{"id":52999,"date":"2025-04-26T20:35:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-26T20:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/52999\/"},"modified":"2025-04-26T20:35:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T20:35:08","slug":"kemi-badenoch-tears-into-pompous-keir-starmer-and-labour-cruel-and-incompetent-politics-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/52999\/","title":{"rendered":"Kemi Badenoch tears into ‘pompous’ Keir Starmer and Labour: ‘Cruel and incompetent!’ | Politics | News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Labour in Government is not just incompetent but cruel, according to Kemi Badenoch. Sir Keir Starmer<\/a> and Rachel Reeves have been running the country for less than a year but the 45-year-old Conservative leader says the harm to the country is worse than she feared.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, we knew they would be bad but they are worse because there\u2019s a cruelty to what they are doing rather than just an incompetence,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Kemi points to the changes in inheritance tax which farmers warn will devastate agriculture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe family farms tax is a cruel thing to do because they are going after people they think can\u2019t fight back and will never vote for them,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

This is not the only shock she has experienced since succeeding Rishi Sunak<\/a> as Tory leader in November.<\/p>\n

She says she expected in the wake of Labour\u2019s landslide \u201cnobody would be listening to us or looking to us for answers\u201d. But she claims Labour\u2019s popularity has sunk to such depths people across the nation are asking: \u201cWell, what are you going to do about this?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t believe Labour could be genuinely this bad,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The Conservatives<\/a> will face their biggest electoral test on her watch this week when council and mayoral elections take place across England. Election experts such as Tory peer Lord Robert Hayward expect a drubbing with her party losing 475 to 525 councillors.<\/p>\n

Kemi says voters on the doorstep are \u201cnot as angry with us as they were last year,\u201d adding: \u201cI know it\u2019s still going to be a challenging election result but they are very angry with Labour, that\u2019s for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

She urges voters not to make a protest vote, saying: \u201cWhen you look at what Labour has done \u2013 snatching away winter fuel payments \u2013 it\u2019s time to send them a message and the best way to send them a message is to vote Conservative. If you vote Reform you\u2019ll probably just let Labour in by splitting the Conservative vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Kemi looks four years into the future to the next Westminster election, she says she worries how \u201cbig the mess they\u2019re leaving will be\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cLabour is the biggest danger facing the country because they are occupying space in government without a plan which means that everything now that isn\u2019t great is going to get worse,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Her disdain for Sir Keir was on display last week when she faced him for the first Prime Minister\u2019s Questions since the Supreme Court ruled that under equality law a woman is defined by biological sex. The Tory leader urged the PM to apologise to Rosie Duffield, whom she says was \u201chounded\u201d out of the Labour party for \u201ctelling the truth\u201d on this issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a man who believes that he is always right; that everyone is wrong,\u201d she says. \u201cThere is a pomposity to him.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe never answers any questions; he just thinks that these things are beneath him…<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have someone running the country who thinks that it\u2019s his way or the highway, that everything he does is right, then that means that when he\u2019s doing the wrong thing he will not course-correct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite her admiration for Ms Duffield, she does not want the now-Independent MP to join the Conservative ranks.<\/p>\n

\u201cRosie is a fantastic person,\u201d she says. \u201cI think she is great.<\/p>\n

\u201cI enjoy her company. She is very funny.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut she is not a Conservative. I\u2019m not one of those people who\u2019s just trying to get the numbers up; this is how we end up with problems later.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want Conservatives<\/a> in the Conservative party.\u201d<\/p>\n

She wants to avoid a return to the \u201cinfighting\u201d which rocked her party for years as different factions vied for control and toppled leaders.<\/p>\n

Kemi also counsels voters against backing Nigel Farage<\/a>\u2019s party because they find him entertaining.<\/p>\n

She warns: \u201cEntertainment does not fix your roads, entertainment does not look after children with special educational needs; it doesn\u2019t find money for adult social care. What we\u2019re voting for is who is going to be running local services.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd across the board Conservative councils deliver better services for lower taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n

She sees an array of long-term threats facing the country, including a potential collapse in food security.<\/p>\n

A farmer recently told her that British agriculture is in a similar situation to the crisis-wracked steel sector. As young people quit farming and families sell off land there is the danger \u201call of a sudden one day we\u2019ll wake up and we can\u2019t produce food\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s something I\u2019m determined to fight,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She is concerned Energy Secretary Ed Miliband\u2019s push for net zero carbon emissions will result in more pylons appearing across the countryside.<\/p>\n

\u201cNet zero will bankrupt us unless we change course and actually start delivering cheap abundant energy,\u201d she says. \u201cWe need to look after our environment but we can\u2019t look after it if we\u2019re bankrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mother of three is also worried about the falling birth rate, which the Office for National Statistics reported dropped in 2023 to to its lowest level on record for England and Wales with just 1.44 children per woman.<\/p>\n

She says: \u201cWe are becoming an older society… We need people to work longer and be healthy longer; we need them to have more children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Relying on migration for growth, she continues, has had \u201cdevastating\u201d consequences.<\/p>\n

Nearly 33,000 people have come to the UK on small boats since Labour won the election and Kemi insists numbers would be radically lower if the scheme to send migrants to Rwanda for processing had not been axed.<\/p>\n

She says: \u201cWe need a third country deterrent… It\u2019s a relatively new problem and that\u2019s why we needed something radical and new to deal with it…<\/p>\n

\u201cLabour has made the problem worse. They are making everything worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warning of the harm caused by Labour hiking up employers\u2019 National Insurance, she says: \u201cYou look at what Labour has done with the jobs tax. It\u2019s killing businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kemi is not optimistic about Sir Keir\u2019s attempt to \u201creset\u201d relations with the European Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She states: \u201cWhen Labour negotiates, Britain loses…<\/p>\n

\u201cLabour and the Lib Dems are just trying to take us back to where we were 10-20 years ago but the world has changed. We need to think about the future, not the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kemi is preparing for the Westminster election when she will ask voters to entrust her with Britain\u2019s future and bring the curtain down on Starmerism. And if the Conservatives<\/a> can do better than expected in this week\u2019s local contests, Tories<\/a> will look to that day with new ambition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour in Government is not just incompetent but cruel, according to Kemi Badenoch. Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53000,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[28367,527,1198,28366,528,12,16,3106,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-52999","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-conservative-leadership","10":"tag-conservative-party","11":"tag-kemi-badenoch","12":"tag-labour-criticism","13":"tag-labour-party","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-uk-politics","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114406183649806916","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}