08/10/2025 09:14
The Guardian
Tory leader says proposal would ‘protect interests of taxpayers and students’ but university representatives say it is ‘economically illiterate’Here is more from the YouGov polling report showing that that people in favour of leaving the ECHR know less about what it actually does than those in favour of staying in. In his YouGov write-up, Matthew Smith says:There is virtually no difference in proclaimed familiarity with the EHCR between those who want to remain members and those who want to withdraw, while current Labour voters are more likely than others to claim knowledge and Tory voters somewhat less likely.When tested on their actual knowledge, the public are most likely to correctly identify that the right not to be tortured (59%) and the right to a fair trial (56%) are covered by the ECHR, although these are the only two of the eight true or false questions that most Britons got right.Badenoch has spent a year immersed in pseudo-intellectual laundering of radical nationalist positions, all the while imagining she was heading to some other, more sophisticated destination. She really thought she was rehabilitating the Tories, but she has reduced them to a low-wattage thinktank attached to a warehouse storing future parliamentary candidates for Farage.For the remnant of moderate centre-right Conservatives hoping for some pathway back to credibility, Badenoch’s leadership has been the worst of all worlds. Her claim to be thoughtful was an affectation, squandering time when real thought might have been applied to the hard questions she has avoided. She discredited the idiom of serious Conservatism by appropriating it for the shallowest agenda. She understood the need for a boundary between traditional Toryism and populist demagoguery but lacked the clarity of thought, strategic acumen and political courage to enforce one. She has accelerated the dissolution of her party’s identity by asserting it in terms that no casual voter will understand. In the post-Conservative climate of British politics, they won’t even notice. Continue reading...
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