Kemi Badenoch recently made the obligatory voyage from the provinces to the imperial centre, travelling to Washington D.C. to meet and network with various figures in the broader American right. As well as meeting those like Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, Badenoch also gave a speech that was rightly panned by Ben Sixsmith. Then, Badenoch made an appearance on the Honestly podcast, hosted by Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press Substack news outlet. 

The interview was billed as being with the next Thatcher, once again demonstrating that British Conservatism is a form of ideological necromancy. It ignores the lessons, both good and bad, provided by Thatcher’s personal example and instead thinks that copy-pasting her later policy programme from the 1980s into the 2020s will be the cure for all our ills. To be fair to Badenoch, she herself said that whilst being compared to Thatcher was in some ways flattering, in other ways it places a weight of expectation on the individual that can never be satisfied when the fallible human in question is compared to the radiant political spirit in the mind’s eye of the party faithful.

Much of the interview covered the familiar territory of the culture war waged by “the left has gone bonkers” radicals who want to push the revolution ten per cent further than their erstwhile slightly-less leftist comrades want it to go. There was much talk about how the left are the real racists, sexists, misogynists, and homophobes, all enabled by unaccountable bureaucracies. It all felt like a conversation that could’ve been had any time in the pre-Covid Intellectual Dark Web days. Badenoch’s contention that “liberalism has been hacked” by wokeness, using its virtues of inclusivity, progressivism and equality against it ignore the fact that wokeness isn’t a deviation from liberalism but is a radicalisation of liberalism’s core tenets of liberation and equality as a mask for political centralisation. It is also a way for her to let her party off the hook and shirk the responsibility for their complicity in where we are.

This is all woefully behind the times we live in, of “actually existing post-liberalism” where the administrative state and corporate oligarchies intertwine, supported by a Blob of the NGOcracy, legacy media and legal frameworks to divert power and sovereignty from political institutions and instead into extra-democratic centres of power and influence. Badenoch made a stab at framing this in a leadership election pamphlet, but this interview showed that she fails to understand that everything she complains about follows on from taking liberalism to its endpoint and is entrenched by laws passed by previous governments. It will take the active use of political power framed by a right-wing view of the good, to repeal and replace in service to restoration. Badenoch’s contention in the pamphlet that everything about Britain’s social liberal society is fine, displays a detachment from the malign social and cultural consequences for our social and moral ecology.

One of the areas most disastrously affected by this dispensation is immigration. Weiss knows this is an area that Badenoch is vulnerable on, both because of her party’s record in office and her own record as an MP. Weiss rightly asked why immigration was so high given Badenoch’s party’s fourteen years in power and repeated promises to lower it. Badenoch responded that before Brexit, EU freedom of movement meant that we had no control over our borders and that most immigrants were Europeans. Moreover, post-Brexit and post-Covid the so-called “Boriswave” of 2.2 million immigrants in less than two years, or one migrant every 30 seconds, was because we needed doctors and nurses, and also workers because not enough Brits are in work.

If she really wants Britain to avoid the tribalism of her homeland, she should be prepared to say explicitly how her party brought us here

None of this is true. Even when we were in the EU, it is likely that the majority of migrants were from outside the EEA. Moreover, doctors and nurses amount to 2.5-3 per cent of the overall total. We could, if we wished, curtail all other avenues of migration, maintain our healthcare migration, and thus cut numbers by over 90 per cent. The idea that our foreign-born population currently sits at 17 per cent, higher than the Ellis Island period in American migration history, because of the NHS’s desperate need for immigrant doctors and nurses is simply rubbish. We do not need 906,000 net immigration, or 1.2 million gross immigration in one year. 

Finally, the fact that 4-5 million Brits are not just unemployed but have fallen out of the workforce completely and sit on welfare is indeed true. This is one piece of the disaster zone that is the British economy. However, the idea that migrants do the work Brits won’t do is also not true. Firstly, only 16 per cent of visas were given to migrants on the work route. That is work overall, not skilled work. The rest have been to dependants, students, and refugees. Further, even taking into account the numbers out of work, native Brits still work at higher rates than immigrants. They are also more likely to be net fiscal contributors, whilst the evidence from here and elsewhere in Europe is that the majority of non-EEA migrants are never net fiscal contributors, and instead represent a massive drain on the public purse in both welfare costs and capital stock usage.

Speaking of students, Badenoch tried earlier to finesse her own role in the explosion in numbers, by arguing that the video of her in the Commons praising the lifting of the cap on foreign students after having lobbied for it. Badenoch’s claim that “We brought in a system that should have controlled the numbers, but people gamed it. Liberalism has been hacked”, is utter drivel. The Boriswave was the logical result of deliberate policy decisions designed to open the floodgates from a Prime Minister and Cabinet careless of the costs of such numbers and such an increase in ethnocultural diversity over such a short period of time. 

This was indicative of a theme throughout: Badenoch talks up her own willingness to be blunt in her honesty and brutal in her self-criticism. However, throughout this interview she says she will be honest and will pursue self-criticism to accept responsibility but seems to think that saying you’ll do something is the same as actually doing something and being seen to have done it. This is the equivalent of Keir Stamer’s idea of leadership being to say that one is a leader. 

To give her some credit, Badenoch says to Weiss that Britain is a “home and not a hotel”, which she has said elsewhere, and is exactly right to do so. But when it comes to concrete specifics, she is much more comfortable talking about the benefits of Thomas Sowell-esque economic liberalism and loosely-defined Western values than she is about how a conservative politics that responds to the specific problems of Britain’s present can be addressed by drawing on the particular resources of Britain’s past. Any effort to address the institutional capture that she identifies here and elsewhere must begin by looking back at the old constitutional order of Britain in order to repeal the managerial leviathan launched by Blair (and entrenched by the Tories) and restore in adapted form what is native to our constitutional tradition. 

This particular example strikes at the broader question of “who are we?” This is fundamental. Any affinity amongst national majorities for an identity deeper than one based in transactional values is still mostly seen as inherently immoral. Peoplehood precedes principles. Identity-as-values, divorced from the people who produce, practice and embody those values in a place and over time is not open to being hacked because there’s nothing of substance to hack in the first place. Such an identity is inherently replaceable and disposable.

Badenoch should reckon with the fact that the economy comes from the people and is framed by the culture they produce. If you change the people, you change the culture, you change the economy, and the country. Badenoch is absolutely correct that social order and cultural harmony are precious achievements that are undermined by the centrifugal effects of tribalism and competition over scarce resources. If she is sincere in wanting Britain to avoid the tribalism of her family’s homeland, then she should be prepared to lay out explicitly how her party brought us here, accept it was not an accident or liberalism being “hacked”, and then lay out how she would act to stem the flow. Unfortunately, such reflection or remorse has been perfunctory and quickly disposed of. This interview provided more evidence of the same.