Badenoch says politics is broken. The Conservatives should mend it, because it already seems too ‘fixed’
Confidence requires clarity.
That old phrase ‘you wait for a bus and then three come at once’ has always been, for me, just a fact of life.
If I have a super-power at all, it is the ability to miss any given and randomly chosen method of public transport by a few seconds. Psychologists would say I merely think this is the case, but my wife would tell you how much it surprises her that it’s actually true.
Last week and leading into this, more than three buses have turned up at once in the form of examples of how our politics may indeed be broken, even if you don’t buy into the doom loop Reform repetition that the country is.
There seems to have been a normalisation that the ‘rules’ of our democracy have succumbed to a particular bug bear of mine. This problem has evolved across myriad aspects of British politics:
Conventions, rules and agreements should either be abided by all parties or universally abandoned. There should be no middle ground. The idea of ‘flexibility’ or ‘exceptionality’ is problematic when the justification, as it too often is, is predicated on who it helps, and what party they are in.
A niche example: chucking milkshakes at a politician is either part of the ‘rough and tumble of politics’ or it is an assault. I’m hard over on the latter. However if you are too, then it makes no difference who the politician is. Laughing it off because you don’t like the victim, means you can’t be outraged when you do. Consistency should not be threatened by political circumstance or bias.
The request from 29 councils to postpone elections under a rather generous Government interpretation of a dusty bit of legislation is bending a basic democratic right. It is true there are three Conservative councils, and one Liberal Democrat who have done so, but the majority are Labour or ‘no overall control.’
The reasons given are the disruption and cost in holding an election for councils that may not exist in the same form once the Government carry out their “reorganisation of local government”. Ironic when their organisation of national government is so chaotic.
It is not clear either how the Government intends to bring the election cycle back into sync after postponing, and whether that might involve a further delay.
Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government James Cleverly told the Commons that elections are the cornerstone of democracy, and accused Labour for “moving seamlessly from arrogance to incompetence and now cowardice“.
Reform UK are equally aggrieved and it’s not hard to see why. They expect – and are probably right to – that they’ll do very well in the elections in May, and any postponement reduces the number of wins they might get. Of course, they argue that this is an attack on the people’s democratic rights, though they seem less …
Confidence requires clarity.
That old phrase ‘you wait for a bus and then three come at once’ has always been, for me, just a fact of life.
If I have a super-power at all, it is the ability to miss any given and randomly chosen method of public transport by a few seconds. Psychologists would say I merely think this is the case, but my wife would tell you how much it surprises her that it’s actually true.
Last week and leading into this, more than three buses have turned up at once in the form of examples of how our politics may indeed be broken, even if you don’t buy into the doom loop Reform repetition that the country is.
There seems to have been a normalisation that the ‘rules’ of our democracy have succumbed to a particular bug bear of mine. This problem has evolved across myriad aspects of British politics:
Conventions, rules and agreements should either be abided by all parties or universally abandoned. There should be no middle ground. The idea of ‘flexibility’ or ‘exceptionality’ is problematic when the justification, as it too often is, is predicated on who it helps, and what party they are in.
A niche example: chucking milkshakes at a politician is either part of the ‘rough and tumble of politics’ or it is an assault. I’m hard over on the latter. However if you are too, then it makes no difference who the politician is. Laughing it off because you don’t like the victim, means you can’t be outraged when you do. Consistency should not be threatened by political circumstance or bias.
The request from 29 councils to postpone elections under a rather generous Government interpretation of a dusty bit of legislation is bending a basic democratic right. It is true there are three Conservative councils, and one Liberal Democrat who have done so, but the majority are Labour or ‘no overall control.’
The reasons given are the disruption and cost in holding an election for councils that may not exist in the same form once the Government carry out their “reorganisation of local government”. Ironic when their organisation of national government is so chaotic.
It is not clear either how the Government intends to bring the election cycle back into sync after postponing, and whether that might involve a further delay.
Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government James Cleverly told the Commons that elections are the cornerstone of democracy, and accused Labour for “moving seamlessly from arrogance to incompetence and now cowardice“.
Reform UK are equally aggrieved and it’s not hard to see why. They expect – and are probably right to – that they’ll do very well in the elections in May, and any postponement reduces the number of wins they might get. Of course, they argue that this is an attack on the people’s democratic rights, though they seem less …
Badenoch says politics is broken. The Conservatives should mend it, because it already seems too ‘fixed’
Confidence requires clarity.
That old phrase ‘you wait for a bus and then three come at once’ has always been, for me, just a fact of life.
If I have a super-power at all, it is the ability to miss any given and randomly chosen method of public transport by a few seconds. Psychologists would say I merely think this is the case, but my wife would tell you how much it surprises her that it’s actually true.
Last week and leading into this, more than three buses have turned up at once in the form of examples of how our politics may indeed be broken, even if you don’t buy into the doom loop Reform repetition that the country is.
There seems to have been a normalisation that the ‘rules’ of our democracy have succumbed to a particular bug bear of mine. This problem has evolved across myriad aspects of British politics:
Conventions, rules and agreements should either be abided by all parties or universally abandoned. There should be no middle ground. The idea of ‘flexibility’ or ‘exceptionality’ is problematic when the justification, as it too often is, is predicated on who it helps, and what party they are in.
A niche example: chucking milkshakes at a politician is either part of the ‘rough and tumble of politics’ or it is an assault. I’m hard over on the latter. However if you are too, then it makes no difference who the politician is. Laughing it off because you don’t like the victim, means you can’t be outraged when you do. Consistency should not be threatened by political circumstance or bias.
The request from 29 councils to postpone elections under a rather generous Government interpretation of a dusty bit of legislation is bending a basic democratic right. It is true there are three Conservative councils, and one Liberal Democrat who have done so, but the majority are Labour or ‘no overall control.’
The reasons given are the disruption and cost in holding an election for councils that may not exist in the same form once the Government carry out their “reorganisation of local government”. Ironic when their organisation of national government is so chaotic.
It is not clear either how the Government intends to bring the election cycle back into sync after postponing, and whether that might involve a further delay.
Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government James Cleverly told the Commons that elections are the cornerstone of democracy, and accused Labour for “moving seamlessly from arrogance to incompetence and now cowardice“.
Reform UK are equally aggrieved and it’s not hard to see why. They expect – and are probably right to – that they’ll do very well in the elections in May, and any postponement reduces the number of wins they might get. Of course, they argue that this is an attack on the people’s democratic rights, though they seem less …
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