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

There's this thing that a lot of politicians like to have, you know, walking on stage, I'm at these conferences, global leadership, we signed this thing, we were the first to do it. And I think that that's how we ended up there.

That's 2019. I think it's middle of 2019. Okay. So I've been an MP for two years and I'm already seeing quite a lot of what I call bad science, bad faith arguments to deal with climate change. And I know that conservatives love the environment. You know, of course, that's what we want to conserve amongst other things. We want to keep things as they are.

We want to leave a next generation inheritance. Let's give something to our children. So there's fertile soil here. But the net zero idea is bad because there is no plan. It's just an announcement. So we say we're going to do this thing and then we start working it out later. This is one of the things that I want to stop. Conservative Party is under new leadership.

We're not just going to say things and figure it out later. We will figure it out. And then when we know how to do it, we can say it. But the why it happened, that failure. Fear of cancellation, that fear of going against the grain is a more fundamental problem. People are so afraid of challenging bad orthodoxies. There is a terror of being heterodox. And I think that I am on one level an outlier.

You know how you describe yourself as being extreme on this? Well, for me, it is an outlier when it comes to Telling the truth and challenging orthodoxies and nothing will stop me from saying it. And a lot of people think that I'm very combative. If you look at almost every single argument I have had where people have said that it was because somebody was lying or being inaccurate.

And I hate that. We have to tell the truth. And you've gone through this thing. where you say something and a lot of people agree with you, but they're all afraid of speaking out. People are afraid of being labeled. They're afraid of being called climate change skeptics. They're not able to speak up for themselves. And so they stay quiet. And that's how it happens.

It's all part of the proliferation of identity politics, which goes well beyond race and religion and so on. It's even the identity of ideas. We are environmentalists. So this is what we believe in. You've got to do all these tick boxes.

And with no one challenging or those few people who are challenged labeled as climate change deniers, I should say, they're not worried about being called skeptics. They're worried about being called climate change deniers and being ostracized. So they stay with the herd. What's everybody saying? All right, I want to be with that crowd. And you add on top of that the diminishing of free speech.

And you suddenly get a place where people are afraid to point out what's going wrong. And that's how we ended up with net zero. And throughout my time as a minister, I was constantly challenging it, saying no to things. I got some of the laws we had scaled back. But one person cannot change everything unless they are the leader and unless they are the prime minister. It all starts from the top.

How's that? Does that explain it?

And it's why I don't point fingers and blame. I just say, this is what we need to do. And, you know, I love the Reagan slogan of never speak ill of a fellow conservative. There's just no time for that. People just need to know there's a new leader. She does things differently. But one of the other things that I think is such a scam is that people don't know what other countries are doing.

We are, as you say... basically exporting our carbon emissions to countries that are opening up new coal-fired plants every week. It's just not serious. It's this complacency and an assumption that everything is going to be all right. And we are losing resilience. And one of the things that I tried to do was sort of save a couple of our steel workers

plants maybe let them turn into electric arc furnaces but we need to be able to do these things you need national resilience and you need people who understand the system who can make sure that it doesn't they don't use all these legalistic uh frameworks whether it's on cancellation judicial review etc to unwind it all and when you have a party that can see how to do things and another party that says what it wants to do but doesn't know how to do things

And it starts to do better. We're in a tricky situation because you need to tell people the truth. And what I have at the moment are parties on either side who are telling people exactly what they want to hear one way or another on the left and on the right. And I have seen the inside. And I just think that we need to get real very quickly. We need to get serious and stop messing around.

This is what I mean by us not being serious, where you're not really solving the problem, you're just giving yourself a nice announcement or a nice headline. So there's certain things that I know. One is that the decisions we're making now most of us will not be alive to see how it turns out.

And it could be that we don't necessarily get the impact we want from net zero, even if we achieve net zero. So you need to make sure that you are doing other things as well. You're making the planet better. You're creating renewable energy sources, for example. So that if one day the fossil fuels do run out in 500 or 1,000 years or whenever it is, that we have built something that is in place.

I think that there is a way to look at how we create that sort of future that is more sensible than what worries me as being a movement that is inspired by a lot of things that are actually just anti-human in and of themselves. That when I hear the rhetoric of a lot of people who talk about net zero,

you know, the left-wing extremists, not just the traditional left, but the hardcore sort of climate extremists, it's like they don't like humanity itself. Like they don't like people. They see us as being alien to the planet and it should just be nature without people in them. And I'm particularly exercised by this because one of my younger cousins killed himself in

after going down an internet rabbit hole of anti-natalism and pro-mortalism and started, you know, he didn't become an environmentalist, but at least not that I know of, but he became someone who felt the human beings shouldn't be here. And why are we doing this to the planet? And I see a lot of that in, you know, much of the rhetoric around the climate change extremists. And I don't like it.

I don't like things that are anti-human. I don't like things that make people feel bad about themselves, whether it's that human beings shouldn't be on the planet or, you know, the identity politics of race and, you know, white people are all evil or whatever. I don't like any of that stuff. And so I have a skepticism towards this movement and the outcomes I have seen.

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