British Conservatives elect Kemi Badenoch as leader of movement to the right

Kemi Badenoch was elected as the new leader of the Conservative Party on Saturday following a vote by party members. This heralds a further shift to the right for this militaristic, nationalist, austerity party.

Badenoch, a former business secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government, defeated former immigration minister Robert Jenrick by 53,806 votes to 41,388, winning 57 per cent of the 70 per cent of Tory members who voted.

Kemi Badenoch elected leader of the Conservative Party (Photo by Edward Massey/CCHQ/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The need for the vote was prompted by Sunak’s crushing defeat in the general election in July. The Tories lost by 10 points, receiving just 23.7 per cent of the vote. Reflecting what has been described as a “loveless landslide”, the Labor Party received only 33 percent, but due to the UK’s anti-democratic first-pass post-electoral system, this resulted in the Tories winning just 121 seats – the worst result in the party’s history .

That decline was reflected in the 40,000-member drop in voting this time around compared with the last Tory leadership contest in 2022, when the short-lived Liz Truss was elected.

Truss polled 81,326 votes compared to 53,806 for Badenoch.

The general election ended 14 years of Tory rule, during which the deeply unpopular party faced an ever-worsening crisis. This resulted in Britain’s oldest bourgeois party being forced to burn an unprecedented five prime ministers in just six years from 2016 to 2022. Truss epitomized this by lasting just 41 days.

The day after Labour’s victory, Sunak resigned, kicking off a four-month leadership contest requiring several rounds of voting by Tory MPs to narrow the field to two. Contenders Badenoch, Jenrick, former home secretary Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat and another former home secretary, James Cleverley, spent the summer trying to outdo each other in their right-wing views.

In putting forward their policies, candidates appealed not only to fellow Tory parliamentary candidates and the party’s dwindling membership, but also to Nigel Farage’s far-right British reform movement and its supporters. Over the past decade, the Tories have lost the support of various incarnations of Farage’s anti-immigration, pro-capitalist party – the UK Independence Party, the Brexit Party and now the UK Reform Party. In the July election, Reform received more than four million votes (third highest vote share at 14.3 percent), mostly from the Tories. However, thanks to the first post, the reform received only five seats.

Reform continued to erode Conservative support over the summer, with the latest polls showing it within a few percentage points. One commissioned survey Time Last month (data collected October 10-11), with the leadership battle in full swing, Labor and the Tories were tied on 27 points and Reform on 21 points.

Patel and Stride dropped out in September, followed by Tugendhat and Cleverley after the party conference in Birmingham. Badenoch knew the mood of the party and took to the conference stage to say, after her three rivals had just addressed the conference delegates: “Good speeches boys, but I think you all know I’m the one everyone’s been waiting for.” “

Badenoch has built support among senior Tories, winning the backing of five MPs in the last two weeks, including two members of the shadow cabinet. By the time of the vote, she was supported by 13 other members of the shadow cabinet, while Jenrick was supported by only three.

The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Badenoch joined the Tory party in 2005 and won a seat in the London Assembly in 2012. A Brexit supporter, she became MP for the safe seat of Saffron Walden in Essex at the 2017 general election. after the referendum on leaving the European Union. She was given the Treasury post in Johnson’s government and became business secretary in the Sunak administration.

Badenoch made few political statements, presenting herself as a leading “anti-woke” candidate challenging the “progressive” left whose policies had destroyed the country. The Tories lost the election because they “spoke for the right and controlled for the left”. She would repeal Labour’s introduction of value added tax on private school fees and oppose gender-neutral toilets.

During the Tory conference she made several speeches condemning “excessive taxes… over-regulation and excessive government intervention”. Citing the case of a local business owner in her constituency whose cafe closed, Badenoch said minimum wage and maternity benefit rules were among the rules “overburdening businesses.” After the media storm, she said she didn’t mean the maternity pay was “excessive” and that that was a good thing. There was no such waiver for the minimum wage.

In calling for cuts in the civil service, Badenoch was deliberately provocative, declaring: “About 5-10 per cent of them are very, very bad – you know, must be bad in prison – divulging official secrets, undermining the authority of their ministers, agitating.” .

The shift that Badenoch is seeking to make in the election is made clear in the pamphlet her team produced during the election campaign, Conservatism in Crisis: The Rise of the Bureaucratic Class. The introduction, written by Badenoch, said that in a Parliament dominated by the Labor Party, committed to austerity, war and attacks on democratic rights, the election “has created the most left-wing Parliament this country has ever seen.” She complains: “A new progressive ideology is growing in almost every country. This ideology is based on two pillars of constant intervention to protect marginalized, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves, and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals or even democratic nation-states.”

“The new progressive ideology views the nation state and its associated migration controls as purveyors of historical injustice rather than the fundamental needs that they are.” Therefore, “we are uncomfortable restricting migration for economic or cultural reasons, and as a result too many people are coming here , putting a strain on our economy and society.” This meant: “We risk holding back our economy and tearing apart the fabric of our society. The progressive left’s war on the nation state is a disaster for us all and must end.”

Its pamphlet states that what is required is not “misplaced nostalgia for a country a hundred or fifty years ago” but “the defense of our society today against a progressive threat.” The need was to “develop an agenda as radical as Thatcher’s was fifty years ago, the last truly successful reinvention of conservatism.”

With Badenoch the favorite to win the presidency, Jenrick’s campaign was about ensuring he could influence events by holding a senior position in its leadership. He focused his fire on shifting Tory policy towards winning votes for reform by calling for an annual cap on domestic net migration to “tens of thousands”. The Tories will “never be in government again” unless they win back the support lost by reforms and Jenrick puts Farage “out of business”.

As the Conservatives under previous home secretaries Priti Patel and Suella Braverman failed – due to legal problems – to implement a policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, Jenrick vowed to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to “stand for our nation and our culture, our identity and our way of life.” He boasted that British special forces “kill rather than capture terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they are caught, the European Court will release them.”

Jenrick advocated increasing defense spending from the current 2.2 percent to 3 percent of GDP. He told Telegraph this month: “Peace comes through strength. To deter Russian encroachment into NATO, we must spend 3 percent of GDP on defense and make this the new NATO standard for all member states.”

This put Jenrick in a good position if Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. He told Telegraph“We must prepare for America’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific to contain China, which means the UK and Europe stepping up their defenses against Russian aggressiveness. The era of freebies is over… We must wake up and urgently prepare for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan within three years.”

Badenoch complained that Jenrick’s insistence on leaving the ECHR would “split our party. This will mean that infighting and squabbles will continue. If we want to end this drama, we need to do it right.” Instead, “a limit must be placed” on net immigration to prevent “the wrong people coming” and “good people” leaving.

But beyond such minimal arguments, Badenoch told Jenrick in her acceptance speech: “You and I know that we don’t have that many differences. I have no doubt that you will play a key role in our party for many years to come.”