Kemi Badenoch has said she will “fundamentally” overhaul the Equality Act and draft a new national civic story for schools in order to defeat “separatism” in Britain. Though the Iran war is dominating the headlines, the Conservative leader made a speech today at the Policy Exchange think tank declaring that “while Britain is a multiracial country, we must not be a multicultural one” and that “our country is our home, it is not a hotel”.
Badenoch said as prime minister she would have “the courage to set boundaries” and root out what she described as “separatism”: communities living in Britain who have neither “integrated” nor “assimilated”. The “real lesson” of the Gorton and Denton by-election, according to Badenoch, was that parties are encouraging this separatism with “campaigning designed to mobilise voters on ethnicity and religion”.
In an effort to reverse this, Badenoch has set up a “Cultural and Integration Commission” which will provide an interim report before Conservative Party conference in the autumn. Badenoch’s team feel this subject is a strong one for her – that she can speak uncomfortable truths, say the unsayable, etc.
The peg for this announcement seemed obvious to Badenoch’s team after the Greens won the by-election with a campaign that emphasised Labour’s record on Gaza and was partly conducted in Urdu. The Green victory was followed by claims from second-place Reform UK that the result was illegitimate because 10 per cent of eligible voters in the seat were born in Pakistan.
But all of that was knocked off the news agenda by America and Israel’s war with Iran. Instead of delaying the speech or accepting a lower billing, Badenoch attempted to fuse the two subjects together.
She claimed that the “real explanation” for Keir Starmer’s hesitancy in allowing the US to use British bases for defensive operations Iran was a fear of upsetting “groups whose political loyalties when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East do not align with British national interests”.
To quote her in full, Badenoch said: “The official explanation for the hesitancy is international law, but this is a fig leaf. The real explanation is not legal, it is political. Across the UK there are groups whose political loyalties when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East do not align with British national interests. These are people who Labour sees as their voters because without them, they cannot stay in power. This is not international law or principle, it is pure partisan political calculation from a Labour Party that has surrendered its right to govern our country, and it is the reality of decades of failed integration policy.”
It came off as a too clever by half analysis (or, to be a little harsher, not very clever at all). She intimated that Starmer had hesitated about providing assistance to the United States because he feared the reaction of British Muslim voters, rather than because he wanted to be sure any such action would be appropriate under international law. If that was the case why did Starmer announce that support in a speech from Downing Street on Sunday evening following the drafting of government legal advice which said the action would be lawful?
Her suggestion that the Green Party’s win was a sign of a dominant socially conservative “Muslim vote” obscured the fact that the party’s support was much broader than Muslims, and that their candidate had the most socially liberal programme of any in the contest (a fact also obscured by the Prime Minister, who compared the Greens to George Galloway).
And any suggestion that the Conservative Party lost the by-election because of a rising tide of sectarianism holds little water. Their candidate won 1.9 per cent of the vote, a quarter of their 2024 election result in the seat, and set a record for the party’s worst by-election result on record.
She also contrasted the Conservatives with Labour and the Greens, claiming that while the latter pitched toward the foreign policy concerns of different communities in Britain, thereby encouraging “separatism”, her party was different. That will be a shock to anyone who lives in the Tory-held constituency of Harrow East. Its MP Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 committee, has campaigned on the treatment of Hindus in Bangladesh, is associated with the Overseas Friends of the BJP organisation and once attended a UK4Modi car rally. Nearly 30 per cent of his constituents are Hindu.
Could this not be described as the other side of the coin from the Green campaign in Gorton and Denton, which circulated a photo of Starmer with Narendra Modi in an attempt to win over voters who oppose the BJP government in India? Will Blackman be expelled from the Conservative Party for “separatism”? Another lesson in the old mantra: opposition is hard.
[Further reading: Can Keir Starmer avoid the mistakes of Iraq?]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentKemi suggesting that the Muslim populace at large is sympathetic towards the Iranian regime js definitely a thing that she said.
The majority of British Muslims are Sunni, whilst Iran is a Shia theocracy. Which is partly why they have no problem firing drones at Sunni States in the Gulf.