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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
You know, I had to do everything. But I hated being, we used to call it on the grill in those days. I hated being, it was just boring. I liked talking to people. So I liked to be on the till. You were either on the till or on the grill. I don't know if they still say that now. This is nearly 30 years ago. But you had to do everything there. You had to clean toilets, mop the floors.
There were no special cleaners coming in. But a lot of people, and this has been very interesting for me, a lot of people in the U.K., think that it was like a summer job or something I was doing at weekends. That was my job. And then I went to a part-time college to do my A-levels, this sort of between age 16 and 18.
And that was also a very formative experience for me because I had done SATs when I was 16 and I had such good scores. that I got all these scholarship offers. And I got a part scholarship from Stanford when I was in Nigeria to go pre-med. At 16? Yes, at 16. And my dad said, well, we can't afford the rest of the fees, so you can't go.
When really what should have happened was I should have kept going till I was 18 and I'd probably have gotten the full thing. And going to the UK and starting at this college, It was a completely different experience. I call it the poverty, the soft bigotry of low expectations, the poverty of ambition. Why do you want to study medicine? You can do this other thing instead.
And so because they didn't care about grades, I stopped caring about grades when I'd been a straight-A student. And I realize now just how tough it is for so many people who may not have families that push them And then they go to a school where no one is pushing them to fulfill their potential. And it's so unfair.
And that's one of the things that got me on that journey to becoming a conservative.
Well, I joined the party because because I thought it would be a fun thing to do. So I had finished university. A lot of my friends had just dispersed all over the country, in fact, all over the world. And I thought, well, If I join, I might meet some new people who are very like-minded. So I was already a conservative before joining the party. But how did I become a conservative?
It was those experiences at school, comparing them to the experiences I had growing up, and also just the rise of identity politics I'd seen then. And I knew that this was not a good thing. I grew up in a very multicultural society. But everybody looked the same. Everybody looked the same. And yet there are 300 different languages. There are all sorts of different customs and norms.
And it's very hard for people to get along. And when I heard people say, oh, this bad thing happened to me because I'm black or because I'm brown. No, it's not. It's just it's just a bad person. Not everything is. is about race. I'm a very colorblind person.
And the Labour Party, in my view, was quite race-obsessed and was quite keen on labeling lots of other people in a way that I thought was unfair. And I thought, I don't like this identity politics business. We need to find ways to bring people together not to tear them apart.
And if you don't have a dominant culture that brings everyone together where there's a lot of diversity, I think you run into problems because it just becomes different groups competing over resources. And that's very dangerous if you want to have a cohesive society.
So Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which was... I can't, I think I just, it was a recommendation. I thought it was quite hard work, but it did.
No, no, no, it definitely wasn't a beetroot, but it did convince me. that the planned economy didn't work because I could see it. I also, you know, I have a control operating environment in Nigeria where I can see that people did try that and it didn't work. So yeah, this guy's onto something. But the biggest, biggest influence was Thomas Sowell and basic economics.
And that was a very, very random choice. I can't remember. There was something, there's a discussion in work and I thought, oh, I don't really know that much about economics. I studied engineering and I just Googled basic economics. It came up on Amazon and I read it and it was like my whole world changed. I thought, who is this guy?
And I didn't know for about five years or longer that Thomas Sowell was black because I just read the book. There was no picture on the sleeve. And when I found that out, I thought this is even more amazing. Although actually, you know, he must have, I don't know whether he mentioned it in that book or in another book, but it was a long time before I'd really clocked it.
I might be misremembering now. It's all 20 years ago. But there was that book. And then later on, books like Why Nations Fail. Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, I think, is an amazing book. Those three books in particular. What about Roger Scruton? Yes, yes. How to Be a Conservative. That also had... I mean, there's so many. But those four, I think you're right, are...
How to Be a Conservative by Roger Scruton also kind of showed me, it showed me how there's a lot of truth in different people's ideologies and beliefs. And it isn't so much about being on the left or being on the right, but about finding the common ground. So I am on the right. There's no two ways about it. But I also recognize...
that just talking about things within your own bubble is not how to win other people over. And I'm able to have conversations with those very different philosophies because there is a way you can speak that shows the commonality and shows that we're all trying to get to the same place. And that's what I'm trying to do with my party now.
I think it was just a feeling of not being fulfilled in the job that I was doing. And I'd started off as a consultant, a systems analyst, and it was interesting. I really enjoy solving problems. I enjoy coding. But there was just so much more. I like fixing things that are broken. And the things that were broken for me in the world weren't software so much as everything else.
And so I wanted to understand how stuff worked. That's why I read Basic Economics. And the more I read, the more I thought, you know, I should join this party. I wasn't actually thinking of becoming a member of parliament because I didn't think it worked like that. I should join this party and try and help out.
Showing 361–380 of 549 · page 19 of 28
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