The Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch has long argued against the Labour party and the left’s ‘divisive agenda of identity politics’. Instead, she has sought to portray the Conservatives as a truly ‘colour-blind party’ and a ‘genuine meritocracy’. Speaking to the Times earlier this year, she even argued that we should not make a ‘big deal’ of her potentially becoming the first black woman to lead the party.
This isn’t the first time Badenoch has failed to live up to her anti-woke credentials
So it’s strange, as ballots for the leadership contest go out to Tory members, to see Badenoch suddenly emphasising her ethnicity. The Essex MP would be ‘Labour’s worst nightmare’, she told the Telegraph this week, in part because her race would protect the Tories from accusations of racism. ‘[Labour] want to paint people on the right as being prejudiced’, she said, but ‘with me there, they will be unable to make that case convincingly’. Badenoch said she has already ‘stood firm’ in the face of such attacks in the past, and ‘exposed a lot of their hypocrisy’. The idea seems to be that if the Tories have a black woman in charge, Labour’s go-to attack line about the Conservatives will misfire, and… their heads will explode.
It’s disappointing to see a politician who has made her name inveighing against identity politics making this claim. If anything, it plays into the left’s hands. The underlying assumption is that only ethnic minorities are able to challenge identity politics because they rank higher in the oppression Olympics. When in reality, anyone should be able to criticise the flawed logic of identity politics, regardless of their background.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time Badenoch has failed to live up to her anti-woke credentials. When the actor David Tennant attacked Badenoch over her stance on LGBT issues earlier this year, she opted to hit back by playing the race card. Badenoch alleged that in telling her to ‘shut up’, Tennant had failed to note the ‘optics’ of ‘a rich, lefty, white male celebrity… attacking the only black woman in government’. Nor is it the first time she seems to have used ‘white’ as a pejorative, referring to her former University of Sussex classmates as ‘stupid, lefty white kids’ in an interview earlier this year. As a backbencher, she hailed a government decision to loosen limits on work and student visas ‘as a first-generation immigrant’. These are strange comments for a woman who in 2020 told this magazine that it’s wrong to ‘politicise’ where you are from.
Badenoch’s latest statement on identity politics doesn’t just smack of hypocrisy though, it also appears weak. For one thing, how can anyone look at the woefully unpopular, muddled Keir Starmer and fret about how he will portray the party?
If anything, the tedious culture war games of ‘who’s the real racist?’ seem hopelessly ineffective in today’s political climate. Online, Elon Musk’s free-speech regime on X and the growth of new media are already shifting Britain’s Overton window to the right. In broadcast media, GB News is doing much the same. It’s notable that Badenoch’s leadership rival, Robert Jenrick, has himself changed the conversation on immigration by calling for league tables for migrant crime and, of course, with his strong stance on leaving the ECHR.
The idea that it requires a black woman to do anything tough on immigration, a common refrain from Badenoch’s backers, is also being rapidly proven wrong by events abroad. Remember those centrist arch-Eurocrats of the Brexit years, Michel Barnier, Ursula von der Leyen and Donald Tusk? All are now morphing into immigration hawks as the EU moves right, effectively ending Schengen in the process. In Germany, nine years after Angela Merkel declared ‘wir schaffen das’ (we can manage this) and let in over a million Syrian migrants, even that neurotic and Europhile nation is bringing in border spot-checks to prevent the rise of the AfD. Meanwhile, being denounced as ‘far-right’ has not stopped other right-wing populist parties from achieving stunning electoral success in countries including Austria, Sweden, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, to name but a few. Across the pond, accusations of racism have not prevented President Trump leading the polls, on the back of his pledge to deport millions of illegal migrants. Notably, none of these movements finds it necessary to rely on a black woman with strong views on women’s spaces.
One might have thought that by now, leading Tories would have worked out that trying to outflank the left from the left by touting their diversity credentials simply doesn’t work. Have David Cameron’s attempts to make the Tories less ‘male, pale and stale’ – undermining his party’s selection procedures – meant that the ‘nasty party’ stopped getting stick over issues of race? Did Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill sail through unopposed because the commentariat was impressed that his party was being led by a Hindu? Did the fact that Suella Braverman is a graduate of Cameron’s infamous A-list stop pro-Gaza marchers labelling her and Sunak ‘coconuts’? No, of course not, on all counts. The Tories’ efforts to out-woke the woke are only ever pointless at best, because, as Ben Sixsmith has noted, you can’t beat the left at its own game.
There is another issue at stake here. Badenoch’s attempt to bolster her right-wing credentials by talking about her ethnicity carries an ugly implication. After all, there is only one other candidate in this race, Robert Jenrick – one of those ‘white males’ she likes to criticise. Badenoch seems to be suggesting that because of his immutable characteristics, because he’s a white man, Jenrick is less fit than she is to be leader of the Conservative party. It’s certainly hard to see what else she could have meant by her remarks. And it’s impossible to see how she could ever stand by such comments while claiming to be an ‘anti-woke’ candidate in this leadership election.
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