Browsing, History

Angela Rayner is calling on Keir Starmer to implement Kemi Badenoch’s policy of nationalising everyone’s children by banning under-16s from social media, thereby depriving them of the formative experience of their international peers while constantly forcing the rest of us to prove our ages by means of digital ID from Palantir and the Tony Blair Institute. The Government’s legislative programme would already give the vote to people on the day that they first became able to access any non-Epstein Class political opinion. This is all a great shame, because it has become obvious that Rayner had been thrown under the bus to ensure far less extensive legislation than was necessary and had been promised on the rights both of workers and of tenants. It also looks increasingly as if her removal was clearing the way for the attack on trial by jury and on the right of appeal.

Still, Rayner and Rishi Sunak were both born, less than two months apart, in 1980. Both were first time voters in 2001, the high water mark of Tony Blair. Sunak had been Head Boy of Winchester, and had still yet to do a day’s work in his life. Rayner had left school with literally nothing fully five years earlier, and was to make her way through her trade union. Make what you like of either of those backstories, but the fact that he was the first member of Generation Blair to become Prime Minister while she may yet be the second makes Blairism a spectacular failure in its own terms even before considering the fact that Badenoch, who was also born in 1980, never did a day of school in this country until she was 16. Education, Education, Education, indeed.

And here is Badenoch telling LBC that she was “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, even though her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before her heroine, Margaret Thatcher, had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch also failed to mention that her Muslim grandmother had converted to Christianity. And even as, on the other side, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, Badenoch claims to have taken part in Islamic Friday prayers, “because that was what happened there when I was in school.” Really? Like a lot of churchgoers in this country these days, I know Nigerian Christians, and again I ask, “Really?” Now, Badenoch may well have been naturalised, and as a Commonwealth citizen she would in any case be eligible to vote and stand in elections in this country and to hold office all the way up to Prime Minister. But that was not how she presented herself until 28 April 2026.