Badenoch in the bindweed

The Leader of the Opposition made an interesting speech at the Institute for Government on Tuesday. It is a shame that it is likely to be overshadowed by the news of an unfortunate man in Northern Ireland nearly having his head cut off by a Sudanese immigrant, as it raised some important questions.  

The context of Kemi Badenoch’s speech was the aftermath of the sentencing of the killer of Henry Nowak, and the debate that has swirled about two tier justice that followed. The policy substance was the announcement that the Conservatives would abolish the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), but would retain the Equality Act 2010 overall, making the eyebrow-raising claim that the latter functions as an essential protection for white people against discrimination. 

Badenoch’s speech at the Institute for Government on Tuesday morning was pretty good

I will begin by noting that — up until that point — Badenoch’s speech at the Institute for Government on Tuesday morning was pretty good. It didn’t say everything that most of us would have wanted to have heard from a political leader on the subject of Henry Nowak’s death, but it offered a well-articulated defence of the principle of individual equality before the law, as well as an unashamed statement that our public services have been falling short of that ideal as a matter of policy. And she delivered it well. 

It followed an article that she had contributed to The Sunday Times two days earlier, and a recorded interview that she had done with The Spectator’s Tim Shipman on Monday. Mrs Badenoch’s flurry of media activity was a bold attempt at regaining the initiative after a week in which the contest between Reform UK and Labour appeared to dominate the agenda. The Tory leader offered a narrative of the institutional failings that led to the police mishandling of Henry Nowak’s death, which began with the Macpherson Inquiry. 

In Kemi Badenoch’s telling of events, a sincere and morally proper public outcry following the death of Stephen Lawrence and the failure of the Metropolitan Police to give due care or consideration to his murder inquiry, opened the door to bad ideas and politically motivated actors. This had led to the acceptance of the definition of racism as being anything that is perceived as racist by the purported victim, or by anybody else. She appeared to equivocate at that point, and suggested that this interpretation might have been reasonable at some unspecified point in the past, but that it obviously wasn’t today. 

In her subsequent analysis of three prominent atrocities, the Nottingham killings by Valdo Calocane, the Southport killings by Axel Rudakubana and the Manchester Arena bombing by Salman Abedi, Badenoch noted that authorities failed to stop the perpetrators at critical decision points because of their race. Calocane was not sectioned despite displaying clear symptoms of psychosis, because of institutional fears that black men were disproportionately likely to be sectioned. Rudakubana’s headteacher was accused of racial stereotyping when she raised concerns about his posing a potential threat. And security guards avoided stopping Salman Abedi at the Manchester Arena for fear of being accused of being racially prejudiced. 

Badenoch attributed this to a culture of institutional box ticking that had arisen as a result of the PSED — itself a reiteration of the 2001 Race Equality Duty, which was created following the Macpherson Inquiry. Not only has this resulted in public services that obsessively guarded against any suggestion of prejudice to the point that they were unable to fulfil their core function, but it also created institutional space for grievance-mongering activists and radicals to assume positions of authority within the institutional architecture set up to oversee adherence to the PSED. 

She criticised Labour, the police, schools, the mental health care system, social services and local government. She also gave a robust defence of her own leadership while in government in a way which made her sound like a singular voice of reason in an otherwise dysfunctional administration. But this was as far as she went in terms of acknowledging any specific failure on this issue generally on the part of the Conservative Party. Which perhaps is reasonable enough — one may argue that it is not her job to critique the failures of the Tories in power, and it is not as if there is any shortage of willing volunteers for the task. 

The speech was intended to instill vigour and direction into the Conservatives, and to imbue the party with a sense that it now occupied a coherent political position on a strong moral footing. This was no time for dwelling on the past. She sought to contrast Labour and Reform UK as representing the forces of identity politics — Labour on behalf of the coalition of intersectional minority groups pushing wokeness, and Reform as the agents of an emerging backlash that was becoming the mirror image of what they opposed. She would position the Conservatives above and between these two blocs, articulating the case for colour-blind justice and genuine equality.  

She echoed the drone-like mantra repeated ad nauseam by every tedious government mouthpiece that the Nowak family had urged commentators to avoid using their son’s death to stoke “division” — a remark she clearly intended as a rebuke to Nigel Farage. She did so before expanding on the undeniably political case that made up the substance of Mark Nowak’s statement outside the court the week before, to draw fairly similar conclusions to those drawn by Farage and other Reform figures. However, she stopped short of recognising that the police failed Nowak specifically because he was white, as Farage and Reform have — and it is presumably this difference which Badenoch believes justifies the charge that Reform are engaging in the identitarian politics of victimhood.

Setting aside for one moment the dispute about whether it is just the PSED or the whole Equality Act that needs to go, there is a danger of overstating the status of both as causes rather than as symptoms of what has gone wrong. The same can also be said of the Macpherson Inquiry itself, right though Kemi is to identify it as an important milestone. 

She was nearer the mark when she noted that the Stephen Lawrence case was the first and most prominent in a string of cases which had been used to justify political responses aimed at altering police operations and the way that justice is implemented in Britain. She mentioned the shootings of Mark Duggan and Chris Kaba, which had prompted civil disorder and lengthy and humiliating inquiries of the officers involved. She left the George Floyd killing out of this list, although I presume she would agree that the case was a similar (if far more significant) example of a death being politicised in a specifically racialised way to bring about change to justice and policing. 

Looking back with the benefit of a quarter of a century’s hindsight, Macpherson and its aftermath can be seen as one episode in a long political negotiation, as the British establishment underwent a generational changing of the guard. By the mid-1990s, the police recognised that their traditional political patrons were leaving the stage, and that they would have to consent to massive reforms to both their practices and their staffing make-up if they were to serve new masters and survive as an institution. The Met in particular had struggled to adapt to its new role as an unarmed gendarmerie in parts of London, where its functions had become closer to counterinsurgency than to community policing by consent. Undoubtedly, there had been excesses carried out shortsightedly under the naïve assumption that the police would continue to enjoy the indefinite protection of successive Home Secretaries. There had also been serious sloppiness in an institution that traded to some degree on the affection in which the public held its semi-amateurishness. 

Between the late 1980s and the mid 1990s, there were in all likelihood any number of cases across the country which, if they had caught the imagination of the right campaigner or journalist, could have been set up to embody the institutional failures of the police or the criminal justice system. There were also any number of recently retired pillars of the outgoing establishment who could have been drafted in to act as the public face of the formalities as the new establishment dictated its terms; but Sir William Macpherson, with his war service and SAS background, fit the bill perfectly. Yet even if the case, and the judge and the specifics had been different, there was absolutely no way that the police were going to get through that period of history without being reformed and “professionalised” along the same lines as New Labour rebuilt every other element of the state in its own image. 

The changes that were implemented during that period were designed so that they couldn’t be undone; at least not without the expenditure of vast political capital. Bodies were put at arms length from ministers, which would serve as vehicles for opposition should any future government flirt with revisionism. Judicial review would ensure that aspirational legislation would function as a de facto constitution, unless a prime minister were willing to look a cad by overturning it. 

I think Kemi Badenoch understands all of this. Her example of Adimbole Johnson as chair of the Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board monitoring the Police Racism Action Plan is a clear example of how something like the PSED creates the institutional architecture that embeds this malign political cadre. But getting rid of the PSED is the legal equivalent of cutting a single vine of bindweed in an infested garden.

The problem she has is reckoning with the role that her own party played as the stewards of this revolution throughout their time in office. And as much as she likes talking about courage, and adept as she is at mounting vehement defences of her own record, she will not and cannot address this legacy. Because the problem is still there, and her election as leader was a conscious and public decision by the Conservative Party to ignore it. As with the police and the justice system, the reasons the Tory Party failed is because of the individuals that compose it. And as with the police, it is a self-reinforcing problem; as it gets worse, more good people leave. 

Again, I think she gets this. But the weakness of her position within the party compels her to put it in the most oblique terms. During her self-defence on Tuesday, she spoke of her time as equalities minister pushing back against activist overreach saying: “the Equalities Minister can only warn and advise. She has no direct authority or power to command or compel every police force, NHS trust, school, or local council across the country to follow her warnings. Some listened, but many stalled or ignored the advice”. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but among others, that seems like a blunt criticism of the Home Secretary at the time. And yet still she is stuck with that person as her shadow foreign secretary. 

They expected her to put clear blue water between them and Reform UK, and she obliged

I don’t really believe that Kemi Badenoch thinks that the Equality Act 2010 is all that is standing between white British people and rampant racial discrimination, and I don’t believe that she thinks the protections it provides for other groups justify its many drawbacks. I think she would rather she didn’t have to stand on a stage and claim that she does. But she leads a party that is now, on balance, far more revolted with Nigel Farage and Elon Musk talking about what happened to Henry Nowak and what should be done about it, than they are with what actually happened.  They expected her to put clear blue water between them and Reform UK, and she obliged. 

The reaction of the Conservative Party in years gone by would have been very different, but so many of its traditional supporters, members, MPs and voters have now gone. What remains resembles the party that David Cameron was trying to build 20 years ago, but with fewer MPs. Badenoch showed genuine leadership by saying some of the things she said about Macpherson and about two tier justice — almost any other member of her front bench would have been far more equivocal in her position — and her party will follow her to some extent. But she knows she can only go so far. If voters want the country to be run on essentially the same terms as it is now, but with one or two reasonable reforms and a slightly better economic policy, they know where to look.