Badenoch says politics is broken. The Conservatives should mend it, because it already seems too ‘fixed’ | Conservative Home

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 worried about that when it comes to any by-elections in Newark, or Romford. Or, lest we forget, East Wiltshire.

Either you do have by-elections after a defection – something Farage believed was ‘honourable’ in 2014 when Douglas Carswell defected to UKIP, and called for again when Carswell left in 2017 – or you don’t. It shouldn’t be about when it suits.

Carswell’s seat was Clacton.

Drive four hours from there and it takes you to Gorton and Denton, a destination the media pack will be eagerly preparing to decamp to soon, as Starmer faces a double dilemma. Should he ‘stop’ Andy Burnham being able to run, and becoming ‘his Jenrick’ as one Tory MP put it to me, or not attempt to game the system and risk making the threat to the PM’s leadership very real?

However, can you, should you, ‘stop’ a candidate running? Of course that must be an option in some circumstances but the idea of making it and all-women-shortlist, or only open to BAME candidates, is actually insulting to both since it would be the most egregious fig leaf to rig a candidate election for the benefit of one individual and the removal of another.

Then again, what of the voters of Manchester who elected Burnham Mayor, only to see him drop that, against his word, to try and run for a bigger prize?

Would the Electoral Commission step in? Doubtful, but I mention them because the current head of that body was very deeply involved in the discussions over a handover – not ‘hand back’, thank you broadcasters –  of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Gorton to Chagos is more than a four hour drive but keep with me.

The Government pulled it’s Chagos bill from the Lords, due tomorrow, after a concerted and excellent team effort by Conservatives to try and stop it. I suspect it has just moved the debate to another day but think whatever you like about Donald Trump or his motives, the US seems to have changed its mind about this awful deal, and that matters.

Now the Government has admitted the deal may actually break the rules of a 1966 defence agreement between the US and UK, a new feature in the saga. Now, I profoundly hope the Lords do manage to scotch this deal. It’s government run by Hermer-Simpson, but Labours argument – as it is about the fate of the Assisted Dying Bill – is the ‘unelected Lords’ shouldn’t game the system to stop the will of the elected chamber. It was less their argument during the tortuous passage of the Rwanda Bill, but there we are.

This might be a fair critique if it wasn’t for the fact that the entire passage of the Assisted Dying Bill was flawed, rushed and gamed. It seems our politics is open to all sorts of jiggery-pokery dressed up as good faith and ‘the best of intentions’. I’m not actually against the concept, but this bill was another example of the murkier manoeuvres increasingly tried within our political processes.

My final bus to arrive was a proposed datacentre in Buckinghamshire.

These things are the future, and we should be building them, but they consume huge amounts of power, and need access to a lot of water. I’m not going into detail of this specific application as the Guardian did it for me, but

“the government has been forced to admit its own planning approval for a major AI data-centre should be quashed after it failed to fully consider the climate impact, in what campaigners described as “an embarrassing climbdown”.

Add it to the list of embarrassing climbdowns and Starmer’s government looks like it’s on a mass rout descent of Everest. Although apparently you are supposed to call it Chomolungma.

It is however another example of a democratically elected Government, pursuing, albeit badly, a stated aim of streamlining planning – especially for infrastructure projects – and getting knocked down by legal challenge. Labour’s plan to tackle the ossified British planning system was about the only thing they deserved some applause for.

Although this is a government of lawyers for lawyers, nonetheless the expansion of activist lawfare is another increasingly recognised obstacle to the functioning of our democracy. It’s used both for or against parties, to their advantage or disadvantage, but has moved from the ‘responsible checks and balances’ side of the governing ledger to the active frustration side. Anyone who has worked, politically, in the Home Office, will tell you, not least on immigration, just how frustrating that can be.

Kemi Badenoch says our politics is broken. I’d agree with that. She wants to mend it, and I want to believe the Conservatives can but let’s not ‘fix’ it.

Recently, politics has given people the impression that it’s far too fixed, as it is.