Kemi Badenoch

Appearances

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I didn't know for about five years or longer that Thomas Sowell was black because I just read the book. There was no picture on the sleeve. And when I found that out, I thought this is even more amazing. Although actually, you know, he must have, I don't know whether he mentioned it in that book or in another book, but it was a long time before I'd really clocked it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I might be misremembering now. It's all 20 years ago. But there was that book. And then later on, books like Why Nations Fail. Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I think, is an amazing book. Those three books in particular. What about Roger Scruton? Yes, yes. How to Be a Conservative. That also had... I mean, there's so many. But those four, I think you're right, are...

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton also kind of showed me, it showed me how there's a lot of truth in different people's ideologies and beliefs. And it isn't so much about being on the left or being on the right, but about finding the common ground. So I am on the right. There's no two ways about it. But I also recognize...

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

that just talking about things within your own bubble is not how to win other people over. And I'm able to have conversations with those very different philosophies because there is a way you can speak that shows the commonality and shows that we're all trying to get to the same place. And that's what I'm trying to do with my party now.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I think it was just a feeling of not being fulfilled in the job that I was doing. And I'd started off as a consultant, a systems analyst, and it was interesting. I really enjoy solving problems. I enjoy coding. But there was just so much more. I like fixing things that are broken. And the things that were broken for me in the world weren't software so much as everything else.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And so I wanted to understand how stuff worked. That's why I read Basic Economics. And the more I read, the more I thought, you know, I should join this party. I wasn't actually thinking of becoming a member of parliament because I didn't think it worked like that. I should join this party and try and help out.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And after I joined, and also the social side, of course, and the fun, meet interesting people. I met my husband in the Conservative Party. So that's, you know.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yes, yes. And that's how he met. And I just thought, this guy is always around and he's pretty cool. But it wasn't love at first sight or anything like that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

No, no, no, no. I think we were both actually quite suspicious of each other. And then the more we talked, the more we realized that we were, you know, we use the phrase brain twins, that we just think the same things on so much. And he had political ambitions himself. He did. And then he said to me one day, I think you're a lot better at this than I am. Do you think he's right?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, I'm now leading the party, so I think he's not. So I think he was right. But I wouldn't have been able to do this without his encouragement. I certainly wouldn't have been able to do it. And so if I hadn't met him, I probably I may have actually left because I wouldn't have been able to afford it. It's quite an expensive business being in politics. You take a pay cut.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So taking massive pay cards, but it was just, I needed something more than what my jobs in banking and engineering and software were giving me.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So I describe myself as a reluctant Brexiteer in the sense that I voted leave before I was an MP because I just couldn't see a way forward. We tried to negotiate and nothing was working. And we're giving this option. Leave or remain. My husband and I agreed on everything. He voted remain. I voted leave. And then I got into parliament and there was no plan.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I thought this was completely insane. How can there be no plan? If you made everybody vote for something, you must have had a plan beforehand. And this is something that we keep doing wrong in UK politics. And the current prime minister has done the same thing of just talking, but not knowing how you're going to do something. We'll figure it out later.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So I come into parliament to a party that's gone backwards. It's lost seats. We're still in government because we're still the largest party, but there's no majority. And we're going round and round in circles. endlessly making concessions to the left. And that was the beginning of where it started going wrong. The first seven years were okay.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The second seven years were us making concessions to the left and compromising in ways that were not moving things forward. And we have paid for it now, seven years later, just endless sort of what I call managerialism. we moved into a space where it's no longer about what you believe in, but just being competent. And of course, competence is important.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But if there's no underlying philosophy, you're just administrators. There's no vision. You're not shaping the future. You're not showing the way. You're just managing the status quo. And managing the status quo at a time of Very high mass migration all over the world. It's not just affecting the UK. Rapid technological innovation, you know, social media, AI, all of that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Soaring debts, as you described at the beginning. Low productivity. This is, you can't just manage that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yeah, low birth rate, exactly, falling birth rate. What are we going to do? And we would just come out with, well, we'll have a little bit more childcare there, or we'll cut tax by like a penny. And these things create huge swells of frustration. And it all spilled out this July, where we had tried but failed to cut immigration. We had tried to cut taxes.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Again, it not quite working because we just couldn't manage the balance sheet between how much we were spending and how much we needed to take in taxes.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The Conservatives lost. And... Labour won on a historic low share of the vote, 34%. I don't think any party has ever won with that number. But also, they won a landslide because of reform. So Labour are winning on a low share of the vote because people just want to kick us out. But the low share of the vote isn't just, you know, a majority of one.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It's a majority of a hundred and something, which is a landslide because reform were holding our legs. And they only won five seats despite having lots of votes spread around the country. And it was very much people voting to get conservatives out because they were just sick and tired of us, like what I call talking right and governing left, which annoys everybody.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Because the right doesn't get what it wants and the left doesn't like what it hears and doesn't recognize what you're doing. So they were sick of us. They were sick of the squabbling. There was a lot of infighting. And we would probably have lost anyway the natural fatigue that comes after 14 years in government. But the scale of the defeat was because of all of those other factors.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I think they probably would just have won. We would probably have had about 200 rather than 120. So they would have won, but we would have been a big opposition. I mean, I'm speculating. But if I look at the way the seats fell, maybe we would have had 250 and they'd have had 100.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

He is very much a bureaucrat. And I think I don't even I don't even know if it's managerialism, because I don't think he even understands what the status quo is and is trying to manage it. What I see him as is and most of his cabinet is student politicians who have not grown up. So they are they are still very much at university. And the causes that they take over are different.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

you know, student talking points.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Like, well, they're giving away these islands, the Chagos Islands, which is an absolute disgrace. And it's, I know that the reasoning behind it is, oh, it's anti-imperialism, but, There's an American defense base, Diego Garcia on there. We've bought this island many decades ago from Mauritius, but there's some international court judgments that have different rulings.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And rather than negotiate their way out, it's just, oh, well, we'll give it away. We shouldn't have had it in the first place. Or they put a tax on private schools, which has never happened in the history of the UK, but they want to tax the rich. And so they tax education, but actually most of the mega rich won't care. The people who it's really affecting are

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

are those people who are, you know, not necessarily poor, but they're struggling, and they've made a sacrifice, and they just can't pay that extra money. They've cancelled a free speech law, which we put in place. And I care very passionately about free speech, which is why I said yes to this podcast. And I thought that it was absolutely outrageous. It's all about their ideology.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

They've brought in this awful tax on farmers. Because they've treated them as if handing down a farm to the next generation is an inheritance tax loophole. When, of course, if you keep taking out bits of farms, you won't have any land left. And farms go from generation to generation. Very few people go into farming from other families. And it's extraordinary. And it's made a lot of people angry.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It was very foolish. It wouldn't raise a lot of money. So I don't think he's managing anything. I think they are just living out this fantasy of now we're in charge and now we're going to have a real socialist government. And he's run into trouble very quickly because that stuff doesn't work anymore. It never did, but it's definitely not going to work now.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, first of all, the first five years were a liberal conservative coalition. We didn't win that election. Okay. So there is a myth that we've had 14 years of conservatives- in power. You've had 14 years of conservatives in office. The first five years, it's actually liberals and conservatives running the country together. And then there's another three years where we have no majority.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So let's start with that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

No, no, no, no. We have to take responsibility. But I'm setting some of the context that quite often we didn't always have the power. Do you remember when I was talking about making concessions to the left? We're making concessions so we can stay in office. we'll do this law that's not very good because we can get the votes on it. And that's not how to run a country.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But to the point that you were making, why have we ended up where we are? It is increasing the size of the state and thinking that regulation is the way to solve everything. And it's often very hard for conservatives to explain this well. When we talk about deregulation, people think, oh, you're taking away our safety net, or you're just going to let cowboys do whatever they want.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But that's not really what it is. It's about... Making sure that people can carry out enterprise in a free way. Getting rid of regulations and laws that are holding people back, that aren't working. So we are not as free as the U.S. is in terms of setting up companies, starting things out. Even opening a bank account now has become more complicated.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Many of these things were because we were going along with EU regulation.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So leaving the EU should have been a way of breaking out of that and doing things better or differently and having a competitive advantage. But weirdly, when we left the EU, because we were trying to please many of the people who didn't want to leave, we made promises. And I say this, not me, but the government made promises of,

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, we'll just keep doing things the same way and it'll all be fine. Then we have what I call treasury orthodoxy, which believes that wealth is GDP and you can increase GDP by increasing immigration. This is crazy because we ended up not increasing GDP per capita. which in itself is not necessarily the best metric.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But if people are not getting richer and the country is supposedly getting richer, something's going wrong. And I remember when I first became a new MP, I had companies, very, very well-known companies like the Wellcome Institute say, we can't get visas for the best sort of scientists. Can you help us? And I thought, this is crazy. Those are the people we should be letting in.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We need high-skilled immigration and get rid of the low-skilled immigration. So I lobbied for that. Now people talk about it as if I was lobbying for uncontrolled immigration. But it was definitely not supposed to be like that. We brought in a system after we left the EU that should have controlled the numbers, but people gained it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

This is what I mean when I talk about how liberalism has been hacked. People say they're students. We think, yeah, of course we want students. Yeah, let's have some more students. Then they bring in grandparents. Oh, these are my dependents. I mean, there's extraordinary situations like that. Or, for example, when we were told we needed more care workers, Could they have a care visa scheme?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We allowed that. We were expecting 6,000. We got 250,000. And who was monitoring? It's not clear. So even I, as a minister in the government, found this shocking. Like, who was looking at this? So I gave a speech about two weeks ago where I apologized effectively for what had happened and said, this should never have happened. It happened on our watch.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We've got to explain to the public that we will never let this happen again. We've got to fix immigration. It is too high. And it is not working for the people who are in the country or even for the new migrants.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, remember, a lot of that migration would have been within the European Union. So we have free movement. So we couldn't control it for a very long time. But a lot of the new migration has been because even as you're trying to control the numbers. The health workers, you know, the health service says we need more doctors and nurses. The agricultural sector says we need more seasonal workers.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The big fundamental problem is that a lot of people are not going to work. A lot of Brits are not going to work and we need to get them to work. And we now have this absurd situation where migrants come in and then they stop working too because there's a benefit system. So we've got to change the incentives. We've got to change the incentives.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Something else has happened. I remember 20 years ago, conservatives were campaigning very, very visibly on immigration, saying it's not racist to talk about immigration, and we were losing. So a lot of people believe that, well, people don't like us talking about this, so let's just not talk about it. But actually, as we stopped talking about it, the problem was getting worse.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And one of the things that I'm determined to do is ensure that we talk about what is happening in our country. And it is a lot easier for me to say it than many other people. Because of your identity. Because of my identity.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And as much as I hate identity politics, I know that I can go out and say some things and challenge the people who would try and pretend that I was a racist or whatever, just more effectively. And that is helpful. It's not the reason why I am the leader, but it is helpful. And, you know, I have some crazy, really, really crazy attacks. She's the face of white supremacy. You really look like it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yeah, yeah. I know. There are some people who they don't even know how to respond when something different happens. Sometimes it's jealousy or they can't explain why you are not following the templates which you've been told to follow, that this is what you do. You're a black woman, you should be going to the black woman's room and doing black women's groups and things like that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Why are you not doing that? And the two sides that do this are black people on the left and white racists. Those two, they're both, both sides of the same coin. The black racists and the white racists both do the same thing of this is not where you're supposed to be. Yes, they both want separatism and you've got to fight it, whatever the person who's advocating for looks like.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And one of the ways that liberalism has been hacked is that you get people who should not be advocating for segregation being the ones pushing for it. oh, we need our own spaces. We need to preserve, you know, all this sort of segregationist nonsense.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Exactly. That's what I say, that a lot of bad ideas were the cloak of the civil rights movement. And many people don't want to challenge them. We've seen race relations exploited in this way. We've seen, you know, all of the wins that gay people have had.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

being exploited by those who want to do all sorts of actually what I would call very, very predatory behavior, exploiting children, and they're using gay people as a cover. It's awful. And we need to make sure that we go back to a point where people can see what is real and what isn't real. And that requires a lot more free speech and a lot more proper conversations.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So I think that people have... degraded a lot of what we call Western culture into it's just food and what you wear. Culture is a lot more than food and drink and clothes. It's norms, it's customs, it's behavior, it's tradition, it's what you hand down to your children, you know, expectations of behavior. And

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

You will often find people saying that there's not really anything like British culture or American culture. We've just absorbed things from all sorts of other places. So there's nothing wrong with us absorbing more. This is nonsense. If you don't defend your culture, it will disappear. And when people come to a country, they should want to be a part of that country. We are not a hotel.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We are not a dormitory just for some people who want to make money and go off. This is our home and we need to look after it. And that means making sure that the people who come to the country are compatible with those beliefs and at the very least do not damage that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I think that means getting more migration from places that are more like-minded, one, but two, making sure that those people who do come to the country, this is far more important, understand that these are the terms that they accept when they want to move to the UK. It's not about bringing the culture from the other place and turning the UK into the place you just come from.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

If I wanted to be in Nigeria, I would have moved back to Nigeria. I don't want to recreate Nigeria in the UK. And I think that there are many people who come from countries where they want to recreate what they are familiar with in the UK. That is bad for social cohesion and it is bad for society. the very things that made Britain what it is.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

All of those things which I call, I know you use liberal differently in the US, those things that I call liberal values, you know, free speech, equality under the law. People don't understand how special this stuff is. Freedom, that being treated the same no matter who you are, whether you're the poorest person or the richest person.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The presumption of innocence, something that's thrown away with cancel culture, got to fight these things. And I know what it is like to live in a place that doesn't have these things. So it's very, very precious. And I will die to protect those things. And I don't want the UK being turned into the sort of place that everybody else is running from. Somebody has to defend it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, one of the things I've said is that what we tried previously didn't work. So we got to have a new policy platform. One of the things that we never quite finished was the third country deterrence, which was sending people who were claiming asylum, but really were economic migrants to a different country for processing. And that was supposed to be Rwanda.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But a lot of the things that Nigel Farage has talked about are just wishes. So sending people to France, for example, We've had deals with France. We've tried to do that. France doesn't want these people either. So simply saying we'll send them to France doesn't make any sense. And what I say about him is that he can see the problems that we can see. So his diagnosis of many things is not wrong.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

but he has never tried to actually fix things so he doesn't understand the system and there's an assumption that all you other people who are in government you just didn't want to do it and so when we come in everything will be fine and what i say is we know why these things didn't work we had different arguments we had disagreements and my side didn't necessarily win those arguments now i'm in charge we can start doing things so for example the intimidation that you talked about this was something that i thought was a moral outrage

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I talked about it in my speech in Washington, that you take a liberal value like the right to protest. It's very special. And then you have people saying, oh, we're just protesting. We're just protesting. But actually what they are doing is intimidating Jews. If you're just protesting, why are you ripping down posters of missing children. How could you do that?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

If all you were talking about was other people's freedoms, you would not want to remove the freedoms of those who want to talk about their families. You know, just last week, I was speaking to the mother of a hostage, Emily Damari's mother, Mandy. It's unbelievable what people are going through. What kind of human being are you to rip down

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

a poster of a missing child, of missing mothers and children. And it's very obvious to me what is happening. It doesn't mean that everybody on the protest feels that way, but it's quite clear that many people used those protests as a cover for anti-Semitism. It was very clear. And that should never happen. Why did we allow it to happen is a more interesting question.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I remember the discussions we were having at the time. And there were certainly two schools of thought. My view was that we needed to show some moral courage. The prime minister needed to come out and say this was not acceptable in October, really. Those protests started even before Israel had invaded Gaza.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And there's another school of thought, which I call laissez-faire, which is that, well, you shouldn't do anything because if you do that, you're stopping other people's freedoms. And actually, you know, you can't interrupt the police, let the police out.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

carry out their policing and you know we just tell them what we want but the police themselves are often confused because if they're heavy-handed they get labeled as racist and then if they're not heavy-handed then you know people think that they are it's two-tier policing we need leaders we need political leaders who can say this is what's right this is what's wrong this is unacceptable but they got to the point where there were so many people because it wasn't nipped in the bud it then in my view became out of control you need to take back some of that control

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So this is why I used the phrase moral courage, that we need to have some courage. There is a lot of fear. I think that a lot of the fear is unfounded, but there's also a sort of lack of knowledge and ignorance about how to talk about these issues. So I will often get asked, usually by mischief-making journalists, I should say, oh, this is just Muslims. Why aren't you just saying the word Muslim?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And what I tell them is that this isn't about Islam. It is about a virulent strain of Islamism. And I recognize it because I saw it in northern Nigeria. So for me, the October 7th was actually a reminder of what had happened 10 years ago in Nigeria, where 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped. And I spent one year in a school like that, like a state boarding school. They're horrible. They're like prison.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And you just want to get out. And I can just imagine being a child and some men just scoop you all away and most of you don't come back. It's absolutely horrific. This thing is not just about Israel and Palestine or Israel and Gaza. This virulent strain is hurting people across the world, including many Muslims. They are the ones who are most in danger.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So I talk about Islamism, like this political version of Islam, rather than people who are living their religion peacefully and minding their business. But I also, and I have this conversation with someone who was disagreeing with me and saying, if you believe in protests, you should be allowed to. And I said, what we have in this country is very special.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Where are the protests about Gaza in Saudi Arabia or the UAE? Because they are very muscular about what they believe people can and cannot do. they are able to control that. People there feel the same way, but they're not protesting. And yes, some of it is about not having that right. But it's also, it's about keeping certain views out of the mainstream.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We need to have our own version of what I call muscular liberalism, where we say these sorts of behaviors are unacceptable. And if you carry them out, you will be punished. And the big question that my speech was trying to answer is how does a creed like liberalism, which is about accepting and tolerating, how does it deal with accepting and tolerating things that want to destroy it?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

If you say, yes, of course, we're going to accept and we're going to tolerate, and something says, okay, fine, I want to destroy it. But it can't be tolerant of intolerance. Exactly. And too many people just stop at the accept everything, tolerate everything. They don't know how to defend their values. And that's what I want the Conservative Party to start doing. We can't just be managers.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We have got to start championing and defending those people who can't speak for themselves, those who are vulnerable. The conversation cannot just be about the economic. The social and the cultural are linked with the economic, that you can't split them. If you have behaviors like that, it is going to affect your economy. It's going to affect what is being taught in schools.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It's going to affect people's attitudes to work. It's going to affect so much. So you've got to look at it across the board. And that is what I am changing with my party. It's not going to happen overnight. So I get lots of criticism of you haven't changed anything. It's, you know, it's been four weeks. I think I have four and a half years to do this, maybe a bit less. But there is a plan.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But you have to do things systematically and properly. I'm a systems analyst. I don't rush into things. And I think this is the biggest challenge for people. Having an engineer and a systems analyst in charge rather than a politician or a lawyer who just talks, talks, talks. I'm not somebody who starts with the rhetoric.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It's going to require a lot of changes. In my view, it's going to need a change of government. It's going to need a change in the way that we police. And people will say, oh, but we just have the conservatives and conservatives didn't do this or that. But there are different types of conservatism. This is a new type. And it's something that's going to be a lot more muscular.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And we need to start showing that if you behave this way, there will be consequences. And this is where the argument about two-tier policing comes from, where people think that some people are allowed to get away with bad behavior or some groups are allowed to get away with bad behavior. It seems that way. And other groups aren't. It is a confusion that has come from...

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The interpretations of the Equality Act, where people believe that there are protected groups. There are no protected groups in the Act. There are protected characteristics. Misapplication of the law and abuse by those who deliberately misinterpret it is part of the problem. So the police think that there are protected groups. There are not.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Everybody is protected on the basis of those characteristics. And that's one of the things that I want us to start looking at. Do we need to change these laws or do we just need to... find a way to make sure that we remove some of the levers and the mechanisms that are allowing these differences in terms of the experience of policing.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

What that is, and I know Alison is actually my constituent. I am her member of parliament. Oh, wow. So this was my local police force. And I know exactly how this happens. It is to do, I'm afraid, with the difference in behavior between the left and the right. So what happens in Alison's situation is that some vexatious lefty rings up the police and says, this person has done something.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It's affecting me. and you need to go and do something about it. So you have people... Acting like Stasi. Yeah, yeah, acting like Stasi. And that doesn't really happen on the right. So if you are on the right, you will be a victim of this. It's like with the doxing and so on. There are orchestrated attempts by all sorts of different groups to try and get prominent people who are on the right.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But when it's like the Oxford Union situation, that's much more complicated for the police to deal with. It's a university environment. We're not so sure what's happened. Right. Not everybody is complaining. There might be some intimidation. We'll protect those people, but we're not going to arrest everybody because, well, it's students that's protesting.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So there is confusion about how to deal with it. But the issue with what happened to Alison is that old laws are being reinterpreted to do new things. Words, the meaning of words are changing. So the law that allowed a police officer to go to her house comes from, I think, 1999. It's very old. And it was about, there was a race report where the report came out about the Stephen Lawrence case.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It was called the McPherson Report. And it was a way of trying to capture situations where it's not a crime, but it's probably something that's likely to lead... It has a very Orwellian name. Yes, yes. Non-hate crime incident. And it was a way of capturing, I think it was to build a picture so that if a crime was committed, you would have evidence pre the crime that something was going on.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

That there was intentionality. Yeah, exactly. It is now being used as a way of just intimidating people. Because in 1999, people weren't ringing up the police to say someone's done something that's hurt my feelings. There wasn't any social media that allowed people living hundreds of miles away to ring the police and ask that you be arrested.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So it is the combination of old laws and no updates to how we respond to them. Social media, the internet, everybody living in a more polarized society and all of these things are just thrown into a pot and it's explosive. So if you pick at them one by one, it's very hard.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, we don't want to get rid of these incidents reporting because we've had them for 25 years and they were helpful in these cases. But you look at how they are being exploited. Liberalism has been hacked. You have something that was good and was fine, but it only works if everybody polices the boundaries and uses them appropriately. If you allow people to exploit liberalism,

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

these rules and these laws to exploit liberal values, you will get these insane things happening. And that's one of the things that I want my party to take some time to think about. How do we stop people from abusing our system? How do we stop people from taking advantage of the freedoms that we have to use them to try and destroy us? Do you trust the British police? I do.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Remember, my experience with the police in Nigeria was very negative. And coming to the UK, my first experience with the police was very positive. You know, the police in Nigeria would rob us. So when people say, oh, I had this bad experience with the police because I'm black and they're white, I was like, well, you know, I remember the police stole my brother's shoes and his watch. His shoes?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yeah, they took his shoes and his watch. It's a very poor country. So people do all sorts of things. And giving people a gun is just a license to intimidate. But that's not the bar we should use for British police. Obviously, it should be much higher. But my experience was so positive when I was burgled, for example. The police were there, very helpful. They eventually caught the person.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

This is 2004. So 20 years ago, the police did catch criminals. And now we've given them too much to do, in my view. So the police are the first line of defense for everything. And I think that that burden makes it a lot harder for them to actually do the basics. And that's another thing that we need to look at.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It is so important. And, you know, one of the reasons why I don't like the term woke is because I think it disguises just how bad this stuff is. This is civilization ending philosophy. where really bad ideas are being smuggled in under the guise of civil rights and so on. But also with something like, you know, the attacks of being a race traitor. Those don't bother me.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I grew up in a place where everybody looked like me. And I don't need people who have only had the minority experience.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

to tell me what it means to be black a lot of the things that we use to define people are awful stereotypes you know so they take a very distorted view of what black is black is you listen to this type of music you dress in this way you study these courses you have these political views and we have created what a black person is and if you don't fit into that box It doesn't, you're not real.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

This is destroying the identities of hundreds of millions of people who have different ethnicities. They're all black, different cultures, different languages, and just throwing all of that away to create this really bland stereotype. The same thing with Islam and Islamic countries. There's so many different groups.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And then all of that is thrown away for this identikit, sort of Islamic identity of you are pro-Palestine, you are anti-Israel, you will only eat halal, this is how you dress, and you don't like the way Western people behave. We must stop putting people in these boxes. Critical race theory is an enabler of putting people into boxes.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We did so much to get rid of stereotypes, and now the stereotypes are coming back, except now they're coming back as a norm to be enforced rather than something to be laughed at. And it matters because if you are a black child in a school and people tell you that this is how to be black, you know, why are you wearing glasses? You're being a SWAT. You're being a nerd.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

That's not what you should be doing. We start taking away opportunity and options away from young people. They feel that they have to conform. and not conform to a high standard, which is how things used to be, but conforming to a low standard. This is life destroying. So I hate critical race theory.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I remember I had a very interesting experience with this woman called Kimberly Crenshaw, who apparently is the queen of this stuff. I had no idea who she was. It was 2018.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I had no idea. I was speaking at a festival in 2018. And I just talked about me. And I could tell she'd never met anyone like me before.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yeah, we were on the panel and she couldn't out black me. I was like, look, I come from like the place where all the black people come from. This is not what we're like. People have different political views. They have different identities. And she was trying to squeeze people into this sort of minority identity. And I kept challenging her. And at the end of it,

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

At the end of the panel, she came over to me and told me that I was disrespectful. And I said, why am I disrespectful? She said, you haven't you haven't read my books and you shouldn't talk about these things until you've read my books. What a load of nonsense. You know, you can write a book about astrology. Doesn't mean the horoscopes are real.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Like just this writing rubbish and thinking that because you've written a book, it's it's fine. And I was very pleased that I took such a hard line. at the time, because I think maybe if I'd known who she was, I might have been in a different mindset and thought, oh, well, you know, let me give her some space. But I didn't. And I was just very honest. And she got a lot of facts wrong as well.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Loads and loads of terrible facts. So I am an enemy of critical race theory. It is not real equality. It is not even promoting the well-being of minorities. It is a way for the left to exploit minorities in order to do the thing they always want to do, which is the same socialism, Marxism, fighting the right. And it kills people. It destroys lives.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Thank you, Barry. It's lovely to be here.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yeah, it is. It's just identity politics. You know, we can give it all these fancy names, but it is just identity politics. And human beings will always form tribes. So society and the leadership, the political leadership, has to work hard to make sure that the tribe is the nation, not all these different groups. What word should we use instead of woke? I don't know. My word isn't catchy.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

What is it? I thought progressive authoritarianism. It hasn't caught on. It has not caught on. I've done my best. It's just not snappy enough. Woke is very snappy.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I say this as somebody who is both black and a woman. We all have multiple identities. I think that being a woman is so fundamental to who we are. The biology is so important to being a woman. It's so fundamental. And people don't think very hard about how biology impacts life. But the vulnerabilities that we have as women are very, very closely linked to our biology.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

We're not as physically strong as men. We have all these experiences, whether it's menstruation or, you know, pregnancy. All of those things have an impact on how we live our lives. And that is reality. And for people to then say that you can just self-define as a woman, for me, just has no basis whatsoever in reality.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

When I call myself a feminist, it is about equality, that I think women should be able to do the same things that men can do. It was about having equal agency, equal power. It was not an academic form of feminism. it was very much a lived experience form of feminism. I saw what my grandmother had to deal with, how she was treated.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And, you know, you look at what women historically had to deal with, not being able to own your own property, things being owned by your father or your husband. I thought, you know, I don't want any of that. Thank goodness I wasn't born in that era. But I always want the equality. And I think one of the issues is that feminism became too academic.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And then it started going down these rabbit holes where, well, being a woman is a social construct. Like, well, no, it isn't. It's real. It's biology. There are expectations and the stereotypes and so on. Those are social constructs. But being a woman... There is a shared relationship that you will have with every single woman across the planet.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And it will be the same for men, too, within that biological aspect. And we shouldn't throw that away. But the thing that drove me crazy was seeing how the lives of young, sometimes very young, gay, autistic children were being destroyed on the altar of trans activism. which was then in conflict with feminism. And a lot of women who call themselves feminists, in my view, were on the wrong side.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I thought, you don't understand what it is you're fighting for, that you are letting go of reality and somebody needs to take a stand. And meeting children and young people who've been effectively sterilized, I think it's horrific. How can people just allow that to happen and say it's just a self-defining thing? So I'm very, very much against that. Do you think that war has been won?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I think a lot of battles have been won. I don't think these wars are ever won. I think that the price of victory is eternal vigilance. And I'm very pleased, actually, at how far we've got, because I don't have to talk about it as much as I used to. And I didn't even talk about it that much. But when I did, I made sure that the interventions were very clear and very strong.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And they were always to give cover for those people who couldn't speak for themselves.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So I actually think that the issue has come up because people don't know how to fix the stuff that's really impacting people's lives. And so they want to look at things that you can just fix with regulation. You bring a law in and it's fine. You can't just bring a law in and fix debt or fix productivity. You can't fix a birth rate with a law.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So legislators start looking for things that they can fix. And this is one of those campaigns that legislation can sort. Personally, I am not against the idea of assisted suicide. In fact, I've been very much for it because of experiences I saw in my family. But I voted against it because I don't think we're ready for it. I think we need to look at what's happened in Canada. It's being rushed.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It's all moving very quickly. And what I saw as a minister was a system that was broken, a system that was failing. And in the same way that I keep saying that liberalism is being hacked, This is another thing that could end up being hacked. How do we make sure that we do it the right way? And it is in Canada. Yes, exactly. And the rush was what made me vote against it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I just thought, no, these guys don't know what they're doing. They're going to take something that's very sensitive, which we should try and figure out, and they're going to mess it up. And I don't want to be a part of that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, we do have a constitution. It is just uncodified. Right. And it is in our common law. We have these freedoms. We still do. What is happening is that we are increasing the scale of regulation that is limiting freedoms that are already there. The British common law system is amazing.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And it's about freedom unless it is explicitly said that you cannot do those things, which is very different from the Napoleonic system. We just need to rediscover these things. And that's why I talk about culture, that you need to understand your culture. You need to understand where these freedoms, these ideas, these institutions came from.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So it certainly shaped my character, but my family shaped my character a lot more. I was born into a relatively wealthy family and I was born in January 1980. This is just as the oil boom is taking off in the country in the 70s. Everybody's got lots of money and my family is doing well, partly because of that. And

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

If you just believe that it's all the fruit of exploitation and it's just what bad people did and it's not real, we will lose all these things.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, I wouldn't call it a total change. I think that this is definite progress. But you can't assume all the battles have been won. You need a plan. You need to make sure that you're defending the turf that you have just or the ground that you have just gained. But I think Neil's use of the phrase vibe shift is more accurate. And that even just a shift in vibe can change things.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So it's not to be neglected. And You know, yesterday at dinner with JD, it was it was it was really fun. You know, we were there for for a few hours. And we were basically talking about the millennial experience. So I'm 1980. So I'm the end of Gen X and the beginning of millennials. And this is our time.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, I used to call myself Generation Y because I didn't know I was born in the 80s, but I didn't know which group I was in. And we are in charge now, like all over the world, people in their 40s are doing things. And I think it's taken people of our generation a long time to just accept that we are adults.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And that's something that I think is causing a lot of the infantilization of our societies and the lack of will and that moral courage to defend what is right. It's not our job. Where are our parents? They should do this. It must be somebody else's job. But it isn't. It's our job. So we had very interesting conversations about that.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

what the future of conservatism will look like for our generation. You know, it's no longer Thatcher, Reagan, and all of that. The Bush era is over. And the Trump era, or Trump Mark II era, is this the beginning of a new thing? What could that look like? And just how life has changed so much for us. You know, we talked a lot about the media. And, you know, during the... Your love of it, obviously.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yes. Yeah. Well, I find it so I actually I do love media. I worked in media. I used to work for The Spectator. What I don't like is lies and inaccuracy. And I don't like people creating fake news, which is a real thing. Every day I read something like that is not true. I know it is not true. But anonymous sources and so on will tell a journalist, oh, this thing that never happened, happened.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And people start believing lies. And that's what I hate. But what was interesting was we both had the same experience. So he had been messaging me in my leadership contest and vice versa. And we both had this experience.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

At a dinner in London about 18 months ago. So Usha was there. And it was one of these sort of dinners. Here's some interesting people and we'll put them together around a table. And I told him about the experience I had where everyone... in the press kept writing about how I had lost and I couldn't win and I'm so weird.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And her opponents are seizing the initiative and they're definitely going to win and look how great they are. And it just wasn't true. And I knew it wasn't true, but my friends would say, what's happening? Why aren't you doing well? And I would tell them, don't worry, it's fine. And of course he had the exact same experience.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And he talked a lot about how they were fairly confident of what their polling was saying. and just ignored what the media was saying about Kamala Harris and what was happening. And it's about understanding what is reality now. How do you know what an authoritative source is when everyone is trying to make the news rather than report the news? That's the new thing in our age.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

No, no. But he was a doctor who had lots of oil company patients. And he worked for them to some extent as well. They would send their patients to him. So he didn't work for the companies, but he treated them and got paid very well. And my grandmother, who... grew up never learning how to read or write, was poor. She made a lot of money from trading.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

A lot of media doesn't want to observe and report. It wants to influence. It wants to be on the pitch rather than reporting.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Not so much. I think probably the way I express it is different. But just going back to that theme of how... you know, liberalism has been hacked. I started my career as a secretary of state in trade, saying that we must not be knowingly naive. We have adopted this naive behavior of, well, we'll do this thing. And of course, other countries will follow us and everything will be fine.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And that doesn't happen.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yes, exactly. And that is not saying that our values are wrong. It's that you have to recognize that not everybody shares those values. So you can't use your values outside that system. It doesn't make sense. If you try and use free speech in a way where people will abuse that to defame other people, provide lots of misinformation and disinformation, then it doesn't work in the same way.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So you've got to have a way of managing that. So TikTok, for example, I don't use because I'm very worried about, you know, having Chinese spyware on your phone. Yes, exactly. Very worried about that. But also, if you allow other foreign actors to have free speech in your country, and they start saying things about your country that aren't true, you just say, hey, it's free speech. It's fine.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

That doesn't work. You are allowing people to hack your system. This is the same with things like free markets. It's only a free market if everybody is playing by the rules. It's not I will do free markets and everybody else can do what they like. That is how globalization, in my view, went wrong.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So the reason why, you know, there's more protectionism is because we did not defend those values and apply them in a way that was very sensible. We've got to rethink that. And COVID showed us what happens when these things go wrong. So I think I express these things differently. Do I think that, you know, tariffs are helpful? Mostly no.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But they are useful and should be used appropriately in order to defend your economy and order to make sure that other people do not abuse your system. And the World Trade Organization gives levers for that. You know, if there is dumping taking place, you know, you have anti-dumping measures, anti-subsidization measures. So it's just about using the tools effectively and not being naive.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So she was my initial inspiration, this woman who could never read or write, but she made so much money, she sent some of her children to the US to study, paid all the fees, not my dad, but others. And they're still here. I still have family here because of what she did back in the 60s.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, I think it is both the US's and the EU's Rome, or Greece, I should say, or Greece to everybody's Rome. I think that the role that we have in the world is one where we are connected to so many places, either from the Commonwealth, the legacy of empire, the Anglosphere. It's not just us, it's Canada, it's Australia. And, you know, it's even places like Nigeria and Kenya.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

There is a lot that we know. We have a lot of links around the world. We have a lot of knowledge and we should use that power, whether it's soft power or hard power, in the interests of our values and making sure that the world does not become a place that is dominated by axes of countries that are actually trying to destroy so much about what is good.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It is very clear that there is an axis of authoritarian states that are collaborating against the West. You see it with the North Koreans in Russia. You see it with China and Iran. There is collusion taking place. We know this. And yet we, at this point, have just lost our confidence.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I think that the UK has an important role to play in bringing back so much of that moral courage and confidence that the West needs.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

No, I haven't, although I am a big fan of his. I thought X got better. I still call it Twitter, to be honest. I thought it got better in many ways after he took over. It got worse in a lot of ways, but I think overall it is better. And he, you know, community notes. It's an amazing invention. It just made so many things. So I think he brought lots of innovation and I'm a big fan of his.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But what he is doing with Doge is actually something I've been talking about for a long time. And I call it the rise of the bureaucratic class. This is my productivity thesis. If you look at the middle class in the UK 30, 40, 50 years ago, it was people who made things, people who drew things, people who built things as farmers. It's builders, small businessmen made good.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But what really shaped me was watching the decline of the family wealth because of terrible economic policies that the country was having. And I tell people that it was socialism and they say, oh, it wasn't socialism. It was just a military dictatorship. And this is one of the things which I referenced in the speech that I gave in Washington a couple of days ago.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

You can see the productivity. You can see what they are doing that is actually adding value to society. The middle class now has changed. It has become a lot more bureaucratic. And we are producing more and more people from universities who are going into a bureaucratic job rather than a genuine producing job where you're adding value.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And that, I think, is why the growth is reducing at the same time as we're facing increased competition from other countries that are not spending a lot of time on bureaucracy. The EU is the classic of this genre. It's all about pumping out regulation. So I remember... meeting a guy just after COVID who owned a string of hotels. And I said, business must have been really bad. How have you coped?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And he said, Kemi, believe it or not, I have never made so much money in my life. And I said, how? And he said, because my hotels are full of asylum seekers. That is not real productivity. That is living off government. Yes, it's private sector, but it's government work. When I did a whole bunch of scrapping of corporate regulations, do you know who complained? KPMG.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Because they were going to make money from advising on those things. And that, in my view, is not creating productivity. I left banking. People say, why did you leave banking? You know, you were making money. But I left it because I wasn't doing engineering anymore. I was no longer a systems analyst. I was doing compliance because that's where the money was. Lots of banking regulation coming in.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I just thought, I'm a bureaucrat. This is not what I want to do. And I left. And that is what I think Elon and Vivek are going to try and change in Washington. They're going to try and shrink the size of the state, shrink all of the waste, a lot of the inefficiency. And when that happens, many more people will go out into productive areas. It'll help people getting back to work.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I think that an element of that is needed across the West, in Europe definitely, but I would like to see that happen in the UK.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yes. How do we address that? There is an economic and a cultural malaise. And I think... Once upon a time, that hole was filled with religion and a belief in God. I'm not a religious person, but I do understand it. And when I look at the way things are going wrong, you can see that it's about people looking for that meaning. And, you know, J.D.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

made a joke yesterday when we were talking about this, you know, in an adjacent way. He said that, you know, people are Calvinists, but they're not believing anymore. They're looking for something to feel guilty about. And so they go, you know, that's where the wokeism... comes from, that how can we make ourselves feel guilty and self-flagellate.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And, you know, that festival that I was talking about where I met Kimberlé Crenshaw. Yes. There were some girls in the audience who I spoke to afterwards and they were all sort of, you know, very left wing and they didn't like what I had to say. And the more I spoke to them and we, you know, we were having arguments, very friendly arguments, the more I realized that they were not left wing.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The people keep saying, oh, it's not socialism because it doesn't call itself that. But it is. It was the government owning everything, deciding which businesses would run and which ones wouldn't run by decree. It was the government choosing which school you would go to for secondary school. I wasn't able to pick the school. The government decided you will go to this school.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I said, why are you saying all these things? You're not left wing, you don't believe this. And one of them said to me, because I want to feel like I'm a part of something special.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Yeah, but I had been sort of probing and pushing. I don't even think she realized what she was saying when she said it. And I realized also, as she said it, that this is one of the failures of the right. That we don't give people, certainly in the UK, it might be different here, We don't talk about that meaning anymore. We just talk about the managerialism.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And yes, we'll get you some more doctors and we'll try and reduce your taxes. My whole campaign was about principles. It was about what are the things that we believe in. Let's put the policy aside for a second. Where are we starting from? It's family and how important family is. You know, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but without family, so many of us are lost. It's freedom.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It's equality under the law. It's citizenship, real citizenship, not just I have a passport and I can travel with it. It's about caring about a place, about the people who are there, your community. You want everybody to succeed. That's what it is.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And we've got to start from there rather than just throwing out lots of different policies on welfare and so on, because people don't understand what you're about. And if they don't get what you're about... They think you have no meaning and they will vote you out. And that's what happened to my party.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

No, but I think I have no choice here.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Very strong, builder's tea, lots of sugar. How much sugar? I don't know. There's been this whole debate about how much sugar I have. It can be anything from nothing to six. It depends on how I'm feeling that day. Coke, Diet Coke or Coke Zero? Always Coke Zero.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

You would see probably quite a lot of stuff my kids listen to, like the Zombies soundtrack. So Someday plays a lot on my rap. Taylor Swift, there's lots of different Swifty songs there. Sabrina Carpenter.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And then lots of R&B. What's your favorite R&B song? My favorite R&B song is 112's Only You.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

The last show I binged. How have I forgotten the name of it? Slow Horses, yes. Oh, Slow Horses. Yes, yes. Drink of choice. Prosecco, if I'm at a party, otherwise Coke Zero.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Oh, I haven't made New Year's resolutions for about 20 years, which is great. My last New Year's resolution was not to have any more, and I've kept it so well. Do you believe in God? Not anymore. But I am not an atheist. I am agnostic. I used to believe very much, but now I describe myself as a cultural Christian.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

I don't think it matters so much. It matters what they do with the belief or the lack of belief.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And sometimes they send people thousands of miles away. And one day, for example, the water just stopped running. And it was just a state run water company just couldn't cope. And we ended up having to dig a borehole and get our own water. But for a long period, I had to go out fetch water. So I tell people that I know what it is like to be wealthy and also to not have any money to be poor.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Always breakfast and a bacon and egg McMuffin.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Not all the time, but she's a hero or heroine of mine. So it's very flattering, but it's also quite heavy. And she's a different person. I admire her, but I want people to recognize that I'm not a pastiche of this person, that I am my own person. And Having your narrative written for you is one of the most challenging things about being a politician. No one ever knows you.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

You know, you have unauthorized biographies. You have all these articles from people trying to paint a picture of who you are. But it's never a mirror reflection. It's always a vague image. They can see parallels because she was a chemist. She studied law. I studied law as well after the engineering. And, you know, she came in at a difficult time and so on. She was, you know, very robust.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And I think that those things, those comparisons I like. But I have a totally different problem to fix. She didn't have to fix the party in the way that I have to fix my party. And that's going to be quite tough.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

By the time I moved to the UK in 1996, there was virtually nothing left, hyperinflation and so on. And my dad gave me the equivalent of what was his last hundred pounds and said, you know, good luck, because I really wanted to come back to the UK and I had a British passport. So all of those experiences have shaped my view of the world that even if you're wealthy, things can disappear.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And you have to work very hard to maintain not just your family, but also your country. Otherwise, it'll degrade. Things aren't always going to be the way they are. You've got to make sure that you culture and cultivate what is good about your society or you will lose it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

My family was not very political. You know, if you're growing up or if you're living, I should say, in a military dictatorship, there's no politics. It's just it's soldiers. So it doesn't really, you know, it doesn't really come into it. And there wasn't a very vibrant sort of academic spirit. atmosphere in certain places where you would debate Marxism or socialism.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

My parents were academics, but they were scientists. My parents were doctors. And my mother taught at university. I never saw that sort of thing. So the politics was very social and cultural. This is how you behave. This is what's normal. This is what you're expected to do. And it was very much about standards and excellence, because it's a very competitive country.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

There are only so many university places You have to do well or you will fail. And you look out the window and there are loads of examples of people who either failed or never had a chance in the first place. So the risk is very clear to you. There's no social security. There's no benefit system. There's no safety net. Safety net is only family.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So people have lots of children because that's what looks after you when you get old. And that makes a difference. On Margaret Thatcher, everybody knew. who she was, you know, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Jackson, just a handful of icons that transcended. And she was one of them. I don't know what my parents thought of her beyond the fact that everybody called her the Iron Lady.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But I do remember when I was at school, and you know, this is still a very patriarchal society and not not in the

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

funny way that people in the West talk about the patriarchy, you know, I'm talking about proper, actual, like the real, yeah, the real, the real way, you know, men marrying lots of wives, girls not being allowed to go to school, like real, real patriarchy, not someone, you know, didn't open a door for me or did open a door and I didn't like it.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And you'd have boys make very derogatory comments about girls. And this was still in a relatively, you know, sort of well-educated, progressive, relatively progressive sort of environment. They say, women's place is in the kitchen. And girls shouldn't, why are you bothering doing this? You know, you're only going to get married and have children.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And you would just say two words to them, Margaret Thatcher, and it just shut them up. She was the most powerful woman in the world. Certainly she felt like the most powerful person in the world for a long time. And everyone knew who she was.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

But I did have somewhere to stay. So my mother had a friend who I was going to stay with. So it wasn't like they gave me money and then I stayed in a homeless shelter. I had a roof over my head, but I had to look after myself. And so I had to get a job. And that was at McDonald's. And did you do the fries like Kamala Harris did?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

You know, I had to do everything. But I hated being, we used to call it on the grill in those days. I hated being, it was just boring. I liked talking to people. So I liked to be on the till. You were either on the till or on the grill. I don't know if they still say that now. This is nearly 30 years ago. But you had to do everything there. You had to clean toilets, mop the floors.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

There were no special cleaners coming in. But a lot of people, and this has been very interesting for me, a lot of people in the U.K., think that it was like a summer job or something I was doing at weekends. That was my job. And then I went to a part-time college to do my A-levels, this sort of between age 16 and 18.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And that was also a very formative experience for me because I had done SATs when I was 16 and I had such good scores. that I got all these scholarship offers. And I got a part scholarship from Stanford when I was in Nigeria to go pre-med. At 16? Yes, at 16. And my dad said, well, we can't afford the rest of the fees, so you can't go.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

When really what should have happened was I should have kept going till I was 18 and I'd probably have gotten the full thing. And going to the UK and starting at this college, It was a completely different experience. I call it the poverty, the soft bigotry of low expectations, the poverty of ambition. Why do you want to study medicine? You can do this other thing instead.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And so because they didn't care about grades, I stopped caring about grades when I'd been a straight-A student. And I realize now just how tough it is for so many people who may not have families that push them And then they go to a school where no one is pushing them to fulfill their potential. And it's so unfair.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And that's one of the things that got me on that journey to becoming a conservative.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

Well, I joined the party because because I thought it would be a fun thing to do. So I had finished university. A lot of my friends had just dispersed all over the country, in fact, all over the world. And I thought, well, If I join, I might meet some new people who are very like-minded. So I was already a conservative before joining the party. But how did I become a conservative?

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

It was those experiences at school, comparing them to the experiences I had growing up, and also just the rise of identity politics I'd seen then. And I knew that this was not a good thing. I grew up in a very multicultural society. But everybody looked the same. Everybody looked the same. And yet there are 300 different languages. There are all sorts of different customs and norms.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And it's very hard for people to get along. And when I heard people say, oh, this bad thing happened to me because I'm black or because I'm brown. No, it's not. It's just it's just a bad person. Not everything is. is about race. I'm a very colorblind person.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And the Labour Party, in my view, was quite race-obsessed and was quite keen on labeling lots of other people in a way that I thought was unfair. And I thought, I don't like this identity politics business. We need to find ways to bring people together not to tear them apart.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And if you don't have a dominant culture that brings everyone together where there's a lot of diversity, I think you run into problems because it just becomes different groups competing over resources. And that's very dangerous if you want to have a cohesive society.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

So Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which was... I can't, I think I just, it was a recommendation. I thought it was quite hard work, but it did.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

No, no, no, it definitely wasn't a beetroot, but it did convince me. that the planned economy didn't work because I could see it. I also, you know, I have a control operating environment in Nigeria where I can see that people did try that and it didn't work. So yeah, this guy's onto something. But the biggest, biggest influence was Thomas Sowell and basic economics.

Honestly with Bari Weiss

Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher?

And that was a very, very random choice. I can't remember. There was something, there's a discussion in work and I thought, oh, I don't really know that much about economics. I studied engineering and I just Googled basic economics. It came up on Amazon and I read it and it was like my whole world changed. I thought, who is this guy?

Pod Save the UK

Dear Donald: Can Starmer Tame Trump? w/ Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Ed Davey

So I welcome his announcement on repurposing money from the overseas development budget. That is absolutely right. And I look forward to him taking up my other suggestion of looking at what we can do on welfare. He will know that we had a fully funded plan and we urge him to take it up. Having said that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

My dad used to talk about a law of homogeneity, and he said, people find their kind of people and they stick together. And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Yes, it is more important than just pure money because it means that you can be thrown into any sort of circumstance and you are likely to succeed. And I always consider myself so lucky because had I been born into a different family, I might have had a different trajectory. And it's one of the reasons why I think that family is something that is not talked about enough in UK politics.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And maybe we talk about a little bit more childcare for mothers and certain policy elements, but family is the biggest determinant of your success and your life outcomes. And we need to make sure that we have more stable families.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I think we have a statistic here that 95% of the prison population, or certainly in the 90s, the 90% plus of the prison population, the male prison population, grew up without their father.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I don't know. I was a good all-rounder at school. I was very good at maths. I was very good at English. I remember my English was better than my teachers, which they found very frustrating. And I think some of that would have been just the exposure, you know, living in the US, having parents who, you know, bought books. So I read a lot and I was good academically.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

But something different happened when I moved to the UK. I stopped being good academically and I just became pretty average. And I didn't understand why that was happening.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And my friends who left Nigeria at the same time I did and went to the private schools, they've got a lot of money, you know, they had parents far wealthier than mine, certainly by that time, by the mid-90s, whatever relative wealth we had was gone. And these were people who I used to beat easily at school. They were suddenly doing very well.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I realized that not all the schools are the same here, that there are some schools that are very focused, they coach, they train, and there are other schools which people pass through. And it was one of the things that I think was the foundation of my conservatism, that making sure everybody's got an equal chance or the best opportunity. And

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

i realized that yes there would have been a baseline level of you know good academics or you know intelligence with me but actually the things that made the difference were the family that i had the schools that i went to the culture around me all of those things added to however smart i was in maths and english and when you took those things away and when i started hanging out with children who didn't care about those things

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

then my academic results dropped. And it took a while for me to get back on track. And I ended up studying engineering. Sorry? How did you get back on track? So it took a while for me to just figure out what I wanted to do. Engineering was, when I realized I couldn't get into medical school here, very competitive. And the number of places are regulated in the UK.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So there's a limit on how many places that can be. Engineering, on the other hand, is not. And

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

the society that i grew up in had four magic courses there was medicine engineering law and accounting and if you you know that you were almost judged if you didn't do one of those four things so i thought well i can't do medicine i'm you know good at maths i like computers a lot by then i was already coding i'd been coding since i was seven years old my dad got me a zx81 and then a spectrum plus two so all of these things just the exposure to those sorts of things helped me so i went uh

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

onto a course for systems engineering and i just kept reading and i took a year off to work because i needed to save up money for university and i met a lot of kids uh during my apprenticeship i worked as an apprentice engineer i met a lot of other people who were going to oxford and cambridge and they had more of the sort of culture that i had grown up with so hanging out with people

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

who were different in a different setting also had an influence. And then also just knowing that if I didn't get my act together, my life trajectory would end up in a place that I would not like. I'd already had all the values instilled in me by my parents.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So 16, technically still a child, but just old enough to know how to, it's just old enough to remember and not forget what the values that you've been inculcated with, I would say.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It is a great relief. Do you know why it's a great relief? Because you then, you find your people. And my dad used to talk about, when he was alive and when I was younger, he used to talk about a law of homogeneity. And he said, people find their kind of people and you will always get, they find each other and they stick together. And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I thought, these are my people. Like, where have you guys been all my life? People who I agreed with on almost everything, people who thought the way I did about so much. And I think when you are in a place where the people around you think so differently, you feel very isolated.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I think that making sure that young people in particular have a sense of belonging is so critical for mental health. And it is why I hate so much of... You know, whether you call it postmodernism, woke, but so much that tries to detach people from what is right for them and give them this horrible deconstructed nonsense and say, this is what's real. I think it's terrible for mental health.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It's terrible for society.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Yes. So after I finished my university degree, and I did a longer degree, I did a four-year engineering degree rather than a three-year one. Where was that? At the University of Sussex, which is on the south coast of England. And, you know, after university, everybody... disappears. You all go off to different places. You get different jobs, different parts of the country.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I just had this feeling that of unfulfillment. And I thought I made a mistake. Maybe I shouldn't have done engineering. Maybe I should have done something else. And everybody says, you know, I speak very well and I make good arguments. I should have been a lawyer. So I went to, it was really night school.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I went to the University of London, but they have a college called Birkbeck where the classes are in the evening. And so I went to night school while working about 2005.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So I'm about 25 and I do a law degree part-time, which was fascinating because I learned so much about the principles of all of the things we talk about, you know, the rule of law, jurisprudence, but also a lot of the history of the UK, which I would have learned had I gone to primary or secondary school here, I learned in my law degree. And it was just so amazing.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And at the end of it, I thought, I don't want to be a lawyer. Definitely don't want to be a lawyer, but I love having this stuff in my head. And I'd become quite political by that time. And I was more interested in helping to make good law, so being a legislator, than being, you know, a corporate lawyer or something like that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

No, no, I'm not familiar with that, but it sounds like you had one. Yes, I think I had a quarter-life crisis, sort of 25, and I've done everything I'm supposed to do. You know, you finish prime school, you finish secondary school, you do your A-levels, you get your degree, you get a job. I had a good job, I was working in consulting, and I still wasn't happy.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I was looking, I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for something. And I thought another degree would give it to me. And what I really was looking for was the vocation which I found in politics. And it was a long journey over probably from age 16 onwards, having that experience of the, you know, that low expectation culture, which I thought was very race coded.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And looking back on it, it was extremely race coded. If I was, I think, a white child, I would have been treated differently. And again, it was sort of left wing teachers who were trying to be helpful. but actually creating a lot of destruction along the way. That experiences at university where I think I met my first sort of proper left-wing students culture type person. And I did not like it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I thought they were very ignorant. They, because by this time, of course, I know a lot about Africa and they talked about Africa as this place where they would come in and help the people, you know, who was, you know, just these helpless people, no agency whatsoever. They were not interested in the real problems and it was really a way for them to virtue signal. And I found that so aggravating.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And that also semi-radicalized me around what we do with aid, for example, and how we let a lot of African countries get away with things that they shouldn't do. An irritation with what I call moral colonialism, where rather than focusing on growth and how to make these countries self-sufficient...

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We sort of preach values which the West has come to after a long period and try and impose them in places where there's no, you know, they're not ready to receive them or interested and not engaging with people on that level. So I had that radicalism, that radicalization process. And that was actually my first work with the Conservative Party. So it's 2005, I'm 25, 2006.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

A lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism. People have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing. In a low-trust society, everyone's a potential enemy. And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

David Cameron sets up these policy commissions and one of them was called Globalization and Global Poverty. And I really cared about this subject because I thought a lot of money was being wasted and sent to places where it shouldn't be sent to when actually what people needed was partnerships, business, more sensible policies. more sensible ideas.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And it was supposed to, even back then in 2006 onwards, it was how do we tackle globalization? How do we make sure it works for everyone else? But these things end up getting co-opted always by, you know, vested interests, which is a real shame. So many things took me on the journey to conservatism. I think also culturally, I am a Christian. I don't believe anymore. I used to.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

There was something changed. Something happened about 2008, which changed my views on Christianity. But still, I am culturally a Christian. My grandfather was a reverend in the Methodist church. I went to a Church of England school. And many of the things that are formative in my experience, singing hymns, And, you know, knowing them off by heart.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And just a lot of the stuff that you end up doing in an African country, almost all of which are very religious, can shape you. And I find the interpretation of Christianity in the UK quite interesting compared to certainly Africa and Nigeria. People believe that. It's not just something you do on a Sunday. The Bible is a living word of God, and you have to do all these things.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And of course, they're inconsistent, and there are all sorts of hypocrisies. But growing up in a country that was genuinely multicultural, half the people were Muslim. We had both Christian and Muslim prayers in my school. You look at the behaviors and so on. You just get a lot of insights. into religion as an aspect of culture. Religion, in my view, is downstream of culture. It's not upstream.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I think people not understanding that is why I have a lot of critiques about the way people speak about religion, Islam in particular, in this country. I don't think they understand it. I think that they miscategorize a lot of people in a way that should not happen.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I'm working as a systems analyst for a company that no longer exists. It was called Logica. It was quite big at the time. It was a sort of dot-com boom software company. And it was fine, and I was earning good money and saving. I had enough, you know, earning enough to save for a house deposit. It was okay, but... I wasn't there in the hierarchy of fulfillment.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So actually, what I saw started before law school, but I just couldn't define it. It was the stuff that I saw when I was studying engineering with those students. That was the first degree. And I had... Just a very dim view of a lot of the students studying the humanities courses because they didn't need to work as hard as those of us studying engineering.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I think I had about 26 hours of, you know, teaching time and lab time. You know, we were in the laboratory all the time. And then you had these people studying arts and they were all sort of, you know, just messing around all the time. They were acting plays and having lots of fun and going on demonstrations and protests. And I thought, where do they have time for this?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And they were all so sort of smug and condescending. So I realized, well, I don't like this. And because I have the self-confidence of growing up in a relatively wealthy family, I don't feel intimidated by them. And I challenge them. I have arguments with them. And they lose and they get angry.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I think that they are just very weak people who don't like arguments and they say things like, well, you can't say that. Or how can you how can you say that you're black? You should know that, you know, all these people are racist and we're just trying to be helpful and so on. And they were so condescending. So I know I don't like that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I also know that I don't like teachers who just set very low expectations. I'm learning that family has actually been the most important thing in making me who I am. And I didn't realize that long enough. So all of these things are taking me on the journey to conservatism.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Then I do the law degree where I'm reading about John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke and, you know, how the rule of law is so critical to conservatism. you know, the West, but how this country functions and you learn the power of institutions, you see how you need to preserve institutions from generation to generation.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

You then compare with what happened during the colonial era where institutions are brought and, you know, dropped in a place. And so, yes, there's now a common law tradition, but the culture has really changed and eventually the culture erodes it. So a lot of it is personal experience and observation and lots of arguing. So I loved arguing, loved debating.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I remember when I was in that job working as a systems analysis, there was a lefty French guy who worked with me. And he kept saying, you are so right wing, you are so right wing. And I didn't know enough then. And I said, no, I'm not right wing because right wing, as I had been taught, was a bad thing.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

You know, the media and the cultural establishment always used right wing as a pejorative term. So I would say, no, I'm not right-wing, but I was. And I remember when I really sat down and read the canon and the text, and you read Hayek, and of course, Thomas Sowell, who I love very much, I realized, oh my goodness, I'm very right-wing. And I'm proud of that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

This is not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about. And my being very much on the right is that mix of the cultural conservatism, because I want us to preserve the things that are amazing here. And one of the things that is amazing is the classic liberalism, not the postmodern, you know, sort of corruption of that. And a lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I gave a speech in December where I said liberalism has been hacked, that people have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing. And you need muscular liberals to defend their turf. And instead what they've been doing is giving away their turf. And that is how we ended up with a lot of the extreme gender ideology, uh,

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

coming into play because it wore the clothes of the gay rights movement. It's nothing like that. And that's how we saw a lot of the craziness of critical race theory, the BLM movement set race relations in a terrible negative territory, but it wore the clothes of the civil rights movement. And you need people who are in touch with reality who can say, no, this is not real. This is not true.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I think that is something which I am lucky to have that I just don't get detached from everyday life. I know what is real and what isn't. And I am amazed that we have politicians, including the British prime minister, who will say things like 99% of women don't have a penis, as if 1% of women do. This is just not real.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So what are the preconditions? And there's a lot to unpack in what you've just said. So you are right. I force myself to always try and look at our country from an outside lens. And that's how I know that it is, in my view, you will differ. You will disagree because you're in Canada. This is the best place to be. Despite a lot of efforts to change it, it still is wonderful.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So you're asking, what are the preconditions? In my view, having a high trust society is so critical. People need to be able to trust each other. And the problem with having lots of different groups and lots of different group identities other than one shared group identity, is that no matter how hard you try, people will compete with each other, even when they look exactly the same.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Whether you're looking at Nigeria or Northern Ireland, where Protestants and Catholics had endless troubles and turmoil, Everybody looks the same. We need to get past the skin color categorization because it's just a correlation. It's not the underlying thing. You need to create a society where people can trust each other.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

The more they trust each other, the more they will interact, the more you will have better businesses because you don't have to worry about people stealing. We're all safe. We're not worried about people harming each other. Anything that creates lots of different groups.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

where the group identity becomes more powerful than anything else, means that you start to dislike or distrust other groups, and that creates a problem. There's then competition for resources. People aren't collaborating, they're not cooperating. And I think what has been remarkably successful about Western society

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

is that it has had a dominant culture for a very long time, but has been able to tolerate other strains within it. This is something that's very unique. Most countries, if you're bringing in something else, it gets killed or you are forced to assimilate. It's not just allowed to be its own thing and just sit there.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I think that that's something that's really special about a lot of Western culture. And it has allowed it to thrive and take the very best from what's all around the world. But the dominant culture has to be reinforced. And when we move away from culture as the starting point and think it's law or it's religion, we start to get confused about where we're going to end up.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

You end up with the relativism. It doesn't matter what people's cultures are and so on. As long as they follow these rules, everything will be fine. And yes, the rules are important. But if your culture is strong enough... Quite often, you don't even need the rules. People just know. They know that you don't behave this way. They know that you don't speak like this to other people.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It's just in the system. And that's where I want us to get to. That's where I want us to get to as a country. And you can see, I haven't done theses and written books about this. A lot of it is just pure, as you say, anthropological observation.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I look at a lot of Christianity or a lot of churches in Africa, and there are elements of the way that worship takes place that is exactly as it used to be when it was an animist society. And the cultures take the bits of Christianity that they like the most. So there is a lot of speaking in tongues. which is almost unheard of in Catholic and Protestant sort of churches in the UK.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

You go to Africa, there's a lot of speaking in tongues and people throwing themselves on the floor. They love the exorcisms, the witchcraft bits of the Bible, which are barely spoken or land in a sermon in the West. So, because that's what the culture demands. The culture's like... okay, there's this new thing called Christianity. What do we like here?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We like exorcisms, we like speaking in tongues, we like all the bits. There's more singing and dancing. It's very vibrant. And the culture starts to take over and it interprets texts in a way that works for it. And this is the thing about text. You have to really guard. If you wanted to keep doing what it was always doing, you have to really pay attention. You have to really guard it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Otherwise, people can appropriate it and almost make it do the opposite of what it was meant to do. And I see this with a lot of UK legislation. We see it with the non-hate crime incidents. This nonsense where people get arrested for saying things online. These laws have been there for 30 years, but the culture is changing. You have judges who think differently about this stuff.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It's the same with the Equality Act. The Equality Act was there as a shield, not a sword. It was there to protect people from discrimination. Started being used to discriminate between different groups. Oh, let's have some positive action. These groups are being treated unfairly, so we'll give them a boost and treat these other people unfairly. You need to guard your text carefully.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I had a very interesting and varied childhood. I was born in London, I was born in Wimbledon, but purely by accident. It was not by design. My mother, who's a professor of physiology, had an obstetric referral. And her doctor said, you need to go see this doctor in the UK.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And that needs principles, I think conservative principles.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We still queue, by the way. I remember someone showing a video. There was a set of riots that happened about 10, 15 years ago, and the looters were queuing to get into the shop.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And, you know, she had me at a private hospital at a time when if you were born in the UK, you got citizenship automatically, which she was unaware of. And my childhood was us coming on holiday back and forth to the UK. We lived in the US for about a year. She had a fellowship there. So I come from a very academic family, not just my parents, but their siblings and so on.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

That's a good thing to see. Yes, we still queue. So the question is, what is the thing that is undermining the high-trust nature of our society? And I think it's complacency. And, you know, you talked about the careless immigration policy. This is something that I find unbelievably infuriating. How did this happen? Because everybody thought someone else was dealing with it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And, you know, whether the ministers thought the civil service was doing it or the civil service thought that the borders were The border people were doing it and so on. At the end of the day, we as the political party in charge have to take responsibility for that. But it's one of the things that I find most frustrating because there is a complacency in this country that it doesn't matter when...

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

something's happening because everything's going to be okay we are the uk we are a rich country and so everything's going to be fine and it doesn't matter what you do the uk is the uk it's a civilized country people queue and it doesn't matter how many people come in we're always going to be the uk and everything's going to be uh everything's going to be fine it is complacency

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And the complacency comes from, my view, the memories of harder times receding, almost fading from living memory. And by that, I mean war, when people were very alive to the threat from other people, other countries, when you have generations that have grown up where everybody is having a great time and we're not really at war and, you know, I think all of that contributes to the complacency.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

That's number one. And complacency means that people stop looking after things because they think it's always going to be like that. And there are a large number of people across our cultural establishment, even the political establishment, I would say, in fact, it's probably especially the political establishment, who are suffering from what I call cargo cult syndrome.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Do you know what I mean by cargo cult syndrome? You should explain it for people, though. Okay, so just to summarize and paraphrase, In World War II, there was a plane that would drop supplies on a Pacific island, and the islanders saw air traffic control, people moving their arms, they saw runways had been drawn, and eventually a plane would come around and drop the food.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And after the plane stopped coming, they wanted the food supplies to return. So they drew lines on the ground and they made the hand signals, but they didn't understand why the food was no longer coming. Why were the planes not coming? And it is what happens when people have a very superficial observation of what is happening and assume that they understand it all and they know everything.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

They don't test themselves. They don't really query. And I see that behavior in a lot of politics. Just today, we had a chancellor who went out and made a whole bunch of announcements. Oh, we're going to do this. We're going to do that. And said, we're delivering growth. That is not how growth is created. Announcements are not policy.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

But many politicians have just seen that you stand up and you say, we're going to do this. And they imagine that there's an army of minions somewhere that make the thing happen. This is what happened with our immigration policy. The ministers would say, the prime minister would say, we're going to cut immigration, vote for us.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And an assumption that we've said it, of course, the people who are responsible for doing it will make it happen. It was complacency. And I hate it because... I always felt that immigration in this country was too high, but I did know that we needed to get good people coming in high skilled because other people were leaving and you needed to replace that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It never once crossed my mind that as we were saying, let's have some good high skilled immigration in limited numbers, that people would use that to wedge the door open and effectively just let anyone who had a good story go.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

um come in that needs to be fixed and just because we got it wrong before doesn't mean that we don't have a right to talk about it anymore we know more about this than anyone else we know how to fix it uh in a way that other parties don't and we have the will as well certainly under my leadership and that's one of the things that i'm trying to get people to see that the conservative party is under new leadership i am a different person from what we had before and yes

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I was there, you know, when we had those previous governments, but I was working on the inside to stop a lot of nonsense, which is aggravating people out there. And I will never stop doing that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And she had a fellowship at the University of Nebraska. So a lot of my early childhood memories, really vivid ones, are actually of Omaha. And the snow and the first grade.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So it's very interesting that you said reform as the third party. Reform is not the third party in this country. It's doing well in the polls at the moment, but the third party in this country is the Liberal Democrats, who had more votes and have 14 times as many members of Parliament as reform. Reform has five. Liberal Democrats have 70. We have 100. Yes, yes.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And then Labour has 400 and something. I can't even remember the exact number. But I would say the difference between the four parties. So the Labour Party used to be the party of the working class blue collar workers. It has now become the party of the bureaucracy. whether it's the public sector or people who live off government.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So people who live off government regulations, compliance and so on. That's who they speak for now. They don't speak for the, you know, what we would call blue collar. We are the traditional party of the right. The Conservative Party is the most successful political party, I think, in history, certainly with our longevity. And we are the centre right party.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And we are traditionally the party of the entrepreneurs, low tax. We've merged what I would call classic liberalism with old school conservatism. And that's where we are. That's where we are now. The Liberal Democrats are basically a protest party for mainly people on the left. And they don't have much of an ideology other than being nice.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

They will go with all sorts of extreme things, you know, extreme gender ideology, etc. And reform is... is representing the rage that a lot of people are feeling about things going wrong in the country. But it's all rage. It's not courage. And I understand why a lot of traditional conservative voters have gone to reform because they're angry with us because they think we let them down.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And a lot of traditional Labour voters are also going to reform because they're angry with their traditional party. And then people who don't want to have anything to do with it vote Liberal Democrat.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

They are not on Twitter, but they are in local communities. And what you tend to get, a typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof. And, you know, people in the community like them. Oh, you fixed the church roof. You should be a member of parliament. And they want to be nice. And then they get there.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So my family are from Nigeria, Lagos, so the southwest, the very sort of cosmopolitan city that's by the Atlantic. And I don't know how much of the history you know, but Nigeria was a very wealthy country in the 70s. And it was a country on the up. Post-colonial times, they discovered oil. So I was an oil boom baby. And it was at the height of the oil boom.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

But actually, they've got lots of very silly and foolish ideas, along with, you know, being able to fundraise for a local community. And then they have bad views on national security, for example. They don't want us to keep maybe a nuclear deterrence. They have silly ideas about education. They're always, you know, they don't want people to go to prison. They want prisons closed down.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Let's just have restorative justice. You know, people being nice. And if you're not paying attention, you will think that's a good one. These are nice people. We should vote for them. But actually, they will destroy the whole country if you let them at it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

No, the Liberal Democrats are basically trying to be nicer Labour. They will, they have a, what I would say is that they have more of a rural base. So the Labour Party is very urban. It's very sort of towns and cities.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

You will find Liberal Democrats in a lot of rural constituencies because they talk about the environment, something that we care about as well, but they talk about it in a way that resonates with people who want to maintain things as they are. So Liberal Democrats don't like building anything.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

They want everything to stay as it is, which in itself appeals to a certain kind of conservative, you know, I don't want anything to change and they will block any kind of thing being developed. And what is interesting is that as politics becomes more volatile, as we have more social media and people retreat into echo chambers of agreement, we're seeing a lot more fragmentation across the board.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

If this was a country where you had proportional representation, it would probably come out in the wash, but we don't. So you will have a party like Labour, which has won a landslide majority on 34% of the vote. That is a scandal. And unfortunately, a lot of the people who would have been in the Labour movement that I would have respected because they were culturally conservative,

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And so we would have something to agree on that aren't there anymore. So instead, we have a prime minister who, when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, he took the knee right in this room, actually. He took the knee in this room. And I sat there thinking, what on earth is this man doing? This is completely ludicrous.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

But people who will pander to whatever is going on because they're not rooted in anything serious, they are detached from reality, and they don't know what is real and what isn't real. And we are the only party that is real, which means that we're often pragmatic in a way that annoys people and we don't communicate the pragmatism well enough. And that's what I'm trying to do now.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We have new leadership. We're going to be honest. We're going to tell the truth to the public, even when it's difficult. People like to tell the public what they want to hear rather than what's really happening. And I have said that the Conservative Party is not going to do that. People must know the truth.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

There was a lot of wealth going on, lots of people, you know, buying homes in Knightsbridge in London at a time when the UK was actually having a downturn. Nobody was really thinking about moving here the way that we see the mass migration now. And it just goes to show just how the fortunes of countries over the latter half of the 20th century changed. have really changed.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So I think that we should start by stating what my position is. So I am not a climate change skeptic, but I am very much a net zero skeptic. And the reason why I am a net zero skeptic is because I saw how the legislation was put in place. I was a newish MP when it started. And if you look at how it happened, then you look at why it happened, the whole thing makes sense.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So we have a minority government. We can't get any legislation through. And we need to put something that everybody can agree on. And on both sides of the House, left and right, environmentalism has supporters. There's the centre-right type of environmentalism and the centre-left. Net zero looks like a thing that everybody can agree on.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I remember asking in the debate, it was a 90 minute debate for this trillion pound legislation. And I stood up. I was one of only two people who asked a sceptical question. I said, how are we going to pay for this? Where is the plan? And I was dismissively waved away by the minister at the time saying the plans will be forthcoming.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

That minister now works, you know, in the green industries, I'm told. And I think that the reason why this happened is because a lot of people are afraid of being attacked, of cancellation, of going against the grain. This was a way for us to say, we're showing global leadership.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

There's this thing that a lot of politicians like to have, you know, walking on stage, I'm at these conferences, global leadership, we signed this thing, we were the first to do it. And I think that that's how we ended up there.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

That's 2019. I think it's middle of 2019. Okay. So I've been an MP for two years and I'm already seeing quite a lot of what I call bad science, bad faith arguments to deal with climate change. And I know that conservatives love the environment. You know, of course, that's what we want to conserve amongst other things. We want to keep things as they are.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We want to leave a next generation inheritance. Let's give something to our children. So there's fertile soil here. But the net zero idea is bad because there is no plan. It's just an announcement. So we say we're going to do this thing and then we start working it out later. This is one of the things that I want to stop. Conservative Party is under new leadership.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We're not just going to say things and figure it out later. We will figure it out. And then when we know how to do it, we can say it. But the why it happened, that failure. Fear of cancellation, that fear of going against the grain is a more fundamental problem. People are so afraid of challenging bad orthodoxies. There is a terror of being heterodox. And I think that I am on one level an outlier.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And by sort of 1995, the country is in a really terrible place. It's been kicked out of the Commonwealth. Universities are on strike. And I, by this point, 96, I'm doing very well in my studies. I have scholarships, part scholarships to go to Stanford. And there's nowhere for me to go. And my mother says, you need to leave the country.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

You know how you describe yourself as being extreme on this? Well, for me, it is an outlier when it comes to Telling the truth and challenging orthodoxies and nothing will stop me from saying it. And a lot of people think that I'm very combative. If you look at almost every single argument I have had where people have said that it was because somebody was lying or being inaccurate.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I hate that. We have to tell the truth. And you've gone through this thing. where you say something and a lot of people agree with you, but they're all afraid of speaking out. People are afraid of being labeled. They're afraid of being called climate change skeptics. They're not able to speak up for themselves. And so they stay quiet. And that's how it happens.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It's all part of the proliferation of identity politics, which goes well beyond race and religion and so on. It's even the identity of ideas. We are environmentalists. So this is what we believe in. You've got to do all these tick boxes.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And with no one challenging or those few people who are challenged labeled as climate change deniers, I should say, they're not worried about being called skeptics. They're worried about being called climate change deniers and being ostracized. So they stay with the herd. What's everybody saying? All right, I want to be with that crowd. And you add on top of that the diminishing of free speech.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And you suddenly get a place where people are afraid to point out what's going wrong. And that's how we ended up with net zero. And throughout my time as a minister, I was constantly challenging it, saying no to things. I got some of the laws we had scaled back. But one person cannot change everything unless they are the leader and unless they are the prime minister. It all starts from the top.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

How's that? Does that explain it?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And by this time, we had discovered that I could come to the UK. It wasn't where she originally wanted me to come to. But I had a family friend who was here and who said, well, why doesn't she come stay in London with me? So my mother said, you should go and stay with her. I will take you. And my dad gave me his last hundred pounds. He spent all his money on the flights.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And it's why I don't point fingers and blame. I just say, this is what we need to do. And, you know, I love the Reagan slogan of never speak ill of a fellow conservative. There's just no time for that. People just need to know there's a new leader. She does things differently. But one of the other things that I think is such a scam is that people don't know what other countries are doing.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We are, as you say... basically exporting our carbon emissions to countries that are opening up new coal-fired plants every week. It's just not serious. It's this complacency and an assumption that everything is going to be all right. And we are losing resilience. And one of the things that I tried to do was sort of save a couple of our steel workers

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

plants maybe let them turn into electric arc furnaces but we need to be able to do these things you need national resilience and you need people who understand the system who can make sure that it doesn't they don't use all these legalistic uh frameworks whether it's on cancellation judicial review etc to unwind it all and when you have a party that can see how to do things and another party that says what it wants to do but doesn't know how to do things

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And it starts to do better. We're in a tricky situation because you need to tell people the truth. And what I have at the moment are parties on either side who are telling people exactly what they want to hear one way or another on the left and on the right. And I have seen the inside. And I just think that we need to get real very quickly. We need to get serious and stop messing around.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Exchange rate was terrible. And I came here and it was... just so amazing because I couldn't remember the UK from my early childhood. And it was like watching TV and just thinking the amount of opportunity I had was fantastic, how lucky I was. But also it was at a time where leaving was just something that felt like an escape from a place where no one could escape from.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

This is what I mean by us not being serious, where you're not really solving the problem, you're just giving yourself a nice announcement or a nice headline. So there's certain things that I know. One is that the decisions we're making now most of us will not be alive to see how it turns out.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And it could be that we don't necessarily get the impact we want from net zero, even if we achieve net zero. So you need to make sure that you are doing other things as well. You're making the planet better. You're creating renewable energy sources, for example. So that if one day the fossil fuels do run out in 500 or 1,000 years or whenever it is, that we have built something that is in place.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I think that there is a way to look at how we create that sort of future that is more sensible than what worries me as being a movement that is inspired by a lot of things that are actually just anti-human in and of themselves. That when I hear the rhetoric of a lot of people who talk about net zero,

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

you know, the left-wing extremists, not just the traditional left, but the hardcore sort of climate extremists, it's like they don't like humanity itself. Like they don't like people. They see us as being alien to the planet and it should just be nature without people in them. And I'm particularly exercised by this because one of my younger cousins killed himself in

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

after going down an internet rabbit hole of anti-natalism and pro-mortalism and started, you know, he didn't become an environmentalist, but at least not that I know of, but he became someone who felt the human beings shouldn't be here. And why are we doing this to the planet? And I see a lot of that in, you know, much of the rhetoric around the climate change extremists. And I don't like it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I always feel very lucky about that. So I see the UK as a place of hope and opportunity. And one of the things I'm most worried about now is that the country is changing. It's not the same place that I moved back to in 1996. It's not the same place that I came back to. It's changed a lot. And that worries me. So... I think you and I probably have something in common here.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I don't like things that are anti-human. I don't like things that make people feel bad about themselves, whether it's that human beings shouldn't be on the planet or, you know, the identity politics of race and, you know, white people are all evil or whatever. I don't like any of that stuff. And so I have a skepticism towards this movement and the outcomes I have seen.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I was the Secretary of State for Industry and Business, and I saw our manufacturing closing down because people said the energy prices were too high. This is crazy. We have to stop it. And there I was fighting my own colleagues and saying, we have to stop this. And they would say, Paris Agreement, the Climate Change Act that Labour brought in, we've got to do it.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Otherwise, we're legally liable and so on. So we did not transition. to remove the framework of the left. We went along with it for many understandable reasons. We didn't have the numbers for most of the time. When we did have the numbers, we were dealing with COVID. But that time has passed now. We need to talk about the future. What are we leaving for our children?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

A much better environment, I think, is important. And I don't think we will get it by just closing down all our industry and hoping that China looks after us. That is not serious. We have to be smarter than that.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I think that we are classified as conservatives now, but really what we are conserving is classical liberalism, like the old liberalism, not the horrible postmodern lefty nonsense stuff, but the good stuff.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So why should they trust me? Because they can look at my record. When the net zero debate was happening, you can see me on the screen literally questioning it. So you can trust because of what I have done before. So it's asking people to look at what I did when I had the chance. And it is because every point where I had a fight, I was quite often fighting for other people.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Tackling extreme gender ideology, this was something that took hold, the social contagion across the West. And I fought despite a lot of personal attacks, a lot of threats of cancellation, and I broke through. So I'm not going to hide and not tell people the truth. It is because I am honest that they can trust me. But it is also because I like fixing things. I'm an engineer.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I don't like seeing stuff that's broken and wondering who's coming by to deal with it. I like to deal with it. And I love this country. I love its institutions. I am a builder. I want us to build things. And the problem I have, with other people on the right is that they're so angry, they want to destroy things. They don't have a plan for how to build things.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

They just say, well, we'll just do this and we'll tow boats back to France and we'll shoot the people who are coming there and then everything will be fine. You can't... seriously think that that will work. These are people who've never been in the system. So I am a realist. I'm an honest realist. I know how to fix things.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I have the experience, which, you know, you were talking about the reform leader. He doesn't have that experience. He is more a media personality. He talks a lot. If we do not get Labour out because the right is split, we're going to have so much more of this. And we don't want a party that has never had to deal with these things in government before. There is a system that works.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

If you try and burn it down without knowing how to replace it, we'll be in trouble. And this is where my experience of other countries comes in. You look at the Arab Spring, for example. You look at revolutions across the world. This sort of rage, and we're going to have a revolution and we'll tear the establishment down, does not tend to end well.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And this isn't saying that people have no right to be angry. Of course they have a right to be angry. I am furious about immigration. It's absolutely too high. There was a lot of carelessness. Who's coming into our country? The culture, the levels of integration are getting lower and lower. No one has a plan for integration. I'm going to work on one. That is what is different about me.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

The Enlightenment values, you know, freedom of speech, you know, things like the presumption of innocence, free enterprise, all of the things that I think helped make this country really great and a lot of the countries around the West slowly being forgotten, being taken for granted.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

If you just want someone who's going to be angry with you, then that's a totally different proposition. I'm not here to be angry with you. I feel your anger, but I am here to fix things. And that's the big difference between the two of us.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Whether it's on net zero, whether it's on extreme ideology, whether it's on deregulation, whether it was fighting for women's rights, I am somebody who always makes sure that I speak on behalf of those who have no voice. That is what I see my job as. I do not understand this love of global summits and so on. I went to Davos as a Secretary of State

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

ministers from all over the world tend to meet there because they're all there at the same time and I can see why a lot of people are angry about it because it looks like a closed room where decisions are being made it's not really it's more like a boring conference where people spend a lot of time preening and I didn't enjoy it but once you start seeing those things you start to understand how people get influenced how decisions are made and I'm quite immune to a lot of that

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And that is what I want to bring to the leadership of this country. And we've got four more years, at least, of labor. By the time they have finished, there's going to be a big mess to fix. And you're going to want people who understand it and who get it to clean up that mess. You're not going to want people who will just start thinking about it and learning on the job. And that's the offer.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

I'm not a lawyer.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And I can never forget those things because I have a comparison country and I have lived and seen a place where those things are not respected, institutions are not respected, where everybody looked like me, but it was multicultural and there was so much conflict. And it's one of the reasons why I describe the UK as a multi-ethnic country, not a multicultural one.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And then we can talk about political Islam and how we manage to tackle those problems while having an integrated society, how we fix immigration. which has gone very wrong. And I have a plan. There's so much that we can dive into. But I think too many people have not done the foundational work and they're just angry and they're just talking.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

We have a Labour government that is completely clueless, no plans. They've just accidentally found themselves where they are. But there's a way out. And I'm very optimistic about the future, especially for young people. And I think if I was to leave you with a thought, it is that I... am so in despair at how young people see the future.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Because I remember when I was in my 20s, having that quarter-life crisis and wondering where my life was going, I never thought there was no opportunity. I just didn't know which way to go. And... The young people today don't see that anymore. They don't go out, they're not drinking, they're not socializing the way they used to. They're just becoming, they're becoming different.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And that worries me about the future. And it also means that they are more susceptible to a lot of bad ideas, both, you know, what I call the woke left and the woke right. I've now started using the word woke. I never used it before. There's a woke left and a woke right.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And they're going to those places because they're angry about migration and how it looks like it's taken opportunity away from them. They're angry because they think the world is unfair, intergenerational unfairness. We need to give young people the sort of optimism that we had when we were younger. Remember what it was like being 25. It was great. How can we take that away from people?

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And between COVID and high house prices and so on, there's so much that has created despair. And I remember having a conversation with Pierre Poliev about this. He's my kindred spirit, by the way. I love him. He's fantastic. And, you know, he is six months older than me. And we see these things in the same way. We have to give people hope.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And that is really, I think, maybe the difference between me and the other party leaders, that I'm thinking very much about the future and giving people hope, not just about today or yesterday.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

because you need to make sure that you have a shared dominant culture. And yes, people can eat different foods and have songs and so on, but those are the very superficial markers of culture. Culture trumps everything. It's much deeper things. Customs, norms, how we treat each other, the expectations that you have of society, and more importantly, what society has of you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

What are your responsibilities, not just your rights? And those are the things that led me on the journey to conservatism. But it is very rooted in my having two places to compare to.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

No, how would I have political aspirations? I grew up under a military government. I didn't even know what politics was. You kind of knew what democracy was, but you knew you didn't have it. So the politics And the political sort of interest came much, much later. Now, I was supposed to be a doctor like my parents and my uncles and aunts and all their friends. That was the family that I was born.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

That was the sort of family that I was born into. And I had, you know, when I talked about that part scholarship, I had a pre-med part scholarship to Stanford and my father couldn't afford the rest of it. And that was age 16. So. There was time and I came here and the first thing I did was get a job because I was left on my own and I wanted money.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So I got a job at McDonald's and I went to a college part time for sort of 16 to 18 year olds. It's called a further education college. And I just thought, well, you know, my parents are doctors. Of course, I will be a doctor as well.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And what I didn't realize was that between the expectations of the school I was going to, and the amount of time I was spending, you know, earning money and flipping burgers and eating them, that actually I was no longer on that academic track. And I also had my first experience of what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Because I had grown up in a relatively wealthy middle-class family, everybody's a doctor, and of course you get all As, and of course you do well. It just wasn't even a thing to not succeed academically. And I got to a school where failing was okay, and it didn't matter if you didn't get the top grades, and the teachers would say, well, why do you want to be a doctor? You can be a nurse instead.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And it wasn't because... they wanted to keep me down. It was because what they had seen was that if you're Black, then you probably shouldn't be stretched too much because you won't achieve it. And so they set lower targets and give you a huge congratulations and a round of applause for meeting them. That was the complete opposite of my upbringing.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

Being relatively wealthy in a poor country is very different from being relatively wealthy in the West. For me, being relatively wealthy meant that we had a car. And we, certainly up until I was about 13, we had running water. After 13, we stopped having running water. And we could occasionally, but not very frequently, travel on holiday. But we didn't have electricity a lot of the time.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So it's an experience that comes from just being in a poor country, that even when you have a bit of money, you still experience life like people who don't have any. So no electricity, eventually no running water, lots of fuel shortages. But I was never hungry. So that's what I mean by that. And you're absolutely right.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

A lot of Nigerians who do leave the country end up doing well because they have left a system that holds them back. and go to a system that allows them to flourish. And that's why I'm so interested in what is it that holds people back in one place and allows them to flourish in another. And it is not just money.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

It is many of the things that go with culture, the attitude to entrepreneurship, whether you live in a high trust or a low trust society, it's a very low trust society. You get a lot of clan behavior, but it is also, it's a very competitive place.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So if you grow up in a very competitive culture and you then live in a place where competition is allowed and is allowed to flourish, you will very likely do well. And I think that's one of the things that explains the fact is when people look at the look at the demographics.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

So I think that if you live in a place, if you've come from a country that is very competitive because there are limited resources, Because there are not enough jobs to go around. There's not enough university places. So you need to be very academic. You need to be, you know, very hustling in your behavior.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

And then you then move to a place where you don't have those barriers, but you still have that culture. You are more likely to succeed. And I think that that is what explains some of the success of, I think it's West Africans, not just Nigerians. But I suspect as you see more and more lower skilled migration, I think you will start to see those improvements

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch

disappearing um as well i think that's one of the things i remember seeing a study that mentioned that so you know the the relative class of the people who move makes a difference and it's one of the reasons why i say it's not just about the country people come from but who is coming what skills are they bringing and do they want the place to succeed

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