a special school (which trust me being more expensive the Councils bend over backwards to avoid) and with access to training for teachers but by squeezing them through the system as cheaply as possible they’re actually denying them an education that they need that more able pupils take for granted.
I really find Badenoch utterly contemptible. She obviously has no clue about the reality and doesn’t care. I can see her bent over her little computer making up her latest nonsense to further her career and as a Mum who he’s even been to court and won to get what my child is entitled to I could quite cheerfully kick her up the arse.
Your second paragraph seems to presuppose that the ideas are her own . Her words might be, but I think she's being fed a lot by Tufton St. She's their replacement for Truss, The Useful Idiot That Failed.
If she’s decided to sell these ideas it really doesn’t matter to me whether she invented them first or Tufton street did. The minute she becomes the mouthpiece she owns them. The Culture Wars didn’t start with her but no matter whether it’s Truss or her, at the end of the day I still have to navigate the chaos. It’s like she is saying “well, autistics get too much support”. Thats a fundamental and deliberate misinterpretation. Disabled people have needs, they are assessed, they receive support commensurate with their needs so they can become a fully functioning member of society. That’s how it is supposed to work. How it actually works is, they have needs, the Council delay assessing them due to funding cuts, they resist anything but the absolute minimum support possible in many cases.
What protected my son was me taking the Council to court. The Law. If only I could take her to court. One whiff of evidence to test her nonsense.
Good article. there has always been weird contradictions at the heart of Conservatives' beliefs - they profess to believe in autonomy, except where autonomy extends to smoking weed, they profess to believe in rewarding individual effort and industry and then expect us to defer to the royals and they dislike monopolies, except when it comes to arms contracts. The harder right also loathed the EU but seem quite happy with the subordination that comes from NATO membership, and whilst crowing about Brexit refuse to countenance the idea that Scotland could have a constitutional route and right to leaving the UK. As I say, full of unresolved contradictions
There are parallels to the Republican party in the US, where I am. It's the tension between the desire for a smaller, less complex national government and the lure of a powerful central government able to enforce RightThink. The 2 groups form an uneasy alliance to fight a progressive movement that wants a large complex national government to deal with large complex problems outside the reach of the Invisible hand, and enforce the wrong kind of RightThink. As long as the 2 groups have common cause, there will be contradictions.
I wonder if this bit "The problem now is that profits are no longer linked to market capitalism but to fulfilling bureaucratic class whims.” is a reference to some of the provisions in the US inflation reduction act, which had manufacturing subsidies that were dependent on the companies meeting certain conditions like union recognition. It suggests to me US think-tank input into the whole thing, since there is obviously no equivalent here. It might even explain the bit that has really upset people - maybe in the US autistic kids do genuinely get some assistance, unlike the Kafka-esque nightmare we face here. So it suggests a Boris Johnson like attitude of just copying someone else's homework without actually reading it.
This is a great point, which I thought about getting into but refrained in the end, mostly due to space concerns. A lot of this stuff flows from American think tanks, with the issue being that Britain is in fact quite different to the US in important ways, and trying to pretend that anything that works with a right-wing audience in America will automatically fly here will get you into loads of trouble.
Excellent analysis. Thank you.
Many thanks for the link to the pamphlet and your dissection.
You may be interested in this draft which has a chapter on "The Management Virus"
https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZWR4b0Z8dkVGLdbXy5mB5nBwlx45VqyPiey
Nick, the idea of a bureaucratic or managerial class emerging to dominate societies goes back to Trotskyist Marxists in the 1930s and 40s. This mangled version of it ignores one key component of the original diagnosis - the rise of the managerial class WITHIN giant, monopolistic, capitalist corporations. I wrote about it a few years back (see link).
https://blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk/whitehallwatch/2011/10/the-managerial-revolution-is-over-they-won/
The invention of a managerial structure to manage society goes back to the days of yonder, 100,000 y ago or more. From our viewpoint of now we classify this as religion. But religion then and now is nothing more or less than the desire to govern with the goal to unite the adherents into a capital producing entity. Where the top of the hierarchy enjoy the fruits that the base produces.
Does some of this go straight to their ongoing misreading of the Brexit result? That it meant that everything they stand on magically became " the will of the people" forever? That their social conservatism wouldn't actually need its own bureaucrats, because once the country is freed from the "tyranny"of that progressive ideology , the things they want to see- reduced immigration etc- would somehow happen naturally on a tide of this people's will?
" stand for"