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

So it's very interesting that you said reform as the third party. Reform is not the third party in this country. It's doing well in the polls at the moment, but the third party in this country is the Liberal Democrats, who had more votes and have 14 times as many members of Parliament as reform. Reform has five. Liberal Democrats have 70. We have 100. Yes, yes.

And then Labour has 400 and something. I can't even remember the exact number. But I would say the difference between the four parties. So the Labour Party used to be the party of the working class blue collar workers. It has now become the party of the bureaucracy. whether it's the public sector or people who live off government.

So people who live off government regulations, compliance and so on. That's who they speak for now. They don't speak for the, you know, what we would call blue collar. We are the traditional party of the right. The Conservative Party is the most successful political party, I think, in history, certainly with our longevity. And we are the centre right party.

And we are traditionally the party of the entrepreneurs, low tax. We've merged what I would call classic liberalism with old school conservatism. And that's where we are. That's where we are now. The Liberal Democrats are basically a protest party for mainly people on the left. And they don't have much of an ideology other than being nice.

They will go with all sorts of extreme things, you know, extreme gender ideology, etc. And reform is... is representing the rage that a lot of people are feeling about things going wrong in the country. But it's all rage. It's not courage. And I understand why a lot of traditional conservative voters have gone to reform because they're angry with us because they think we let them down.

And a lot of traditional Labour voters are also going to reform because they're angry with their traditional party. And then people who don't want to have anything to do with it vote Liberal Democrat.

They are not on Twitter, but they are in local communities. And what you tend to get, a typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof. And, you know, people in the community like them. Oh, you fixed the church roof. You should be a member of parliament. And they want to be nice. And then they get there.

But actually, they've got lots of very silly and foolish ideas, along with, you know, being able to fundraise for a local community. And then they have bad views on national security, for example. They don't want us to keep maybe a nuclear deterrence. They have silly ideas about education. They're always, you know, they don't want people to go to prison. They want prisons closed down.

Let's just have restorative justice. You know, people being nice. And if you're not paying attention, you will think that's a good one. These are nice people. We should vote for them. But actually, they will destroy the whole country if you let them at it.

No, the Liberal Democrats are basically trying to be nicer Labour. They will, they have a, what I would say is that they have more of a rural base. So the Labour Party is very urban. It's very sort of towns and cities.

You will find Liberal Democrats in a lot of rural constituencies because they talk about the environment, something that we care about as well, but they talk about it in a way that resonates with people who want to maintain things as they are. So Liberal Democrats don't like building anything.

They want everything to stay as it is, which in itself appeals to a certain kind of conservative, you know, I don't want anything to change and they will block any kind of thing being developed. And what is interesting is that as politics becomes more volatile, as we have more social media and people retreat into echo chambers of agreement, we're seeing a lot more fragmentation across the board.

If this was a country where you had proportional representation, it would probably come out in the wash, but we don't. So you will have a party like Labour, which has won a landslide majority on 34% of the vote. That is a scandal. And unfortunately, a lot of the people who would have been in the Labour movement that I would have respected because they were culturally conservative,

And so we would have something to agree on that aren't there anymore. So instead, we have a prime minister who, when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, he took the knee right in this room, actually. He took the knee in this room. And I sat there thinking, what on earth is this man doing? This is completely ludicrous.

But people who will pander to whatever is going on because they're not rooted in anything serious, they are detached from reality, and they don't know what is real and what isn't real. And we are the only party that is real, which means that we're often pragmatic in a way that annoys people and we don't communicate the pragmatism well enough. And that's what I'm trying to do now.

We have new leadership. We're going to be honest. We're going to tell the truth to the public, even when it's difficult. People like to tell the public what they want to hear rather than what's really happening. And I have said that the Conservative Party is not going to do that. People must know the truth.

So I think that we should start by stating what my position is. So I am not a climate change skeptic, but I am very much a net zero skeptic. And the reason why I am a net zero skeptic is because I saw how the legislation was put in place. I was a newish MP when it started. And if you look at how it happened, then you look at why it happened, the whole thing makes sense.

So we have a minority government. We can't get any legislation through. And we need to put something that everybody can agree on. And on both sides of the House, left and right, environmentalism has supporters. There's the centre-right type of environmentalism and the centre-left. Net zero looks like a thing that everybody can agree on.

And I remember asking in the debate, it was a 90 minute debate for this trillion pound legislation. And I stood up. I was one of only two people who asked a sceptical question. I said, how are we going to pay for this? Where is the plan? And I was dismissively waved away by the minister at the time saying the plans will be forthcoming.

That minister now works, you know, in the green industries, I'm told. And I think that the reason why this happened is because a lot of people are afraid of being attacked, of cancellation, of going against the grain. This was a way for us to say, we're showing global leadership.

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