logo
Kemi Badenoch snitched on a cheating pupil at school who was then expelled

Kemi Badenoch snitched on a cheating pupil at school who was then expelled

Daily Mirror4 days ago
The Tory leader Kemi Badenoch claimed her fellow students were not impressed after she stood up in an exam and accused another pupil of cheating, who was later expelled
Kemi Badenoch snitched on a fellow pupil at school and got them expelled, she has revealed.

The Tory leader, who abstained on a vote supporting a report that found Boris Johnson repeatedly misled parliament, told the BBC she had a hatred of rule-breakers. She explained she was "about 14 or 15" when she stood up in an exam and said "'he's cheating, he's the one that's doing it', and that boy ended up getting expelled".

Ms Badenoch claimed her fellow students failed to praise her for dobbing the pupil in. She added: "I didn't get praised for it. I was a relatively popular kid at school, and people said 'why did you do that, why would you do it?' I said 'because he was doing the wrong thing'." It comes after reports Nigel Farage is under pressure to distance himself from 'racist' Ant Middleton rant.

It came during a wide-ranging interview, where the embattled Conservative leader also announced that the case of Austrian sex offender Josef Fritzl 'killed' her belief in God. Describing herself as a "Christian apologist", she said this changed after reading the vile story of Fritzl, who locked his daughter Elisabeth in a cellar for 24 years, repeatedly raping her and fathering seven children with her.

Ms Badenoch, whose maternal grandfather was a Methodist minister, said: "I thought to myself, no human being should have had to experience what this woman did. 'And maybe because I was very close to my father. So the idea of a father doing that to his own daughter for me was a level of disgust and abhorrence that I'd never experienced.
'I couldn't stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued. And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn't miss something.
"It's like, why were those prayers answered and not this woman's prayers? And it just, it was like someone blew out a candle."
Ms Badenoch, who has a 21% approval rating according to YouGov, also claimed her tenure as Conservative leader was going "well".
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Energy bill discounts of £250 a year included in new plans
Energy bill discounts of £250 a year included in new plans

Western Telegraph

time2 hours ago

  • Western Telegraph

Energy bill discounts of £250 a year included in new plans

Families living near new pylons would get a £125 discount on their energy bills every six months for a decade under Government plans to get electricity infrastructure built. New transmission cables and pylons are needed across the country to upgrade ageing electricity networks, connect up new wind and solar farms, nuclear power plants and large scale battery storage, and reinforce the grid to cope with the planned rise in electric heat pumps and car charging in homes. The Government says around twice as much new transmission network infrastructure will be needed by 2030 as has been built in the past decade. But building new pylons and cables through the British countryside has faced a backlash, with homeowners and campaigners concerned about the visual impact and disruption to local areas and beauty spots. (Image: John Kelly) The Government hopes cash benefits to local people will reduce opposition and planning delays to the infrastructure needed to deliver the clean energy plans. Households within 500 metres (a third of a mile) of new or upgraded electricity transmission infrastructure could receive a discount of up to £250 via their electricity bill every year for 10 years, totalling £2,500. The discounts, which would be assigned to the home, and applied to the occupant, could be provided in instalments of £125 every six months. Recommended Reading: Minister for energy consumers Miatta Fahnbulleh said: 'As we build the infrastructure we need to deliver homegrown, affordable energy, communities must be given a stake. 'That is why we are teaming up with communities hosting new pylons to ensure they receive direct, tangible benefits. 'We are on the side of those who want Britain to get back to what it does best: building for the future, driving innovation and putting communities first.' Shadow energy minister Andrew Bowie said it was 'right that communities get some payback for pylons – with this scheme following initiatives started by the last Conservative government'. But he added that the public should 'be in no doubt' that more communities would see pylons built nearby 'as a consequence of Labour's net zero by 2050 zealotry'. Mr Bowie said the Government was now having to 'scramble to try and build the infrastructure needed to support their mad green projects' and urged more investment in nuclear power rather than solar.

Black and white thinking takes us closer to fascism
Black and white thinking takes us closer to fascism

The National

time2 hours ago

  • The National

Black and white thinking takes us closer to fascism

Both of those things are enough to remind me that while communication in black and white is possible, it quite often seeks to create contrast where none is appropriate or desirable. We do not, for example, live in a world where the people of Israel are wholly good or wholly bad. Likewise, we do not live in a world where the same could be said of Palestinians, or the US government, or even – and perhaps this is the most difficult to admit these days – the Parliamentary Labour Party. READ MORE: Trust selling Highland clan's land for £6.8m under investigation There are good and bad people in every one of the groups I have mentioned. The numbers of those who are good and those who are bad might vary within them but to pretend everything is a simple question of groups being good or evil, or right and wrong, is mistaken. The reality of human life is that such simplistic claims can never be justified. In every group, every society, among people of every ethnicity or race, and in every state, and every organisation, we have to recognise good and bad can coexist, and sometimes simultaneously even in the same people. I know this makes life much harder. But, if we succumb to the temptation to subscribe to generalisms about any group, anywhere, at any time, and believe blanket descriptions can apply to them without taking into account the diverse nature of humanity, then we succumb to something that is best called fascism. Fascists have one political goal, which is all too easily seen among some politicians in both the UK and the United States at present. They seek to describe some group in society as the 'other'. They then ascribe to that group a range of characteristics which can, in truth, be found in any group in any society, anywhere, but which they claim are commonplace or universal within the group they deem to be the 'other'. They then blame all the ills in a society upon that 'other'. The extermination of that group becomes their political focus, all the while disguising the fact that what they are really doing is pursuing an agenda that, almost without exception in the case of fascism, is intended to advance the interest of some (but not all) among the wealthiest in their society, at cost to everyone else. This is most easily seen in the US, where the support of some (but I stress, not all) within the tech community for the agenda pursued by Donald Trump and far-right think tanks is resulting in the 'othering' of those they describe as illegal immigrants. US president Donald Trump They are then indifferent to the suffering of all those who might share ethnicity with those they 'other'. All of this is being done to advance the interests of a white, male, evangelical Christian anti-feminist elite within that society over the interests of all others. In the UK, we see a similar exploitation of so-called illegal immigrants, even though no-one is an illegal immigrant in the UK until their application to be resident here has been formally declined. It is easy to identify far-right politicians from Reform UK and the Conservative Party who are undertaking this activity but, as Keir Starmer has reminded us, not least with his 'island of strangers' speech, this is something Labour are also all too keen to do. Division is now a political strategy when not so long ago our whole focus was upon the creation of integrated communities so that people might live in harmony. READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon says she should have paused gender reform legislation The change has been dramatic and appears to have been quite sudden but in practice it can be fairly easily traced as having begun in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Then, it became apparent to many that our economy was being systemically structured to ensure some got all the advantages of the actions the state undertook as a consequence of the banking collapse. The majority, and most definitely those on median incomes or less, enjoyed no gain at all, and quite probably suffered losses. People were told there was growth, that there was no such thing as austerity, and that government services were being maintained by additional government spending. But what they experienced was something entirely different. They were not better off. Services were worse. The society in which they lived was very definitely suffering, and they were angry about that. Then, despite the fact that this was actually because of the exploitation created by some bankers and others in a wealthy elite (and again, I stress, this was not universal), some politicians, acting with the outright support of those who were benefiting the most, chose to blame those they call illegal migrants for the situation the majority of people found themselves in. The anger and disillusion people quite reasonably felt as a consequence of the deliberate failure of the Tories to meet need was redirected for the political advantage of the elite that was actually exploiting people and, in the process, something once described by the German historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt occurred. As she explained, the constant lying of our politicians is not intended to make people believe the lies that they are told. Instead, its goal is to ensure no-one believes anything any more. The intention is to ensure no-one can, with any degree of certainty, distinguish between truth and lies, and so between right and wrong. People deprived of that power are, in Arendt's opinion, also deprived of the power to think and judge and, as a consequence, are then unwittingly subject to the rule of lies. This then means politicians who wish to manipulate a population for their own advantage are free to do so. That is what happens when we give up on nuance. That is what happens when we give up on believing we have more in common with others than that which divides us. That is what happens when we forget there is right and wrong, but that there is no-one, or any group, that is at all times and in all places possessed of either quality on every occasion. That is, in effect, what happens when we give up on judgment. We become exposed to manipulation and so to abuse. And this is where we are. This is why politicians think they can lie to us, on Gaza, on the state of the UK, on Scottish independence, and on almost anything else. It's because they believe we have forgotten how to determine the truth in among the noise that those who wish to distract us deliberately create. It is our job to work out what is really happening and to form a judgment upon it. That is what politics and political economy demand of us. It's hard and it sometimes leaves us confused and feeling alienated, but that is the price we have to pay if we are to continue to believe in humanity and decency, and to believe there are things we must do because they are simply right.

Drink-drive limit could be cut in plan to overhaul road safety laws
Drink-drive limit could be cut in plan to overhaul road safety laws

Glasgow Times

time5 hours ago

  • Glasgow Times

Drink-drive limit could be cut in plan to overhaul road safety laws

In a major overhaul of the UK's road safety laws, ministers are also considering tougher penalties for uninsured drivers and failing to wear a seatbelt, according to a report in The Times. The proposals, set to be published as part of a road safety strategy in the autumn, come amid concern about the number of people being killed or seriously injured on Britain's roads. Last year, 1,633 people were killed and almost 28,000 seriously injured in traffic incidents, and numbers have remained relatively constant following a large fall between 2000 and 2010. A Labour source said: 'At the end of the last Labour government, the number of people killed and seriously injured on our roads was at a record low, but numbers have remained stubbornly high under successive Conservative governments. 'In no other circumstance would we accept 1,600 people dying, with thousands more seriously injured, costing the NHS more than £2 billion per year.' Meanwhile, the number of people killed in drink-driving incidents has risen over the past decade, reaching a 13-year high in 2022 and prompting concern that existing road safety measures are no longer working. Under the plans being considered by Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander, the drink-drive limit in England and Wales could be cut from 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100ml of breath to 22 micrograms. This figure would be in line with Scotland, which cut its drink-drive limit in 2014, and the rest of Europe, where no other country has a limit as high as that in England and Wales. Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander is due to publish the Government's road safety strategy in the autumn (Jonathan Brady/PA) The UK is also one of only three European countries to rely on self-reporting of eyesight problems that affect driving, leading ministers to consider compulsory eye tests every three years for drivers aged over 70 and a driving ban for those who fail. Other proposals are reported to include allowing the police to bring prosecutions for drug-driving on the basis of roadside saliva tests rather than blood tests as increasing numbers of drivers are being caught with drugs in their system. The Labour source added: 'This Labour Government will deliver the first road safety strategy in a decade, imposing tougher penalties on those breaking the law, protecting road users and restoring order to our roads.' The strategy is due to be published in the autumn, and all proposals will be subject to consultation.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store