Kemi Badenoch just showed why she can lead Tories to election win | Politics | News

Who’s really in charge? In a democracy, we like to think that it’s us, the voters. But is it? Really?

In a recent paper, Kemi Badenoch and like-minded souls state that the biggest danger facing Britain and other western countries is the rise of the we-know-best “bureaucratic class”.

This huge array of civil servants, media operators, politicians and public officials tell the rest of us how to live our lives, from what we can eat, to how much we can drink, how to heat our homes, what car we should drive, what vaccines we must submit to and what we can think and say.

It is this bureaucratic class that tried with all their might to overturn the Brexit referendum. It is they who are responsible for imprisoning those who make hateful statements on social media — thereby contradicting the age-old acceptance that we might detest what someone says but still defend to the death their right to say it.

It is they who are propagating the evermore absurd nanny state culture, which just this week, Keir Starmer confirmed, will include government-sponsored teeth-cleaning classes (no, that’s not a joke). It is they who are taxing entrepreneurialism and endeavour while rewarding striking train and undermining national borders.

The threat to personal responsibility and freedom is all too clear. Big Bureaucrat is watching you.

Badenoch and her supporters are absolutely right to see this big bureaucracy as a threat to our future. But are people willing to listen? Or are we so indoctrinated by state control of our lives — and lockdown, of course, gave this indoctrination booster rockets — that we are simply unwilling to leave the comfort of nanny’s lap, where we can hand over decision-making to a shadowy authority above us and not have to think for ourselves?

It could go either way. But let’s be positive for a moment, and recognise that Kemi is on to something. By the next election in 2029, we will have had five years of big-state Starmer and his legions of smug, bullying bureaucrats.

By then, we will in all likelihood have sunk into the economic doom in which Labour governments always end, while being taxed up to our necks. We’ll see other countries on other continents forging ahead, while our our own bureaucratic class obsesses about what’s in our kitchen fridge, whether public toilets are inclusive, and whether we’ve hit the state-imposed target for flu jabs.

In such circumstances, the votes could well follow Kemi Badenoch, as people begin to realise the foundations of a healthy society are personal freedom, personal responsibility and personal endeavour, all operating within the rule of law and within the borders of the nation state.

The age of the bureaucratic class is now with us. There’s little doubt about that, and it’s intensely depressing. But it could yet be short lived. Let’s pray it is.