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
It is very clear that there is an axis of authoritarian states that are collaborating against the West. You see it with the North Koreans in Russia. You see it with China and Iran. There is collusion taking place. We know this. And yet we, at this point, have just lost our confidence.
And I think that the UK has an important role to play in bringing back so much of that moral courage and confidence that the West needs.
No, I haven't, although I am a big fan of his. I thought X got better. I still call it Twitter, to be honest. I thought it got better in many ways after he took over. It got worse in a lot of ways, but I think overall it is better. And he, you know, community notes. It's an amazing invention. It just made so many things. So I think he brought lots of innovation and I'm a big fan of his.
But what he is doing with Doge is actually something I've been talking about for a long time. And I call it the rise of the bureaucratic class. This is my productivity thesis. If you look at the middle class in the UK 30, 40, 50 years ago, it was people who made things, people who drew things, people who built things as farmers. It's builders, small businessmen made good.
You can see the productivity. You can see what they are doing that is actually adding value to society. The middle class now has changed. It has become a lot more bureaucratic. And we are producing more and more people from universities who are going into a bureaucratic job rather than a genuine producing job where you're adding value.
And that, I think, is why the growth is reducing at the same time as we're facing increased competition from other countries that are not spending a lot of time on bureaucracy. The EU is the classic of this genre. It's all about pumping out regulation. So I remember... meeting a guy just after COVID who owned a string of hotels. And I said, business must have been really bad. How have you coped?
And he said, Kemi, believe it or not, I have never made so much money in my life. And I said, how? And he said, because my hotels are full of asylum seekers. That is not real productivity. That is living off government. Yes, it's private sector, but it's government work. When I did a whole bunch of scrapping of corporate regulations, do you know who complained? KPMG.
Because they were going to make money from advising on those things. And that, in my view, is not creating productivity. I left banking. People say, why did you leave banking? You know, you were making money. But I left it because I wasn't doing engineering anymore. I was no longer a systems analyst. I was doing compliance because that's where the money was. Lots of banking regulation coming in.
And I just thought, I'm a bureaucrat. This is not what I want to do. And I left. And that is what I think Elon and Vivek are going to try and change in Washington. They're going to try and shrink the size of the state, shrink all of the waste, a lot of the inefficiency. And when that happens, many more people will go out into productive areas. It'll help people getting back to work.
And I think that an element of that is needed across the West, in Europe definitely, but I would like to see that happen in the UK.
Yes. How do we address that? There is an economic and a cultural malaise. And I think... Once upon a time, that hole was filled with religion and a belief in God. I'm not a religious person, but I do understand it. And when I look at the way things are going wrong, you can see that it's about people looking for that meaning. And, you know, J.D.
made a joke yesterday when we were talking about this, you know, in an adjacent way. He said that, you know, people are Calvinists, but they're not believing anymore. They're looking for something to feel guilty about. And so they go, you know, that's where the wokeism... comes from, that how can we make ourselves feel guilty and self-flagellate.
And, you know, that festival that I was talking about where I met Kimberlé Crenshaw. Yes. There were some girls in the audience who I spoke to afterwards and they were all sort of, you know, very left wing and they didn't like what I had to say. And the more I spoke to them and we, you know, we were having arguments, very friendly arguments, the more I realized that they were not left wing.
And I said, why are you saying all these things? You're not left wing, you don't believe this. And one of them said to me, because I want to feel like I'm a part of something special.
Yeah, but I had been sort of probing and pushing. I don't even think she realized what she was saying when she said it. And I realized also, as she said it, that this is one of the failures of the right. That we don't give people, certainly in the UK, it might be different here, We don't talk about that meaning anymore. We just talk about the managerialism.
And yes, we'll get you some more doctors and we'll try and reduce your taxes. My whole campaign was about principles. It was about what are the things that we believe in. Let's put the policy aside for a second. Where are we starting from? It's family and how important family is. You know, and they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but without family, so many of us are lost. It's freedom.
It's equality under the law. It's citizenship, real citizenship, not just I have a passport and I can travel with it. It's about caring about a place, about the people who are there, your community. You want everybody to succeed. That's what it is.
And we've got to start from there rather than just throwing out lots of different policies on welfare and so on, because people don't understand what you're about. And if they don't get what you're about... They think you have no meaning and they will vote you out. And that's what happened to my party.
No, but I think I have no choice here.
Very strong, builder's tea, lots of sugar. How much sugar? I don't know. There's been this whole debate about how much sugar I have. It can be anything from nothing to six. It depends on how I'm feeling that day. Coke, Diet Coke or Coke Zero? Always Coke Zero.
Showing 521–540 of 549 · page 27 of 28
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