Who is Kemi Badenoch?
How socially conservative is the new leader of the UK Conservative Party?
Kemi Badenoch has won the Conservative Party leadership contest and becomes the first black person ever to lead a major party in Britain.
David Farrar from Kiwiblog wrote that Badenoch is the 19th leader of the UK Conservative Party. She is the 4th woman and 2nd non-white to lead the party, while UK Labour have had 19 white male leaders in a row. This of course has not stopped a Labour MP calling her a white supremacist in blackface!
A couple of quick facts from Kiwiblog
She is 44, making her the 4th youngest leader
She was born in London, but lived outside the UK in Nigeria and the US until she was 16
She has a Master of Engineering degree
She gained a law degree while working as a software engineer
She voted for Brexit
She has been an MP for only seven years
She once said 5% to 10% of civil servants are leak and agitate against Ministers, and should be in prison
She has three children, aged from five to 12.
Here’s her speaking in 2017 just after being elected
Here she is in her acceptance speech this week
Our good friends in the UK - Christian Concern – put together a summary of who she is. Badenoch is the Member of Parliament for North West Essex, and was first elected in 2017. Here’s their summary:
She has a mixed record voting on issues to do with abortion:
· Badenoch has been absent for several key votes, including votes that imposed abortion on Northern Ireland.
· She voted against allowing abortion pills to be posted without an in-person consultation as a permanent measure in March 2022.
· She also voted against introducing ‘buffer zones’ making it illegal to offer support or pray around abortion clinics in October 2022.
· However, in 2021 she voted in favour of regulations to give the Northern Ireland Secretary new powers to impose commissioning abortion services in Northern Ireland, and again in 2022 in favour of increasing those powers.
· She also voted in favour of a motion to impose teaching about abortion on schools in Northern Ireland in 2023.
Badenoch’s views are unclear when it comes to euthanasia and assisted suicide. There have been no significant votes on the topic in parliament since she has become an MP and she has made no clear public statements.
When it comes to issues of marriage and family, she has a generally unpromising record:
· She was not an MP when same-sex ‘marriage’ was introduced in 2013 but has said that she supports it. She was absent from the votes in 2019 to introduce it in Northern Ireland.
· She did, however, defend the right of Kate Forbes to oppose same-sex ‘marriage’ when Forbes was campaigning to lead the Scottish National Party.
· Badenoch was absent from the vote on no-fault divorce in 2020.
Nevertheless, she has a positive record on issues relating to gender:
· When she was Minister for Women and Equalities in 2024, Badenoch asked members of the public to submit examples of bad guidance on single-sex spaces.
· In June 2024, she suggested that the Conservative Party would change the law so that trans people would be excluded from single-sex spaces. She planned to change the Equality Act so that sex was defined biologically.
· She also proposed a law to make sure single-sex toilets were available in new non-domestic buildings
Badenoch argued in 2023 that gender-affirming care for children is ‘a form of conversion therapy’. She nevertheless kept saying that she intended to bring forward legislation to ban conversion therapy, which is in fact a ban on consensual conversations.
Badenoch is married to a Catholic man with whom she has three children. She has described herself as “an honorary or associate member of the Catholic Church.” When asked whether religion plays a part in her politics, she replied “Not particularly, no. I define myself as a cultural Christian. My grandfather was a reverend.” She added: “So I’m agnostic really, but I was brought up with cultural Christian values.”
During Black History Month in October 2020, Badenoch pushed-back against calls for more teaching of Black history in schools, saying she did not want white children being taught about “white privilege and their inherited racial guilt”.
According to Brendan O’Neill, who is the chief political writer for Spiked online, he writes that she had a solid win over her rival candidate for the leadership position, and that she would fight the culture war:
Towards a readiness, even a glee, to lock horns with a political class that has thrown everything from biological truth to our very own national story on to their bonfire of the vanities. Kemi could be the culture warrior we’ve been waiting for. She has more than proved her mettle in the battle of ideas. She knows what a woman is…
Keir Starmer is like Chris Hipkins on that one apparently.
Badenoch hasn’t so much ‘waded in’ to the ‘trans row’, as the media like to describe it, as she has marched in, sword of truth raised. She insists we must ‘protect women’s spaces’ from the presence of men. Whether it’s ‘rapists being housed in women’s prisons’ or ‘men playing in women’s sports’, it’s just not on, she says. And we must be free to say so without the ‘fear of being accused of transphobia’. Three cheers for that.
She has stood up for the right of young gay folk to discover their sexuality without being pumped with puberty-blocking drugs or mauled by surgery to ‘correct’ their ‘wrong’ bodies.
She has challenged the fashionable view of Britain as ‘institutionally racist’. Actually, she says, this is ‘the best country in the world to be black’. Her praise of this plucky nation that ‘sees people, not labels’ infuriates the mostly white wet-wipes of the opinion-forming classes who get off on flagellating both themselves and the kingdom for all the racial crimes of history. To these people, there’s nothing worse – really, nothing – than the sight of a black lady saying ‘It’s good to be black in Britain’. It shatters their ideologies of self-loathing from which they derive their cultural power and media clout. A black woman nipping at the heels of the fashionable shame of white influencers? It just won’t do.
She’s an enemy of cultural relativism. ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’, she recently said, to the noisy chagrin of the woke. They know she’s right – these people would never move to Kabul or let their daughters suffer the FGM that poor girls in Africa are forced to endure – but they hate that she says it. For in doing so, she punctures their cult of post-judgementalism, their moral cowardice that they doll up as a ‘celebration of diversity’.
She’s even injected moral clarity into the tortured and frankly terrifying Israel-Hamas debate. ‘I stand with Israel’, she says. ‘We cannot stand with Hezbollah, we cannot stand with Hamas.’ Then her killer line: ‘We know who the bad guys are.’
…She has slammed cancel culture – we ‘need more bravery and less cancel culture’, she says.
She fiercely rebuked the Californian tech bosses who exercise a moral stranglehold over the modern public square. It’s a very serious problem when tech giants ‘become so big [that] they effectively become more powerful than government in regulating what people say’, she says. And she defends Brexit, the right of the 17.4million souls who voted to leave the EU to have their wishes acted on by the political class.
…This is why the left is pissed off. This is why they cannot celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of this 44-year-old woman of colour to the top of Britain’s oldest political party.
The LGBT++ side aren’t happy.
In PinkNews, they say that Badenoch has positioned herself as one of the UK government’s most vocal opponents to LGBTQ+ rights. They’re annoyed that she met with the LGB Alliance – without the T (transgender). So this is the LGB that rejects choosing your gender – so it’s transphobic apparently.
She described trans women as ‘men’ in a leaked recording. In the recording, Badenoch could be heard saying:
“It’s no longer about minority rights in terms of race any more or nationality, it’s now, you know like, it’s not even about sexuality now, it’s now like the whole transgender movement, where, OK well we’ve got gay marriage, and civil partnerships, so what are transexuals looking for?... you know like the whole bathroom thing, it’s actually more of an American thing but they have a similar problem, .. now it’s not just about being free to marry who you want, you now want to have men using women’s bathrooms.”
Excellent point!
Another ‘criticism’ was that she “worked to quash trans-inclusive workplace policies”. According to PinkNews, the proposed policies would have allowed trans staff to self-identify their gender, but Badenoch wrote to the FCA and said: “The ‘sex’ of an individual is an important protected characteristic. It would be helpful to understand what measures are in place to ensure that your approach does not undermine your efforts to measure and improve the representation of the female sex in company boards.”
Good thinking.
But sin of sins, as we mentioned, she failed to ban conversion therapy. She correctly argued that gender-affirming care i.e. locking children into puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, preferred pronouns and confusion is “a new form of conversion therapy”. Correct. It’s a pity she doesn’t realise that the LGB part is also conversion therapy. Badenoch spoke about Keira Bell, a detransitioner. Badenoch said doctors were “fearful of giving honest clinical advice to a child because if they do not automatically affirm and medicalise a child’s new gender they will be labelled transphobic”. Which is what the court realised also. And it’s what the recent CASS report also argued.
So we’ll watch with interest how she goes – and how long she lasts.
Liz Truss replaced Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and became PM on 6 September then resigned 45 days later. The previous record was set at 119 days by George Canning who died in office in 1827.
It’s interesting. I lined up all the analyses for all the candidates for conservative party leader.
Have a look. You’ll see why the conservative side of politics is in such trouble – worldwide.
Green means good. Red is bad and orange is close to bad.
They’re hopeless on abortion at the top. Hopeless on marriage. Split on euthanasia and gender identity – 2nd and 4th respectively.
Only one is good on the whole ‘conversion therapy’ ban propaganda.
And we have one person of faith.
This image sums up just why we have an uphill battle in rescuing our culture from self-destruction.
The conservative politicians have lost their spine and direction.
And the culture and we are paying the cost.