Kemi Badenoch

speaker

549 appearances 8 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 9 Jun

Kemi Badenoch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 522. The New Conservative Party | Kemi Badenoch · 17 Feb 2025 podcast

Exchange rate was terrible. And I came here and it was... just so amazing because I couldn't remember the UK from my early childhood. And it was like watching TV and just thinking the amount of opportunity I had was fantastic, how lucky I was. But also it was at a time where leaving was just something that felt like an escape from a place where no one could escape from.

And I always feel very lucky about that. So I see the UK as a place of hope and opportunity. And one of the things I'm most worried about now is that the country is changing. It's not the same place that I moved back to in 1996. It's not the same place that I came back to. It's changed a lot. And that worries me. So... I think you and I probably have something in common here.

I think that we are classified as conservatives now, but really what we are conserving is classical liberalism, like the old liberalism, not the horrible postmodern lefty nonsense stuff, but the good stuff.

The Enlightenment values, you know, freedom of speech, you know, things like the presumption of innocence, free enterprise, all of the things that I think helped make this country really great and a lot of the countries around the West slowly being forgotten, being taken for granted.

And I can never forget those things because I have a comparison country and I have lived and seen a place where those things are not respected, institutions are not respected, where everybody looked like me, but it was multicultural and there was so much conflict. And it's one of the reasons why I describe the UK as a multi-ethnic country, not a multicultural one.

because you need to make sure that you have a shared dominant culture. And yes, people can eat different foods and have songs and so on, but those are the very superficial markers of culture. Culture trumps everything. It's much deeper things. Customs, norms, how we treat each other, the expectations that you have of society, and more importantly, what society has of you.

What are your responsibilities, not just your rights? And those are the things that led me on the journey to conservatism. But it is very rooted in my having two places to compare to.

No, how would I have political aspirations? I grew up under a military government. I didn't even know what politics was. You kind of knew what democracy was, but you knew you didn't have it. So the politics And the political sort of interest came much, much later. Now, I was supposed to be a doctor like my parents and my uncles and aunts and all their friends. That was the family that I was born.

That was the sort of family that I was born into. And I had, you know, when I talked about that part scholarship, I had a pre-med part scholarship to Stanford and my father couldn't afford the rest of it. And that was age 16. So. There was time and I came here and the first thing I did was get a job because I was left on my own and I wanted money.

So I got a job at McDonald's and I went to a college part time for sort of 16 to 18 year olds. It's called a further education college. And I just thought, well, you know, my parents are doctors. Of course, I will be a doctor as well.

And what I didn't realize was that between the expectations of the school I was going to, and the amount of time I was spending, you know, earning money and flipping burgers and eating them, that actually I was no longer on that academic track. And I also had my first experience of what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Because I had grown up in a relatively wealthy middle-class family, everybody's a doctor, and of course you get all As, and of course you do well. It just wasn't even a thing to not succeed academically. And I got to a school where failing was okay, and it didn't matter if you didn't get the top grades, and the teachers would say, well, why do you want to be a doctor? You can be a nurse instead.

And it wasn't because... they wanted to keep me down. It was because what they had seen was that if you're Black, then you probably shouldn't be stretched too much because you won't achieve it. And so they set lower targets and give you a huge congratulations and a round of applause for meeting them. That was the complete opposite of my upbringing.

Being relatively wealthy in a poor country is very different from being relatively wealthy in the West. For me, being relatively wealthy meant that we had a car. And we, certainly up until I was about 13, we had running water. After 13, we stopped having running water. And we could occasionally, but not very frequently, travel on holiday. But we didn't have electricity a lot of the time.

So it's an experience that comes from just being in a poor country, that even when you have a bit of money, you still experience life like people who don't have any. So no electricity, eventually no running water, lots of fuel shortages. But I was never hungry. So that's what I mean by that. And you're absolutely right.

A lot of Nigerians who do leave the country end up doing well because they have left a system that holds them back. and go to a system that allows them to flourish. And that's why I'm so interested in what is it that holds people back in one place and allows them to flourish in another. And it is not just money.

It is many of the things that go with culture, the attitude to entrepreneurship, whether you live in a high trust or a low trust society, it's a very low trust society. You get a lot of clan behavior, but it is also, it's a very competitive place.

So if you grow up in a very competitive culture and you then live in a place where competition is allowed and is allowed to flourish, you will very likely do well. And I think that's one of the things that explains the fact is when people look at the look at the demographics.

So I think that if you live in a place, if you've come from a country that is very competitive because there are limited resources, Because there are not enough jobs to go around. There's not enough university places. So you need to be very academic. You need to be, you know, very hustling in your behavior.

And then you then move to a place where you don't have those barriers, but you still have that culture. You are more likely to succeed. And I think that that is what explains some of the success of, I think it's West Africans, not just Nigerians. But I suspect as you see more and more lower skilled migration, I think you will start to see those improvements

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