RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/02/finally-a-leader-whos-willing-to-fight-the-culture-war/

Imagine if, a few years ago, you had told the wet leftists of the British establishment that one day there’d be a black woman in charge of a major political party and that they would freak out about it. That instead of celebrating this final breakthrough for race relations, these self-styled progressives would be bitterly murmuring into their muesli that ‘She’s a bit abrasive’ and ‘God help us now’. They’d have refused to believe you. Yet here we are. Kemi Badenoch has won the Conservative Party leadership contest and becomes the first black person ever to lead a major party in Britain. And the left ain’t happy.

Badenoch has succeeded Rishi Sunak as Tory leader. She beat Robert Jenrick, winning 53,806 votes from party members to his 41,388. That’s a solid win. She has a clear mandate to steer the party in her preferred direction. Ideally that will be away from both the frothing Brexitphobia of the One Nation melts and the thin, Johnny Come Lately ‘populism’ of Jenrick and his socially odd support base. And towards a greater willingness to fight the culture war. Towards a readiness, even a glee, to lock horns with a political class that has thrown everything from biological truth to our very own national story on to their bonfire of the vanities. Kemi could be the culture warrior we’ve been waiting for.

She has more than proved her mettle in the battle of ideas. She knows what a woman is, which instantly makes her more deserving of a vote than Keir Starmer, who famously turns into a gibbering wreck whenever he’s asked basic questions about biology. Badenoch hasn’t so much ‘waded in’ to the ‘trans row’, as the media like to describe it, as she has marched in, sword of truth raised. She insists we must ‘protect women’s spaces’ from the presence of men. Whether it’s ‘rapists being housed in women’s prisons’ or ‘men playing in women’s sports’, it’s just not on, she says. And we must be free to say so without the ‘fear of being accused of transphobia’. Three cheers for that.

She has stood up for the right of young gay folk to discover their sexuality without being pumped with puberty-blocking drugs or mauled by surgery to ‘correct’ their ‘wrong’ bodies. The sinister medical meddling with gay kids’ bodies is a species of conversion therapy, she says, essentially aimed at ‘making them straight’. She’s right. And her views were lately echoed by JD Vance, who said ‘trans-affirming healthcare’ is ‘pharmaceutical’ conversion therapy. Badenoch has even met with the LGB Alliance, the brilliant gay-rights group ruthlessly maligned by the lost souls of the woke as a ‘hate group’. She’s a better friend of homosexuals than anyone on the Labour benches.

She has challenged the fashionable view of Britain as ‘institutionally racist’. Actually, she says, this is ‘the best country in the world to be black’. Her praise of this plucky nation that ‘sees people, not labels’ infuriates the mostly white wet-wipes of the opinion-forming classes who get off on flagellating both themselves and the kingdom for all the racial crimes of history. To these people, there’s nothing worse – really, nothing – than the sight of a black lady saying ‘It’s good to be black in Britain’. It shatters their ideologies of self-loathing from which they derive their cultural power and media clout. A black woman nipping at the heels of the fashionable shame of white influencers? It just won’t do.

She’s an enemy of cultural relativism. ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’, she recently said, to the noisy chagrin of the woke. They know she’s right – these people would never move to Kabul or let their daughters suffer the FGM that poor girls in Africa are forced to endure – but they hate that she says it. For in doing so, she punctures their cult of post-judgementalism, their moral cowardice that they doll up as a ‘celebration of diversity’.

She’s even injected moral clarity into the tortured and frankly terrifying Israel-Hamas debate. ‘I stand with Israel’, she says. ‘We cannot stand with Hezbollah, we cannot stand with Hamas.’ Then her killer line: ‘We know who the bad guys are.’ At a time when so many of our young are beating the streets to damn Israel as evil and to praise Hamas as ‘the resistance’, it couldn’t be more important to have a party leader who is able to slice so finely through such abject moral idiocy and to state out loud that the Jewish nation has the right to defend itself against the armies of Jew haters that surround it. ‘Bad guys’ – how rare, how refreshing, to hear that phrase.

She has slammed cancel culture – we ‘need more bravery and less cancel culture’, she says. She fiercely rebuked the Californian tech bosses who exercise a moral stranglehold over the modern public square. It’s a very serious problem when tech giants ‘become so big [that] they effectively become more powerful than government in regulating what people say’, she says. And she defends Brexit, the right of the 17.4million souls who voted to leave the EU to have their wishes acted on by the political class. This has earned her the animus of those insufferable craft-beer snobs at the New European who say she ‘will be bad in all sorts of ways’. Wear it as a badge of pride, Kemi – if the New European doesn’t hate you, you’re doing it wrong.

So here we have a leader who knows that women don’t have dicks, who thinks the West is good rather than rotten, who appreciates the importance of the liberty to utter, who supports the right of the Jewish State to fight back against the Jew-killing machines of Hamas and Hezbollah, and who thinks gay kids shouldn’t be drugged or chopped up. We’re meant to think this is a ‘far right’ agenda? It all sounds pretty sensible to me. Kemi is the anti-Kamala, a politician willing to resist the intolerant overtures of woke nuts and think for herself. As the world holds its breath waiting to see if Trump or Harris wins the White House, let us take heart from the fact that a genuine free-thinker has taken the oppositional reins in Britain.

This is why the left is pissed off. This is why they cannot celebrate the remarkable ascendancy of this 44-year-old woman of colour to the top of Britain’s oldest political party. This is why the painfully woke Guardian wrings its hands over the ‘worrying rise’ of ‘divisive [politicians] like Kemi Badenoch’ and frets that she sometimes seems ‘openly abrasive’. (I guess the old woke rule about not tone-policing black women has been retired.) It’s because, with evidence and flair, she challenges their ideologies that have dominated for so long. For too long. Will she fight the culture war with the clarity and firmness it requires? That remains to be seen. But I wish her the best of luck in this most important of endeavours.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy