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