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
And rather than negotiate their way out, it's just, oh, well, we'll give it away. We shouldn't have had it in the first place. Or they put a tax on private schools, which has never happened in the history of the UK, but they want to tax the rich. And so they tax education, but actually most of the mega rich won't care. The people who it's really affecting are
are those people who are, you know, not necessarily poor, but they're struggling, and they've made a sacrifice, and they just can't pay that extra money. They've cancelled a free speech law, which we put in place. And I care very passionately about free speech, which is why I said yes to this podcast. And I thought that it was absolutely outrageous. It's all about their ideology.
They've brought in this awful tax on farmers. Because they've treated them as if handing down a farm to the next generation is an inheritance tax loophole. When, of course, if you keep taking out bits of farms, you won't have any land left. And farms go from generation to generation. Very few people go into farming from other families. And it's extraordinary. And it's made a lot of people angry.
It was very foolish. It wouldn't raise a lot of money. So I don't think he's managing anything. I think they are just living out this fantasy of now we're in charge and now we're going to have a real socialist government. And he's run into trouble very quickly because that stuff doesn't work anymore. It never did, but it's definitely not going to work now.
Well, first of all, the first five years were a liberal conservative coalition. We didn't win that election. Okay. So there is a myth that we've had 14 years of conservatives- in power. You've had 14 years of conservatives in office. The first five years, it's actually liberals and conservatives running the country together. And then there's another three years where we have no majority.
So let's start with that.
No, no, no, no. We have to take responsibility. But I'm setting some of the context that quite often we didn't always have the power. Do you remember when I was talking about making concessions to the left? We're making concessions so we can stay in office. we'll do this law that's not very good because we can get the votes on it. And that's not how to run a country.
But to the point that you were making, why have we ended up where we are? It is increasing the size of the state and thinking that regulation is the way to solve everything. And it's often very hard for conservatives to explain this well. When we talk about deregulation, people think, oh, you're taking away our safety net, or you're just going to let cowboys do whatever they want.
But that's not really what it is. It's about... Making sure that people can carry out enterprise in a free way. Getting rid of regulations and laws that are holding people back, that aren't working. So we are not as free as the U.S. is in terms of setting up companies, starting things out. Even opening a bank account now has become more complicated.
Many of these things were because we were going along with EU regulation.
So leaving the EU should have been a way of breaking out of that and doing things better or differently and having a competitive advantage. But weirdly, when we left the EU, because we were trying to please many of the people who didn't want to leave, we made promises. And I say this, not me, but the government made promises of,
Well, we'll just keep doing things the same way and it'll all be fine. Then we have what I call treasury orthodoxy, which believes that wealth is GDP and you can increase GDP by increasing immigration. This is crazy because we ended up not increasing GDP per capita. which in itself is not necessarily the best metric.
But if people are not getting richer and the country is supposedly getting richer, something's going wrong. And I remember when I first became a new MP, I had companies, very, very well-known companies like the Wellcome Institute say, we can't get visas for the best sort of scientists. Can you help us? And I thought, this is crazy. Those are the people we should be letting in.
We need high-skilled immigration and get rid of the low-skilled immigration. So I lobbied for that. Now people talk about it as if I was lobbying for uncontrolled immigration. But it was definitely not supposed to be like that. We brought in a system after we left the EU that should have controlled the numbers, but people gained it.
This is what I mean when I talk about how liberalism has been hacked. People say they're students. We think, yeah, of course we want students. Yeah, let's have some more students. Then they bring in grandparents. Oh, these are my dependents. I mean, there's extraordinary situations like that. Or, for example, when we were told we needed more care workers, Could they have a care visa scheme?
We allowed that. We were expecting 6,000. We got 250,000. And who was monitoring? It's not clear. So even I, as a minister in the government, found this shocking. Like, who was looking at this? So I gave a speech about two weeks ago where I apologized effectively for what had happened and said, this should never have happened. It happened on our watch.
We've got to explain to the public that we will never let this happen again. We've got to fix immigration. It is too high. And it is not working for the people who are in the country or even for the new migrants.
Well, remember, a lot of that migration would have been within the European Union. So we have free movement. So we couldn't control it for a very long time. But a lot of the new migration has been because even as you're trying to control the numbers. The health workers, you know, the health service says we need more doctors and nurses. The agricultural sector says we need more seasonal workers.
The big fundamental problem is that a lot of people are not going to work. A lot of Brits are not going to work and we need to get them to work. And we now have this absurd situation where migrants come in and then they stop working too because there's a benefit system. So we've got to change the incentives. We've got to change the incentives.
Something else has happened. I remember 20 years ago, conservatives were campaigning very, very visibly on immigration, saying it's not racist to talk about immigration, and we were losing. So a lot of people believe that, well, people don't like us talking about this, so let's just not talk about it. But actually, as we stopped talking about it, the problem was getting worse.
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