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 I remember the discussions we were having at the time. And there were certainly two schools of thought. My view was that we needed to show some moral courage. The prime minister needed to come out and say this was not acceptable in October, really. Those protests started even before Israel had invaded Gaza.
And there's another school of thought, which I call laissez-faire, which is that, well, you shouldn't do anything because if you do that, you're stopping other people's freedoms. And actually, you know, you can't interrupt the police, let the police out.
carry out their policing and you know we just tell them what we want but the police themselves are often confused because if they're heavy-handed they get labeled as racist and then if they're not heavy-handed then you know people think that they are it's two-tier policing we need leaders we need political leaders who can say this is what's right this is what's wrong this is unacceptable but they got to the point where there were so many people because it wasn't nipped in the bud it then in my view became out of control you need to take back some of that control
So this is why I used the phrase moral courage, that we need to have some courage. There is a lot of fear. I think that a lot of the fear is unfounded, but there's also a sort of lack of knowledge and ignorance about how to talk about these issues. So I will often get asked, usually by mischief-making journalists, I should say, oh, this is just Muslims. Why aren't you just saying the word Muslim?
And what I tell them is that this isn't about Islam. It is about a virulent strain of Islamism. And I recognize it because I saw it in northern Nigeria. So for me, the October 7th was actually a reminder of what had happened 10 years ago in Nigeria, where 300 schoolgirls were kidnapped. And I spent one year in a school like that, like a state boarding school. They're horrible. They're like prison.
And you just want to get out. And I can just imagine being a child and some men just scoop you all away and most of you don't come back. It's absolutely horrific. This thing is not just about Israel and Palestine or Israel and Gaza. This virulent strain is hurting people across the world, including many Muslims. They are the ones who are most in danger.
So I talk about Islamism, like this political version of Islam, rather than people who are living their religion peacefully and minding their business. But I also, and I have this conversation with someone who was disagreeing with me and saying, if you believe in protests, you should be allowed to. And I said, what we have in this country is very special.
Where are the protests about Gaza in Saudi Arabia or the UAE? Because they are very muscular about what they believe people can and cannot do. they are able to control that. People there feel the same way, but they're not protesting. And yes, some of it is about not having that right. But it's also, it's about keeping certain views out of the mainstream.
We need to have our own version of what I call muscular liberalism, where we say these sorts of behaviors are unacceptable. And if you carry them out, you will be punished. And the big question that my speech was trying to answer is how does a creed like liberalism, which is about accepting and tolerating, how does it deal with accepting and tolerating things that want to destroy it?
If you say, yes, of course, we're going to accept and we're going to tolerate, and something says, okay, fine, I want to destroy it. But it can't be tolerant of intolerance. Exactly. And too many people just stop at the accept everything, tolerate everything. They don't know how to defend their values. And that's what I want the Conservative Party to start doing. We can't just be managers.
We have got to start championing and defending those people who can't speak for themselves, those who are vulnerable. The conversation cannot just be about the economic. The social and the cultural are linked with the economic, that you can't split them. If you have behaviors like that, it is going to affect your economy. It's going to affect what is being taught in schools.
It's going to affect people's attitudes to work. It's going to affect so much. So you've got to look at it across the board. And that is what I am changing with my party. It's not going to happen overnight. So I get lots of criticism of you haven't changed anything. It's, you know, it's been four weeks. I think I have four and a half years to do this, maybe a bit less. But there is a plan.
But you have to do things systematically and properly. I'm a systems analyst. I don't rush into things. And I think this is the biggest challenge for people. Having an engineer and a systems analyst in charge rather than a politician or a lawyer who just talks, talks, talks. I'm not somebody who starts with the rhetoric.
It's going to require a lot of changes. In my view, it's going to need a change of government. It's going to need a change in the way that we police. And people will say, oh, but we just have the conservatives and conservatives didn't do this or that. But there are different types of conservatism. This is a new type. And it's something that's going to be a lot more muscular.
And we need to start showing that if you behave this way, there will be consequences. And this is where the argument about two-tier policing comes from, where people think that some people are allowed to get away with bad behavior or some groups are allowed to get away with bad behavior. It seems that way. And other groups aren't. It is a confusion that has come from...
The interpretations of the Equality Act, where people believe that there are protected groups. There are no protected groups in the Act. There are protected characteristics. Misapplication of the law and abuse by those who deliberately misinterpret it is part of the problem. So the police think that there are protected groups. There are not.
Everybody is protected on the basis of those characteristics. And that's one of the things that I want us to start looking at. Do we need to change these laws or do we just need to... find a way to make sure that we remove some of the levers and the mechanisms that are allowing these differences in terms of the experience of policing.
What that is, and I know Alison is actually my constituent. I am her member of parliament. Oh, wow. So this was my local police force. And I know exactly how this happens. It is to do, I'm afraid, with the difference in behavior between the left and the right. So what happens in Alison's situation is that some vexatious lefty rings up the police and says, this person has done something.
It's affecting me. and you need to go and do something about it. So you have people... Acting like Stasi. Yeah, yeah, acting like Stasi. And that doesn't really happen on the right. So if you are on the right, you will be a victim of this. It's like with the doxing and so on. There are orchestrated attempts by all sorts of different groups to try and get prominent people who are on the right.
But when it's like the Oxford Union situation, that's much more complicated for the police to deal with. It's a university environment. We're not so sure what's happened. Right. Not everybody is complaining. There might be some intimidation. We'll protect those people, but we're not going to arrest everybody because, well, it's students that's protesting.
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