For centrist voters - whom the Tories, if they are serious about returning to power, must take back from the Labor Party - Badenoch may prove to be too radical a politician. She has never shied away from controversy, and recently became embroiled in it with her comments on over-reaching privileges for mothers on parental leave.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
In early November, the British Conservative Party elected a new chairwoman: Rishi Sunak replaced Kemi Badenoch, minister of trade and industry in his government.
After the disastrous reaction of the markets to the Liz Truss government's radically neoliberal experiment and the chaotic Johnson government, Sunak was seen as someone to restore a respectable, elementally responsible face to Conservative power. In practice, this meant avoiding the topic of the culture wars, returning to the politics of austerity and failing to scare the public with the "fiscal irresponsibility" of the Labor Party under Keir Starmer.
Bedenoch has always been much more clearly right-wing than Sunak, including on the issue of migration. Unlike her predecessor, she has a clear vision of the ideological direction in which British conservatism should evolve by the next election. The new party leader has also been shaped by a very different biographical experience. It has a key influence on her worldview and policies.
Nigerian context
Neither Sunak nor Badenoch belong to the white majority - except that their biographies could not be more different. Sunak is a descendant of migrants, his family having come to the country from India via the British colonies in East Africa. He himself was born in Britain and grew up in comfortable circumstances - his father was a doctor, his mother ran a pharmacy. He went through the traditional institutions that educate Britain's elite: the private secondary school Winchester College - full tuition there is now nearly £50,000 a year, almost double the average annual net wage in the British economy (£27,500). From there, the future prime minister went to Oxford, where he studied the PPP course - politics, philosophy and economics, chosen by people thinking about a career in politics or the media. He then did an MBA at Stanford University and landed a job in the City of London.
Badenoch was born in London, but spent the first 16 years of her life in Nigeria's capital, Lagos. Her family there had a similar class position to that of Sunak. Her father was a doctor with a profitable practice, treating employees of oil companies operating in Nigeria. Her mother taught at the local medical school. The politician's parents could afford to give birth in a private clinic in London, under conditions that even the private sector could not offer in Nigeria.
Prosperity, however, began to be undermined by Nigeria's political instability. His father lost his contracts to treat oil workers, and the family had to subsist for a time on his mother's academic salary. In 1995, when Badenoch was 15, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth after the government of General Sani Abacha - who had gained power in a coup two years earlier - sentenced environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa to death. A year later, Badenoch's parents, fearing for their daughter's future, sent her to London. The future prime minister moved in with friends of her parents, completed the last two grades of a public-sector high school and got a job at McDonald's.
She then graduated with a degree in computer science from the University of Sussex. In a interview for The Times, Badenoch recalled that one of the many things that made her a conservative was her interactions with "dumb, left-wing kids from Sussex," representatives of "the white middle class of north London who didn't manage to get into Oxford or Cambridge, which didn't stop them from speaking with great self-confidence and arrogance on subjects they didn't know anything about - such as Africa."
Why Nations Lose
More significant than the student experience at Sussex were the African ones. They largely shaped Badenoch's views on issues such as multiculturalism, migration, the nation-state, and the problem of social cohesion. The Tory leader stresses that she is essentially a "first-generation migrant," which, she hints, allows her to look at these issues soberly, without the prejudices of the liberal "chattering classes."
As wrote about Badenoch by Tom McTague on the "UnHerd" website, she brings a unique experience to the top of British politics - someone who "was born in post-colonial Africa, but entered adulthood in anti-colonial, modern Britain. The result is a whole new form of conservatism. (...) Badenoch's politics flow from the biography of an Anglophile middle-class Nigerian woman confronted with an English progressivism that is alien to her." From the perspective of her biography, for Badenoch, Britain is "not a cloaca of racism, inequality and backwardness - a blinded Brexit Island cut off from the world - but a place with relatively few flaws, a place to be protected, including from itself, before it loses what it has."
Margaret Thatcher is said to have always carried Constitution of Liberty von Hayek - so that if anything happened, she could put a copy on the table and say "we believe in it!". It is said that in the case of Badenoch, such a role could be fulfilled by the book Why Nations Lose by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, this year's Nobel laureates in economics. The new Tory leader cites the two as her main sources of intellectual inspiration: along with Thomas Sowell (a classic of American black conservatism and a critic of affirmative action), Jonathan Haidt (a social psychologist who gained popularity on the right mainly with his book The Coddling of American Mind, criticizing modern university culture, which subordinates everything to protecting students from trauma), and the conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton, who died four years ago.
Acemoglu and Robinson, interpreted through Scrutonian spectacles, shaped the politician's belief that for the success or failure of nations, trust, shared cultural codes, and a sense of obligation to one's countrymen are crucial. All this, according to Badenoch, is being destroyed in Britain today by two forces tearing at the social fabric: uncontrolled migration and radical progressive ideology.
Against the "new bureaucratic class"
Badenoch's idea for the party, however, is not limited to ramping up anti-immigrant rhetoric - here a more populist message represented by her main rival for party leadership, Rober Jarrick - or fighting "woke." An outline of what this would look like is shown in a paper prepared by the Badenoch-centered group of politicians document from October of this year, entitled Conservatism in Crisis. The Rise of Bureaucratic Class. It mainly broke through to the media with statements about how neuroatypical people, rather than conforming to social norms, receive preferential treatment today - but there is much more in it.
The document starts with a diagnosis: political polarization today does not run around old class divisions, how much we earn has less and less influence on how we vote. The key polarization runs elsewhere: between the guiding "radical progressive ideology" or "new bureaucratic class" and the rest of society.
By "radical progressivism," the authors mean an ideology that sees society as a space filled with various practices of domination, discrimination, violence - physical and symbolic - and microaggressions, often structural in nature, reproducing themselves over a long historical duration. These practices particularly affect various historically marginalized groups: from minority groups, such as the aforementioned neuroatypical people or the LGBT+ community, to groups as numerous as women. In this perspective, the task of policy is to protect these groups. And also to protect people from their own poor choices - such as health - and nature from exploitative human actions.
The "new bureaucratic class" dealing with all this should not be equated with public administration officials. It operates by crossing the traditional divisions between the public and private sectors. According to the authors of the document under discussion, the place of its concentration is also the HR and compliance departments of large corporations, universities or NGOs.
The growth of this new class is slowing down the economic development of Western economies, the paper argues, and in several ways. First, it imposes costs on them to maintain it and meet the subsequent standards it sets. Second, the greater the power, prestige and income of the new bureaucracy, the more the most talented individuals choose to work in this sector - to the detriment of the market-based, productive part of the economy. Third, the over-regulated economy creates too high a cost of entry for new entrants - which suits the biggest corporate players, eager to enter into alliances with the "new bureaucracy."
Fourth and finally, the specific progressivism of the "new bureaucracy" - with its obsession with discrimination, trauma, microaggressions - is profoundly anti-development. As the document reads: "If we want to build an economy where people are not afraid to take risks, take initiative, and show resilience in the face of adversity, this is incompatible with a progressive ideology that believes in the need to protect fragile individuals rather than build resilience."
Because of its focus on minority rights - but also its ecological dimension - the progressivism of the "new bureaucracy" is deeply anti-democratic, according to the authors. Hence its aversion to the only form of democracy that works today - the nation-state. An aversion that intensifies when it begins to take its own borders seriously.
The new conservative policy would be to build a broad alliance against the "new bureaucratic class" and its progressive ideology, recruited on the one hand from entrepreneurs rebelling against the over-regulation of the economy, on the other from the working class, rejecting elements of modern progressive ideology, or the lower middle class, demanding more restrictive migration.
The goal of such an alliance would be not only electoral success, deregulation of the economy and the weakening of the bureaucratic class, but also a moral revolution - putting a resilient, entrepreneurial individual uninterested in victim status at the center of the social imagination in place of the vulnerable group identities of the "new progressivism." As for Thatcher, for Banenoch, the right-led political and economic revolution is only to be a stepping stone to a moral revolution.
Find the right measure of radicalism
To what extent will this message reach Britons, tired of 14 years of Tory rule, which for the country has been a lost decade, if not an outright period of economic and social regression? For centrist voters, whom the Tories, if they are serious about returning to power, must take away from Labour, Badenoch may prove to be too radical a politician, steeped in culture wars and controversy. She has never shied away from them, and recently became embroiled in them with her comments on over-reaching privileges for mothers on parental leave.
By contrast, as William Atkinson wrote in the New Statesman, for the youngest generation of Tory voters, strongly radicalized by 14 years of economic stagnation, their labor market prospects, prohibitive real estate prices and pandemonium, Badenoch is too tied to estabilishment to be a candidate of conservative renewal. The group, moreover, sees the entire modern Conservative Party as, to quote Atkinson, "decadent, useless and intellectually bankrupt," with an increasingly favorable eye toward Reform Nigel Farage. If the Tories want to return to power, they must not only retake the center again, but also stop Farage's leakage from the right. Once renowned for its stability and predictability, British democracy has now become extremely unstable, chaotic and volatile. No one can predict which way the pendulum will swing in the next election.
