Badenoch: “the fundamental problem”

By Pete North - January 28, 2025

The internet is down at TT Towers this evening so I’m stepping in with a guest post.

You might have guessed that we are less than impressed with Kemi Badenoch. I personally think she is ill-equipped to lead the Tory party and the country on account of being an immigrant and a citizen of nowhere. She has no idea what makes Britain tick. But we’re supposed to overlook all that and judge her on her personal merits. Whatever those are.

That presents me with a small problem in that I still don’t actually know what she’s for. Apart from vague noises about being anti-woke, and unlike many of her parliamentary colleagues can tell that men in dresses are not women, she has yet to put a personal stamp on her leadership or define what this “different” Tory party is.

From the latest television interview we see that she’s still rattling off the same shtick we heard three months ago. Badenoch says “The fundamental problem is that politicians tell the people what they want to hear… [but] without working out how you’re going to deliver it, you run into trouble after you win.”

The lady ain’t wrong about that but that’s not the “fundamental problem”. The problem is politicians telling us what we want to hear, but having precisely zero intention of delivering it, who are more absorbed by their own narcissistic delusions such as Net Zero. I actually DO want politicians to tell me what I want to hear, and then I want them to spend the rest of the time demonstrating that they have understood the issues and have workable solutions.

Insofar as Badenoch has spoken about immigration, she has repeatedly waffled about “integration” and the need for a “dominant culture” while at no point defining what integration looks like or what she’ll do to enforce it. Moreover, this is not exactly new thinking. People were making these precise arguments circa 2003, and absolutely nothing happened. It all got worse.

If you are harbouring the notion that third-worlders barely evolved from cannibalism, who struggle with the concept of flushing toilets can be integrated into British society then you are not even close to understanding the issue. Nor can you talk about integrating migrants when there is so little of British society and culture left in our cities.

Both Badenoch and Reform are misleading us when they talk about integration. Or at the very least, are using that word dishonestly. You can only use that term if you are willing to define it. There is no way to softly encourage integration. You’re not going to get elderly Pakistani men to stop wearing pyjamas and start speaking English unless you force them to. You’re not going to stop Pakistanis conducting their community affairs in a foreign language unless you force them. You have to shut down the mosques where hate preachers operate (which is probably most of them). You’re going to have to order foreign owned shops to replace their signs with English signs. You’re going to have to ban the burka.

They will, of course, resist all of that. They will riot. They are not going to integrate willingly. That’s the reason neither Reform or the Tories will do anything even close to that, and it’s also the reason why they shouldn’t be here at all. Remigration is the only solution to people who categorically don’t want to integrate, who are basically parasitic colonisers. Integration will not work. Remigration will.

The idea then that Badenoch is going to shuffle off and do her homework and apply her “systems thinking” is actually quite absurd. An effective leader, familiar with the issues (which she should be since she fancies herself as a leader) would by now understand that we are way, way past “integration”, and at the very least the so-called Boriswave must be reversed.

As much as she is not in on top of the issues, I still don’t see that she is in any meaningful sense a conservative. Badenoch takes a lot of flak for having lobbied for more immigration in the form of foreign students. That tells us that she was, until very recently, completely oblivious to immigration as a major public concern, but is also ignoring the well known fact that British universities are milking foreign students as a cash cow, largely because our bloated universities are no longer in the business of education. They are in the empire-building business.

It’s long overdue that they were cut down to size and rationalised. Conservatives have been making this precise point for twenty years, but somehow it bypassed Badenoch entirely. How confident then can we be that she’s even commissioning policy to those ends? Ultimately, if she really did believe she was made of the right stuff, to the extent that she chucked her hat in the ring for leadership, she must have had some idea of what is broken and how to fix it, but as yet there is no evidence of this.

I’m told we should give her a chance, but I don’t buy the idea that she hasn’t had long enough. Comprehensive policy to implement an agenda is not all that difficult to put together when you’re at the heart of politics. She works next door to a huge hub of think tanks and has access to the brightest and best people in the country. She could start with the CPS report on immigration by Jenrick et al. Plenty of work has already been done on a bill of rights. She doesn’t have to start from scratch.

On energy, she doesn’t have to spell out what every new power station will be, but she certainly could be explicit that the current phase of windfarm-building will be the absolute last. Again, this is not a new argument. What Net Zero sceptics are writing about the stupidity of wind energy is more or less the same tract we were writing as far back as 2007. She could at least be explicit and say that the EV mandate will be abolished outright and Net Zero targets will be repealed.

But there’s a reason why she won’t. And it’s nothing to do with “getting it right”. In common with Reform, the Tories believe that if they put out policy then the media and the opposition will attack it so they have to “keep their powder dry”. It doesn’t occur to them the the whole purpose of being a political party is to do politics and advance policy. You pick the policies that are right and you go out and sell them. You pick holes in the bad ideas of your opponents and you venture your own alternatives, setting the agenda as you go.

Badenoch would have us believe that the Tories are changing, but we have to take her word for it because we won’t get any policy from her. In the meantime, she will tread water and vacillate and waffle her way through every interview, each time exposing what an ineffable lightweight she really is.

I recall at the time of the leadership election that many Reformers wanted Badenoch to win because Reform would be the chief beneficiary. They were right about that, but wanting the worst quality competition is bad for politics as a whole. We now have two mainstream, notionally right-wing parties who do not see the utility in producing policy, and they each have no competition pressing them to do better. They’ll each wait to the last minute to see which way the polls are going and run their ideas through focus groups, then come up short when it’s their turn in office.

I’m now starting to think that Labour will get a second term regardless of how incompetent they are. Neither the Tories or Reform can win a majority and neither of them deserve to. As a rule, voters don’t sack governments unless there is a viable alternative waiting in the wings. The most the right can offer is a Tory-Reform coalition, where we again have a mismatched and dysfunctional spectrum of conservatives and populists, with no intellectual foundation and no agreement on how to proceed. Right back where we started in 2019. We are a long way off from the great reset we’ve all been hoping for.

I’ve said it many times but there will be no way out of Britain’s malaise until there is an intellectual renaissance on the right. We can say for certain that it won’t come from the Reform end of things, especially while Farage is in control, but it’s not going to arrive on Badenoch’s watch either. Our politicians are universally unserious and the right is no exception.