Despite being the only black candidate in the Conservative Party leadership race to replace Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch, a former equalities minister has been accused of “enabling white supremacy.”
On Friday evening, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative MP for Saffron Walden, entered the race to succeed Boris Johnson. In outlining her reasons for running, the Nigerian-born candidate emphasised the importance of standing up to the woke mob and the identity politics that have dominated much of the political conversation in the UK since at least 2020.
“Our country is falsely criticised as oppressive to minorities and immoral, because it enforces its own borders. We cannot maintain a cohesive nation-state with the zero-sum identity politics we see today,” Ms Badenoch said.
“Exemplified by coercive control, the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance or individual rights but the very opposite of our crucial and enduring British values,” she continued.
Despite her relatively junior role in government, Badenoch has become a central figure of ire for the far left in Britain due to her strident opposition to the implementation of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other leftist ideologies on race into the UK education system.
In response to Badenoch’s entry into the leadership race on Friday evening, This is Why I Resist author and leftist political commentator Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu said that Badenoch’s “power-grabbing ambition is rooted in discrediting [and] delegitimising antiracism efforts, denying systemic racism, whitewashing [the] British Empire [and] enabling White supremacy against Black people.”
Dr. Shola added, “She can crawl back into her mother.”
“Kemi Badenoch is a GIFT for racists & White supremacy – a Black Racial-Gatekeeping Executioner of Tory racist policies.” Mos-Shogbamimu wrote on Saturday morning.
Mrs. Badenoch is no stranger to such attacks from the left; following the release of a government race report last year, Labour MP Dawn Butler appeared to call her and others “racial gatekeepers” in the House of Commons.
In the aftermath of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain following the death of George Floyd in America, which prompted many British educational institutions to implement leftist ideologies such as Critical Race Theory, Badenoch rose to international prominence in 2020.
In her leadership pitch, Badenoch stated that she would follow the advice of one of her heroes, American economist Thomas Sowell, who said, “If you want to help people, tell them the truth; if you want to help yourself, tell them what they want to hear.”
In contrast to Boris Johnson’s and Rishi Sunak’s big-spending, high-tax regimes, Badenoch promised to govern with “tight spending discipline” and a focus on improving economic growth and productivity, as well as lower taxes.