Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch appears to be emerging as the preferred choice of the small-c conservative base of the Conservative party in the contest to replace liberal-minded Boris Johnson as the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
To the dismay of the far-left in Britain, the conservative right seems to be coalescing around the Nigerian heritage MP for Saffron Walden, Kemi Badenoch, 42, who emerged as a champion in the struggle against Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory and has argued against the big spending and high tax philosophy that has defined Tory rule over the past decade.
Anglican Deacon and conservative political commentator for GB News, Calvin Robinson told Breitbart London that he is supporting Badenoch because “it would be great to see a conservative leader of the Conservative Party.”
“Kemi Badenoch believes in the free market, limited government and a strong nation. She’s an active promoter of family values and is not suspectible to woke nonsense. Her straight talking approach is exactly what’s needed right now.
“Kemi is the only candidate who can unite the Right of the party. It’s important we don’t get another globalist establishment figure leading the country, the Right should all get behind Kemi to provide a united front against the obvious candidates.”
Making it through to the first round of voting amongst MPs on Wednesday, Badenoch topped the survey of the Tory Party aligned Telegraph newspaper, appearing to signal a strong support among the actual membership of the party. She has routinely come near-top in other recent polls attempting to take the temperature in this race.
Although the mainstream media has attempted to cast Theresa May’s former Defence Secretary, MP Penny Mordaunt as the right-wing challenger to the establishment favourites former Goldman Sachs banker and Chancellor Rishi Sunak and former Lib-Dem Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Mordaunt has backed the green agenda of Boris Johnson and has been criticised for her declaration that “trans men are men” and trans women are women”. Meanwhile Badenoch has pushed back against the Net Zero climate goals as “unilateral economic disarmament” and has also stood firmly against the far-left ideology surrounding gender.
Badenoch has also differentiated herself from other candidates by actually calling for a reduction in the size of the state as opposed to the ‘Labour Light’ ethos that has defined the Conservative party in the decades following the ousting of Margaret Thatcher.
“The scale of the challenge we face means we can’t run away from the truth. Inflation has made the cost-of-living crisis acute, but the problems go back way further. We’ve had a poor decade for living standards. We have overburdened our economy. There’s too much unproductive public spending, consuming taxpayers’ hard-earned money. And there are too many well-meaning regulations slowing growth and clogging up the arteries of the economy,” she said on Tuesday.
Badenoch said that the political right in Britain has lost the “confidence and courage and ability to defend the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper.
“It has been undermined by a willingness to embrace protectionism for special interests. It’s been undermined by retreating in the face of the Ben and Jerry’s tendency, those who say a business’s main priority is social justice, not productivity and profits, and it’s been undermined by the actions of crony capitalists, who collude with big bureaucracy to rig the system in favour of incumbents against entrepreneurs.”
The Conservative party leadership candidate, who spent her youth in Lagos, Nigeria before coming back to England where she worked as a McDonald’s employee “flipping burgers, cleaning loos” as she paid her way through college, earning a degree in engineering, said that her experience defines the value of a free economy rather than the “poverty and broken dreams” inherent in the socialist model.
The former equalities minister first rose to international attention in 2020 when she took to the floor of the House of Commons to denounce the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and the implementation of Critical Race Theory in British schools amid the furore following the death of George Floyd in the United States.
“Of course black lives matter, but we know that the Black Lives Matter movement is political,” she said, going on to say that the “the promotion of Critical Race Theory” is a “dangerous trend in race relations” and “an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression.”
The speech, which readers of the ConservativeHome website voted as the best of the year in 2020, drew acclaim in the UK and the United States.
It is for her strident stance on the cultural issues that won her the support of Reclaim Party leader and former London Mayoral candidate Laurence Fox, who told Breitbart London that “she has the best handle on the most important thing that’s going on outside of the cost of living crisis, which is the cultural problem in the UK.”
“She’s anti-Critical Race Theory, she’s against all of these contested ideologies and she’s sound on almost everything, she’s toned down the idea of Net Zero. I just don’t trust any of the others… I quite like Suella Braverman… but I think Kemi is the best of the bunch.”
“She’s very calm, very confident, very good speaker, very passionate but not in an overbearing way and I think she would have Keir Starmer for breakfast,” Fox added.
When questioned why he didn’t support Penny Mordaunt, Fox quipped: “Penny Mordaunt doesn’t know what a woman is, so in all good conscience, I can’t back someone as the leader of a political party who can’t define what a woman is.”
Perhaps belying the fear of the prospect of a Prime Minister Badenoch, far-left figures have begun a full out assault on the candidate, with political commentator Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu saying that she was “enabling white supremacy” in her campaign. Anti-Brexit activist Femi Oluwole said, apparently without irony, that should Badenoch become the first black prime minister in the history of the UK it would “damage… the fight against racial inequality.”
In a response provided to Breitbart London, Laurence Fox said: “I’m not sure how a black person can enable white supremacy but hence is the woke way, none of it makes any sense. They are just upset that England is a place of opportunity for all, is a warm and wonderful country, tolerant and respectful of all cultures and peoples.”
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