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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Like just this writing rubbish and thinking that because you've written a book, it's it's fine. And I was very pleased that I took such a hard line. at the time, because I think maybe if I'd known who she was, I might have been in a different mindset and thought, oh, well, you know, let me give her some space. But I didn't. And I was just very honest. And she got a lot of facts wrong as well.
Loads and loads of terrible facts. So I am an enemy of critical race theory. It is not real equality. It is not even promoting the well-being of minorities. It is a way for the left to exploit minorities in order to do the thing they always want to do, which is the same socialism, Marxism, fighting the right. And it kills people. It destroys lives.
Yeah, it is. It's just identity politics. You know, we can give it all these fancy names, but it is just identity politics. And human beings will always form tribes. So society and the leadership, the political leadership, has to work hard to make sure that the tribe is the nation, not all these different groups. What word should we use instead of woke? I don't know. My word isn't catchy.
What is it? I thought progressive authoritarianism. It hasn't caught on. It has not caught on. I've done my best. It's just not snappy enough. Woke is very snappy.
And I say this as somebody who is both black and a woman. We all have multiple identities. I think that being a woman is so fundamental to who we are. The biology is so important to being a woman. It's so fundamental. And people don't think very hard about how biology impacts life. But the vulnerabilities that we have as women are very, very closely linked to our biology.
We're not as physically strong as men. We have all these experiences, whether it's menstruation or, you know, pregnancy. All of those things have an impact on how we live our lives. And that is reality. And for people to then say that you can just self-define as a woman, for me, just has no basis whatsoever in reality.
When I call myself a feminist, it is about equality, that I think women should be able to do the same things that men can do. It was about having equal agency, equal power. It was not an academic form of feminism. it was very much a lived experience form of feminism. I saw what my grandmother had to deal with, how she was treated.
And, you know, you look at what women historically had to deal with, not being able to own your own property, things being owned by your father or your husband. I thought, you know, I don't want any of that. Thank goodness I wasn't born in that era. But I always want the equality. And I think one of the issues is that feminism became too academic.
And then it started going down these rabbit holes where, well, being a woman is a social construct. Like, well, no, it isn't. It's real. It's biology. There are expectations and the stereotypes and so on. Those are social constructs. But being a woman... There is a shared relationship that you will have with every single woman across the planet.
And it will be the same for men, too, within that biological aspect. And we shouldn't throw that away. But the thing that drove me crazy was seeing how the lives of young, sometimes very young, gay, autistic children were being destroyed on the altar of trans activism. which was then in conflict with feminism. And a lot of women who call themselves feminists, in my view, were on the wrong side.
And I thought, you don't understand what it is you're fighting for, that you are letting go of reality and somebody needs to take a stand. And meeting children and young people who've been effectively sterilized, I think it's horrific. How can people just allow that to happen and say it's just a self-defining thing? So I'm very, very much against that. Do you think that war has been won?
I think a lot of battles have been won. I don't think these wars are ever won. I think that the price of victory is eternal vigilance. And I'm very pleased, actually, at how far we've got, because I don't have to talk about it as much as I used to. And I didn't even talk about it that much. But when I did, I made sure that the interventions were very clear and very strong.
And they were always to give cover for those people who couldn't speak for themselves.
So I actually think that the issue has come up because people don't know how to fix the stuff that's really impacting people's lives. And so they want to look at things that you can just fix with regulation. You bring a law in and it's fine. You can't just bring a law in and fix debt or fix productivity. You can't fix a birth rate with a law.
So legislators start looking for things that they can fix. And this is one of those campaigns that legislation can sort. Personally, I am not against the idea of assisted suicide. In fact, I've been very much for it because of experiences I saw in my family. But I voted against it because I don't think we're ready for it. I think we need to look at what's happened in Canada. It's being rushed.
It's all moving very quickly. And what I saw as a minister was a system that was broken, a system that was failing. And in the same way that I keep saying that liberalism is being hacked, This is another thing that could end up being hacked. How do we make sure that we do it the right way? And it is in Canada. Yes, exactly. And the rush was what made me vote against it.
I just thought, no, these guys don't know what they're doing. They're going to take something that's very sensitive, which we should try and figure out, and they're going to mess it up. And I don't want to be a part of that.
Well, we do have a constitution. It is just uncodified. Right. And it is in our common law. We have these freedoms. We still do. What is happening is that we are increasing the scale of regulation that is limiting freedoms that are already there. The British common law system is amazing.
And it's about freedom unless it is explicitly said that you cannot do those things, which is very different from the Napoleonic system. We just need to rediscover these things. And that's why I talk about culture, that you need to understand your culture. You need to understand where these freedoms, these ideas, these institutions came from.
If you just believe that it's all the fruit of exploitation and it's just what bad people did and it's not real, we will lose all these things.
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