Georgia L Gilholy is a journalist.
Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch started her campaign slamming the Conservative administrations she served in for having “talked right but governed left”. Her track record, and current leadership pledges, suggest she could end up doing precisely the same, given the chance.
I find Badenoch’s meteoric rise to leadership challenger somewhat baffling in and of itself.
In 2010 and 2012, she was selected to run as an MP and London Assembly candidate respectively. She failed to get but ended the process sat in fifth on the London wide list. In 2015 she was then appointed to the London Assembly – on the strength of that list – when a Tory AM vacated her seat to take up one in the House of Commons. Actually the Assembly seat would have gone to the fourth person on the list but they too were elected to the Commons; one Suella Fernandes, now Braverman.
Badenoch soon followed both into the Commons having been selected into a safe Tory seat in 2017, and just two years later is being touted as a leadership contender.
I’m not sure her record in Government helps convince me either.
As Minister for Women and Equalities from 2020-2024, she was adept at wading into press rows, less so at implementing concrete steps to stymy the extreme ideologies creeping through the public sector – including on her own patch.
While serving as International Trade Secretary and then the Business and Trade Secretary prior to the 2024 election, she slimmed down the target number of EU laws to be scrapped from 4,000 to just 800, but still failed to reach even this drastically reduced ambition.
One thing Badenoch has undoubtedly succeeded in is making a sense of “anti-wokery” her trademark. Despite this, she has appeared more than happy to use her own ethnic background as a political tool. Using “White” as a pejorative is generally thought to be a preserve of the uber-progressive Left, but seemingly adopted such tactics when slating her former University of Sussex classmates as “stupid lefty white kids” in The Times. She also dismissed Doctor Who star David Tennant as a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity”.
Isn’t there something revealing about those comments?
Whether Badenoch intended so, they imply that in these instances being “white” demeaned the perspective of her detractors. Given her open criticism of far-Left activists, Badenoch seems her to view “white” people as inherently more “privileged” than her? I’d suggest that is very problematic for someone modelling herself as the saving grace of the Right.
Then there are the many self-inflicted column inches recently dedicated to Badenoch’s poor public relations skills, recently opining on the problems with of maternity pay and the minimum wage in ways that might make Ayn Rand jealous. There was her tin-eared suggestion she “became working class” by taking a part-time McDonalds job while studying, despite being the child of a GP and a physiology professor.
Now I know this row was overblown by some corners of the progressive media, but they clearly revealed that Badenoch does not grasp the nuance of the British class system. Again, surely a problem for a wannabe Prime Minister.
But surely the biggest problem with her pitch of ‘disruptor’ on the Right, is her outright refusal to promise caps on immigration figures? She has blamed ballooning migration figures on “woke” Home Office civil servants but she herself voted for major visa relaxations in 2018.
She may hope to brush this record off as a reluctant decision, in line with collective responsibility in government. Yet this is unlikely to wash with voters, given that she proudly admitted to having personally lobbied then-Prime Minister Theresa May on behalf of the changes.
These laws were not insignificant tinkerings with the system but a wholesale removal of the cap on Tier 2 (General) visas, which had limited the number of “skilled” non-EU workers allowed to enter the UK each year. The specific salary requirements to qualify as a “highly skilled” migrant was around £26,200 per year, although this could vary depending on the occupation and its employment gaps.
In 2018, the mean UK salary was approximately £29,588 per year.
In other words, the policy deliberately opened our borders to over 100,000 “skilled” immigrants for jobs which were below the average wage, under the guise of a highly selective new policy. It should be noted that this policy change was some two years after the watershed of the Brexit vote, which largely went the way it did because of decades of ignored grievances about this precise kind of mass immigration, which has divided many towns and cities, driven down wages and dented productivity.
Moreover, in her resurfaced 2018 speech on the matter, Badenoch did not simply argue that the changes were sound policy, but decided to link it to her own background “as a first-generation immigrant”. Her response to fresh reporting on this was poor, with her merely claiming her views had “changed”, after initially refusing to comment.
Badenoch’s approach to illegal migration also leaves much to be desired. She is amongst those who refuse to commit to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)- despite its impact on the UK’s ability to detain and swiftly deport illegal migrants, thousands of whom are currently being accommodated at the taxpayers’ expense.
Her statements on the matter during her leadership have amounted to confusing waffle. One minute she implies exiting the ECHR would not be “radical” enough, the next she complains that other politicians are unfairly positing it as a “silver bullet” solution, claiming her “wholesale strategy” would be preferable. As a strategy it is still frustratingly vague.
Her understanding of divisions and rising sectarianism across swathes of the country is in my view potentially dangerous. Ahead of the Tory party conference, she wrote that the UK needed to “start again” with a new “integration strategy”. But how?
What if certain immigrant groups do not wish to integrate?
We have already seen many cases where this is undoubtedly true, whether it be the grooming gangs scandal, Hindu and Muslim mob clashes in Leicester, anti-semitic Islamist preaching revealed in some mosques across the country or Albanian sex trafficking gangs. These issues often stray into matters of national security, and Badenoch seems lightyears behind on this discourse.
Tinkering with an “integration strategy” will not change people’s deeply-held beliefs, nor magically rehabilitate hostile communities into law-abiding Brits.
Paying lip service to anti-immigration rhetoric is what the Tories already did for more than a decade while overseeing unprecedented levels of migration. Badenoch has shown no solidity about the issue beyond bland regurgitated talking points about the failure of multiculturalism which several of its prime political architects already admitted over a decade ago.
Politicians do not deserve a pat on the back for doing the bare minimum.
Sadly, it seems to me Badenoch may well get just that from Tory members next month.
