Kemi Badenoch: ARC Conference Speech

Today [Monday 17th February 2025], Kemi Badenoch MP, Leader of the Conservative Party, has delivered a keynote speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship's 2025 Conference.  

The full text of her speech can be found below.  

Checked against delivery:

“Western civilisation is in crisis. 

Our ideas and our culture have dominated the world for well over two centuries.  

This is not a crisis of values, it's a crisis of confidence that has set in at exactly the same time that we face existential threats. 

On the Left this self-doubt manifests as an embarrassment of the West's legacy and in extremis, a hatred of Western history and even its culture.

But what about the Right?  

We know that the West has given the world amazing ideas and values, from democracy and free markets to our banking systems.  

Yet around us we see so much cultural and economic decline, we doubt ourselves. We doubt our ability to build like our predecessors did.  

We doubt liberal values of tolerance, or free trade, demanding a post-liberal world.  

It's not liberal values that are the problem. It's weakness. 

Last week two surveys were released that should alarm everyone in this room. Almost half of young brits think their country is racist. Nearly 60% of them are not proud to be British. 

Nearly 40% of the fighting-age population wouldn't fight for our country under any circumstances. 

More than half those aged between 13 and 27 said “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”. A dictator. 

We shouldn't be surprised.  

Young people see a Parliament obsessed with trivia presiding over stagnation… despite making more and more laws. 

A Parliament with only a few defending our values, and many more too scared to challenge those who attack what we believe in. 

I would say to those young people “I understand your anger but be careful what you wish for.” 

I was born in London but grew up in a country with a military dictatorship. And strong leaders who did away with pesky liberal values like democracy because people voted in bad politicians. And stopped free speech because some used it to offend.  

In the 1960s, many former British colonies in Africa decided to move on from British values a lot of people preferred strong man politics and ethnic nationalism to democracy and pluralism.  

But when they got it, they didn't like it. The strong men had lots of words, but no plan. They ran everything and delivered nothing. They flogged teachers, shot journalists, people disappeared dead bodies were found on the streets.  

Without the ability to speak freely or trade freely the government controlled everything, and wealth became hard to create and easy to destroy. 

So, let's remember what we are defending here. not just our wealth, but our culture. 

A culture built on those values we've taken for granted. 

Classic liberal values, not left-wing liberalism, but classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, the rule of law, and equality under it no matter who you are or where you come from. 

As the world becomes more complicated, we need to bravely fight for these values, now. Instead, we are distracted. Too busy critiquing and deconstructing what previous generations built, rather than making sure that the very best of our inheritance is left intact for the next generation. 

This is the real poison of left-wing progressivism. Whether it's pronouns, or DEI, or climate activism, these issues aren't about kindness—they are about control. We have limited time and every second spent debating what a woman is, is a second lost from dealing with challenges. 

In order to fix things, we need to know what went wrong. I believe that loopholes in liberalism have been found and easily exploited. 

We have been hacked. rule of law is what built so much of the West. It is in the corruption of the rule of law itself that we see where the problems begin.  

The most extraordinary example is how the European Convention on Human Rights, designed to stop the persecution of individuals by the state is now weaponised by those who wish to erode our national identity and border security.  

The current system is being exploited the public are enraged at the perception that the UK has become a haven for foreign criminals. 

One case involved a man who was allowed to stay, it was claimed that his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets. In another, a drug dealer reportedly avoids deportation because of his daughter's gender identity issues.  

But we were members of this convention for half a century without this madness. What's changed? It's not the values. It's the people. They are afraid of creating any kind of conflict, they use the most novel and expansive interpretations of human rights law to avoid it.  

And we see that lack of confidence now in everything from law and order to national defence. A fear of sticking up for young girls being abused by rape gangs over many decades so as not to upset community relations.  

Totalitarian states like Russia, Iran, North Korea, and are coordinated in their efforts. Failing to spend more on defence isn't peace-making, it is weakness, and it only emboldens their threats to democracy and global stability.  

So how do we defend? Conservatives are the guardians of western civilisation. We need to defend what we have. But many have forgotten how to do so. It requires bravery and not endless compliance at the threat of legal challenge.  

So, I'm going to give you a brilliant example of a woman who has done this. She's known as Britain's strictest headmistress and runs the Michaela School, the best school in the country. 

Her name is Katharine Birbalsingh. 

The Michaela school is secular.  

However, religious tolerance was being exploited to harass and bully others. This led to segregation and tensions, with some students beginning to pray in the playground, violating school rules pressuring their peers to follow religious practices they hadn't before, like wearing a headscarf or stopping choir practice.  

In response, Katharine banned those prayer rituals to restore order and refused to provide a dedicated prayer space, aiming to maintain the school's secular environment and treat all pupils equally. 

The response was an orchestrated attempt to destroy her reputation and her school.  

She was sued by one child's parents. The BBC ran a headline saying, “the school made being Muslim seem toxic.”  Most politicians are afraid of that sort of headline for fear of being labelled Islamophobic. Most teachers would have relented the minute they were challenged. Katharine Birbalsingh took her case all the way to the High Court, and she won.  

Katharine showed how you defend Western civilisation. Contrast this courage with Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister who took the knee during Black Lives Matter protests, in response to a problem that was not in his country and did not apply. Why? Because he was cowed by the mob. 

The problem isn't liberalism, the problem is weakness.  

Millions of people all around the world want to live in the west because they want the benefits. However, some of them bring behaviours, cultures and practices that will undermine the west and the values that helped make us great. They find common cause with our useful idiots who don't appreciate their own inheritance.  

The Conservative Party in Britain has just lost an election. We have a crisis, just like the West. 

People ask me, what difference new leadership will make? Well, take a look at President Trump. He's shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems but it's the second time around when you really know how to fix them. 

And it starts by telling the truth. 

A country cannot be successful if its people and intellectual elite don't believe in it. 

This means dealing with the poisoning of minds through higher education. 

We have been naïve on economic growth. 

We've been naive on issues from Net Zero to immigration, weakening ourselves and strengthening our competitors. 

Immigration is far too high. We cannot support all those who wish to come to our country. We have no obligation to do so. The British people must come first.  

We cannot keep racking up debt for our children.  

It was fiscal weakness, not just war, that led to the decline of the roman empire. We need smaller government and smarter spending.  

The belief that the state and not business creates wealth has become normalized.  

The world owes no-one a living.  

Millions of people cannot just sit on welfare and expect to be paid to do so. And if they don't like it, that's their problem, not the state's.  

Our country is not racist. We don't need to apologise. We don't need to pay reparations or give away the Chagos Islands.  

Free speech matters.  

Some cultures are better than others, and it's only contentious to say this because honesty has become impossible.  

People should not be afraid to speak out. We will be proud of our country. Most of all, we need to get up off our knees and start fighting not just for the UK but for the west and our values again.  

We will have to decide between the true but hard way that needs tough decisions and bravery, or whether we have more slogans and announcements but no plan.  

Don't listen to the media class complain about populism. The very essence of democracy is acknowledging the will of everyday people – and then actually making it happen.  

Populism becomes corrosive if it is just words without thought, rage without reason, anger without the ability to action. For those of us who seek leadership, we must do better. 

And that is why, in the United Kingdom, my party is starting the largest renewal of policy and ideas in a generation. This conference is part of finding those answers – and it fills me with hope. 

If we get this right, we stand at the dawn of a new conservative century – with so much opportunity and possibility. If we throw this opportunity away because of anger or self-doubt, or weakness, our country and all of western civilisation will be lost. And that is why, we the next generation of conservatives, must lead the world back from the precipice.  

It is time to speak the truth.”