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

And I just had this feeling that of unfulfillment. And I thought I made a mistake. Maybe I shouldn't have done engineering. Maybe I should have done something else. And everybody says, you know, I speak very well and I make good arguments. I should have been a lawyer. So I went to, it was really night school.

I went to the University of London, but they have a college called Birkbeck where the classes are in the evening. And so I went to night school while working about 2005.

So I'm about 25 and I do a law degree part-time, which was fascinating because I learned so much about the principles of all of the things we talk about, you know, the rule of law, jurisprudence, but also a lot of the history of the UK, which I would have learned had I gone to primary or secondary school here, I learned in my law degree. And it was just so amazing.

And at the end of it, I thought, I don't want to be a lawyer. Definitely don't want to be a lawyer, but I love having this stuff in my head. And I'd become quite political by that time. And I was more interested in helping to make good law, so being a legislator, than being, you know, a corporate lawyer or something like that.

No, no, I'm not familiar with that, but it sounds like you had one. Yes, I think I had a quarter-life crisis, sort of 25, and I've done everything I'm supposed to do. You know, you finish prime school, you finish secondary school, you do your A-levels, you get your degree, you get a job. I had a good job, I was working in consulting, and I still wasn't happy.

And I was looking, I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for something. And I thought another degree would give it to me. And what I really was looking for was the vocation which I found in politics. And it was a long journey over probably from age 16 onwards, having that experience of the, you know, that low expectation culture, which I thought was very race coded.

And looking back on it, it was extremely race coded. If I was, I think, a white child, I would have been treated differently. And again, it was sort of left wing teachers who were trying to be helpful. but actually creating a lot of destruction along the way. That experiences at university where I think I met my first sort of proper left-wing students culture type person. And I did not like it.

I thought they were very ignorant. They, because by this time, of course, I know a lot about Africa and they talked about Africa as this place where they would come in and help the people, you know, who was, you know, just these helpless people, no agency whatsoever. They were not interested in the real problems and it was really a way for them to virtue signal. And I found that so aggravating.

And that also semi-radicalized me around what we do with aid, for example, and how we let a lot of African countries get away with things that they shouldn't do. An irritation with what I call moral colonialism, where rather than focusing on growth and how to make these countries self-sufficient...

We sort of preach values which the West has come to after a long period and try and impose them in places where there's no, you know, they're not ready to receive them or interested and not engaging with people on that level. So I had that radicalism, that radicalization process. And that was actually my first work with the Conservative Party. So it's 2005, I'm 25, 2006.

David Cameron sets up these policy commissions and one of them was called Globalization and Global Poverty. And I really cared about this subject because I thought a lot of money was being wasted and sent to places where it shouldn't be sent to when actually what people needed was partnerships, business, more sensible policies. more sensible ideas.

And it was supposed to, even back then in 2006 onwards, it was how do we tackle globalization? How do we make sure it works for everyone else? But these things end up getting co-opted always by, you know, vested interests, which is a real shame. So many things took me on the journey to conservatism. I think also culturally, I am a Christian. I don't believe anymore. I used to.

There was something changed. Something happened about 2008, which changed my views on Christianity. But still, I am culturally a Christian. My grandfather was a reverend in the Methodist church. I went to a Church of England school. And many of the things that are formative in my experience, singing hymns, And, you know, knowing them off by heart.

And just a lot of the stuff that you end up doing in an African country, almost all of which are very religious, can shape you. And I find the interpretation of Christianity in the UK quite interesting compared to certainly Africa and Nigeria. People believe that. It's not just something you do on a Sunday. The Bible is a living word of God, and you have to do all these things.

And of course, they're inconsistent, and there are all sorts of hypocrisies. But growing up in a country that was genuinely multicultural, half the people were Muslim. We had both Christian and Muslim prayers in my school. You look at the behaviors and so on. You just get a lot of insights. into religion as an aspect of culture. Religion, in my view, is downstream of culture. It's not upstream.

And I think people not understanding that is why I have a lot of critiques about the way people speak about religion, Islam in particular, in this country. I don't think they understand it. I think that they miscategorize a lot of people in a way that should not happen.

I'm working as a systems analyst for a company that no longer exists. It was called Logica. It was quite big at the time. It was a sort of dot-com boom software company. And it was fine, and I was earning good money and saving. I had enough, you know, earning enough to save for a house deposit. It was okay, but... I wasn't there in the hierarchy of fulfillment.

So actually, what I saw started before law school, but I just couldn't define it. It was the stuff that I saw when I was studying engineering with those students. That was the first degree. And I had... Just a very dim view of a lot of the students studying the humanities courses because they didn't need to work as hard as those of us studying engineering.

I think I had about 26 hours of, you know, teaching time and lab time. You know, we were in the laboratory all the time. And then you had these people studying arts and they were all sort of, you know, just messing around all the time. They were acting plays and having lots of fun and going on demonstrations and protests. And I thought, where do they have time for this?

And they were all so sort of smug and condescending. So I realized, well, I don't like this. And because I have the self-confidence of growing up in a relatively wealthy family, I don't feel intimidated by them. And I challenge them. I have arguments with them. And they lose and they get angry.

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