Things are currently looking choppy for Kemi Badenoch. Polls last weekend were bad enough, seven of them showing Reform leading the Conservatives by a point. But now it seems this gap may have widened dramatically. A poll on Thursday showed Reform pushing the Tories in to third place, with Farage’s party on 25 per cent and the Conservatives trailing on 22 per cent.
It’s when Kemi speaks from her own experience that a gap between the Conservatives and Reform seems to open up
‘The message that’s coming from this is very, very clear,’ Farage has crowed. ‘Not only do we have momentum but if you want to beat Labour, if you want to get them out at the next general election, don’t waste your vote with the Conservatives.’
Kemi herself has decided, publicly at least, to play it cool, recently shrugging off Reform’s growing popularity: ‘What we’re seeing with those numbers, a lot of people still don’t know who I am. They’ve known Nigel Farage for twenty years.’ As for Farage’s stated ideas on tackling immigration, she’s dismissed these (perhaps accurately) as ‘just wishes…His diagnosis of things is not wrong, but he has never tried to fix things so he doesn’t understand the system.’
When pushed on the possibility of merging with Reform, she says it’s absurd to consider dealing with a group of people ‘who have said what they wanted to do is destroy the Conservatives… They’re not interested in solving problems. It’s all about taking us down.’
Do Reform have a good chance of achieving this? And are pundits correct to see the writing on the wall for Kemi and her party? Right now, it certainly looks like it. But given that four years is an eternity in politics, let us, just for the sake of it, imagine a different outcome.
It’s 2029, and after a full term of Trump2 in the White House, with all its attendant sturm und drang, the UK is wearying of more florid styles of right-wing leadership. Kemi, a little late to the shindig, has nonetheless made a fair entrance and is finally having an impact on the public. Reform, by pitching themselves as a populist (and popular) movement well to the right of the Conservatives, have freed up swathes of those who once proudly declared they’d ‘never kiss a Tory’ to vote for a party that now seems emollient by comparison.
Yet what would they actually be voting for? Badenoch has said this week that under a Conservative government migrants on work visas but claiming benefits will be banned from settling indefinitely in the UK. But other policy announcements have been deliberately slow in coming.
Instead, we need to look at what she herself has said. We know she describes herself as ‘an economic liberal who believes in a small, fiscally prudent state,’ and that she values ‘family… freedom… equality under the law… citizenship, real citizenship, not just to have a passport.’ Yet these are blandishments which surely no free-market Conservative or Faragist would dispute. What does Badenoch, in her own words, actually believe?
She has promised to be radical, and to ‘rewire, reboot and reprogramme’ the state. She intends to shift workers away from a swelling bureaucracy and into more ‘productive areas’ – bad news, in other words, for the civil service and much of the public sector. ‘We keep creating more bureaucracy, more regulation, and yet the public services are not improving.’ Government, whether under the Conservatives or Labour, is ‘doing too much, and it’s doing it badly… People want the government to fix everything. They want the government to solve everything. And if you ever sound hesitant, you are made out to be a cruel, unfeeling person.’
She also recognises the need for slow, methodical analysis before plans get made: ‘If you get the diagnosis wrong, the treatment won’t work.’ But if Reform continues to trounce the Conservatives in the polls, with Badenoch herself seen as the main obstacle to any merger, will she get the chance to carry out either?
We know she believes in free speech, much of it for practical purposes: ‘We need to go back to a point where people can see what is real and what is not real and that requires a lot more free speech and a lot more proper conversations.’
She also recognises that British tolerance can be its own undoing: ‘How do we stop people from taking advantage of the freedoms we have, to use them to try and destroy us?’ On immigration, her view is that the country needs ‘high-skilled immigration’ and to ‘get rid of the low-skilled immigration… Our country is our home; it is not a hotel….If people arriving don’t want to integrate into British culture, they shouldn’t be here.’ She clearly feels multiculturalism is, as it stands, an abject flop: ‘We are getting people having separate and insular communities… We have to make sure we have a dominant culture in our country…’
‘Numbers matter,’ she’s conceded, but ‘culture matters even more;’ it’s vital that ‘people who come to the country are compatible with those beliefs’ or ‘at the very least, do not damage’ them. You sense at times that Badenoch wants to alter the entire mood-music of Britain, to change the way it sees itself and where it draws the line. Many will wish her luck here, but the test will be her policies for bringing such things about, lest they too turn into ‘just wishes.’ There is still, some would say, not enough clear blue water here between her party and Farage’s.
Badenoch’s kind of specificity is something neither Labour nor Reform are currently offering
Yet it’s when Kemi speaks from her own experience that a gap between the Conservatives and Reform seems to open up, and you get a more thoughtful picture of race and immigration. When it comes to the first, Badenoch, largely as a result of her own experience, loathes blanket categories and likes to be exact. As she has pointed out, ‘I grew up in a very multicultural country. But everyone looked the same.’
She deplores the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ she found at Phoenix College, South London, where she did her A-levels, and where she says she was gently deterred from attempting to become a doctor: ‘They couldn’t tell the difference – and this is where judging by skin colour is a terrible thing – between someone who had perhaps grown up in a very disadvantaged family and had serious challenges, and someone from a stable family who had loads of opportunities.’
She dislikes the left-wing thinking which says (in her own words again) ‘‘You’re a black woman, you should be going to the black woman’s room and doing black women’s groups’ and which dismisses those who choose not to as ‘coconuts’ or in her particular case as the ‘black face of white supremacy.’ This attitude she’s condemned as ‘destroying the identities of hundreds of millions of people, who have different ethnicities – they’re all black – different cultures, different languages, and just throwing all of that away to create this really bland stereotype.’
The same goes, she says, for Islam and Islamic countries,’ of which ‘there are so many different groups’, adding at another moment that the failure to distinguish between ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamism’ is hurting ‘many Muslims.’
She’s been criticised for applying this thinking to Pakistani grooming gangs, but has defended it robustly: ‘They did come from a particular place where they were mostly peasant farmers, they were insular, even from the rest of Pakistan, they’re not like the people in Lahore… a lot of innocent people who happen to share characteristics are being blamed, so let’s be specific.” Nor is this attitude confined to race. She is just as wary of generalisations about big business, or those who dismiss landlords as mere ‘exploiters’ of their tenants. Her instinctive dislike of viewing any so-called group en bloc seems to apply across the board.
Let us leave aside, for a moment, the elephant in the room: that a split and fractious right-wing vote at the next election will be a gift to Keir Starmer and his party, however disillusioned the electorate may be. The fact is, Badenoch’s kind of specificity is something neither Labour nor Reform are currently offering. Nuance doesn’t always play well with voters – particularly in an age of spin and soundbites. But it may be what the world is crying out for in 2029, after four years of Donald Trump in office and the ongoing circus – sometimes engaging, sometimes exhausting – of Farage and his ambitions. When Kemi Badenoch comes to outlining the clear differences between her Conservatives – ‘under new management’ – and the Reform Party, here would not be a bad place to start.
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