After years of existential bewilderment, Britain’s Conservative Party appears to have found its mojo. Freed from the shackles of governance, the Party’s remnant membership has its heart set on a fearless cultural crusader. Not for the first time, an abrasive, no-nonsense woman promises to deliver a popular conservative rebirth; vanquishing Britain’s bureaucratic inertia through sheer force of personality. 

Indeed, leadership favorite Kemi Badenoch has a habit of dominating headlines. Whether it’s bold statements like “not all cultures are equally valid” or blistering attacks on equality tribunals, the Prime Minister to-be has sent a clear message: I will take the fight to the woke establishment 

With five years’ worth of ministerial portfolios under her belt, we should expect Mrs Badenoch to be able to point to a healthy track record of delivery. Well, not quite. 

As Minister for Equalities, Badenoch built a strong reputation on the back of her 2022 command paper, Inclusive Britain: An Action Plan, which set out to Parliament the Conservative government’s official response to the Sewell Commission’s report on ethnic disparities. Hitting all the right buzz phrases, the paper won praise in the right-wing press for its attacks on terms like “BAME” (“black and minority ethic”) and “white privilege”, and Mrs Badenoch’s fiery press statements about the perils of “critical race theory”. 

Begin working through Kemi’s 97-page action plan, however, and it’s hard to escape the creeping impression that neither its nominal author, nor her adoring pundits, read it.  

Action 17, for example, pledges to “consider the scale and causes of the ethnicity pay gap across the NHS and produce actionable recommendations on how to reduce it.” The latest progress report, also published under Mrs Badenoch’s name, notes with approval the completion of the NHS Equality, Diversity and Inclusion improvement plan which “requires employers across the NHS to take action to ensure year-on-year reductions in pay gaps.” 

Said plan actually goes rather beyond this, mandating that: 

Every (NHS hospital) board and executive team member must have EDI [‘Equality Diversity & Inclusion’] objectives that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound and be assessed against these as part of their annual appraisal process.

Specific metrics include “year-on-year improvement in race and disability representation leading to parity” in senior leadership roles. In other words, this plan entails forcing the leadership of every NHS hospital to meet annual racial and disability promotion quotas.

To see what this plan looks like in practice, one can walk 5 minutes from Kemi’s parliamentary offices to Guy St. Thomas NHS Hospital Trust, whose racial action plan includes “Reverse Mentoring”. When I enquired with a seasoned NHS administrator who had been subject to this now widespread practice, I was told it had entailed being followed around all day by a junior black employee, who gave her pointers on fighting “normative whiteness”. 

Is this an anti-woke victory? 

Peering closely at the new NHS plan, we can see that the progressive acronym BAME (“black and minority ethnic”) has indeed been replaced by BME (“black minority ethnic”). Liberal snowflakes lose this round. 

Just to be safe, however, Kemi’s action plan doubles down. Action 18 “require[s] the health and social care regulator to measure workforce diversity and inclusion in all their inspections.” Indeed, under the “new assessment framework”, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) — which is traditionally responsible for patient safety — is ordered to “ensure that healthcare providers are held to account for why ethnic disparities exist in their workforce.” In accordance with the referenced Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES), this entails regulatory pressure on hospitals in which BME staff are more likely to enter “formal disciplinary processes” than white staff. 

If this sounds fair, note that nearly 1/3 doctors, nurses and medical support staff are trained overseas; with the majority of new doctors trained outside of Europe, often in countries with significantly lower standards. In 2014, researchers commissioned by the General Medical Council (GMC), which oversees UK medical licenses, made the startling discovery that the majority of NHS doctors trained outside the UK and European Economic Area would fail the British medical licensing exam. The following year, GMC-commissioned analysis  found that overseas trained doctors were 4.3x more likely than British doctors to have their license struck-off due to malpractice — accounting for 69 per cent of those suspended. In 2019, a multi-year analysis found doctors from beyond Europe are 2.9x more likely to be referred to disciplinary tribunals. Earlier this year, 700 newly-registered Nigerian nurses came under investigation for faking their qualifications after revelations of wide-scale fraud. With appropriate embarrassment, an ICU nurse I question conceded that the new African nurses on her unit “sap manpower”, as other nurses have to be tasked to “follow them around and make sure they don’t endanger patients.”

All this is, of course, evidence of widespread racism. Thankfully, the pressure from central government appears to be righting this wrong. The latest NHS-wide WRES report finds “modest improvement”, with the relative rate of BME disciplinaries down 61 per cent since 2016 — cratering from 156 per cent to just 103 per cent the white average. 

Mrs Badenoch did, however, help expand the corrosive effect of these regulations on public bodies

To be fair to Mrs Badenoch, she did not pioneer this “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to patient safety. As I’ve previously written, the primary blame lies in Part 11 of the Equality Act 2010, which — as amended in 2017 — requires all public bodies to publish “specific and measurable” equality actions plans at regular intervals and “encourage persons who share a relevant protected characteristic to participate in public life or in any other activity in which participation by such persons is disproportionately low.” Mrs Badenoch did, however, help expand the corrosive effect of these regulations on public bodies, including the health service. 

As with much of the rest of the Action Plan — which includes government support for race-based loans and snooping on “hate speech” in private messages — this seems rather at odds with Kemi Badenoch’s public persona as the scourge of Whitehall wokery. 

How to explain Kemi’s dual personality?

I caught a glimmer of the truth in late 2023, when secondary legislation, introduced in Mrs Badenoch’s name, looked set to incorporate a particularly destructive EU Court of Justice ruling into UK law. As I wrote earlier this year, existing “indirect discrimination” rights have already allowed female employees in majority female professions (like retail floor staff) to sue retailers, and bankrupt Birmingham council, for the sin of offering greater pay and benefits for majority male roles (like warehouse workers). The new legislation creates a new category of “second hand indirect discrimination”, which would allow male employees in majority female professions to do the same.

Alarmed, Conservative MPs I helped brief raised concerns, both in committee and directly with the Equalities Minister. Mrs Badenoch promised to look into the proposals. She didn’t, and they passed into law.

None of this bodes well for the future of British conservatism

This experience ties in with what appears to be a long-standing pattern of laziness and disorganisation. A number of Badenoch’s former colleagues, in government and at The Spectator, allege repeated lateness to meetings (including being half an hour late to her own hustings), failure to complete priority tasks, and complete disinterest in reading her Ministerial briefings. Those inclined to take such accusations with a pinch of salt are obliged to choose between two explanations for Badenoch’s behaviour: either she is a woke sleeper agent, secretly advancing ultra-left wing regulations for ideological reasons, or she is a lazy, inattentive politician who prioritised the media spotlight over doing her job. Based on my own experiences with politicians, I am inclined to blame laziness. 

None of this bodes well for the future of British conservatism. Since 2019, the Party has been defaulting to a losing electoral tactic Ed West has dubbed “rule left, talk right” — alienating progressive voters via reactionary rhetoric whilst infuriating right wing voters with waves of progressive regulations. Unwilling to get bogged down in detail, Conservative ministers repeatedly attacked “woke” civil servants and public bodies for acting in accordance with regulations they themselves unwittingly introduced. Doubling down on this strategy risks discrediting the right of the party for a generation.

The culture war’s impact on public bodies is both real and harmful; its resolution is to be found in detailed regulation, not cantankerous television interviews. If the Conservative Party has any interest in renewing the country, it will pick a leader with an interest in government. Kemi Badenoch is not that leader.