The new bureaucratic, left-wing class are waging a war on freedom of expression and speech, according to Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch’s new report.
Kemi Badenoch’s Renewal 2030 campaign has released a report ‘Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class’.
The report explains how a global realignment in politics, lower growth and social polarisation is affecting the whole of the West and is centred around the rise of a “new bureaucratic class”.
The authors argue that this bureaucratic class “damages society” through “attacks” on free speech and thought.
Kemi Badenoch’s report argues that it is on the left, not the right, where intolerance is most clearly found
PA
Between 1965 to 2015, the heyday of liberalism before the “new progressive paradigm” took over, there were many social changes including decriminalisation of homosexuality, legalised abortion of up to 24 weeks, cuts in defence spending from nearly 6 per cent to just over 2 per cent of GDP, simplified divorce and the rise of women in the workforce.
This small selection out of a substantial list of changes was generally accepted by the right to “keep social peace.”
Despite this, the progressive ideology “rejects” the idea that we have seen real social change and is instead in “favour of endless and vicious social struggle.”
“We must believe that our society is still riddled with prejudice and obsess over new victimised identities around race, nationality, sex, gender, and the environment itself,” the report says.
According to Badenoch’s report, the” rise of ‘cancel culture’, attacks on freedom of speech and thought, the rising racialisation of society, the demand that as a woman, LGBT person, migrant or any other potential group you must see yourself as a victim and demand redress” are all unhelpful to our society.
But they are helpful for the bureaucratic class.
The report suggests it is on the left, not the right, where intolerance is most clearly found.
A 2019 poll showed Leavers would largely date Remainers by 69 per cent to 15 per cent, while among Remainers, 48 per cent would date a Leaver and 34 per cent would not.
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The numbers are even worse amongst the young who are most likely to be progressive rather than the old more liberal left.
Among younger Labour voters, 51 per cent of party supporters aged 16 to 24 found it difficult to be friends with Conservatives compared to just 23 per cent of those who were aged over 55.
To quote political commentator Matthew Goodwin: “In 2021, remarkably, nearly six in ten people in Britain agreed with the statement ‘I sometimes find myself stopping myself from expressing my views on political and/or social issues’ … Researchers at the University of Cambridge have found the same share of people now believe ‘political correctness is undermining free speech’ while the British, remarkably, were more likely than the Americans, the French, the Germans, the Hungarians and the Poles to feel this way”.
The authors argue that the progressive goal is to “turn everything political and into a struggle” and that the “very ideas of free speech and debate is no longer valid for progressives.”
By turning everything political, this turns democracy into an “existential struggle” because if your opinion only conforms to the new progressive consensus then liberal democracy is “really just a sham.”
