My guess is the membership will vote for a white man when given the chance. Kemi might win if others withdraw in a timely fashion so it doesn’t go to the membership.
The party membership have had a vote since 1998 - the only time they haven’t elected a white man was when they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
My guess is the membership will vote for a white man when given the chance. Kemi might win if others withdraw in a timely fashion so it doesn’t go to the membership.
The party membership have had a vote since 1998 - the only time they haven’t elected a white man was when they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
Why do you guess that? Past evidence is based on the two the members have been given to vote between every time. With the exception of Truss v Sunak the choice they have been given every time was two white men…
The MPs are busy trying to *stop* her from getting to the membership because very few of them want her but the membership really do seem to.
My suspicion is that the tory membership will, all other things being equal, prefer a white candidate (some viscerally). However I don't think that overrides in most circumstances their preference for the most right wing, whether economically bonkers (Truss) or, these days, fascist adjacent.
... None of Jenrick, Badenoch or Cleverly are capable of leading the Tories anywhere.
As I kept on saying before the election, 'don't waste your time criticising Sunak; he isn't the problem; it's the rest of them.'
Likewise, it isn't that none of the four lacklustre non-entities left standing at the moment is capable of leading the Tories anywhere. The problem that Tories have is them, collectively. Since the referendum and then Johnson cleared out everybody who disagreed with him in the autumn of 2019 shortly before his election, what's been left has no talent and nothing that attracts.
The party membership have had a vote since 1998 - the only time they haven’t elected a white man was when they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
Shall we try that without the dishonest spin?
2001: Iain Duncan Smith vs Ken Clarke
(2003: Michael Howard unopposed)
2005: David Cameron vs David Davis
(2016: Theresa May unopposed)
2019: Boris Johnson vs Jeremy Hunt
2022: Liz Truss vs Rishi Sunak
(2022: Rishi Sunak unopposed)
In most cases, the party membership elected a white man by construction, because they had a choice between two white men. In 2016, they would have had a choice between two white women, except that Andrea Leadsom withdrew.
The only time the party membership had the opportunity to vote for a candidate who wasn't a white man was in 2022, when they had two candidates, neither of whom was a white man. So your claim is based on precisely zero data, and is worthless.
There are plenty of real grounds on which to criticize the Tory party without making up nonsense.
We have quite a lot of data on the social conservatism / racism / sexism of the conservative party (just ask Baroness Warsi for a start) - my point was that the demographics of the Tory leadership don't reflect a series of votes in which the membership actively made those choices.
The only time the party membership had the opportunity to vote for a candidate who wasn't a white man was in 2022, when they had two candidates, neither of whom was a white man.
And in that election there's a strong argument that they were simply taking a lead from the MPs - as Mordaunt had thrown her support behind Truss. This is a fairly consistent trend with the only exception in your list being IDS - where there wasn't a huge difference between levels of support.
We have quite a lot of data on the social conservatism / racism / sexism of the conservative party (just ask Baroness Warsi for a start) - my point was that the demographics of the Tory leadership don't reflect a series of votes in which the membership actively made those choices.
As I noted, the leadership elections contain no information either way.
One could, probably, learn something about the propensity for Conservative party members to reflexively vote for the white man when given the choice by studying the actions of constituency selection committees. I'll note that when Mrs Badenoch was selected as candidate for Saffron Walden, she won against Stephen Parkinson (a white man) and Laura Farris (a white woman).
Various recent studies suggest that the electoral penalty (amongst the electorate as a whole) for being an ethnic minority candidate is around 4 percentage points. It's rather harder to determine what the penalty is when you restrict the electorate to members of the Conservative party. It would, I think, be an optimistic person who would assume that the penalty was less than 4%.
My guess is the membership will vote for a white man when given the chance. Kemi might win if others withdraw in a timely fashion so it doesn’t go to the membership.
The party membership have had a vote since 1998 - the only time they haven’t elected a white man was when they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
My guess is the membership will vote for a white man when given the chance. Kemi might win if others withdraw in a timely fashion so it doesn’t go to the membership.
The party membership have had a vote since 1998 - the only time they haven’t elected a white man was when they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
It does strike me as odd that this is an attack line, given that out of the Tories and Labour only one of them has never had anything other than white male leaders - and it ain’t the Tories.
It does strike me as odd that this is an attack line, given that out of the Tories and Labour only one of them has never had anything other than white male leaders - and it ain’t the Tories.
I’ve said before that my family upbringing was a merger of a family of old shire Tories and Red Flag singing, union shop stewarding Old Labour.
I’ll give you two guesses which side when it came down to it was more right wing. Actually I won’t, because I’ve never met any group to the right of old-school ‘the British Empire but run by the British Worker’ Labour.
Sure they wanted a better deal for the working Man, and were in constant conflict with ‘the bosses’ but when it came down to it they were deeply, deeply reactionary.
They’d have cut their own arms off rather than vote anything other than Labour - but, my God, buy anything foreign or criticise the Royal Family…
It does strike me as odd that this is an attack line, given that out of the Tories and Labour only one of them has never had anything other than white male leaders - and it ain’t the Tories.
I was not really going for “an attack line” merely explaining what I think will happen if Kemi Badenach and Robert Jendrick are put to the membership and why. I don’t think noticing the institutional and other racism of the Tory party should be that controversial, any more than being able to spot the dynamic in Reform - it’s not exactly subtle and is being called out by senior members of their own party..
It does strike me as odd that this is an attack line, given that out of the Tories and Labour only one of them has never had anything other than white male leaders - and it ain’t the Tories.
I was not really going for “an attack line” merely explaining what I think will happen if Kemi Badenach and Robert Jendrick are put to the membership and why.
There is some indirect evidence that this might be so at the right of the Tory membership (if we assume that they are somewhat similar in this regard to former Tory voters who now vote Reform):
Her family emigrated here and she’s female, and she wants to make it harder for people to come here and harder to take time off to give birth.
(I am unclear why we are supposed to agree with particular foreign policy positions of the governments of foreign countries in order to be considered sufficiently British. Was opposing apartheid anti-British at the point when the UK prime minister didn’t think it enough of an issue to merit sanctions ?)
Just as well considering Islamophobic dog-whistle in her "recent immigrants who hate Israel" comment.
The problem is not just with recent immigrants. It's mainly the far left.
Regardless of the truth or otherwise of that it's utterly missing the point. It's a dog whistle. She didn’t say "muslims" but you know damned well she means "muslims".
She is setting some kind of speed record for pulling up the ladder behind her.
I don't agree with this. She is mainly keen on integration and wants immigrants to aspire to be proud to be British.
Isn't it a free country where we, the people living here, decide what our aspirations are and of what we are and are not proud?
I'm neither proud nor ashamed to be British. Frankly I'm not even sure what it means to be proud of your nationality. It's just something that happened owing to the accidents of my birth. Might as well be proud of being born in March or being 5'11" or whatever. I didn’t engineer it or have any say in it. I love living here because it's what I'm used to and I don’t like unfamiliarity. Is that pride? Frankly I don’t know.
Just as well considering Islamophobic dog-whistle in her "recent immigrants who hate Israel" comment.
The problem is not just with recent immigrants. It's mainly the far left.
Regardless of the truth or otherwise of that it's utterly missing the point. It's a dog whistle. She didn’t say "muslims" but you know damned well she means "muslims".
She is setting some kind of speed record for pulling up the ladder behind her.
I don't agree with this. She is mainly keen on integration and wants immigrants to aspire to be proud to be British.
Isn't it a free country where we, the people living here, decide what our aspirations are and of what we are and are not proud?
I'm neither proud nor ashamed to be British. Frankly I'm not even sure what it means to be proud of your nationality. It's just something that happened owing to the accidents of my birth. Might as well be proud of being born in March or being 5'11" or whatever. I didn’t engineer it or have any say in it. I love living here because it's what I'm used to and I don’t like unfamiliarity. Is that pride? Frankly I don’t know.
`I suspect that you are among the vast majority of people living here and that's not a bad thing.
It was not an accident of birth that I am British. My mom never left the country.
It is an accident of birth because you didn’t choose to be British, you are British simply because you were born here — born herebecause, as you say, your mother never left the country.
Just as well considering Islamophobic dog-whistle in her "recent immigrants who hate Israel" comment.
The problem is not just with recent immigrants. It's mainly the far left.
Regardless of the truth or otherwise of that it's utterly missing the point. It's a dog whistle. She didn’t say "muslims" but you know damned well she means "muslims".
She is setting some kind of speed record for pulling up the ladder behind her.
I don't agree with this. She is mainly keen on integration and wants immigrants to aspire to be proud to be British.
Isn't it a free country where we, the people living here, decide what our aspirations are and of what we are and are not proud?
I'm neither proud nor ashamed to be British. Frankly I'm not even sure what it means to be proud of your nationality. It's just something that happened owing to the accidents of my birth. Might as well be proud of being born in March or being 5'11" or whatever. I didn’t engineer it or have any say in it. I love living here because it's what I'm used to and I don’t like unfamiliarity. Is that pride? Frankly I don’t know.
`I suspect that you are among the vast majority of people living here and that's not a bad thing.
It was not an accident of birth that I am British. My mom never left the country.
Your mother never leaving the country is one of those accidents of birth.
Accident in this context does not mean "Thing that went wrong that I didn't intend".
Her family emigrated here and she’s female, and she wants to make it harder for people to come here and harder to take time off to give birth.
I don't think that just because you're a mother, you have to agree with any policy that gives more stuff to people who are mothers, any more than membership of any other group means that you have to support increased government spending on that group.
Her position seems to be fairly standard Ayn Rand-lite here. She seems to think that people who are in high demand as employees will naturally be offered good packages (including well-paid maternity leave and so on), whereas ordinary people without skills that place them in high demand should put up with whatever they get, and it's not the government's job to intervene.
Cleverly is saying that it's the government's fault that childcare is expensive. Ignoring for the moment that that would be the governments that he served in, it's nonsense. Childcare is expensive because it is labour intensive. You need an adult for every 4 or so children if you've got little ones, and you need enough capacity to accommodate adults getting sick, taking vacations and so on. And of course you need overheads for insurance, and tax, and space rental.
If you assume a world where government doesn't subsidize childcare, then the cheapest reasonable way to do this is to have two families share the care of their children - all the kids go to one family for the day, enabling the other parent to work. You could do it with a jobshare arrangement, where one parent from each family shared a job and the childcare.
Whichever way you work things, it's basically impossible to value childcare for two small children at less than half a person's wage.
People on minimum wage jobs are as much citizens as CEOs, and this idea you are only entitled to a decent life is shareholders make enough money off your labour is bollocks.
Her position seems to be fairly standard Ayn Rand-lite here. She seems to think that people who are in high demand as employees will naturally be offered good packages (including well-paid maternity leave and so on), whereas ordinary people without skills that place them in high demand should put up with whatever they get, and it's not the government's job to intervene.
In her case she was able to resign her post as her husband is an investment banker. So obviously being poor or married to someone in a non-finance job is a skill issue.
I notice that Jenrick in his video clip implied that British forces were killing rather than capturing suspected terrorists because otherwise they'd be eligible for human rights.
Is it the common thing in British politics for people to refer to certain of their prefered values as "Victorian ideas", as Jenrick does?
Granted, I realize that the Victorian era was way more dynamic and forward-looking than it gets credit for, but I'm not accustomed to hearing it referenced as a positive memory these days.
Is it the common thing in British politics for people to refer to certain of their prefered values as "Victorian ideas", as Jenrick does?
I don't think so, unless by 'people' you mean 'a very narrow coterie around the Conservative Party', certainly very few people would use it in the laudatory sense.
People on minimum wage jobs are as much citizens as CEOs, and this idea you are only entitled to a decent life is shareholders make enough money off your labour is bollocks.
Especially, as the whilst CEOs contribute value, it is the labour of the entire workforce that makes money for the shareholders.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch after what happened with Truss and I think the more the membership see of Jenrick the less they'll like him.
He's my MP and has a faithful following who think he's wonderful, but they also think he should also ditch the Conservatives for Reform.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
Interesting. You may well be right.
Seems a strong possibility to me. What's left of the Conservative Party membership wont like that though.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
Yeah, I think so, absent some weird malfunction by either of the latter two or Badenoch managing to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the shape of a deal with another candidate.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
Interesting. You may well be right.
Seems a strong possibility to me. What's left of the Conservative Party membership wont like that though.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true, see the graph in the Opinium piece I re-link here:
Making the (challenge-able) assumption that Tory members are skewed towards the Tory voters who went Tory->Reform, then Badenoch isn't necessarily that popular in net terms.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
Interesting. You may well be right.
Seems a strong possibility to me. What's left of the Conservative Party membership wont like that though.
That hardly matters. The tories long since gave up on their party members doing any useful function. They don't need their fees, they don't need them to knock on doors.
My bet has always been the Cleverley wins. I don't think the party want to offer the membership the choice of Badenoch
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
Interesting. You may well be right.
Seems a strong possibility to me. What's left of the Conservative Party membership wont like that though.
That hardly matters. The tories long since gave up on their party members doing any useful function. They don't need their fees, they don't need them to knock on doors.
I guess the important thing would be where they knock on doors. Nobody has ever knocked on my door. If Labour ever went down to 121 seats. my consituency would be one of them
Comments
I don't think Tugendhat is either, the strangeness of many of his ideas haven't been fully explored because Badenoch/Jenrick are so visibly bad.
And I agree with previous post, Badenoch may struggle to get through.
The party membership have had a vote since 1998 - the only time they haven’t elected a white man was when they voted for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak.
Why do you guess that? Past evidence is based on the two the members have been given to vote between every time. With the exception of Truss v Sunak the choice they have been given every time was two white men…
The MPs are busy trying to *stop* her from getting to the membership because very few of them want her but the membership really do seem to.
Likewise, it isn't that none of the four lacklustre non-entities left standing at the moment is capable of leading the Tories anywhere. The problem that Tories have is them, collectively. Since the referendum and then Johnson cleared out everybody who disagreed with him in the autumn of 2019 shortly before his election, what's been left has no talent and nothing that attracts.
Shall we try that without the dishonest spin?
2001: Iain Duncan Smith vs Ken Clarke
(2003: Michael Howard unopposed)
2005: David Cameron vs David Davis
(2016: Theresa May unopposed)
2019: Boris Johnson vs Jeremy Hunt
2022: Liz Truss vs Rishi Sunak
(2022: Rishi Sunak unopposed)
In most cases, the party membership elected a white man by construction, because they had a choice between two white men. In 2016, they would have had a choice between two white women, except that Andrea Leadsom withdrew.
The only time the party membership had the opportunity to vote for a candidate who wasn't a white man was in 2022, when they had two candidates, neither of whom was a white man. So your claim is based on precisely zero data, and is worthless.
There are plenty of real grounds on which to criticize the Tory party without making up nonsense.
And in that election there's a strong argument that they were simply taking a lead from the MPs - as Mordaunt had thrown her support behind Truss. This is a fairly consistent trend with the only exception in your list being IDS - where there wasn't a huge difference between levels of support.
As I noted, the leadership elections contain no information either way.
One could, probably, learn something about the propensity for Conservative party members to reflexively vote for the white man when given the choice by studying the actions of constituency selection committees. I'll note that when Mrs Badenoch was selected as candidate for Saffron Walden, she won against Stephen Parkinson (a white man) and Laura Farris (a white woman).
Various recent studies suggest that the electoral penalty (amongst the electorate as a whole) for being an ethnic minority candidate is around 4 percentage points. It's rather harder to determine what the penalty is when you restrict the electorate to members of the Conservative party. It would, I think, be an optimistic person who would assume that the penalty was less than 4%.
“All Tories are racists” prejudice?
Well this is not exhaustive but:
The anti-ulez Facebook groupsBaroness Warsi on Islamophobia
The Windrush scandal
Most black people have noticed
The money the party is willing to take
Direct surveys of the party membership are limited but there are some.
This academic study looks at how ethnic minority candidates rise up in that context.
Though were we to dive much deeper on this, we’d need to move to Epiphanies.
I’ve said before that my family upbringing was a merger of a family of old shire Tories and Red Flag singing, union shop stewarding Old Labour.
I’ll give you two guesses which side when it came down to it was more right wing. Actually I won’t, because I’ve never met any group to the right of old-school ‘the British Empire but run by the British Worker’ Labour.
Sure they wanted a better deal for the working Man, and were in constant conflict with ‘the bosses’ but when it came down to it they were deeply, deeply reactionary.
They’d have cut their own arms off rather than vote anything other than Labour - but, my God, buy anything foreign or criticise the Royal Family…
I was not really going for “an attack line” merely explaining what I think will happen if Kemi Badenach and Robert Jendrick are put to the membership and why. I don’t think noticing the institutional and other racism of the Tory party should be that controversial, any more than being able to spot the dynamic in Reform - it’s not exactly subtle and is being called out by senior members of their own party..
Just as well considering Islamophobic dog-whistle in her "recent immigrants who hate Israel" comment.
There is some indirect evidence that this might be so at the right of the Tory membership (if we assume that they are somewhat similar in this regard to former Tory voters who now vote Reform):
https://opinium.substack.com/p/conservative-conference-2024-the (Graph about 2/3rds down the page.
I don't agree with this. She is mainly keen on integration and wants immigrants to aspire to be proud to be British.
(I am unclear why we are supposed to agree with particular foreign policy positions of the governments of foreign countries in order to be considered sufficiently British. Was opposing apartheid anti-British at the point when the UK prime minister didn’t think it enough of an issue to merit sanctions ?)
Regardless of the truth or otherwise of that it's utterly missing the point. It's a dog whistle. She didn’t say "muslims" but you know damned well she means "muslims".
Isn't it a free country where we, the people living here, decide what our aspirations are and of what we are and are not proud?
I'm neither proud nor ashamed to be British. Frankly I'm not even sure what it means to be proud of your nationality. It's just something that happened owing to the accidents of my birth. Might as well be proud of being born in March or being 5'11" or whatever. I didn’t engineer it or have any say in it. I love living here because it's what I'm used to and I don’t like unfamiliarity. Is that pride? Frankly I don’t know.
`I suspect that you are among the vast majority of people living here and that's not a bad thing.
It was not an accident of birth that I am British. My mom never left the country.
Your mother never leaving the country is one of those accidents of birth.
Accident in this context does not mean "Thing that went wrong that I didn't intend".
Sweden offers 480 days for both parents. Parents receive parental leave at 80% of their regular wages.
https://bylinetimes.com/2024/09/30/conservative-leadership-robert-jenrick-plans-to-win-a-culture-war-with-young-people/
When my daughter was born I was allowed to take a few days annual leave at short notice.
I don't think that just because you're a mother, you have to agree with any policy that gives more stuff to people who are mothers, any more than membership of any other group means that you have to support increased government spending on that group.
Her position seems to be fairly standard Ayn Rand-lite here. She seems to think that people who are in high demand as employees will naturally be offered good packages (including well-paid maternity leave and so on), whereas ordinary people without skills that place them in high demand should put up with whatever they get, and it's not the government's job to intervene.
Cleverly is saying that it's the government's fault that childcare is expensive. Ignoring for the moment that that would be the governments that he served in, it's nonsense. Childcare is expensive because it is labour intensive. You need an adult for every 4 or so children if you've got little ones, and you need enough capacity to accommodate adults getting sick, taking vacations and so on. And of course you need overheads for insurance, and tax, and space rental.
If you assume a world where government doesn't subsidize childcare, then the cheapest reasonable way to do this is to have two families share the care of their children - all the kids go to one family for the day, enabling the other parent to work. You could do it with a jobshare arrangement, where one parent from each family shared a job and the childcare.
Whichever way you work things, it's basically impossible to value childcare for two small children at less than half a person's wage.
It's a shame you had so little. Some of us would like to live in a world where that isn't the case.
In her case she was able to resign her post as her husband is an investment banker. So obviously being poor or married to someone in a non-finance job is a skill issue.
Is it the common thing in British politics for people to refer to certain of their prefered values as "Victorian ideas", as Jenrick does?
Granted, I realize that the Victorian era was way more dynamic and forward-looking than it gets credit for, but I'm not accustomed to hearing it referenced as a positive memory these days.
It was normal at the time.
I don't think so, unless by 'people' you mean 'a very narrow coterie around the Conservative Party', certainly very few people would use it in the laudatory sense.
That doesn't mean it should continue to be.
Sorry, what actually is your point?
I am merely telling you of my experience and how we managed to survive back in the day.
Children used to work down the mines and up chimneys in the 1840s. Things change.
There is a logic to that but how far do we take it? Privatise everything? The police, the fire-service, the NHS ...
Especially, as the whilst CEOs contribute value, it is the labour of the entire workforce that makes money for the shareholders.
Or to put it another way, denial. They still don't get it. That is the great existential threat to the Conservative Party.
AFZ
He's my MP and has a faithful following who think he's wonderful, but they also think he should also ditch the Conservatives for Reform.
I think the problem Badenoch has is that she's not popular enough in the parliamentary party to peel off right wing votes, while at some point one of Tugdenhat or Cleverley will drop out and their votes will revert to the other person.
So, you think it will be Jenrick plus one of Tugendhat and Cleverley.
Interesting. You may well be right.
Seems a strong possibility to me. What's left of the Conservative Party membership wont like that though.
Yeah, I think so, absent some weird malfunction by either of the latter two or Badenoch managing to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the shape of a deal with another candidate.
I'm not sure that is necessarily true, see the graph in the Opinium piece I re-link here:
https://opinium.substack.com/p/conservative-conference-2024-the
Making the (challenge-able) assumption that Tory members are skewed towards the Tory voters who went Tory->Reform, then Badenoch isn't necessarily that popular in net terms.
That hardly matters. The tories long since gave up on their party members doing any useful function. They don't need their fees, they don't need them to knock on doors.