Kemi Badenoch just became the first black woman to lead the UK’s Conservative Party, the oldest in British politics, colloquially known as “the Tories.” She’s also 44, has three children, grew up in Nigeria, actually worked at McDonald’s (unlike some American politicians who have claimed to), didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge, and has a master’s degree in computer engineering. Not exactly your typical Tory party leader profile. But it’s Kemi Badenoch who has just inherited a Conservative Party that has dominated British politics for decades until Labour Party leader Keir Starmer became prime minister earlier this year. The Britain that Starmer inherited—the Britain that Conservatives like David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak left behind—is a country with enormous debt, a shrinking GDP, a huge immigration challenge, and arguably a national identity crisis. Or as Free Press columnist and British historian Niall Ferguson has bleakly put it, “it seems that the UK has a national suicide wish.” Can Kemi Badenoch, the woman who has been compared to Margaret Thatcher, turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? How will the rising star in British politics offer something different than the past five Tory leaders who served before her? And can she beat out not just the Labour left but also the growing threat from a very energized hard right? If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hi, Honestly listeners, it's Barry here with a big end of year ask. By the end of 2024, in a few short weeks, we want to get to 1 million free press subscribers. That's right, a million people, 1 million. That's right, 1 million people who value journalistic independence and curiosity, and above all, who want a news source that reflects reality.
If you're here, it's not just because you believe in fearless old-school journalism for yourself. It's because you believe in it for other people, too. You believe it's for the good of the country. Free pressers tell us again and again that we're not just a media company. We're a public trust.
So if for some crazy reason you listen to Honestly and you still don't support the free press, here's your moment. Take out your computer or your phone and go to the Free Press' website. Go to thefp.com slash subscribe and become a Free Presser. You don't even need to take out your credit card.
Sign up for free and get our daily emails that gives you our view of the world and a view into the world of the Free Press in your inbox every morning. If you're already signed up, why not give a gift subscription to your friends and family members or anyone you think can use a good dose of reality? Okay, one more time.
Support us by going to the Free Press' website at dfp.com slash subscribe or click the link in our show notes and help us get to our goal of minting 1 million Free Pressers by December 31st, 2024. Thanks so much. From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss.
The woman I'm sitting across from right now just became the first Black woman to lead the oldest political party in the UK, the Conservatives, otherwise known as the Tories, which have been around since 1834, almost 200 years. She'll probably resent me for noting that fact, given her fierce opposition to identity politics. But I can't help but point out the historic first.
I'll also note that she's 44, has three children, grew up in Nigeria, actually worked at McDonald's, unlike a lot of American politicians who have claimed to, didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, and has a master's degree in computer engineering. Not exactly your typical Tory party leader profile.
But Kemi Badenoch is the one who just inherited a conservative party that has basically dominated British politics since the 20th century, until Labour Party leader Keir Starmer became prime minister earlier this year.
The Britain that Starmer inherited, the Britain that conservatives like David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, and Rishi Sunak left behind, is a country with enormous debt, a shrinking GDP, a huge immigration challenge, and arguably a national identity crisis. Or as Free Press columnist and British historian Neil Ferguson has bleakly put it, it seems that the UK has a national suicide wish.
Where did the conservative party go so wrong? And can the woman I'm sitting across from today turn her party and ultimately the country around? How will she offer something different than the past five Tory leaders who served before her? And can she beat out not just the labor left, but also the growing threat from a very energized hard right? Those questions and much more after the break.
We'll be right back with new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch. Hey, Honestly listeners, I want to let you know about an amazing podcast called Unpacking Israeli History. If you read the headlines about what's going on in Israel, you're only getting a very tiny slice of a very long story. Shorn of depth and historical context, so much coverage of Israel can't even get the most basic facts straight.
One of the things we try and do here on Honestly and at the Free Press more generally is to go deeper into the most important topics of the day as we try and get to the truth. And that's the mission of Unpacking Israeli History, hosted by Dr. Noam Weissman. It offers listeners a journey through the events in Israel's past and its present.
In a world where history is getting rewritten, the goal of Unpacking Israeli History is to provide listeners with a nuanced, fact-based understanding of the state of Israel that's both informative and entertaining. The show delves deeply into the nuances and complexities of Israeli history and how it relates to the present, examining tough questions like, is Zionism a colonialist project?
Is Israel an apartheid state? And are the settlements an obstacle to peace? You won't want to miss it. Learn the history behind the headlines and find Unpacking Israeli History wherever you get your podcasts. Think about a product that's selling through the roof. These businesses often have a good product, outstanding marketing, and a great brand.
But there's an often overlooked secret in business, and that's the businesses behind the business, the ones that make selling and buying simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Shopify is the home of the number one checkout on the planet with shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%. That means way fewer carts are getting abandoned and way more sales are going.
So if you're into growing your business, you better be ready to sell wherever your customers are, whether on the web, in your store, or in their feed. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash honestly, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash honestly to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash honestly.
Kemi Badenoch, welcome to Honestly.
Thank you, Barry. It's lovely to be here.
I'm so happy to have you here. Well, I want to start out at the beginning of your life for those who have not yet encountered you as I have. So you were born in the UK, but then your family moved back to Lagos, Nigeria when you were very young and you were raised there for the first 16 years of your life. Now, in those years, Nigeria had a series of military coups. Inflation reached 40 percent.
Life expectancy was around 46 years old. And by the end of the decade, 43 percent of Nigerians lived below the poverty line. Tell us about your childhood growing up in Nigeria and how this political and economic context shaped your character and shaped your politics.
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
But they're not in oil. Your dad isn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Margaret Thatcher is running the UK at that time. What did your family think of her? And what were the politics like of your family growing up?
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.
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.
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.
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.
But I do remember when I was at school, and you know, this is still a very patriarchal society and not not in the
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.
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.
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.
So 1996, you're 16 years old. You move back to London alone. You said your dad gave you basically his last hundred dollars.
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?
Did she do fries? That was the kind of infamous thing she said is, I did the fries, which sounded very suspicious to everybody.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And that's one of the things that got me on that journey to becoming a conservative.
You joined the Conservative Party when you're 25 years old. Most people when they're 25 years old do not become conservative. And certainly most black women do not become conservative. Why join the Conservative Party? What made you a conservative?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Were there certain books or texts or essays that you were reading at the time? Yes, definitely. What were you reading that was formative in those years?
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.
I was going to say that, not a beetroot.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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...
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.
Okay. Why decide to go into politics?
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.
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.
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.
Well, he was campaigning on your behalf, right?
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.
Was it for him?
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?
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.
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.
So your first race is in 2015 to the London Assembly, which is like a... Yes, that's the first time I won something. It's a civil council. Okay. And then in 2017, you're elected to parliament. Tell us about the Tory party that you are elected to in 2017. Like Brexit had happened the year before that. What are the views and mores of the party at that time?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soaring debts, as you described at the beginning. Low productivity. This is, you can't just manage that.
Not having a lot of children.
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.
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.
Let's talk about the recent election of Keir Starmer and Labour. I think there's sort of three ways to understand that election. The first is that the voters actively want Labour and its vision. The second is that they just hate the Tories, having experienced two decades of, you could argue, failed leadership. We'll talk about whether or not that's true.
And the third is a more nuanced picture where Reform, this party led by Nigel Farage that's to the Tories' right, sort of split the conservative vote and, you know, swept Labour into power. Which is it?
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.
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.
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.
So if Nigel Farage and reform hadn't been in the picture, you think Labour still would have won?
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.
When you talk about managerialism, you know, this sort of like tweaking and, you know, focusing on tiny details rather than talking about like the big issues that actually impact people's lives, that inspire people, that shape culture in the world. Is Keir Starmer the image you have in your mind? Like, is he the ultimate image of the sort of managerial leader?
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.
you know, student talking points.
Like what?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The two issues that Brits care the most about are the two that I think drove this election here in the U.S., which we'll get to. And of course, that's the economy and immigration. I want to ask you about both, starting with the economy. This is the state of Britain's economy today. Wage growth has been flat for 16 years. The GDP is shrinking. National debt is almost 100 percent of GDP.
And productivity growth from 2019 to 2023 was 1.5 percent. And just as a point of comparison, it was 7.6 percent in the U.S. It's not the liberals that are responsible for this state of affairs. It's the conservatives. How did that happen?
You think of conservative parties, not just in the UK, but just more generally, as the party of growth, of free markets, of, you know, all the things that we know. How'd that happen?
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.
So let's start with that.
My point is like the socialists aren't responsible.
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.
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.
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.
Many of these things were because we were going along with EU regulation.
Mm-hmm.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Let's talk about just immigration a little bit more deeply and just put some numbers to this because it's pretty unbelievable. Net migration to the UK hit a record high of nearly a million last year. 11 million migrants have come into the UK since 2012. The population is only 68 million people. That is 16% of the population in the last 12 years.
Big picture, and then we'll get into some of the details. How has this changed the fabric of British society?
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.
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.
In other words, they come in, they get on the National Health Service and... But also...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And doing it under the guise of civil rights language.
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.
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.
Just to stick on immigration for a minute, I was really struck by this number. 54% of people crossing the English Channel by boat are from five countries. Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Syria, and Sudan. You have said many times numbers matter. In other words, labor markets matter, economics matter, what we were just talking about. But culture matters more. That's right.
Put meat on the bones of that. What do you mean by that?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From our vantage point here... And obviously, the U.S. is not immune to this, but it seems 10x or maybe even more bad in a place like London. We're watching as every single Saturday, massive numbers of people, some of whom are perhaps...
Recent migrants, some who are second generation, are marching through the middle of London, one of the most important capitals in the Western world, cheering on behalf of terror groups.
And Nigel Farage, who we've mentioned, the leader of reform, the leader of this sort of right-wing party, he says he wants to close the border, freeze all non-essential immigration, stop channel crossings with the program to detain and deport illegal migrants, and return small boats to France. proposed solutions different from those of Farage?
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
But is the other X factor here fear? I mean, ahead of this interview, I was texting with some friends, writers in the UK, and they said, you have to talk about Islam. And I said, well, doesn't everyone ask Kemi about Islam? And they say, well, we're scared to actively and openly talk about it. It's we're willing to say some cultures are better than others, more tolerant than others.
And the unspoken thing there is that people who are coming to the UK from countries where anti-Semitism is the norm or anti-Westernism is the norm, where mob rule to some extent is the norm, happen to be coming from places where, you know, Islam, or if you want, radical Islam, is normative. And they're bringing those values that are antithetical to British ones or Western ones along with them.
And, you know, someone texted me sort of a glib text, and he said, why do you think Douglas Murray doesn't live in England anymore. Why do you think X, Y, and Z don't live in England anymore? They don't want to go the way of Mike Freer.
In other words, referencing the gay MP who had been wearing a stab vest, who I think was a victim of arson, whose life was threatened because he dared to stand up for Israel. So how much of that is really the elephant in the room?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I want to ask you just a few more questions about anti-Semitism. There have been almost 6,000 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the UK since October 7th, a 200% increase. Some people have called London, or at least parts of London, a no-go zone for Jews. Just last week, I'm sure you read about this, there were two buses of students with 11- and 12-year-old kids from a Jewish school.
Teenagers threw rocks. They came onto the bus. They were yelling, fuck Israel, and they were 11- and 12-year-old kids.
Yeah.
On here, they film themselves doing it. I mean, like, how is this going to be turned around?
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.
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...
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.
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.
Well, just for the listener, let's give an example of two-tiered policing, right? So what we're seeing from here is these protests in which people are actively calling for jihad. By the way, we don't even need to go to the streets. We can go to what happened at Oxford in You know, at the Oxford Union in late November, where they had this kind of a real brouhaha.
They had a proposition that was, this house believes Israel's an apartheid state responsible for genocide. The pro-Israel speakers were shut down. People were saying absolutely insane things. Nothing happens.
And yet you have this Telegraph columnist or writer, Alison Pearson, who tweets something a year ago, an off-color tweet, deletes it, and then gets a visit to her house by the police on a Sunday morning for inciting racial hatred. And this kind of thing makes people think, wait, are there two different rules depending on who the speaker is? Explain that for us who are watching from over here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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?
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.
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.
After the break, we talk about why Kemi Badenoch dies on the hill of the culture war. We talk about DEI, CRT, trans issues, euthanasia, and much more. Stay with us. Thank you so much for having me. ditch the busy work and the endless scrolling, and use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging so that you can connect with candidates faster. And Indeed doesn't just help you hire faster.
A recent survey showed that 93% of employers agree that Indeed delivers the highest quality matches compared to other job sites. Indeed's matching engine constantly learns from your preferences. So the more you use Indeed, the better it gets. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash honestly.
Just go to indeed.com slash honestly right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash honestly. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Hi, Honestly listeners. I have something exciting to tell you about, and it's Stars of David with Elon Gold.
It's a brand new limited series podcast, and let me tell you, it's what we need right now. The world can feel pretty dark these days, but my good friend Elon Gold and his co-host Eli Leonard, who's also a friend of mine, bring a fresh, humorous perspective, showing us that it's possible to laugh even when we're talking about the serious stuff.
In Stars of David with Elon Gold, they sit down with Jewish guests who have made a real impact, whether by making us laugh or fighting for justice. It's the perfect mix of funny and meaningful. And what sets it apart? It's unapologetically Jewish. There's comedy, culture, and even a little kvetching thrown in for good measure.
They play Jewish geography and learn a new Yiddish word with Elon's parents in every episode. Here's the thing, like curb your enthusiasm, you don't have to be Jewish to love it. Stars of David with Elon Gold is for anyone who appreciates good humor, good conversation, and a new way of looking at the world.
So subscribe now to Stars of David with Elon Gold wherever you listen to your podcasts or head to Unpacked Podcasts on YouTube. Let's talk about some of the social issues that have exploded here in the U.S. and also, of course, in the U.K. You have been very outspoken against DEI, which is diversity, equity, and inclusion, but of course means actually something very different, as well as CRT.
It's an alphabet soup, critical race theory. And people have called you a race traitor for opposing these things. They say, why are you focusing on being a culture warrior? You should focus on economics, taxes, immigration, kitchen table issues. Why is this so important to you? Why is this a hill worth dying on?
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.
I grew up in a place where everybody looked like me. And I don't need people who have only had the minority experience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She is the legal theorist who created critical race.
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.
Were you guys like on the panel together?
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,
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.
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.
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.
It also seems like a way of sort of stealthily bringing back almost like tribal warfare.
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.
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.
DEI and CRT, those are not the only culture war topics that you've weighed in on. You're a passionate feminist. You've called yourself a gender-critical feminist.
Mm-hmm.
And the issue, obviously, of feminism and the conflict, I guess, between traditional feminism and women's rights and trans rights has been at the center of politics here in America and in the UK. What is at stake, in your view, on this topic? Why is it so important to you? Well, because I think...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
And they were always to give cover for those people who couldn't speak for themselves.
One last culture war question. It's bigger than the culture war. I think it has to do with something much deeper, which is about meaning of our lives. The rise of medically assisted suicide is a huge issue in Canada, and it's become a very big issue in the UK. What do you think about it? Why is that an issue that's coming up right now?
Does it speak to something more deep and why do you oppose it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike obviously here in the States, the UK doesn't have a First Amendment. There's no guarantee to free speech enshrined in the Constitution. Is there a way to fix that if you're prime minister? Is there a way to pass some kind of free speech law?
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.
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.
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.
You're here in America, I think, six weeks after a huge, huge election that many people, I think, feel marks. You know, some people have called it the end of the woke revolution, the beginning of the counterculture revolution. Neil Ferguson has called it just the vibe shift. What's your sense? You know, you're coming off the train having had dinner last night, I think, last night with J.D. Vance.
Yes, yes. Tell us about what you're hearing and seeing and what this trip's been like for you. Sure.
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.
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.
Claim your Gen X status because as an elder millennial, it's like the most shameful generation to be a part of.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How did you guys first meet?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There has been – and we're living through – like I don't think we know exactly what new conservatism or certainly the Republican Party looks like. When I hear you talk about free markets, about free speech, I hear a message that's pretty old school.
Mm-hmm.
Pretty like conservative, classical liberal, the kind of things that I grew up thinking a conservative would sound like. The shift, I would say, is marked, at least in this country, in two big places. One is an embrace of protectionism economically and certainly Trump's embrace of tariffs. He says it's the most beautiful word in the English language. Yeah.
And then also of isolationism, of a turn against a kind of muscular foreign policy that I think the U.S. certainly, you know, certainly the Republican Party, for my entire adult life, I'm 40, had been known for. Where do you fall on those two issues? And do you see a distinction between yourself and sort of where the right is going here in America?
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.
And that doesn't happen.
So it's like, we'll trade with China and democracy will come to China.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said that Britain was Greece to America's Rome, the wise old empire helping to guide the brash young superpower. What do you see as Britain's primary role in the world today, and especially vis-a-vis the US?
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things that's been really interesting for people to watch over the past six weeks in this country is the way that people who we do not think of as being D.C. swamp creatures, as being government bureaucrats, people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are sort of heading into Washington. They're doing this, you know, government efficiency thing. They're calling it Doge.
People are really excited to see what that might bring. What do you think of that? Is there a thought that you maybe could do something similar in the U.K.? And have you met Elon Musk?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
One last question and then we'll do a quick lightning round. We've talked about a lot of crises that the West is facing and maybe the one that's sort of like underlying all of it is the crisis of meaning, right? This sense that, you know, what is life about?
The reason it comes to mind is because if your life is about compliance and bureaucracy and you're so far away from making something that's actually productive and actually matters, it's very hard to have a meaningful life.
Mm-hmm.
How do you think about that problem? How do you think about the crisis of meaning that seems to be crippling the West? We have this strange paradox where, in a certain sense, we have every luxury that's imaginable. We live lives that our ancestors, even our grandparents, could never have imagined. We have so many true luxuries and privileges in the real sense of the word.
And yet people seem to be in a kind of malaise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wow, that's very self-aware.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kemi, you ready for a lightning round?
No, but I think I have no choice here.
How do you take your tea?
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.
If we looked at your Spotify wrapped, what would we see?
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.
Okay.
And then lots of R&B. What's your favorite R&B song? My favorite R&B song is 112's Only You.
What's the last show that you binged or do you not have time for TV?
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.
What's your New Year's resolution, if you have one?
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.
Do you think the world is better when people either believe in God or act as if God is real?
I don't think it matters so much. It matters what they do with the belief or the lack of belief.
Do you think the U.S. still has what it takes to lead the free world? Yes, of course. What is your order at McDonald's if you eat at McDonald's?
Always breakfast and a bacon and egg McMuffin.
You get compared to Margaret Thatcher a lot. Do you like the comparison?
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.
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.
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.
Kemi Badenoch, thank you so much for coming on Honestly. Thank you for having me, Barry. Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation, if it provoked you, if you were really interested in what Kemi had to say and want to share it, please do share this episode with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own.
Last but not least, we are in a very, very crucial time. Why is that? It's because we are so close to getting to that magic number, a million free press subscribers. You can become a free subscriber today. Don't even pull out your credit card.
Just go to the Free Press' website at thefp.com slash subscribe and sign up to join our community of people that believe in fearless, independent-minded journalism. Thanks for listening.