Kemi Badenoch: ‘I Don’t Think DOGE Is Radical Enough’The Tory leader on J.D. Vance’s ‘truth bomb,’ backdoor blasphemy laws, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Israel, Ukraine, and more. Bari Weiss
https://www.thefp.com/p/kemi-badenoch-i-dont-think-doge-is
On Monday at the ARC Conference in London I sat down with Kemi Badenoch, who has been in charge of the Conservative Party for a little more than 100 days. When I last spoke to her—in December, on Honestly—Trump had just become the president and she had just become opposition leader. I asked her if she could turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? And if so, how? This week, we sat for a follow-up conversation on immigration, the economy, whether the vibe shift has made it to the UK, and more.
Bari: One of the things that everyone has been talking about over the past few days is the blistering speech that J.D. Vance gave in Munich in front of a stunned group of European bureaucrats. And I want to read just one line back to you. “The threat that I worry about most vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. What I worry about most is the threat from within the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” What did you think of the speech?
Kemi: I thought he was dropping some truth bombs, quite frankly. The Munich Security Conference clearly was not expecting what he had to say. And I found it fascinating that the chair of the conference burst into tears at the end of it and needed a hug because of how tough J.D.’s speech had been.
This is what I was talking about when I gave my speech this morning. It’s not liberal values that are the problem. It’s weakness. And that’s what J.D. was trying to tell that conference, too, that we need to get tougher. There’s this belief that tolerance is the core fundamental European value. To the extent that we are tolerating things that are actually destroying everything else, it’s this extreme view of tolerance that is undermining our security.
BW: What are some of the things that Europe and specifically the UK have tolerated that you think are no longer going to be tolerated in our new political moment?
KB: Well, the UK is not having a new political moment just yet. That’s what I want to bring about.
BW: Do you agree there’s been a global vibe shift?
KB: No, I don’t think so. I think that that is premature. I think there has been a big shift in the U.S. There has not been a global shift. Because of the dominance of U.S. media it can sometimes mean that people think that’s everything that’s going on—but it is absolutely not.
Nothing has changed in the rest of the world, as far as I can see. It looks like something may be about to change in Ukraine. But what Europe needs to look at and what we need to fix right now is our understanding of what it is that we are protecting. And it’s not just protecting tolerance of things that will destroy us. One example is what’s happening in the courts. We are having novel and expansive interpretations of law used in a way that was never the intention of Parliament. Parliamentary sovereignty is being eroded. We need to fix all of that.
BW: Something happened over the weekend that seemed almost scripted to prove the point. A 50-year-old stood outside of the Turkish embassy, lit a Quran on fire, and another guy tried to stab him. As far as I understand it, the stabber is being charged but has been released on bail. Meantime, the book burner has been charged with a “religiously aggravated public order offense.” From an American perspective, this is inconceivable. Convince me that this country doesn’t have de facto blasphemy laws already.
KB: We do not have blasphemy laws in this country, but people are behaving as if we do. What is really worrying is that when the prime minister was asked by a Labour MP about bringing in blasphemy laws to stop people from being disrespectful to Islam, he could not say clearly that that was something that he would not do. That worries me. And we see many attempts to bring in effective blasphemy laws through the back door. One of them is about creating a formal definition of Islamophobia. When we were in government, we rejected this multiple times. We wanted to talk about anti-Muslim hatred so that we could be clear that it is hatred against people that we will not stand for. Not hatred against ideas or religion. Freedom of religion also includes a freedom to not like or to criticize religion. And that is something that I will defend to my dying day.
BW: You’ve been in charge of the Tories for about three months. That’s typically the time at most businesses where people are asked to do some kind of self-evaluation. How are you doing three months in? How do you rate your performance so far?
KB: It’s a group project. It’s not just about me. But I have been the leader for 107 days now, and the journey we have ahead of us is still quite long. We suffered a historic defeat. I thought 1997 would be the worst defeat the Conservative Party would ever have. We did much worse than that. And the challenge is trickier because we have a new party on the right that says it is the party for real conservatives and we need to deal with that. My first task right now is to make sure that my party is united. It is a daily battle. But if you looked at the papers this time last year, we were all at each others’ throats. That has stopped.
The second task is much harder, and that is rebuilding trust with the public. It’s like breaking up with someone and coming back eight months later to say, “Do you want to try again? Do you want to try again?” They really will not be interested.
BW: Do you have to play hard to get?
KB: Well, not too hard to get. But they realize that the person that they’re dating now is also a problem and maybe even worse than you. But simply coming back and saying, “Well, don’t you regret leaving me” is not going to work.
We have to do the job that the British public has given us to do, which is being an effective opposition. And we’re doing that. A lot of it is not too exciting. It’s not about tweets. It’s looking at legislation. Labour is destroying education in this country. Their employment rights bill is communism smuggled into our legislation. The unions are back in charge. My job is to make sure that the public can see what it is they are doing. And that is going well. But it is not yet time for the public to say, “Yes, we’ll give you another chance.”
BW: What are your three priorities?
KB: The first one has to be about what kind of country we are building. That means dealing with immigration. It means dealing with what went wrong with immigration. We made promises that we were going to lower the rate of it—and it kept going up and up. We’ve got to explain why and talk about the mistakes that we made. Immigration is far too high. And when we talk about immigration, it’s not just about how many people come into the country, but who comes in, what kind of people are we bringing in. Otherwise, we are going to lose our country.
The second is how we build a better environment without bankrupting ourselves. I am not a climate change skeptic. I mean net zero skeptic.
And the third is about how we create genuine growth. Not just GDP growth, but growth that people can feel and see. Reducing the cost of living, creating wealth—these are the things that will help us deal with everything from law and order to defense.
We cannot pay for the defense we need in our country right now. In the Cold War, when we were not even fighting, we were spending about 4 percent. Now we’re just about managing 2 percent. We have a gigantic welfare state. We’re spending our money on welfare, on people who don’t want to go out to work instead of protecting our country. That requires a strong economy, and that means not chasing away the entrepreneurs and the productive side of the society, whether it’s young people who are all going off to America or Dubai or wealthy people who are finding better places to invest.
BW: If you stood up and said in Parliament and said you stand for zero immigration—none—do you think that would be a winning political message?
KB: No. It would be a slogan. What does zero immigration mean? Does that mean we’re not letting people out to the country as well? Because if people are leaving and new ones coming in, that’s not a better situation. And that’s why we need to start talking about values and principles. What kind of country is it that we want to build?
The last time we spoke I had just given a speech about how liberalism had been hacked. Why are people now so angry about immigration? It’s not because we never wanted people to come to our country. I am testament to that; I’m obviously from an immigrant background. It is because nobody was paying attention to who is coming, and why they are coming. It’s the same on trade. We allow ourselves to be exploited by countries that want to undermine what we have. They copy our intellectual property. They disrespect the World Trade Organization rules, whether it’s on tariffs or dumping. We have rules that we follow and other countries don’t follow them. And when that happens, everything breaks. The problem is not about the rules. The problem is about the strength to police and enforce the rules. That is why I am now talking about weakness. If you’re too weak to enforce your laws, if you’re too weak to defend yourself, if you’re too weak to speak up when things are going wrong, then everything that built the prosperity of the West will be destroyed.
BW: But it’s also a cultural problem. I met such a sweet Israeli photographer the other night. He’s been here in London for a number of years. He’s from one of the southern kibbutzim in Israel. And he said to me, “I don’t tell anyone I’m Israeli. I’m scared to tell people here that I am Jewish.” What do you do about that? This is the reality for many, many Jews that I speak to in this country. They are receding from public life because of the open antisemitism.
KB: It’s worse than that. They’re not just receding from public life. They’re leaving. I’ve met many Jewish people who’ve decided that they feel safer in Israel than they do here even though it’s at war. What we need to demonstrate is moral courage. And that starts right from the top. It is not enough just to tell people that we’re giving money to the community security trust. We need more courage.
October 7, 2023, was a revelation for me because I did not realize just how much antisemitism was lurking under the surface, not just in this country but across the West. And it was like a light went off in the darkness and it was everywhere. What we needed immediately was a leader to come out and say We will not have this in our country. We had protests before a war had even started, which showed that it wasn’t about Israel’s actions in Gaza. It was about people who did not like Israel and who do not like Jewish people. But that requires the sorts of courage that we did not demonstrate, and we’re still not demonstrating it now under Labour.
BW: Let’s talk about Reform and Nigel Farage because I don’t think the dynamic here is unique to the UK—it’s a broader phenomenon. And that is that the strong version of the argument wins the day and the nuanced, more complex, more intellectual version of it seems to be a loser. Now, whether that’s because we live on the internet and strong things go viral, I’m not sure. But I think a lot of people look at where the Tories are and look at where Reform is and basically conclude: They are saying something similar, but the Reform is just stronger tea. What do you say to that?
KB: I would say that it is very easy to say something strongly when you’ve never done it before. Have you met anyone talking about childbirth who’s never done it? Like, I’m just going to, you know, pop out these babies. I’ll have five children and so on. If you haven’t done it, it’s easy to just see things in black and white. The reason why I am more nuanced, even though there’s a lot of what Nigel Farage says that I agree with, is because we tried and it didn’t work.
When people make promises that they cannot deliver, it is not strong. It’s actually weak. It’s just telling people what they want to hear. Then you create disillusionment. Then they start looking for dictators. We made those mistakes before. I’m not repeating those mistakes. We said we were going to leave the European Union. I voted leave, though I was a civilian at the time. Then I got into Parliament and saw that there was no plan. We were working it out as we were going along. People got disillusioned. And we ended up not getting the full opportunities of Brexit.
Same thing with net zero. We’re going to get to net zero by 2050. I stood up in Parliament that day and asked: “How? Where is the plan?” And I was waved away, and told the plans will come. The plans came and they were terrible. They’re not working and they’re making us poorer.
We keep doing this over and over again, saying we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. Rhetoric is not delivery. Rhetoric is not results.
That is why I am not going to be pushed around. Some people right now are like headless chickens, just reacting to every single thing. We need to have a proper plan. That takes time. Does that mean that we will not have anything to say for a couple of years? No. We will have policies early on. But what you can rely on with me is somebody who actually does the thinking and doesn’t say stuff that she’s not going to be able to do. That is the big difference between Conservatives and Reform.
BW: There are some people who look at the political reality and say, hold on. If the Tories and Reform agree on many of the same issues, why not merge? You’ve said that that’s a suggestion “for the birds.” Why is that out of the question?
KB: Just because there are some things that we agree on doesn’t mean that we should merge. There are some things that we agree on with liberal Democrats. We absolutely should not merge with them. There’s some things that we agree on with Labour, but we have to make sure that people know what they’re voting for. Many of the problems which we have in our country have come from coalitions. People talk about Conservatives being in government for 14 years. Actually, seven of those years we didn’t have a majority. We had a minority government under Theresa May. We had a tiny majority for one year with David Cameron, but five years of that was coalition with the Liberal Democrats. And look what that did to them. People don’t like voting for things that change after they vote for them. And also, there are many people who will vote Conservative, who are voting Conservative, who will never vote for Reform. So there is an assumption that we are working on a simple spectrum of left-right. It’s actually a lot more complex—it’s 3D. People are left on some things, right on other things. What they are looking for are solutions. And talking about mergers and pacts shows that you’re not really serious about delivering. Doing the job of leadership is about the people that you are leading. It’s about how you are helping them, not about sitting around in Downing Street.
BW: Donald Trump’s been in power for about one month. It’s felt like a year, especially for those of us trying to keep up with the flood of news. How would you rate his presidency so far?
KB: I think it’s very effective. But if you look back at Donald Trump in 2020, this was at the peak of so much of wokeness, for lack of a better phrase. You had extreme gender ideology everywhere. You had the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, and all sorts of stuff that basically signaled a collapse of Western confidence, U.S. confidence. Now we see him coming in and being very effective because this time he has a plan. Last time there wasn’t really a plan. It’s still early days, but it’s very clear what Donald Trump is trying to do. He wants to make America great again. And we need to start thinking about how we do the same here.
BW: A lot of people in Europe are worried about America’s clear new posture with regard to Europe. Are those worries you share? Specifically about Trump’s policy on Ukraine and the kinds of messages that have come from Hegseth and Vance over the past few days.
KB: Let’s see where we got to in the next few days. I’m open-minded, and I have always said that we need to fully support Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting a war for Western Europe in the same way that Israel is fighting a war for the world against Iran. We need to start spending money on defense. So I completely agree with President Trump when he says that Europe needs to pull its weight. It has been relying on the U.S. to look after it. We cannot do that anymore. We cannot become a gigantic welfare state and hope that across the Atlantic they will do the tough things required to protect us. All of that needs to be fixed. We need to get serious. Israel is a serious country. It knows how to defend itself. It knows who its enemies are. It knows what it has to do to protect its people. We should be thinking about ourselves in exactly the same way.
BW: One of the things that I’m struck by walking around here is there’s so many brilliant people here. But I look around and I’m wondering: Where is your Palmer Luckey? Where is your Alex Karp? How do you bring back that kind of dynamic energy that really feels like it’s lacking here?
KB: We have to change our regulatory and business environment. We now have a government that doesn’t know where money comes from. It doesn’t know where wealth comes from. It thinks it’s just there and you just got to grab it. You increase tax rates and you get more money. They don’t know the difference between tax rates and tax take and people are leaving. Why would anyone with any ambition, any entrepreneur, set up a business here knowing that the government was simply waiting to snatch whatever it is that you have delivered? And so we have millionaires leaving and taking their investments with them. And we also have a lot of young people leaving because there is no opportunity for them. We’ve got to create opportunity. And that means looking again at how our economy is wired. Looking at what we’re spending on welfare, looking at so much waste—a lot of nonsense that government does. It’s too big. We need smaller government, smarter spending. That’s what’s going to get the entrepreneurs back.
BW: So, DOGE for the UK?
KB: To be honest, I don’t even think DOGE is radical enough.
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