Kemi Badenoch is being called the Barack Obama of Great Britain’s Conservative Party. The 42-year-old immigrant from Nigeria and member of Parliament is being described as the leftist Labour Party’s “worst nightmare” and the “antiwoke crusader,” who “loves Britain, and is not afraid to take on the ‘hateful’ Left.”
In the race to replace Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party and thus become Prime Minister, Badenoch came in fourth place, a remarkable showing for someone who doesn’t hold a cabinet position. But, say the experts, she soon will. (The final contenders in that race, after a number of votes from party members, are Rishi Sunak, the Finance Minister, and Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, with the final vote coming on September 9.)
Zoe Strimpel has written about her at Common Sense entitled England’s New Conservative Superstar. She tells about how Kemi Adegoke was born in London, thanks to a medical referral, but raised in Nigeria. When she was 16, she discovered that she was a British citizen due to her birthplace, and, with conditions deteriorating in her homeland, moved to England where she stayed with family friends. She got a job at McDonald’s, among other places, went to school, and graduated from the University of Sussex–as opposed to Oxford or Cambridge like most of her colleagues–as a Computer Science major. She got married, had three children, joined the Conservative Party, and was eventually elected to Parliament.
She caught the attention of the country with a speech she made in Parliament on Critical Race Theory. Here is how Zoe Strimpel describes what happened (my bolds):
“What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact,” she thundered in a now-famous October 2020 House of Commons speech about Critical Race Theory in education, the closest thing to arresting oratory the Tory party has seen in the Commons since Margaret Thatcher. “We don’t do this with communism, we don’t do this with socialism, we don’t do it with capitalism,” she said, lambasting the promotion of CRT as “an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood.”
What a great observation, applicable far beyond Critical Race Theory! Treating contested theories as if they are accepted fact! And using those unproven contested theories as the basis for policies, laws, curriculum, and conventional wisdom!
“Half the country was appalled,” said Strimpel. “Half the country was blown away.”
As a politician, Kemi Badenoch voted for Brexit, opposes unnecessary regulations, votes against expensive environmental rules, opposed the expansion of state power due to COVID, and pushed through a measure banning gender-neutral restrooms in public buildings. And her conservatism grows out of her experiences as a black working class woman and as an African.
Her political sensibilities emerged from her experience of Africa—though in the opposite way that adherents of Black Lives Matter would want. “Growing up in a place like Nigeria means you appreciate what we have in the UK and in the West,” she told me on the phone on Wednesday, after she had dropped out of the race. “One of the things I find frustrating is the ethno-nationalism that you get in many countries like Nigeria: ‘Oh, we’re going to do things our way, we’re not going to do things the Western way.’ People start looking at things like free markets and capitalism as being Western things. And actually the whole world would be in a much better place if they adopted these systems, free markets in particular,” she said. “They are still the best way of lifting people out of poverty.”. . .
“Nigeria’s influenced my views on everything, not just race. Growing up in Nigeria meant that I have very strong views on energy security and the economy, because of what inflation did to my family’s money. It made us poor, when we’d grown up not being poor,” she said. “That’s what happens in a country where you don’t run an economy properly.”
Badenoch’s economic policies are influenced by her hero, the black free market economist Thomas Sowell. “It just goes to show how black conservatives are traduced,” she says. “He’s one of the great economic thinkers of all times, he’s still alive, and people don’t talk about him, they don’t know him, because there’s too much of a focus on black people talking about race rather than amazing black people.”
She once found herself on stage with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the scholar who gave us the term “intersectionality” and is a key figure in Critical Race Theory. Comments Strimpel,
Sparks flew—and not in a romantic way. Badenoch had never heard of her, wasn’t embarrassed about it (to Crenshaw’s surprise), and was unimpressed. “I was struck by how limited her worldview was on race. All she knew was American politics. When I told her that black kids do better than white working-class students in the UK, she didn’t believe it,” she recalled. For people like Crenshaw, Badenoch said, the oppression of black people is the norm. To defy that norm is to betray one’s blackness. “The success of people like me and other black conservatives is basically a denial of their own personal experience,” Badenoch told me. “They don’t want us to exist.”
Strimpel asked her what, in the end, she wanted. “’I want us to go back to normal,’ she told me. ‘I want to bring more rigor to the debate, more truth. I want to bring clarity and honesty about the difficulties we face, to be open and honest and free.’”
Photo of Kemi Badenoch, Member of Parliament, By UK Government – [1], OGL 3, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120269417
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In