Why the Very Online right has it in for Kemi Badenoch

It’s been almost two weeks since Kemi Badenoch took the Tory crown, becoming the first black leader of any major UK party. Much has been made of the meltdown this prompted on the identitarian left, as ‘anti-racist’ activists lined up to accuse her of being a closet ‘white supremacist’. The idea that Badenoch’s victory is a manifestation of ‘anti-blackness’ is, of course, unhinged. But the woke are not the only ones who have reacted hysterically. Those on the Very Online right are just as horrified by Badenoch’s rise – and are also determined to paint her as something she isn’t.

Incredibly, some on the right have accused Badenoch of being the woke left’s ‘useful idiot’. Writer Harrison Pitt sets out the case most comprehensively in the European Conservative. He not only concludes that Badenoch is not the ‘anti-woke warrior’ her supporters make her out to be – he also accuses her of seeking ‘to continue and even escalate the entire [woke] grift’.

Really? The same Badenoch who, as equalities minister, drove out Stonewall from Whitehall? Who, as a junior minister, commissioned the Sewell report, which challenged the woke left’s simplistic narratives around ‘institutional racism’? Who not only stopped gender self-identification from becoming the law in England, but also helped persuade then PM Rishi Sunak to block Nicola Sturgeon’s gender reforms in Scotland? Who pushed back against the excesses of the Public Sector Equality Duty and Equality Impact Assessments? Who brought in guidance around the teaching of sex and gender in schools to stop gender-identity theory being taught as fact? Who openly denounced Black Lives Matter and critical race theory being taught as fact? Who launched an inquiry into the failures of DEI? Who, as a backbench MP, went toe-to-toe with Kimberlé Crenshaw, the academic who coined the term ‘intersectionality’? For all this, Badenoch faced constant consternation from woke-ish colleagues, identitarian civil servants and the mainstream media. To suggest that she is still some sort of woke sleeper agent is absurd.

To make his case, Pitt cites Badenoch’s 2022 Inclusive Britain policy paper, which includes a section on reducing the ethnicity pay gap in the NHS. Pointedly, the actual report does not suggest that private-sector companies should publish ethnic-pay data (Badenoch reiterated this on the floor of the House of Commons when challenged by former prime minister Theresa May). The Inclusive Britain report is actually the government’s response to the 2021 Sewell report – that is, the report that was condemned by identitarians for stating that racial and ethnic disparities are not caused by institutional racism. The Inclusive Britain report also accepted explicitly that racial disparities are not ipso facto evidence of racism, but are more likely to be caused by a range of other factors, such as class and geography. To suggest that Badenoch did not push back against wokeness in her tenure as equalities minister is nonsense.

Arguably, it would be just as nonsensical as accusing Margaret Thatcher of ‘gay race communism’ (as the Very Online right sometimes insists on calling ‘woke’) because she implemented the Scarman report, which partly blamed ‘racial disadvantage’ for the 1981 Brixton riots, and voted to legalise male homosexuality.

Tellingly, Pitt and others have not levelled the same charge of wokeness against Badenoch’s former leadership rival, Robert Jenrick. Jenrick voted Remain and was once a close ally of Tory wets Amber Rudd and Anna Soubry. In 2017, he called for a more liberal immigration policy and signed a letter, along with 16 other MPs, denouncing ‘Farage’s Britain’ as ‘angry, intolerant, limited’ and ‘sepia-coloured’. But Badenoch is the woke one?

Ultimately, Pitt’s biggest objection to Badenoch has nothing to do with woke. It’s that he considers her a ‘foreigner’. In response to Charles Moore’s endorsement of Badenoch, in which Moore stated that Badenoch’s Nigerian heritage would cause a dilemma for the identitarian left, Pitt writes:

‘Would Moore wish to see the Israelis browbeaten into accepting for themselves a similar standard: namely, that a non-Jewish prime minister must be installed to appease the cries of racist wickedness that Israel receives every day? Would a Palestinian Arab lady leading the party of Menachem Begin be a “sight for sore eyes”, or an unmistakable sign that the Israeli right had lost confidence in its own people?’

Of course, one can quite reasonably dispute whether it was right for Moore to raise Badenoch’s ethnic heritage as one of the many reasons for his endorsement, as opposed to merely focussing on merit. But there is no doubt that Pitt’s animus goes beyond a supposed dislike for deploying identity politics. Pitt clearly takes issue with Badenoch’s heritage in itself. He makes this clear when referencing her support for the the recently departed Tory government’s lax immigration policies: ‘For a guest in a new country to identify more with the general pool of prospective immigrants than with the consistently expressed desires of the people hosting her to see immigration drastically reduced reveals a staggering ingratitude.’ He also accuses supporters of Badenoch, like Moore, of thinking ‘the British people are not properly “anti-racist” unless they consent to be governed by a foreigner’. To online rightists like Pitt, Badenoch is a ‘foreigner’, a ‘guest’ and a symbol of a ‘lost confidence’ in the British people. This is despite the fact she was born in Wimbledon and, while raised in Nigeria, has lived in the UK since she was 16.

Another bizarre accusation is that Badenoch is somehow a beneficiary of DEI. In a post that earned more than 4,000 likes, right-wing influencer Jack Hadfield declared that he had cancelled his Tory membership because his former party is now led by an ‘African dominatrix mummy who’s constantly late to everything, has no policies, but Fights The Woke TM’ (sic). He painted her as the ‘DEI leader of the Conservatives’.

But is it really true that Badenoch’s race and sex have boosted her career unfairly? When seeking selection as an MP, she ran against No10 and CCHQ’s favoured candidate, Stephen Parkinson (now Lord Parkinson), to become the Tory hopeful for Saffron Walden in 2017 (she won both the Tory selection and then the seat in the General Election). If her race and sex were fundamental to her career, you would also have expected her to have risen faster up the ranks than her white and male colleagues. This isn’t true either. Alister Jack, a member of the 2017 intake, entered the cabinet in 2019. Liz Truss, Anna Soubry, Amber Rudd, Nicky Morgan, Matt Hancock and Jo Johnson all entered the cabinet within four years of being elected to parliament, whereas Badenoch took five years. Even Robert Jenrick had a faster climb up the ministerial ranks, and entry into the cabinet, than Badenoch did. She was only given a place in the cabinet after coming from nowhere to finish fourth in the 2022 Tory leadership contest, beating the likes of Tom Tugendhat, Nadhim Zahawi and Jeremy Hunt. This was proof she was held in high esteem by many of her peers. That contest also helped to make her the darling of grassroots Tory members. This is not the career trajectory you’d expect from a DEI hire.

Remarkably, others have been even less subtle in their attacks on Badenoch. Josh Ferme of the Lotus Eaters podcast tweeted that Badenoch’s victory had turned the Tories into a party of ‘clowns, browns and pronouns’. Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) insists she is ‘not English’ and that ‘she is Nigerian, a first-generation immigrant. This is an immutable characteristic of which she is very proud. English ethnicity and English culture are not separate properties.’ Another big account described her as ‘not meaningfully British enough to be PM, and that’s not controversial unless you’re absolutely marinated in multiculturalist dogma’.

But do voters agree? While such views may gain traction on X, they are a minority in the real world. In 2022, a poll by British Future asked: ‘How would you feel if the successor to Boris Johnson as prime minister was from an ethnic minority?’ Fifty-eight per cent of respondents said that ethnicity was not relevant to being prime minister. While 26 per cent said it would be a positive development, just 10 per cent said that it would be negative.

Most right-leaning voters are not remotely perturbed by Badenoch’s rise. YouGov found 50 per cent of Conservative voters and 39 per cent of Reform voters believe that the Tory membership made a ‘very good’ or ‘fairly good’ choice in electing her. As for the country as a whole, the Tories now have a poll lead – albeit a small one – over the governing Labour Party.

Unlike the Very Online right, most Britons do not think someone’s race matters all that much. This year, in polling by the More in Common think-tank, 48 per cent of respondents said that ‘I am proud that Britain is a multiethnic society’, with 45 per cent saying ‘I am neither proud nor ashamed that Britain is a multiethnic society’. Only seven per cent of respondents saw this as a source of shame. According to Ipsos polling from 2020, 93 per cent disagree with the statement that to be ‘truly British you have to be white’ (with 84 per cent strongly disagreeing). Eighty-nine per cent say that they would be happy for their child to marry someone from another ethnic group. The most recent British Social Attitudes Survey also finds that only 19 per cent of the public have a ‘primarily ethnic’ conception of British identity, with 68 per cent holding to a ‘primarily civic’ conception.

What this shows is that far from being tribunes of the people, Very Online rightists speak only for themselves. Embarrassingly, they share much in common with the very identitarian leftists who they deride, denounce and define themselves against. Both lack the awareness to grasp that they represent only a small fringe. Both have an obsessive fixation on race and ethnic identity. Both have little understanding of this country’s cultural identity outside of a racial prism. Both have allowed their pathological obsession to distort their critical faculties and unmoor them from reality and morality. Both assume that just because someone is black, they really ought to be woke. Both should be ignored.

Obadiah Mbatang is a British writer. Follow him on X: @residentadviser.