The Significance of Kemi Badenoch

Written by Rev John Root, and republished from his blog 'Out of Many, One People'

Three Ways Kemi Badenoch’s Rise Shakes Up Modern Britain

1. The ‘Radical Unpredictability’ of Super-Diverse Britain

Once more we are in ‘When did it become thinkable . . .’ territory. It was probably less than a decade ago that having a non-white Prime Minister was thinkable; and even less for it to be conceivable that the Conservative Party would choose a black woman to lead it. In some respects, Badenoch’s appointment is more startling than that of Sunak, who inherited the role almost by default. Further, not only was the charge that Sunak was a ‘coconut’ both graceless and unintelligent, but in fact, he could be more accurately described as a ‘reverse coconut’: Winchester head-boy, Oxford PPE degree, successful banking career, the easy and assured charm of the entitled. Sunak was ‘white’ on the outside, but ‘Indian’ within: celebrating Divali as a devout Hindu (but reading superbly the not-easy Colossians 1 passage at the Coronation), stable marriage and committed parenting, perhaps even in lacking that faint patina of guilt and embarrassment that is sometimes carried by the super-rich in Britain.

Sunak fitted fairly easily into his role. Badenoch is different. Not only is she not white or English, but she is definitely Nigerian, more specifically Yoruba. Whilst it may be that her outspokenness is part of this, more importantly she approaches life in Britain as an “outsider,” as I shall discuss below; able to cast a critical eye on the country and question assumptions and policies that indigenes have come to take for granted. So, whilst ten years ago it might have seemed inconceivable that a woman born in England, who spent part of her childhood in Africa and only returned in her late teens, could go on to become the Conservative Party leader less than thirty years later, with hindsight it is not wholly unpredictable. She has the qualities of hard conviction, energy and self-confidence that at this juncture the Conservative Party needs.

Such unpredictable things happen in super-diverse societies, because people do not form strong ethnic blocs that move around in formation like a flight of starlings. Rather, the multiple factors of diversity, affinity and experience throw up an unquantifiable variety of responses to life in Britain, so that Badenoch’s rise to leadership is simply one of a whole range of surprises that our society will generate increasingly. It means that those who see ethnicity as a major, virtually determinative factor are being wrong-footed constantly. Thus the jejune assumption that people with a particular colour of skin are ‘coconuts/bananas’ if they do not think and act in a certain way, through to Dawn Butler witlessly re-tweeting that Badenoch represents ‘white supremacy in blackface’, mark a simple failure to recognise the exuberant complexity, richness and sheer unpredictability of multi-ethnic Britain as it is today. The claim that has been made by black feminists that white people can’t cope with strong black women is contested by the fact that the country’s premier conservative organisation has just made one of them its leader.

But the crude assumption that major ethnic categories describe cohorts of people about whom we ought to expect predictable outcomes is still too often the working assumption of many institutions in our society, not least the churches. Thus we have Diversity, Inclusion and Equality programmes, concern about racially proportionate outcomes across the range of human activities, and setting up sure-to-fail quota systems seeking to create artificial proportionate results.

Racial slurs are insulting, not criminal

Regardless of any party affiliation, it is important to see an important object lesson in the contrasting outcomes of Conservative and Labour policies on ‘race’. It has played a major role in the Labour Party’s self-understanding and aims, and yet the results have been meagre. Like many other high-minded organisations, it still has predominantly white leadership, with ethnic minorities appearing mainly down the lower ranks. The Conservative Party has been spectacularly different from most other organisations, with people from ethnic minorities disproportionately present in the leadership rather than in the rank and file. This has not been sheer fluke. The party went out of their way to recruit able people from ethnic minorities, and – like Sunak and Badenoch – put them in safe seats. But it did not act in a performative way, as to make that a central plank of their identity and policies. It has been a victory for policies of quietly thought-through specific intentionality, rather than grand-standing public declarations.

When Sunak became Prime Minister the self-congratulatory (though correct) response was that ‘the most significant thing about having an Indian Prime Minister was that nobody thought it was significant’. But Badenoch’s victory is significant, but not on the crude basis of colour, or that she is the first black leader of a major political party, a representative of a particular cohort. Rather the reverse: it is significant because she is a unique, one-off individual with a highly untypical back story. None of us are acontextual, and she is the product of quite distinctive contexts. It may be that her energy and self-confidence stem from her Yoruba heritage. Interestingly she introduced her stress on personal responsibility by quoting her father. Moreover, she is recognisably one of the many who came to Britain to make a future for themselves, plough their own furrow, and ask for favours from no-one.

Super-diverse societies are too complex to be controlled from above. Things just happen. Surprising, atypical outcomes just suddenly emerge. With increasing frequency across a wide range of national life, people from ethnic minorities will rise to leadership and power. As for the Church of England, three major evangelical churches in London have welcomed Yoruba curates this year.

2. Questioning ‘Cultural Socialism’.

‘Cultural socialism’ is a term used in Eric Kaufmann’s book Taboo to describe ‘a social agenda that privileged race and gender over facts and logic.’ That is, in these areas scientific or evaluative comparisons are illegitimate. Justice requires that absolute equality must be given to all forms of sexual or ethnic identity, just as economic socialism theoretically sought to remove any distinctions of wealth. The result has been politicians stumbling and becoming incoherent over making what were once straight forward distinctions between men or women, or having to be equally respectful to all cultures without paying any attention to their outcomes. In the background was a loose intellectual climate that saw any distinction-making as an attempted validation of power differentials; in the foreground the reality that politicians were conscious of the danger of how easily the votes of highly motivated minorities could be lost.

Badenoch was nurtured outside this foggy intellectual climate and so has had clear, ‘outsider’ eyes to speak against the denials of ‘facts and logic’ that progressive cultural socialism holds on to. In this respect accusations of ‘populism’, of fomenting cultural wars, have been quickly laid against her. But she has not adopted the populist playbook of propagating conspiracy theories about Covid injections or has denied human-induced climate change. She has simply followed where she sees the facts and logic leading. It is significant that her Leadership Launch speech made much of her background in engineering: ‘Engineers are realists . . We don’t make things better just by using words’. Badenoch also critiques the damaging influence of identity-driven agendas within degrees like Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Classics, and the humanities on political thinking. She has explained how the shallow liberalism of privileged university students led her to adopt conservative views.

As regards gender, it is hardly ‘anti-woke’ to accept the findings of the Cass Report on the fundamental and unchangeable biological differences between male and female as the backdrop against which varied gender identities can be discussed, so that acceptance of variety should not prevail in specific contexts where bodies matter, such as hospitals, prisons, changing rooms and most sporting activity. A view now accepted by the Minister of Health, Wes Streeting, and so presumably government policy; though it would seem there are still people in the medical professions as well as the wider society determined to hold the fort against the arguments of the Report.

If Badenoch’s ‘outsider’ common sense and evidence-based approach is gaining wider acceptance, her views on culture and ethnicity have aroused more controversy. Her statement that ‘all cultures are not equally valid’ is in line with her preference for the actual over the theoretical. ‘Culture is more than cuisine or clothes. It's also customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not’. The issue here is how cultures are actually practised, and, as regards living in Britain, to what extent they respect the rights of individuals, such as over the freedom of women. As with gender, there can be conflict between women’s and transgender rights, so with culture there can be conflict between women’s rights and freedom to practice religion. As we shall see below, Badenoch is quicker than most politicians to recognise that politics means hard choices and that cultural socialism often simply refuses to face the choices that have to be made. For Badenoch such choices should be congruent with the culture of this country – individual rather than communal; a culture that both she consciously chooses to be part of and which is ‘the reason why millions of people from all over the world want to live here’.

3. Emphasising the Role of Principles in Politics

Badenoch is a conservative. Clearly for her it is not a case of tribal identity or loyalty, or a means of ensuring the rich stay rich. Rather it is inherently conservative, that is pessimistic, about what politics can do. It espouses what Thomas Sowell has called ‘the constrained vision’, a sober recognition of limitations and therefore of making difficult choices. For Badenoch this is portrayed in the persona of the engineer: ‘we understand trade-offs . . .We understand how to manage limitations and expectations”. For engineers ‘Things can be good, they can be fast and they can be cheap. But they can’t be all three’. She rightly objects ‘Too often politicians pretend that we can have everything’. But the need to make hard choices, to trade of some positives over against other positives (as opposed to ’cakeism’!) means that whilst her slimmed down role for the state and stronger reliance on personal responsibility (as with her controversial proposal to reduce maternity pay) might be welcomed as reducing the size of the population now dependent on state provision, it could also lead to greater immiseration that the electorate will find unacceptable.

Badenoch has expressed a vision for Britain in 2030 shared not only by conservative minded English people but also widespread enough amongst people who have migrated to Britain to cause dismay amongst those on the left who have assumed monopoly allegiance from such people. It is a vision derived from personal conviction and thought-through principles, not from the consensus emanating from focus groups. It is a sharper, harder, brighter vision. It may well take us in unwelcome directions, but it is significantly different from the options that have emerged from within the confines of our islands’ politics.

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