Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with the new leader of the UK Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. They discuss her multinational upbringing, how that informed her on the fallacies of multiculturalism, the necessary preconditions of a functioning society, the current political landscape of the UK, and why anger resonates - but cannot rebuild. The Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch was Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade between 7 February 2023 and 5 July 2024. She was Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade between 6 September 2022 and 4 July 2024, and Minister for Women and Equalities for the Equality Hub between 25 October 2022 and 4 July 2024. Previously she was Minister of State at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities between 16 September 2021 and 6 July 2022. She was Minister of State (Minister for Equalities) in the Equality Hub between 14 February 2020 and July 2022. She was previously Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury from 13 February 2020 to 15 September 2021 and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education from 27 July 2019 to 13 February 2020. This episode was filmed on January 29th, 2025 | Links | For Kemi Badenoch: On X https://x.com/KemiBadenoch?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kemibadenoch/?hl=en
Chapter 1: What are the preconditions for liberalism to work?
There are preconditions for liberalism to work in the classic sense, and those preconditions are conservative. When they vanish, then the liberal project doesn't work.
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?
Now, you're kind of looking at the UK as an outsider when you think about the unity of culture that brings people together.
Hello, everybody.
I had the privilege today because it was a privilege to speak to the new leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. And the Conservative Party is likely the most successful political party that has ever existed in the West as a whole. And its leadership is, well, a position of cardinal importance.
Kemi Bednok, the new leader, is a relatively young woman who's come to the UK from another country, who is grateful for the intellectual and cultural heritage of the UK and who understands it deeply. She's an engineer and has extensive legal training. And that's a very interesting combination because engineers are very practical and task-oriented and they know how to build things that work.
because they have to deal with the realities of the real physical world. And her legal training has given her deep insight into the legal structure of not only the UK, but the Western world in general, because so many of the institutions that we rely on in the West were originated in the UK. I got a chance to talk to her about her
childhood, her educational background, her rise to predominance in the Conservative Party, her forthright stance on issues such as net zero, which the Conservatives move towards in a fit of, you have to say, foolishness, egotism, and cowardice. We talked about that in some detail as well. We discussed why she believes
that she became leader of the Conservative Party, but why she's also an extremely effective alternative, let's say, to Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which is a right-wing party in the UK as well that's on the up and up and that has, you know, things going for it. I believe we'll be speaking with Mr. Farage. I interviewed him yesterday.
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Chapter 2: How did Kemi Badenoch's upbringing influence her political views?
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.
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.
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.
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.
16.
16. And you said your studies were going well in Nigeria. What were you interested in and what did you study? Now, you have a background in engineering and law, which are very disparate fields. So, I'm very curious about that. So, what were you oriented to academically when you were 16? And did you have political... aspirations or ambitions that early?
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Kemi face in her academic journey?
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
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
Right, right. Well, and that's not even precisely class in the Marxist economic sense. It's more like level of intrinsic aspiration. And the determinants of that are actually relatively difficult to specify. You know, what makes someone...
See, the funny thing about you, so to speak, and this is how I felt when I lived in Montreal because I didn't have a lot of money as a graduate student and I lived among relatively poor people by Montreal standards, which, you know, they were still doing fine. I wasn't poor because of my level of aspiration and possibility.
And the idea that poverty is a consequence merely of lack of money is an unbelievably foolish presumption. And your upper middle class status, as you already pointed out, wasn't a consequence of absolute wealth, although relatively you were doing okay.
It was a consequence of the fact that your family was so educated and so aspirational that it was an unspoken reality that you could and would succeed Right, that's wealth to have that.
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.
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.
Yeah, well, we know, for example, the literature on fatherlessness, for example, is that there's almost nothing that puts a child at higher risk for poor long-term life outcome than fatherlessness, for example.
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Chapter 4: Why does Kemi Badenoch emphasize the importance of family?
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.
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.
Right, right. And so you also point there to the importance of peer selection, especially when you're making important life decisions. Yeah, well, it's one of the things that was a real relief to me when I went off to college, and I was about the same age you were when I left my hometown, was that my high school compatriots in northern Alberta, most of them stayed in our hometown.
Their ambitions didn't really extend. Their vision didn't really extend past the boundaries of the town. I left with a couple of my friends, but it was a very small minority of people. And when I got to college, my new peer group was much more ambitious and outward looking. And that was formative and also a great relief because it was something that was, well, something that I was striving for.
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.
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.
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.
It's terrible for society.
It is. it is it's partly because our definition of mental health in in the west is it's too individualistic and we should return to that when we talk about we will talk about the overlap and the distinctions between classic liberalism and conservatism because i've rethought that to some fair degree over the last five years um well partly well partly because
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of cultural understanding in politics?
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.
Okay, well, we're definitely going to return to that. And so you're at law school now. You're doing that at night. What are you doing as a job during the day?
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.
Right. And so you went to law school part-time and you found that compelling intellectually, but you also, is that where you ran across your leftist nemesis? and first started to understand what the pathologies of postmodernism, that kind of sly Marxism that's a part of that, and why did that strike you so intensely?
Like, you tangled that together a little bit in your self-description with that bigotry of low expectations that you encountered with the more leftist teachers, and so that's all percolating, but it sounds to me like there were some actual striking experiences that perhaps you had in law school that,
politicized you and it also sounds like your politicization in part was at least initially I definitely don't want that Yes, very much. Very, very much so. Well, so let's walk through that because I'd like to disentangle that. There's the bigotry of low expectations that you described and that deviation that you had in your academic striving and consequence. And now you're at law school.
And what are you seeing among the leftist students there? And why is that raising your hackles?
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.
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?
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Chapter 6: How do trust and group identity affect societal cohesion?
And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?
Well, there isn't a bigger lie than a man can be a woman. I don't think there's a bigger, there's not a bigger perceptual falsehood that's even possible than that. It's more fundamental than up versus down or night versus day. So, even creatures without nervous systems can distinguish between the sexes. And so, yeah, there's something very pathological going on there.
So, let's delve into some concepts now, because you're moving in that direction. And so, I want to throw something out for you, and you tell me what you think about this. When I... regarded myself, let's say, more as a classic liberal.
The fundamental reason for that, as far as I'm concerned, was that I believe that societies function better when the individual is the essential unit of analysis or identity. But then, and I do believe that's true, and so I don't like ethnic categorizations or racial categorizations or sexual categorizations.
I think merit itself and ability are independent of those fundamentally, but even more particularly, if you start identifying people in terms of their group membership, you get pathological attributions like group guilt or group privilege, for that matter, and that doesn't go anywhere good. But what I've come to understand more recently is that
that liberal project, which really originated in many ways in the UK. I know the Americans like to take credit for it, but really they just... But it was us, really. That's right. Really it was. Really it was. And in a very serious way.
And that's why it's so terrible to see the UK lose faith in itself because, well, of its common law tradition and its immense contribution philosophically in terms of sketching out liberalism. But then you might say... Well, what are the preconditions for being able to use the individual as the fundamental unit of analysis, like perceptual analysis.
And it seems to me it's like it has something to do with Christianity. And I say that partly because every Protestant and Catholic majority country outside of Africa is a functional democracy. And so that's a very striking fact. It has something to do with the presumption of intact family.
So imagine, liberalism works, individual liberalism works, if there's an underlying unitary ethos, and that would be the antithesis of the multiculturalism that you described, that's predicated on belief in the intrinsic value of every individual as a fundamental axiom, and also the fundamental equality between men and women. and at the level of ultimate value. And so those are preconditions.
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Chapter 7: What role does Christianity play in the development of Western liberalism?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Okay, so let's lay out the political landscape then. Let's turn to the political. We haven't talked about how you moved from your burgeoning political interest to leadership of the Conservative Party in the UK, because that's quite a story. But I think we'll just put that aside for the time being and focus on the political.
The first thing you might want to do for people, since it's an international audience as well that's listening to this, is...
Why don't you outline what you see as the differences between the three major political parties in the UK, Conservative, Reform, Labour, and describe the relationships as you see them presently, and maybe the relative strengths and weaknesses of each position, assuming there are any strengths at all on the Labour side, which I doubt, by the way. I might as well put my... Well, seriously.
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Chapter 8: What is Kemi Badenoch's vision for the future of the Conservative Party?
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.
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.
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.
That's a good summary. Well, I guess one of the things I'm curious about is why the Liberal Democrats are so invisible. I mean, they get no coverage at all on the international side, for example, like really none.
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.
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.
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.
Are they distinguishable? They are known in... Are they distinguishable ideologically from the Labour Party?
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.
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