Tugendhat and Cleverly echo criticisms from Labour and the military as the Tory conference gears up for another day
Earlier I suggested that, even though Robert Jenrick is more hardline on the ECHR, Kemi Badenoch is the most rightwing candidate in the contest. There is some evidence to support this in a 36-page pamphlet her team released last night, called Conservatism in Crisis. Described as an essay based on a forthcoming book, Your New Rules: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class, it does not seem to be available online, although the foreword, by Badenoch, has been published on ConservativeHome. (Who wrote the rest of the pamphlet is not clear.)
In her foreword, Badenoch argues that the Tories cannot win power again just by being a Brexit party. She explains:
While the general election result this year was disastrous for us, we need to consider a wider problem.
Since 1992, the Conservative party has only won a majority when Brexit was on the ballot paper; in 2015, through a pledge to hold a referendum on the European Union and in 2019, to ‘Get Brexit Done’.
The bureaucratic class derives much of their income, or more widely, their justification, from government, through state spending but also an ever-growing regulatory state. They are very different from the market class of entrepreneurs and general market focused workers.
There is a microeconomic link between the bureaucratic class and the government. The key question in assessing the bureaucratic class is: Does this job primarily relate to providing goods or services in the market or administering rules set by government?
On human resources, in 2001, the ONS recorded 119,000 or so people working as personnel managers. By 2023, this had risen to 221,000, an increase of 86%. This happened at a time when productivity rose at historically low levels of 0.8% a year …
The ratio of regulators to financial services workers had increased from 1:11,000 in 1980 to 1:300 in 2011 and now stands at roughly 1:75. In a single decade, the proportion of Citigroup’s workforce devoted to compliance and risk went from 4% to 15%.
Safetyism benefits progressive academics, allied student activists, and most of all, the growing army of administrators. In the USA, a staggering 64% of those who work for universities are now not academics or researchers.
We are moving to a new politics. The Conservatives have to realise the bureaucratic class and the new progressive ideology are their opponents. The idea that as Labour fails, then simply because a voter has a comfortable middle-class job, they will return to us is false.
There will have to be a new type of politics. To take on the bureaucratic class means to ditch radical environmental politics, unpick identity politics, focus on a strong positive national identity, limit migration, streamline HR, compliance, sustainability, planning, to focus on bringing down the cost of the welfare state and much more.
My values haven’t changed, but it’s certainly true that over time the things I have seen in the ministerial jobs that I have done have led me to conclusions that the British state isn’t working in the interests of the British people, and in particular my time at the Home Office where I saw that we were not able to secure our borders and to keep the public safe, which to my mind is the most basic duty of our country.
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