Christmas is nearly upon us – but there is no sign that Kemi Badenoch is ready to enjoy a rest. The Leader of the Opposition this morning held her second London press conference in as many days. The reason? A big pitch on welfare – just, er, a fortnight after her last such speech. But party spinners insisted that Badenoch had Some News to commit. And it turns out, excitingly, the Tory leader has, at last, found the dead weight dragging down Britain: young people. Well, it’s one way to get the 18 to 24-year-olds on side…
Badenoch delivered some tough love for the nation’s youth whom, she suggested, were responsible for Britain’s stagnation. She told hacks that Gen Z types are on too many ‘low value’ degrees and claim too many mental health problems. ‘We are seeing a lot of people not taking jobs because they think those jobs are beneath them,’ Badenoch declared – reminding the audience that in her youth she worked at McDonald’s, a job she once said, ‘made her working class’. Up the workers, eh, comrades?
Given that, um, one degree wasn’t enough for the Leader of the Opposition and she went back for another, one might assume that Badenoch values her university education. But she urged young people to ditch the degrees and opt for apprenticeships, insisting she ‘remembers more from that one year using my hands than I do from both the degrees I did’. Somehow Mr S does not think that Sussex or Birkbeck will be inviting Badenoch back for a speech any time soon…
All this comes as Badenoch embarks on a rolling series of pressers in a bid to set the agenda – another sign of the ‘perma-campaign’ shift in British politics. Yet the latest YouGov polling outlines the scale of the problem, with Reform climbing to 27 per cent, and the Conservatives straggling on 18. Much like Wolves, three points is all the Tories want this Christmas…
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