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 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

disappearing um as well i think that's one of the things i remember seeing a study that mentioned that so you know the the relative class of the people who move makes a difference and it's one of the reasons why i say it's not just about the country people come from but who is coming what skills are they bringing and do they want the place to succeed

Yes, it is more important than just pure money because it means that you can be thrown into any sort of circumstance and you are likely to succeed. And I always consider myself so lucky because had I been born into a different family, I might have had a different trajectory. And it's one of the reasons why I think that family is something that is not talked about enough in UK politics.

And maybe we talk about a little bit more childcare for mothers and certain policy elements, but family is the biggest determinant of your success and your life outcomes. And we need to make sure that we have more stable families.

I think we have a statistic here that 95% of the prison population, or certainly in the 90s, the 90% plus of the prison population, the male prison population, grew up without their father.

I don't know. I was a good all-rounder at school. I was very good at maths. I was very good at English. I remember my English was better than my teachers, which they found very frustrating. And I think some of that would have been just the exposure, you know, living in the US, having parents who, you know, bought books. So I read a lot and I was good academically.

But something different happened when I moved to the UK. I stopped being good academically and I just became pretty average. And I didn't understand why that was happening.

And my friends who left Nigeria at the same time I did and went to the private schools, they've got a lot of money, you know, they had parents far wealthier than mine, certainly by that time, by the mid-90s, whatever relative wealth we had was gone. And these were people who I used to beat easily at school. They were suddenly doing very well.

And I realized that not all the schools are the same here, that there are some schools that are very focused, they coach, they train, and there are other schools which people pass through. And it was one of the things that I think was the foundation of my conservatism, that making sure everybody's got an equal chance or the best opportunity. And

i realized that yes there would have been a baseline level of you know good academics or you know intelligence with me but actually the things that made the difference were the family that i had the schools that i went to the culture around me all of those things added to however smart i was in maths and english and when you took those things away and when i started hanging out with children who didn't care about those things

then my academic results dropped. And it took a while for me to get back on track. And I ended up studying engineering. Sorry? How did you get back on track? So it took a while for me to just figure out what I wanted to do. Engineering was, when I realized I couldn't get into medical school here, very competitive. And the number of places are regulated in the UK.

So there's a limit on how many places that can be. Engineering, on the other hand, is not. And

the society that i grew up in had four magic courses there was medicine engineering law and accounting and if you you know that you were almost judged if you didn't do one of those four things so i thought well i can't do medicine i'm you know good at maths i like computers a lot by then i was already coding i'd been coding since i was seven years old my dad got me a zx81 and then a spectrum plus two so all of these things just the exposure to those sorts of things helped me so i went uh

onto a course for systems engineering and i just kept reading and i took a year off to work because i needed to save up money for university and i met a lot of kids uh during my apprenticeship i worked as an apprentice engineer i met a lot of other people who were going to oxford and cambridge and they had more of the sort of culture that i had grown up with so hanging out with people

who were different in a different setting also had an influence. And then also just knowing that if I didn't get my act together, my life trajectory would end up in a place that I would not like. I'd already had all the values instilled in me by my parents.

So 16, technically still a child, but just old enough to know how to, it's just old enough to remember and not forget what the values that you've been inculcated with, I would say.

It is a great relief. Do you know why it's a great relief? Because you then, you find your people. And my dad used to talk about, when he was alive and when I was younger, he used to talk about a law of homogeneity. And he said, people find their kind of people and you will always get, they find each other and they stick together. And I had this experience when I joined the Conservative Party.

I thought, these are my people. Like, where have you guys been all my life? People who I agreed with on almost everything, people who thought the way I did about so much. And I think when you are in a place where the people around you think so differently, you feel very isolated.

And I think that making sure that young people in particular have a sense of belonging is so critical for mental health. And it is why I hate so much of... You know, whether you call it postmodernism, woke, but so much that tries to detach people from what is right for them and give them this horrible deconstructed nonsense and say, this is what's real. I think it's terrible for mental health.

It's terrible for society.

Yes. So after I finished my university degree, and I did a longer degree, I did a four-year engineering degree rather than a three-year one. Where was that? At the University of Sussex, which is on the south coast of England. And, you know, after university, everybody... disappears. You all go off to different places. You get different jobs, different parts of the country.

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