The New Thatcher? No, Globalist Badenoch Misses the Big Picture

PAUL COLLITS

THE Tories’ new leader has stepped out. Kemi Badenoch has been in Washington DC for the annual meeting of the International Democracy Union. This is the self-styled ‘global alliance of the centre-right’. Australia’s Tony Abbott is on the board, and was there to give a speech.

The speakers list was a decidedly a mixed bag. New Zealand’s Defense Minister Judith Collins was one. She did a pretty poor job recently of defending a British-born lesbian navy officer responsible for sinking a New Zealand naval vessel that was uninsured. Judith started attacking random Melbourne commenters for being misogynistic.

Also speaking was the appalling Scott Morrison, Australia’s unapologetic covid godfather whose plandemic crimes are many and too familiar to readers here to repeat now. Lord Ashcroft of Conservative Home spoke too.

Kemi Badenoch’s speech was interesting and ambitious.  Part introduction of herself and of her story to her international conservative colleagues, part political philosophy, and part analysis of the woes of the West and of the current state of liberalism. Liberalism in its non-American sense.

She said she believed in freedom – free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, ‘trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law, no matter who you are or where you come from’. But liberalism had ‘been hacked’, socially and economically, by politicians on the left, Badenoch argued.

‘I worry that we are losing what made our countries great,’ she said.

Badenoch, who became Conservative leader last month, said ‘opposing ideologies’ were taking over and undermining the culture and institutions that had created space for them. She accused the left of using ‘oppression narratives’ while being ‘not that interested in ethnic minorities except as a tool to fight their battles against the right’. Anti-racist groups, she said, were deciding that all white people were racist and campaigning against ‘white privilege’.

The environmental movement, she added, had been taken over by a ‘radical green absolutism’ about Net Zero. Feminism, she complained, ‘doesn’t know what a woman is any more’. She called for conservatives to fight back, by standing up for a ‘muscular liberalism’ and curbing ‘the growth of activist government’.

This covers familiar territory. But her speech also suggests that Kemi doesn’t fully understand what has happened in political thinking and action over the past generation. Badenoch has often been compared to Margaret Thatcher, for example by Simon Heffer under the headline ‘No Tory has ever reminded me more of Mrs Thatcher than Mrs Badenoch’.

The comparison could be about personal characteristics or about personal beliefs, or both. It is hard for those who knew Thatcher and her supremely authoritative style and stature to see. It is also hard to compute given that Badenoch was in the frame for the Tory leadership over a period when she was a part of only what passed for a Conservative Party in government – ‘in name only’ Conservative administrations.

Furthermore a lot has happened since Mrs Thatcher.  And I for one as a conservative am not sure it would be Thatcher that now I would like having myself compared to, for a number of reasons.

But first, what did she mean by hacked and what does it mean to be ‘hacked’? One definition has it: A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hacker – someone with knowledge of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be inaccessible to them. In a positive connotation, though, hacking can also be utilised by legitimate figures in legal situations. It brings to mind another phrase beloved of centre-right politicians and commentators, ‘the long march through the institutions’. This, of course, refers to the radical cultural takeover of the bureaucracy, the universities, supranational bodies, non-government organisations and even churches.

All this is true. But it is only half the story. There is another sequence of events. It proceeded from Thatcherite deregulation – and not only in Britain – of business and borders, to globalisation and corporate globalism, to woke, green globalism and finally, to the UniParty. The movement has occurred both in politics and in political ideology. The old left has morphed into economic Thatcherism and the old right has accepted social liberalism.The UniParty trades in both. None of this has been the result of a nefarious hack.

The American political theorist Patrick Deneen thinks that liberalism contained the seeds of its own self-destruction. He argues that liberalism fails because it succeeds.  Here is a good summary of Deneen’s theory:

Although the meaning of the term ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism’ has changed over the years and is often used to denote progressivism, liberalism is a broader political philosophy that includes both classical liberals (i.e., conservatives) and progressive liberals (i.e., progressives). As a definition of the term, Deneen writes, ‘Liberalism was premised upon the limitation of government and the liberation of the individual from arbitrary political control.’ This led, in its early application, to a representative democracy in the United States with assurance of free speech, the freedom of religion and robust property rights. In its early implementations, liberalism was supported by the premodern political order that still believed in virtue as a necessary and worthy human ideal.

‘For all the benefits of liberalism (and there are many), it has within it the seeds of its own demise. Liberalism lacks the ability to reproduce virtue, because its foundation lacks substance. Liberalism is something of a content-free philosophy. It functions more as an organizing framework for other substantive philosophies. However, this contentlessness quickly becomes its own content, much like Seinfeld, a show about nothing, had a strong satirical message that tended to deconstruct social norms. Just as Seinfeld worked because it borrowed the substance from the world and made it appear irrelevant, so liberalism has worked borrowing from the substance of other philosophies.’

There has always been a progressive strain within liberalism, that now aligns explicitly and unashamedly with post-modernism and has radical individual autonomy as part of the mix. Just look at J S Mill, a hero to many liberals of every stripe. Thatcher ignored the emerging culture wars. (Even though Badenoch is happy with the description of her by some as a culture warrior. It is too late now, really.)

Kemi Badenoch seemingly hasn’t made the leap from the 1980s wars against hyper-regulation of the economy to today’s much-needed war against progressive globalism and self-reflection on the emergence of the UniParty. Only the micro parties get this shift, and even they mostly do not understand its origins. Badenoch, like many other conservative observers, has missed the big picture.

This is the result of political self-interest and political self-preservation.

All conservative leaders cling to the conservative in-group, the club. Most of those meeting in Washington certainly do. Until the British Tories and the Australian Liberals (for example) make the necessary jump, we will continue to have Tweedledum-Tweedledee governance, and, as Matthew Goodwin often says, the middle 80 per cent of the population will fail to be properly represented.

Judging by Badenoch’s reactions to covid, with her self-serving statements about conspiracy theories and the need to get a better government handle on misinformation; her willingness to rock up to Davos (in 2023); her failure explicitly to embrace the MAGA party, the outsiders and deplorables, unlike Suella Braverman; her one-time (strategic?) acceptance of Michael Gove’s patronage; her avoidance of the National Conservativism conference of 2023; her marriage to a banker and the fact of her oh-so-recent involvement at the cabinet table during some of the worst (Tory or other) governments in British history, she has got a way to go. Clearly.

A Reform UK member noted recently: ‘Kemi Badenoch, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, is a World Economic Forum (WEF) member. In January 2023, she attended the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos. It is clear that unless you have done a Deal with the Davos [devil emoji] you do not become the leader of the Labour or Conservative Party. No change.’

No change, indeed. Woke capitalism central in the Swiss Alps has absolutely no problem embracing either Thatcherism or the agendas of global corporates. Whether that is the same as the free trade/free market globalism of Thatcher is another matter. They will be able to work with and on Badenoch.

The familiar embrace of the safe centre-right narrative about the attacks on the West rolled out by Kemi Badenoch in Washington will only extend the period of waiting for that change.
The conservative vision of the London-born Nigerian Tory remains a limited hangout in the new politics of the 2020s. Her Tories, despite what they should have learned from their disastrous period of government and from their collaboration with the evil of the globalist covidians, still seem to believe in politics as usual and are determined to fight the last war.

Meantime, recent polls show Reform UK to be miles ahead of the Conservatives and now threatening Starmer’s awful Labour Party. Elon Musk’s reported (and denied) $100million injection would certainly help Reform in its quest for more seats and, ultimately, office.

It is a shame that the FPTP (first past the post) voting system in the Mother Country will keep the UniParty going for a while yet.

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This article (The new Thatcher? No, globalist Badenoch misses the big picture) was created and published by The Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Paul Collits

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons