Conservatives: Kemi Badenoch Keynote Speech to the International Democracy Union (IDU) Forum Dinner 2024

I joined the Conservative movement in a very unusual way.

I didn't study politics or government at university. I'm not a lawyer, I'm an engineer. I analyse systems.

I like to know how things work and I love to fix things that are broken.

I'm a child of the 80s.  I was born in London, but I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria - a place where almost everything seemed broken.

I grew up under a military dictatorship. I would never have believed that 40 years later, I would be standing here as the leader of the oldest, and arguably most successful, political party in the history of Western democracy.

And yet, I am here as leader now, because my party suffered its greatest ever election defeat.  We lost two thirds of our members of parliament and polling at a historic low.

I'm here to talk about why that happened, why it matters for all of you and how we can make sure that it NEVER happens again to the parties of the center-right.

I believe my party lost because it spent a lot of time, “Talking Right, but governing Left”.

We didn't recognise how the world was changing, and when we did, we did not adapt enough.  There was complacency about the nature of the enemy we were fighting because a lot of people did not recognise it for what it was.

There's a great movie from the 1990s -  I'm sure many of you have seen called the usual suspects. And in it, there is a fantastic quote, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.”

That is the trick that our opponents on the left, whatever you want to call them -communists, socialists, in this country they call them liberal - I don't know why, there's nothing Liberal about them.

There's a trick that they play which is that they smuggle ideas and policies that look like liberalism but are anything but Liberalism has been hacked.

Let me give you an example.

The United Kingdom like many countries has generous laws to accommodate persecuted people seeking asylum. The UK is a nominally Christian country.  It was reported this year that one in seven asylum seekers who were housed together on a barge in Southern England, were converting to Christianity under the supervision of local church leaders.

I am not religious myself. I am and always will be the grand daughter of a methodist reverend.  I know the joy that comes to a priest every time his flock grows and a sinner repenteth, but I found it shocking, that not a single one of these conversions was treated with any suspicion until at the same time it was discovered that one of such people was found to have committed multiple sexual attacks since arriving in the UK, and then went on to carry out a chemical attack in London on a mother and her two young children.

It turns out that over many years, we have had very naive church leaders converting people who had no interest in Christianity as a means to circumvent border control. This is what I mean when I say that Liberalism has been hacked.  When a system that has accommodations made for the vulnerable is being exploited by opponents of that system, something needs to change.

These aren't features of the system, they are bugs and they need fixing.  If Conservatives, and liberals, try to manage migration with simplistic tests and no overall vision of what kind of country we are trying to create, we will fail and the voters will punish us as my party found out in July.

There are many, many ways that liberalism is being hacked. Both socially and economically.

In January this year, Javier Milei gave a fantastic speech which I must quote. It had very similar themes to a speech I gave two years ago, so I'm hoping I inspired him!

In the speech he says, “I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it's only ridiculous if you limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it's an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition should be updated in the light of current circumstances”.

He goes on to say:

“ Today, states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.”

He is absolutely right.

Two years ago, I gave a speech where I talked about how many leftist ideologies have snuck into institutions across the western world wearing the clothes of the civil rights movement, and they are anything BUT.

So many people don't know what real freedom is.  Because they've always had it, they have no idea just how lucky they are and just how fragile freedom can be, how easily it can be taken away, or in fact given away.  

I was lucky in my experiences. I was born to a relatively wealthy family and had a decent education.  I also know what it is like to be poor.  I watched my family become poor as their wealth, income and savings were inflated away by destructive government policies. They didn't call it socialism – but it definitely was.  

Capital controls, no freedom of movement, government owning the means of production.  There was no freedom either, the government deciding which school your child would go to, deciding what businesses could or could not operate all the way to arrests with no trial, state-sanctioned murder.

So I know what freedom looks like.  I know the values that can make citizens wealthier and happier and how without them, they become engines of misery and despair.

Classic liberal values, not left-wing liberalism but classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law, no matter who you are or where you come from.

All of those things were missing when I was growing up as a child. I know the value and I worry that we are losing what made our countries great.

All of us here are custodians of a great tradition, a tradition that is under threat. We all have something in common, whether you identify as a conservative or a classic liberal or all of us on the centre right share these values and we are dealing with the same problem, and that is that those values have been hacked. They have been undermined. And if we can spot the trick, we can stop it from destroying our societies.

We are giving away our freedoms away by stealth. Because we don't know the value of what we have, and we are failing to adapt as the world is changing and new threats emerge and we don't recognise when opposing ideologies are taking over. Ideologies and beliefs that demand our tolerance even as they seek to undermine the very culture and institutions that create that tolerance.

It is the question all of us in politics today must answer.

How do liberal democracies, which are so tolerant and so accepting, fight against the intolerance of those it has accepted of different norms, customs and values which are accommodated within the liberal framework, but seek to undermine it at every level?

I started my speech by explaining that I joined the Conservative movement in an unusual way. It started when I moved back to the UK from Nigeria aged 16. I had grown up in a well to do family. My parents were doctors, and they expected that I would become a doctor, just like them.

I got a job at Mcdonald's and started off part-time at a local college where I told them what my ambitions were.

It was the first time in my entire life that a teacher told me (till then a straight A student), that my ambitions were too high. 

She asked me if I was sure I wanted to be a doctor and that it would be much easier to become a nurse. I realise now she was trying to be helpful in her own misguided way. She thought that black kids were not very academic. She wanted me to aim low and succeed, rather than aim high and fail.  

And you all know that if a teacher tells a 16 year old their grades aren't that important, they won't work as hard.  I didn't know how to describe what was happening at the time, but I knew I didn't like it today. I call it the bigotry of low expectations. It does not believe in meritocracy, and it seeded in me a hatred of affirmative action style policies that are designed, in theory to help minorities, but in reality, hold them back and cast doubt on their real achievements as being as a result of DEI or quotas, rather than effort and talent.

The truth is that the left are not that interested in ethnic minorities except as a tool to fight their battles against the right. 

In fact, just this morning the British Prime Minister made a joke about how I worked at McDonald's.  He would never have dared to do that, if I was a left-wing activist.  And if a Conservative Prime Minister had made those comments about a black party leader, they would have been called a racist and asked to resign. 

Even as a teenager, I could see the hypocrisy in in so much of their rhetoric.  I knew that these were not my kind of people and so I started taking an interest in Conservatism and happened upon the books of Thomas Sowell.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Growing up in a place where everyone looked like me inoculated me against the fashionable and nonsensical notion of white privilege, or that oppression was primarily related to skin-colour.

Oppression narratives are the new cloak for socialism to smuggle itself into institutions, pretending to be civil rights and social justice. These are the new battle lines, and I'm going to tell you how to fight them.

In the UK, I am criticised as a “Culture Warrior” by the left-wing media. It is meant to be pejorative, but I love the title. My grandfather told me that I was descended from warriors, and so I think I'm keeping up the tradition.

I believe in tradition. And if we don't defend our culture, who will?

So how does liberalism get hacked and how do we fight it? 

Let's start with an example. We believe in freedom. None of us want our countries to be invaded. So of course, we are against imperialism. Suddenly, a group turns up. They want to promote anti-imperialism. Sounds okay. Government gives them money. They get University Grants. They write textbooks, bring those narratives into the school curriculum.

And suddenly you find that anti-imperialism is directed solely against our own country, or the West. They're not attacking China. They're not attacking Russia. In fact, in some instances, they praise Russia, which is actively carrying out an imperialist agenda against a neighbouring country.

Here's another example – the anti-racism movement. We are all against racism. A group turns up says that they are anti racist, sounds okay. And then all of a sudden, we see that they've decided all white people are racist and so the only way to be anti- racist is to be against white people because of their white privilege.

We all care about our environment.  We are conservatives.  Conservative parties, by their very nature, are almost rooted in rural and agrarian communities; the original parties of the land, dedicated to leaving a better world for our children.

And, for many years, conservatives happily worked with all parties to protect our natural world.  To repair it where needed.  To make it more beautiful and to tread carefully in how we used its riches.

Yet, just as in so many other policy areas, these values were hacked.  A radical green absolutism replaced.  Looking after our planet became an exclusive discussion about Net-Zero and reducing emissions and alongside it, the growth of activist government to regulate it.

Even feminism, that was meant to promote the rights of women, has spent so much time diving into post-modernism and deconstructing the dialectic it doesn't know what a woman is anymore to the extent that in Scotland they were putting rapists in women's prisons simply because the men declared themselves women.

This is how liberalism, gets hacked.

We talk about free speech, and then our enemies use it to feed self-loathing propaganda to our children on social media. We talk about freedom of religion, only to see those that do not want freedom use their religion to take away the freedoms of others as we saw just last week in the UK parliament when a Labour MP effectively demand blasphemy laws.

The presumption of innocence is thrown away and replaced with cancel culture masquerading as justice.

The right to protest is used as a cover to carry out intimidation, most recently as we've seen in cities across the world, of Jews. Posters of missing children and kidnapped hostages ripped down, denying the freedom of others to be heard.

Our history - read through the most hostile and negative interpretations possible and taught to children in schools, and widely propagated on our own media and social media.

These problems are not just national.  They are international.  The European Convention of Human Rights now interpreted well beyond the intentions of its creators to a point where nations can no longer arbitrate fairly between citizens.  Motions at the UN that would never pass now do so regularly because of the moral cowardice of those who should know better.

We turn up at international conferences and other countries are demanding reparations to the tune of trillions for historical injustices as we saw last month at the Commonwealth conference.   Every country in the world can claim that it deserves reparations from another.   

This is not serious foreign policy.

I remember when talks of reparations were a fringe discussion but the movements are springing up and will become mainstream because their proponents sense a weakness in the west and in those who are meant to defend and champion western values.

I don't like using the word “woke” to describe these issues.  I use “Progressive Authoritarianism” because the word woke masks just how deeply destructive these ideologies are.  But for some reason, “progressive authoritarianism” isn't catching on.

So how do we fix this? I call it muscular liberalism. We don't want to throw away any of the things that are good about our society. But we need to police the boundaries otherwise our opponents will blur them to the point where they no longer exist.

The first step is to explain the value of liberty.  Our opponents have no fundamental concept of the meaning of liberty. They see it as the freedom to do bad things, whether they are offensive or exploitative.. Liberty is a practical necessity for a flourishing society, not just a philosophical 'nice to have'.

The second, is top stop the expansion of the state. A common mistake is to accept that every problem requires the state to get involved. This reinforces the belief that state action can solve everything, when it cannot.

The more state power grows, the more we curtail what people can and should do for themselves. Worse, we reduce people's ability to think for themselves.  

This is why I am excited about DOGE and what President-Elect Trump and Elon Musk will do on government efficiency.

We have forgotten what the state's purpose is in national life, no longer asking, what it should or should not do. Instead using state power to continue tinkering with every aspect of life in order to achieve social justice, we sleepwalk into a planned economy far more oppressive and stagnant than thinkers of the twentieth century could have envisaged.  

Third, let's stop being afraid to defend our beliefs.  Let's stop being shamed into staying quiet. Part of the problem is that, for the centre-right, liberty has come to mean a laissez-faire attitude - that we should sit back and do nothing. We are told we must not take sides or fight culture wars. That this is the operation of a free society - that this is progress.

This 'do nothing' attitude is deeply misguided. Freedom must be protected and nurtured with reference to important broader principles. People should always be treated as individuals. Due process must always be ensured. A limited state should operate in a neutral fashion to everyone in society. The rule of law must be protected, under which all are equal.

We cannot reverse time, but we can build a new future. This requires a more muscular liberalism that is strong, confident in itself and not overly fixated on the past. We also have to make more of a case for what we are for, not just what we are against.  Otherwise, we create new opponents, but few, if any, new allies. 

A positive alternative is needed, not just harking back to an earlier picture of the good society. This project also requires the case to be made for small government. The unnecessary growth of the state beyond providing essential public services has created multiple opportunities for activists to spread their ideology. We need to make the case for leaner government. And yet, too much rhetoric speaks of a smaller state as an end in itself. A smaller state is a means to secure a better way of doing things, allowing bureaucracy to focus and prioritise its resources. 

The best governments do a few things well, not many things badly.

Arguments over pronouns and gender-neutral toilets or statues and white privilege seem trivial when compared to solving climate change and the demographic time-bomb of an ageing population. But they are inextricably linked. You can't encourage the rest of the world to make sacrifices to achieve net zero if you've told them Western civilisation prospered only by exploiting them. Why on earth would they trust our intentions on everything from technology to vaccines and public health?

If the West, is only prosperous due to slavery and colonialism, if all its success is down to the patriarchy, white supremacy and hetero-normative oppression, there is a price to be paid. That price is that our beliefs, democracy, equality before the law, meritocracy, free markets and so many other liberal values are mere fiction. Fairy tales we tell ourselves to cover up a dark and murky past. There can be no resolution of the big problems of our age if we lose confidence in our history and the story of Western liberalism.

If we fail to defend it, there are many competitor states who will happily watch as we undermine ourselves.

As I conclude, I apologize for ending on a morbid note, but I want to share a personal story of what happens when we don't defend the things we believe in, when we fail to give hope to young people.

A vacuum is created, and other beliefs fill this vacuum. Two years ago, this month, my cousin, who was living in Toronto, killed himself. He was 27 years old and had fallen down the social media and internet rabbit hole of anti-natalism and pro-mortalism.  Movements I'd never even heard of.

He had spent months, probably years, reading and self radicalizing, learning about how human beings were a plague on the world that our very existence was destroying the planet. These movements promoted the idea that having children was wrong, evil even.  

That ending your life was a better way to stop the spread of misery around the world. It was heartbreaking to know that these ideas had filled his mind and tortured him.

He is, or was, one of a generation of young people that see nothing ahead of them but a bleak future and no hope. I worry that when we do not promote what we believe in enough when we do not talk enough about the importance of family or personal responsibility and how our beliefs and ideas are a force for good around the world, we fail to offer hope to the next generation.  

It is our job to provide hope. There is no cavalry coming. It's just us. We have a job to do in championing and defending the values that don't just help us win elections, but make the world a better place