The National Conservatism Conference got off to a bumpy start this week after Jacob Rees-Mogg’s keynote speech was interrupted by protesters and Suella Braverman was heckled from the crowd.
Former business secretary Rees-Mogg used his address to question whether new voter ID laws had backfired for the Tory Party, describing them as “gerrymandering”.
“We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well”, he said.
Elsewhere, there were also esoteric discussions of “biopolitics” on the agenda and frequently shared denunciations of “wokeism”, particularly from Katharine Birbalsingh, who was once dubbed “Britain’s strictest headteacher”.
For your records, she is the one who said that kids should sit in isolation if their parents couldn’t afford school lunches.
She also said people from poorer backgrounds should aim to take “smaller steps” instead of going for top universities, like Oxford and Cambridge.
So an all-around delightful woman.
In a bid to shield these batshit ideologies from the wider public, several left-wing and progressive publications were barred from entering the building.
According to Open Democracy reports, applications for press tickets from openDemocracy, Byline Times, Novara Media and JOE were all denied “due to high demand and limited space” weeks in advance.
Yet videos of the first day shot by journalists who did manage to gain entry show numerous empty seats, while at least one other publication was granted press access despite applying just days before the event was due to start.
How strange…
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