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
Well, I wouldn't call it a total change. I think that this is definite progress. But you can't assume all the battles have been won. You need a plan. You need to make sure that you're defending the turf that you have just or the ground that you have just gained. But I think Neil's use of the phrase vibe shift is more accurate. And that even just a shift in vibe can change things.
So it's not to be neglected. And You know, yesterday at dinner with JD, it was it was it was really fun. You know, we were there for for a few hours. And we were basically talking about the millennial experience. So I'm 1980. So I'm the end of Gen X and the beginning of millennials. And this is our time.
Well, I used to call myself Generation Y because I didn't know I was born in the 80s, but I didn't know which group I was in. And we are in charge now, like all over the world, people in their 40s are doing things. And I think it's taken people of our generation a long time to just accept that we are adults.
And that's something that I think is causing a lot of the infantilization of our societies and the lack of will and that moral courage to defend what is right. It's not our job. Where are our parents? They should do this. It must be somebody else's job. But it isn't. It's our job. So we had very interesting conversations about that.
what the future of conservatism will look like for our generation. You know, it's no longer Thatcher, Reagan, and all of that. The Bush era is over. And the Trump era, or Trump Mark II era, is this the beginning of a new thing? What could that look like? And just how life has changed so much for us. You know, we talked a lot about the media. And, you know, during the... Your love of it, obviously.
Yes. Yeah. Well, I find it so I actually I do love media. I worked in media. I used to work for The Spectator. What I don't like is lies and inaccuracy. And I don't like people creating fake news, which is a real thing. Every day I read something like that is not true. I know it is not true. But anonymous sources and so on will tell a journalist, oh, this thing that never happened, happened.
And people start believing lies. And that's what I hate. But what was interesting was we both had the same experience. So he had been messaging me in my leadership contest and vice versa. And we both had this experience.
At a dinner in London about 18 months ago. So Usha was there. And it was one of these sort of dinners. Here's some interesting people and we'll put them together around a table. And I told him about the experience I had where everyone... in the press kept writing about how I had lost and I couldn't win and I'm so weird.
And her opponents are seizing the initiative and they're definitely going to win and look how great they are. And it just wasn't true. And I knew it wasn't true, but my friends would say, what's happening? Why aren't you doing well? And I would tell them, don't worry, it's fine. And of course he had the exact same experience.
And he talked a lot about how they were fairly confident of what their polling was saying. and just ignored what the media was saying about Kamala Harris and what was happening. And it's about understanding what is reality now. How do you know what an authoritative source is when everyone is trying to make the news rather than report the news? That's the new thing in our age.
A lot of media doesn't want to observe and report. It wants to influence. It wants to be on the pitch rather than reporting.
Not so much. I think probably the way I express it is different. But just going back to that theme of how... you know, liberalism has been hacked. I started my career as a secretary of state in trade, saying that we must not be knowingly naive. We have adopted this naive behavior of, well, we'll do this thing. And of course, other countries will follow us and everything will be fine.
And that doesn't happen.
Yes, exactly. And that is not saying that our values are wrong. It's that you have to recognize that not everybody shares those values. So you can't use your values outside that system. It doesn't make sense. If you try and use free speech in a way where people will abuse that to defame other people, provide lots of misinformation and disinformation, then it doesn't work in the same way.
So you've got to have a way of managing that. So TikTok, for example, I don't use because I'm very worried about, you know, having Chinese spyware on your phone. Yes, exactly. Very worried about that. But also, if you allow other foreign actors to have free speech in your country, and they start saying things about your country that aren't true, you just say, hey, it's free speech. It's fine.
That doesn't work. You are allowing people to hack your system. This is the same with things like free markets. It's only a free market if everybody is playing by the rules. It's not I will do free markets and everybody else can do what they like. That is how globalization, in my view, went wrong.
So the reason why, you know, there's more protectionism is because we did not defend those values and apply them in a way that was very sensible. We've got to rethink that. And COVID showed us what happens when these things go wrong. So I think I express these things differently. Do I think that, you know, tariffs are helpful? Mostly no.
But they are useful and should be used appropriately in order to defend your economy and order to make sure that other people do not abuse your system. And the World Trade Organization gives levers for that. You know, if there is dumping taking place, you know, you have anti-dumping measures, anti-subsidization measures. So it's just about using the tools effectively and not being naive.
Well, I think it is both the US's and the EU's Rome, or Greece, I should say, or Greece to everybody's Rome. I think that the role that we have in the world is one where we are connected to so many places, either from the Commonwealth, the legacy of empire, the Anglosphere. It's not just us, it's Canada, it's Australia. And, you know, it's even places like Nigeria and Kenya.
There is a lot that we know. We have a lot of links around the world. We have a lot of knowledge and we should use that power, whether it's soft power or hard power, in the interests of our values and making sure that the world does not become a place that is dominated by axes of countries that are actually trying to destroy so much about what is good.
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