Kemi Badenoch Uncovered: Deregulation, Small-State Capitalism and Culture War Conservatism

At first glance, Kemi Badenoch is not your typical Conservative Leader. She did not go to public school and, unlike her five predecessors, she did not attend Oxford University. But, at closer look, she is not so different from her predecessors. 

Her parents were in comfortable middle-class professions – one a doctor, the other a physiology lecturer – and, after completing a computer engineering degree at Sussex University, she began a career in software engineering, before moving to banking with RBS, then at Coutts, the Royal bankers.  

She met and married Hamish Badenoch through Conservative politics. A graduate of Cambridge University and a financial high-flyer, he is the global head of future of work and real estate transformation at Deutsche Bank. 

Badenoch, then, is a well-connected politician from a well-off family, who could afford to suggest during the Conservative leadership campaign that maternity pay is “excessive”. 

But her worldview owes much more to prevalent national populism – the ideological thrust which right-wing Conservatives believe is vital to combat Nigel Farage’s Reform – than either free-market Thatcherism or the beleaguered, battered, and largely evicted strain of One Nation Conservatism. 

On issues ranging from climate change, university expansion, and the existence of a new controlling class, Badenoch follows in the footsteps of Matthew Goodwin, David Goodhart, and other commentators for the national populist-supporting websites Spiked and Unherd.

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The Badenoch Thesis

Kemi Badenoch has set out her core thinking in Renewal 2030 – a 22,000-word essay, which seeks to explain a number of long-term trends in the UK and across the developed world. 

Her basic thesis is that there has been an exceptional growth in the number of university students and post-graduates, which she claims has fostered a mushrooming in professional, technical, and administrative posts often shaped and influenced by a growing regulatory agenda on issues of the environment, discrimination, and safety. 

For Badenoch, a ballooning ‘bureaucratic class’ (also known to national populists as the ‘liberal elite’) dominates many institutions and their influence diminishes risk, promotes excessive caution, and discourages entrepreneurship and enterprise. 

It is this culture, she posits, that is responsible for the long-term decline in Western growth rates.  

“In every country, the rise of safetyism, stifling of risk, and a bureaucratic class to regulate and control us and protect the marginalised is rising steadily,” she writes. “The result of this has been a collapse in average per capita G7 large advanced economy growth rates from 2.7% in the 1980s to 2.1% in the 1990s and just 1% in the 2000s and 2010s.”

Like much of Badenoch’s argument, this is a ‘culturalist’ – rather than an economic – narrative. Long-term economic trends such as rising wealth inequality, the falling employee share of real wages, and low levels of public investment are excluded from the Badenoch thesis. Instead, a presumed omnipotent ‘progressive ideology’ setting a regulatory straitjacket on society has been imposed by administrators who have been magically transformed into an all-powerful ‘bureaucratic class’. As a result, “the left controls most powerful institutions in our society”.

This message is emphasised throughout the essay, with 41 mentions of “progressive ideology”, and 142 mentions of the “bureaucratic class” (which is never precisely defined). 

Badenoch’s new controllers are closely aligned to national populism’s ‘liberal elite’, which, in the hands of Goodwin and Goodhart, morphs from a minority of Oxbridge graduates to a quarter of the population – whisking progressive Blairites together with neoliberal Thatcherites in an unlikely ruling coalition. 

For Badenoch and the national populists, this culture-led ideology is a weapon in a ‘culture war’ against the progressive, liberal values held by an increasing majority of the UK’s population. This is the ground on which Badenoch’s Conservatives, and its supporters in the media, intend to fight the ideological battles of the coming decade. 

For this reason, it is important that progressives expose its flaws and contradictions.

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Hostility to Universities

Through her thesis, Kemi Badenoch sets herself at war with basic socio-economic trends. 

With the ubiquitous spread of information technology and the online world, modern developed societies are shifting more towards mental labour. The majority of young people continue their education until 18, as compared to four decades ago, and many of them then study at a higher education institution. This is not to downgrade or deny the continuing role of physical labour and skilled manual trades, but simply to acknowledge this trend. 

For Badenoch (like Goodhart and the national populist-leaning New Statesman columnist John Gray), the expansion of Britain’s universities is seen as an unmitigated disaster. 

There is not one positive word on university growth in the essay. Her attack on higher education is, however, based on fallacious statistics and a profound misunderstanding of the economic – as well as the cultural – benefits they bring. 

Firstly, she wildly exaggerates the growth in student numbers. 

Badenoch claims that “graduate numbers were just 77,000 a year in 1990 but rose by a factor of nearly 10 to 750,000 or so by 2020/21. An even larger explosion took place in post-graduate degrees, which rose from 31,000 in 1990 to 493,000 in the same period, up by a colossal 1,500%”.

She seems unaware that only once the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act gave polytechnics university status, were they included in the figures. As the House of Commons Library pamphlet on historical education statistics states, “this extension of what constituted a university meant that the number of university degrees awarded more than doubled”. 

Secondly, Badenoch appears to have a particular dislike of post-graduate students. 

Her figures here are again distorted by the exclusion from her 1990 baseline of those studying vocational subjects such as teaching, nursing, and planning. It is true that the last three decades have seen a rapid growth in international students coming to the UK, but this flatly contradicts Badenoch’s claims that universities are isolated from market realities. On the contrary, they are attracting large numbers of Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian students in direct competition with global rivals. This is one of few areas where the UK has legitimate claims to being ‘world-class’. As a recent article in Prospect pointed out, universities pull in nearly £22 billion a year in export earnings – for the most part, made up of the fees and living expenses of international students. Are the Conservatives against this?

Thirdly, in her stereotyping of universities Badenoch ignores the significant role that they play in the economy – from the development of science parks to the setting up of new businesses. Currently, there are 21,000 companies, mainly small start-ups, which have emerged from the UK’s universities and which directly employ 96,000 people. How beneficial would it be if they stopped doing that?

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Regulation as the Enemy

Kemi Badenoch’s essay is repeatedly critical of “the sprawling mass of government regulation” – a chief weapon of the “bureaucratic class”. In fact – as any chemical, auto, or aviation company knows – modern, complex societies require solid regulatory mechanisms in order to function. Hostility to regulation also fuels Badenoch’s relentless assault on environmentalism (another national populist trope), amounting to effective climate denialism. 

It also contributes to a ‘pull-yourself-together’ attitude towards mental illness, and the claim that the rise in the incidence and treatment of autism and mental health disorders is evidence of fragility and a lack of resilience among both children and adults, facilitated by health professionals within the bureaucratic class. In this, Badenoch echoes the prejudices of the former Revolutionary Communist Party members, now right-wing libertarians, who promote national populism from the Spiked website.

There is a trap here that progressives should avoid: not every mental health-related recommendation by HR departments should be defended; but nor should the existence of mental health conditions which cause genuine pain, distress, and disablement be challenged.

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The ‘Culturalist’ Narrative

For the new Conservative Leader, then, the decline in Western productivity is due to the grip of a progressive regulatory culture. It flows from the national populist claim that culture is more important than economics – but there is no evidence for this assertion.  

In contrast, there are a stream of mainstream economists – O’Neill, O’Donnell, Mazzucato, El-Erian, Bell – who show that the UK, and the West more generally, is suffering from a lethal combination of wage stagnation, low investment, stalled productivity, and high inequality. 

This would turn attention to the failings of the Thatcherite small-state economic model that Badenoch and her supporters so admire. But this is ignored.   

Instead, her cultural assertions extend to a number of social issues. 

Writing in the Telegraph in September, Badenoch claimed that “talking about immigration in terms of culture as opposed to economics is controversial”, as it risked the speaker “being labelled xenophobic or ‘culture warriors’”. She said that “numbers matter”, but that “culture matters even more”. In this sense, for Badenoch, culture includes “customs which may be at odds with British values. We cannot be naïve and assume immigrants will automatically abandon ancestral ethnic hostilities at the border, or that all cultures are equally valid. They are not”. 

In such thinking, Badenoch arguably embraces the formulation of the far-right post-war French thinker Alain de Benoist – a key influencer of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally – who sanitised racism by insisting, not that some races were ‘inferior’, but that outsiders’ cultural norms were inherently incompatible with their involuntary hosts.  

This cultural lens also extends to Badenoch’s politics.

She claims that urban professionals have shifted leftwards in the last three decades because they like regulation – but perhaps this shift can be explained by their loss of economic clout and status. Teachers, doctors, nurses, and university staff have all been engaged in long-running disputes focused on the falling purchasing power of their wages and an erosion of their working conditions. Alongside this, the rising prominence of new social movements addressing concerns around the environment and countering discrimination against women and ethnic minorities has influenced political choices. It is not surprising, then, that those affected by such issues have shifted their political preferences to those most willing to address them.

Whether it is called ‘the bureaucratic class’ or the ‘liberal’ or ‘metropolitan’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ elite, the identification of a ‘new ruling class’ appears to have two political purposes. 

One is to divide those working in professional, technical, and office labour from those engaged in manual trades and physical work. The other is to divert attention away from the real ruling elite – the 1% of movers and shakers, the media moguls, the hedge fund managers, and the directors of the new tech giants. And, of course, up until July, the Conservative Cabinet.

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Progressive Unity

The election of Kemi Badenoch as Conservative Leader is part of a general move by the party towards national populism and Farageist thinking. 

Theresa May’s ‘citizens of nowhere’ 2016 conference speech claimed to stand up for ‘ordinary working-class families’, attacking both immigration and the ‘international elites’ who support it. Boris Johnson successfully served up a classic national populist cocktail of anti-immigration rhetoric (implied, if not stated, in the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’) with an unachieved promise to ‘level up’ the Midlands and the North. 

Free-market crusader she may have wanted to appear as Prime Minister, but Liz Truss’ post-premiership book has the culture war title Ten Years to Save the West and a subtitle calling for revolution against ‘globalism’ and ‘the Liberal Establishment’. 

During his leadership battle with Truss, Rishi Sunak too succumbed to the culture warrior temptation, attacking “the lefty woke culture that is trying to cancel our history, our values, and indeed our women”. 

Badenoch’s opponent in the most recent contest, Robert Jenrick, spoke of a conspiracy to cover up “the hard reality of mass migration”. The public, he claimed, “can see with their own eyes that they are being gaslit by the liberal elite”.

Badenoch’s essay eschewed specific policy recommendations but her political direction is very clear: a small-state, deregulated capitalism combined with a culture war against new progressive social movements. 

Backed by a right-wing press and media, her victory means that the culture wars are here to stay. 

Paying lip-service to the social gains of the last half-century, the result of her entire essay is to arguably halt and reverse many of these gains. In meeting this challenge, progressives must show that a combination of economic intervention and social liberalism is the common way forward.

Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar’s ‘The Little Black Book of the Populist Right’ is published by Byline Books. Buy a copy