Even now, months after the event, Labour MPs have not forgiven Kemi Badenoch for saying that Britain is one of the best countries in the world in which to be black. It was during the Black Lives Matter protests and many politicians — including Sir Keir Starmer — were ‘taking the knee’ to show fealty to its cause. Badenoch took a different view, seeing within all this a pernicious ideology that portrays blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression. In parliament this week, she went further: this, she said, is ‘critical race theory’ — a new enemy for the Tory party and, as equalities minister, one for her to fight.
We met earlier this month in her old workplace, The Spectator (she was our digital chief), where she reassessed her earlier stance. ‘I’d go further and say this is the best country,’ she says. ‘I’ve lived in the US, I’ve lived in Nigeria, so I feel like I’ve got some context to compare. I look at South Africa and look around Europe and ask: are those places better to be black than the UK? I don’t think so. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect… But if as a politician, especially a black politician, I don’t say this, who will?’
When she spoke in the Commons this week in a six-hour debate on Black History Month, it was quite a moment for the Tories, who, as a party, have tended to shy away from the issue of identity politics. About 30 of them offered support from the normally empty benches as she declared war on critical race theory and BLM. She added that teaching children white privilege as a fact was ‘illegal’.
‘Many people don’t realise that [critical race theory] is political,’ she tells me.
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